Moments later, Dara turned down Sycamore, the street fogged and furtive, inching along until she saw their big old house, its bleary windows, roof tiles loose like whiskers.
It made her chest ache suddenly. Most of the time, you never truly saw your own house from the outside. It was impossible. But she was seeing it now. Seeing her home, her childhood, her family. Drafty, pocked, hungry.
This is ours. It is ours. No one can take it. Never.
She needed, urgently, to be inside. To sit with Charlie at the kitchen table, with their tumblers of wine, now fully replacing the fenugreek, the chamomile, their new nightly routine, Charlie’s shiny orange medicine bottles, his pills and vitamins plotted on the table like a tic-tac-toe game. Together, they were a family. Together, they would protect their home, everything.
* * *
*
But when she arrived at the front door, she saw the note taped to the graying green paint. Charlie had gotten the last available PT appointment. He wouldn’t be home for another hour or more.
* * *
*
She poured some wine for herself then, balancing the tumbler in the crook of her arm, headed upstairs to wait in the bedroom. They had to band together now. They had to. And she’d felt so close to him on the phone earlier, remembering about the snow.
Maybe Charlie’s back would feel better. Maybe he would come back into the bed that night. Maybe he’d let her hands rest on him, find him again in the blue-dark of the late night, his pills working their gentle ministrations.
The thought made her instantly feverish, and the warmth dipped to her hips, between her legs as she climbed the stairs. Charlie.
Halfway up, in the band of light from a second-floor window, she saw the first one.
A footprint, faint but muddy, on one of the carpeted steps.
Looking up, she saw another. Tracks, like tracking a mountain lion, a great black bear.
But these tracks were familiar, the gray-brown slurry she knew so well, trailed daily across the floors of their studio. She even recognized the shoe print, the natty toes of the contractor’s natty boots.
He’s in the house, a cry racing up her throat.
Reaching the top step, she saw the open door at the end of the dark hall. Their childhood bedroom.
She never left that door open. She seldom went in there at all, except maybe once a year to dust it, to polish the old wood of the furniture set—the dresser and, of course, the bunkbed. The bunkbed, Marie on top, Dara on the bottom, like a pair of twins pressed tight in the womb. The bunkbed, with Marie’s teeth clicking in her sleep, and Dara, restless, her foot kicking against the footboard slats, her arches wrapping around them, her thoughts drifting to that year’s Drosselmeier, the feel of his hipbone against hers as she brushed past, her foot pressing, pressing on the slat, as she pushed into the feeling . . .
Standing there, Dara saw the open door. She saw the shadow thrown on the floor.
He’s in the house. He’s in the bedroom.
Dara set the tumbler of wine on the banister and took a few steps.
The streetlamp outside made the door unnaturally bright, beckoning to her.
* * *
*
Who’s there,” she called out, her voice like a bark.
He appeared suddenly, his body taking up the entire doorframe. Like a monster in a dollhouse, like he could reach his arm up and take the whole thing apart in one glancing blow.
“Hey,” he said, swiveling. “Sorry. Did I scare you?”
He looked surprised, he was surprised. But not that surprised.
“I gotta tell you, it’s a trip, being here,” he said. “Marie talks about this house all the time.”
* * *
*
He was enormous, looming, his shadow making him twice his size, and the only light from the streetlamp outside.
“Easy, easy,” he kept saying.
“What are you doing in our house?” Her voice low, tremulous. “How dare you come into our house.”
“I’m sorry I scared you. I thought Charlie would be home,” he said. “I wanted to talk to him about my idea. This house, its potential. But he wasn’t here, and it’s just so damn good-looking—well, great bones at least—I had to take a peek.”
“Trespassing. Breaking and entering,” Dara said, steadying herself. “I want you out now, or I’m calling the police.”
“It’s only trespassing,” he said, lifting his arms above his head, resting his fingertips on the top of the doorframe, “if you aren’t given a key.”
Fucking Marie, Dara thought. Goddammit, Marie. It was so much worse, every time, than she thought it could be.
“Your sister wanted me to see it,” Derek said. “She wanted an outsider’s take. Someone with some expertise, some perspective. Given everything. Given how it all went down.”
“How what went down?”
“How she came to lose it. Her piece of it.”
Here it is, Dara thought. It had been coming for so long. Dara saw it now. If he couldn’t win it, he’d try to take it.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know what she told me,” he said. There was something heavy in his voice even though he was smiling. “She was in a vulnerable state. That’s how it sounded to me.”
“Marie’s lived her whole life in a vulnerable state,” Dara said. “And this is none of your business.”
“Marie’s business is my business,” he said quickly, icily—a tone Dara had never heard from him before.
“Why?” she replied. “Because she opens her legs to you? She opens her legs forty times a day for a living and it doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.”
“You got a mouth on you,” he said, tight and cool. “Quite a mouth.”
“Get out,” Dara repeated. “Go. Or I call the police.”
Derek looked at her. For the first time, she thought she could feel a little desperation on him, a slick of dampness growing on his brow.
“I’ve seen everything I need to,” he said. Dara let herself breathe.
But as he turned, he took one last look into the bedroom behind him. His eyes darting.
“I like to imagine you two in there,” he said wetly, like his mouth was resting on a bottle neck. “Two of you, two little ballerinas, like the tops of a music box. Pink and perfect, tucked tight into a little boy’s bunkbed.”
How do I get him to leave? How will I ever get him to leave? Dara thought, suddenly, of their mother crying over her father, all those nights. How can I get him to leave, which always sounded like, Will he never come home? Those two, their endless tango . . .
“My brother and me had a bunkbed just like it,” he said. “Except it was a ship’s wheel instead of a wagon wheel.”
He paused, then grinned widely. “We had this routine. My brother would do this voice, Miss Touissant, the hot French teacher at De La Salle. Parlez en fran?ais, mes garcons! And we’d both jack off—lower bunk, upper bunk—in time.”
He looked at her, then added, “One time, I came so hard I kicked out a slat on the footboard.”
Dara’s breath caught. In a flash, she was ten again, her own foot snapping, the crack of the wood, the slat darting across the room like a bat.
“Snapped it right in half,” he continued, watching her. “How about that? Told a girlfriend once and she said there was something sick about it. My brother and me. Something unnatural. I told her, if that’s unnatural, sign me up.” He paused. “Do you, Madame Durant, think that’s unnatural? Any of it?”
Dara reached out for the wall, her legs shaking. Thinking of the broken slat, Marie’s face peeking through.
Marie, she thought, her mind racing, Marie, you gave it all away. You gave us all away.
* * *
*
That’s the greatest trick women ever pulled on us,” he said. “Making us believe they’re different.”
He was halfway down, the old steps groaning beneath him.
“She’s using you,” Dara called out, running to the top of the stairs. “She’s using you and when she’s done, she’ll come home to us.”
Derek stopped, turned.
“Come home to you?” he said. “Is that what you think is gonna happen? That poor kid. That poor goddamned kid.”