On her hands and knees, Dara scrubbed the shoe prints, which were everywhere.
Downstairs, Marie was throwing up in the powder room. Throwing up until the vomit came up red, sticky.
I can’t, she whispered when they told her she was coming home with them.
Too bad, Dara said, grabbing her coat, shoving one of the garbage bags in her hands.
* * *
*
As they’d turned down Sycamore, their breath fogging the old car, Marie covered her face in her hands.
At first, she wouldn’t go inside, her head tilting up like a child at a haunted house. Then, Dara shoving her across the threshold, she wouldn’t go upstairs. Finally, she disappeared soundlessly into the den, their father’s old domain.
In the bathroom, Dara examined Charlie’s face, neck, arms, body, for any marks from the struggle. A bruise was blossoming on his upper arm, but that was all.
For the next three hours, Dara and Charlie sat at the kitchen table, thinking it all through with cigarettes and instant coffee, waiting for dawn.
Once, Dara squinted through the den door crack to see Marie curled in their father’s recliner, sunk in some impossible sleep, her face so innocent and pure it nearly made Dara scream. And then it nearly made her cry.
“It was an accident,” Charlie kept saying, his neck clammy with sweat, his hands doing that trembling thing. There was something intent and feverish about him. Something punch-drunk, as their father used to say, beerily recalling getting his clock cleaned in his hockey days until he couldn’t count his fingers.
“It was an accident,” Dara repeated. Over and over again. “We found him there. We don’t know how it happened. But it did.”
* * *
*
They couldn’t bring Marie to the studio.
Dara had tried, coaxing her to the bathtub, pushing her head under the running spout. Trying to clean her up, get her straight. But Marie wasn’t making sense yet, her teeth chattering, talking ceaselessly about the Fire Eater at the carnival who swallowed a neon tube and lit up like a glowworm. (That was the Sword Swallower, she told Marie. You always get everything wrong. You always ruin everything.)
Marie was not okay. Marie, could she even be trusted?
Charlie told Dara to stay home with her sister. He would make the discovery, call the police.
Marie could not be trusted.
* * *
*
Charlie returned to the studio at six a.m. At seven, he called Dara at the house. She could hear police radios buzzing in the background.
Dara, something happened, he said. The police are here. They think our contractor fell down the stairs. . . .
Charlie’s voice was shaking.
He was very convincing.
Oh my god, Dara said, even though no one could hear her but Charlie. Oh my god.
* * *
*
Now it was nearly noon and Dara had spent all morning with the paramedics and the police, then with Benny and Gaspar, who exchanged glances when Charlie told them the news. Both were surprised and Gaspar took his hat off, crossing himself. We didn’t know him well, Benny said vaguely. But it is very sad.
Charlie had done everything right, posting the signs, calling the parents of students scheduled later in the day. Saying the right things. (Still, they came. Charlie told them not to come, but they came. Half grim curiosity, half Nutcracker panic.)
Charlie was sharp and focused with the police, with everyone. It was only Dara who saw his shaky hands, the tremor in his wrist, the spasm at his neck.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was wondering: Is he okay? Would he be okay after what he’d done? But there wasn’t any time.
* * *
*
And when you arrived, you saw him at the foot of the stairs?”
Dara had finally emerged from the powder room and joined the detective in Studio C.
In the back office, a woman was taking pictures, writing things down, showing things to the medical examiner, who couldn’t stop coughing, red-faced and wheezing from construction dust. Earlier, Dara had seen the woman leaning over the contractor’s muddy shoe treads, the tight triangles of his natty boots.
“Yes,” Dara said. “My husband called me after he called you. Like I said.”
The police detective, a creasy-eyed white man of indiscriminate middle age, wore a tan trench coat like a detective in a movie. He had, Dara noticed, a smear of toothpaste on his shirt collar.
“Was it typical of your contractor to be working already at that hour? What, six a.m.?”
“They’d fallen behind. They were trying to pick up the pace,” Dara said. “We’re very busy here. We need that space.”
“How about back there?”
“There?”
“In the office. You weren’t having any work done there, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What about upstairs, that attic? You keep equipment, a fuse box, something, up there?”
“No. My husband showed you. He—”
“So any idea what the guy might’ve been up to? He was either going up or coming down. Looks like coming down based on the angle of the body.”
“I don’t know. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe he heard a sound, or something. We didn’t know him very well.”
We didn’t know him very well. But there you go.
The detective looked at her, nodded.
“Well,” he said, shrugging, sliding his notebook into his pocket, “do any of us really know anyone?”
* * *
*
The medical examiner came out, a dust mask pressed to his face, and the woman who took all the pictures followed, a heavy case in her hand.
It was all ending, nearly. Or at least this part was.
The body was gone, carried out in that big black bag with a zipper. Dara and Charlie had both turned their heads.
“Someone should’ve torn out that staircase years ago,” the medical examiner said to no one in particular. “Death trap.”
* * *
*
The detective spoke to Benny and Gaspar, but not for long. Everything seemed pro forma.
After, Dara told them they could go home for the day.
“Thank you,” Benny said, standing in the middle of Studio B, his hand tentatively touching the saw bench.
Gaspar began packing up, but Benny didn’t move at all for several seconds.
“Benny,” Dara said, “we’re all so sorry. About the accident.”
Benny looked at her and Dara found herself looking away.
“It’s very sad,” he said finally. “But we keep going.” Taking off his cap, he slid in his foam earplugs and reached for the table saw. “That’s how we get paid.”
* * *
*
I don’t know,” Dara said to Charlie later. “I think it’s fine.”
“But they probably knew. About Marie.”
“Maybe,” Dara said, pulling her hair back into a bun.
“We should,” Charlie said, “make sure they got paid.”
* * *
*
All the younger girls were crying in little clumps across the studio. The five-and six-year-olds, tugging at their leotard crotches, whimpering softly, sneaking glances at the door to the back office, the police tape crisscrossed.
The older girls were, as ever, dry-eyed, cool. Speculating, whispering in corners to one another, guessing about canceled rehearsals, biting their fingers and cracking their toes.
Older than most of their fathers, the dead contractor was only a voice through the walls, a constant obstruction as they navigated the makeshift path through Studio B. A dad type, with a thunderous voice and a mercurial schedule, strolling past everyone in his shiny boots, shouting to Benny every time a circuit broke.
They’d likely noticed him far less than Benny, who arrived every day on a candy-orange motor scooter and was always so nice, even when he unclogged the toilet for them, and Gaspar, who was charming with his little habits, like setting a jug of milk on the sill of the open window, not drinking it until it was icy, or the time he played Crazy Eights with a few of the younger girls, their carpool parent late for the day’s pickup.
They had no feelings for the dead contractor and, besides, The Nutcracker began in ten days.
* * *