*
They could hear them in the office below, the fuzz of Derek’s voice.
“I have just as much an interest in that house as you,” Derek was saying. “And just as much a right. We both happen to be involved with women whose names are on that deed.”
“Dara’s my wife,” Charlie said, his voice strange and strangled, a voice she didn’t recognize. “Marie’s my sister.”
There was a pause. “You three, so close. Snug as three bugs in a rug. What guy stands a chance?”
“What does that mean?” Charlie said. “We’re family.”
“So it’s true, then?” Derek asked.
“What’s true?”
Marie, on her knees over the trash can, looked up at Dara. A sudden alertness, a knowingness. We need to go back down there. We need to go.
* * *
*
They were on opposite sides of the office, Derek spinning that bill holder again, spinning it by its rusty spike.
“Derek, stop this,” Marie was saying from the staircase, Dara pushing past her down the steps toward Charlie. “Come upstairs.”
“What’s true?” Charlie repeated, louder now. On his face that expression again, the one that made Dara nervous because she hadn’t seen it since they were teenagers, overhearing Dara’s parents fighting, her father smashing dishes, their mother threatening to throw herself out the window.
But Derek didn’t see it, didn’t know. “That you three,” he said, a funny kind of glitter in his eyes, “over on Sycamore, that you shared . . . things?”
“Shared things,” Charlie said. “Of course we—”
“Like a bed,” he said. “Like you shared a bed.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“Charlie, don’t,” Dara blurted. The feeling suddenly of a death blow coming.
“I mean, what do you even call that?” Derek said. “Tell me how it worked. ’Cause I’m picturing—”
“Derek, stop,” Marie called out from the top stair. “Derek, come up here, okay?”
Derek paused, the air heavy and stifling, before slowly curving his lips into a smile.
And then he set down the bill holder and moved toward the stairs. Dara let herself breathe again.
“Sure, honey,” he said. “I’ll come up.”
Starting up the stairs now, his gaze moving from Dara to Charlie to Marie at the top of the stairs and back again. “But, boy, I gotta say, watching the three of you here, those bodies of yours, always stripped half naked, touching each other all the time. Flesh pressing flesh.”
“No, no,” Marie called out. “Derek, come—”
“Ménage à Durant,” Derek continued, his tree-trunk arms pressing on the quivering stair rail. “It was bound to happen.”
“Shut up,” Charlie said, his voice suddenly icy cool, his gaze fixed on Derek. “Shut your mouth. I know about you. I know more than they do. I know who you are.”
There was a flicker of panic in Derek’s eyes.
Dara looked at Charlie, taken aback. “What do you know?”
“I know about you, brother,” Derek said, a ripple of anger in his voice now as he leaned over the stair rail. “I’ve seen some things. Served two years in Stuttgart. Spent a few lost weeks in Thailand. But the three of you—that’s a new one for me. I mean, the last taboo, right? Or is that cannibalism?”
He had a look, not a smirk, not even a smile. It was something else. It was very serious. He was very serious.
“And you,” he continued, turning to Dara now, his gaze hot. “You, my Dark Durant, are full of surprises.”
“Derek, don’t!” Marie was saying from the top of the stairs.
“Let me ask you,” Derek said to Dara, leaning over the railing, “did you give Marie to Charlie to keep him there, or Charlie to Marie to keep her—”
* * *
*
It was all so fast, Charlie charging up the stairs after Derek.
Charlie and Derek hurtling into each other, a crash of bravado, of machismo, of huffing and puffing and blowing the house down. Derek’s boot clacking against Charlie’s jaw, and Charlie butting hard into Derek’s crankcase chest, knocking him back, the slick bottom of Derek’s slick boots clattering down one, two steps.
His balance lost and Charlie reaching down for him with ropy arms, lifting him, improbably, Derek’s legs scrambling beneath him and the stair rail bending against his weight.
Heaving Derek up, ramming him against the rail, Charlie’s face like it used to look long ago, when he was dancing. Intent, afire. Before the injuries, the haze of pain, the chemical stupor. Before Marie left and left again, like a ghost in the night. Before their parents’ deaths, before their wedding, before everything. When he was only a boy, dancing.
* * *
*
Later, when she remembered it, when she pressed her fingers to her closed eyes and tried to remember it, it was as if, in those final seconds, they were dancing a pas de deux.
Their mother used to say, The beauty of dancing a pas de deux is that you are never alone. There’s always a hand outstretched to accept yours. Someone’s eyes seeking yours.
But you must never forget, a pas de deux is also about power, gaining it, losing it, giving it away.
How can it be both those things? Dara used to ask. How can it be both?
Why, Dara, their mother replied, it’s always about both.
* * *
*
It was fast, so fast. Like a pointe shoe slipping, a wrist softening, a body lurching, a knee thundering down onto the stage floor.
Charlie and Derek interlocked, and the loud squeak of Derek’s mud-stippled boots against the steps, Derek trying to right himself, freeing one arm, clambering for the stair rail, its spokes bending like matchsticks.
“Stop!” a voice cried out. Dara looked up to see Marie descending from the mouth at the top of the stairs, wrapping her jonquil arms under Derek’s arms, pulling him back, Derek’s boots clattering, his legs giving out from under him.
* * *
*
Later, Dara would remember Marie’s face, how it was as wild and strange as Charlie’s. Marie and Charlie, those two childlike faces, twinning in her head.
It was fast, so fast. Marie’s and Charlie’s arms extended, four marble spires. Almost like they were one pair of arms, one pair of hands, their faces red and vivid, wild-eyed and avid.
The heels of Charlie’s hands on the dark expanse of Derek’s chest, Marie’s hands under Derek’s arms, small and clawed, Derek losing his footing, dropping to one knee. Their arms, those spires, were they pushing him away or pushing him over? How could you ever tell?
Derek stutter-stepping backward, his boots sliding, his body bending over the railing, so low and treacherous, his body twisting over the twisting staircase.
It was fast, and then it was slow, so slow, time stretching out infinitely. This monster, this Big Bad Wolf, this bloodsucker who never should have been let in, this stranger who never belonged, falling, falling to the floor.
His body larger, it seemed, than the staircase that held it, the kick-kick of his sliding feet and the force of their arms, thick with blasted muscle, fired by feeling. Some feeling.
Over the railing, he fell, his body spinning, and his head hitting the corner of the desk below, a muted crack.
His face catching something, a whistling sound in the air, his breath leaving him.
A hot spatter of blood and the mortal thud of his body landing on the floor below, his body curled like a cat, small and shabby. His body twitching, then still.
* * *
*
Later, Dara would remember this: Derek’s eyes catching hers, catching Dara’s, as it happened. As he fell.
Looking out at Dara, as if asking, begging for something.
As if warning her, as if saying, Wait, wait—
* * *
*
I don’t know how . . .” Charlie was saying, his voice low and foreign. “It happened so fast and I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
They were all standing over him now, standing over Derek, a crumpled heap on the floor, legs going the wrong ways. Charlie’s eyes glazed, his face stiff.
* * *
*
It was only after they’d turned him over they saw it.