*
Everything felt surprisingly normal, even as both students and parents were in a frenzy. Perhaps because they were in a frenzy. The turbulence of the contractor’s death in these very rooms merely seemed an extension and an intensification of the turbulence of Nutcracker season. Gossip, anxiety, paranoia churning, and two six-year-olds vomiting in the powder room, one in the sink, after another girl claimed there was still blood on the floor where the contractor’s body had fallen. It was terrible! she kept saying. I can smell it!
If only, Dara thought, they’d seen the back of his head when the paramedic turned him over, spongelike and ravaged from hitting the desk’s sharp corner, the unforgiving floor. If only they’d seen the dark hole where his eye had been.
* * *
*
I was scared of him,” Chlo? Lin confided at one point to Dara.
“Why?”
Chlo? took a deep breath, her eyes dragging to Studio B once, then twice.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t go here.”
“Go here?”
“He . . . he didn’t belong.”
No, Dara thought, momentarily gratified. He didn’t.
* * *
*
Few of the students could conjure any specific encounter with the dead contractor, other than Ivy Neuman’s long recounting of the time he helped her untangle her wool scarf from the power cords stretched across Studio B.
Of all the things competing for their students’ attention—which were almost entirely the varied and countless ways they could fail disastrously and on an epic scale onstage—Derek was the least.
Still, everyone had taken notice when they’d carried the body through the studios, the clatter of the gurney, the black monolith of the contractor, the body bag zipper glistening.
Everyone had stepped out of the way, the students grim-faced, hands folded, heads down as if for a fallen solider.
* * *
*
Charlie was steady and reassuring with the parents. Promising them that, while this surely was not ideal timing, in some ways it would have been worse if it had happened a few weeks ago. Now they were nearly ready to move to on-site rehearsals at the Ballenger and maybe they could even expedite the process. Move off the premises until everyone felt comfortable again. You see, it was a very sad thing—tragic, really—but they all knew how much The Nutcracker meant to the students and how hard they’d been working. The show must go on, to coin a phrase.
* * *
*
Finally, everyone was gone, the parents having stuffed their children back into overheated cars, the back office emptying out after being swollen for hours with detectives, with the medical examiner and his watering eyes, with the woman taking photographs, scraping the floor, that thick smear of blood, brown like a coffee rind. Putting things in paper bags, sealing them, packing them in her kit. Metal fragments from the bent and buckled stair rail. The bill holder, its newly bent spike.
All of it was gone now.
There was nothing here to see.
It was all going to be fine.
In a few days, the swirl of Nutcracker madness, everyone would move on.
* * *
*
Dara found Charlie seated at the desk, staring at the worn and pitted floor, the fresh gouges in the wood. A stray glove, acid blue, like a deflated balloon.
“They said we can clean it up now,” Charlie murmured. “They took all the pictures. They took all the statements.”
The stoic face he’d worn all day had vanished. He looked hollowed out, raw.
“So that’s it,” Dara said, reaching for him. “It’s over.”
Charlie didn’t say anything. He just opened the closet, reached for the gallon of peroxide, and began pouring.
* * *
*
The yellow stain on the hardwood after—a wobbly shape like a giant puzzle piece—would stay forever. They could sand it away, brush it with darker stain. But, with the volcanic force of The Nutcracker, there was no time for it, so they left it, tiptoeing around it.
The next day, Charlie would drag the desk over the spot, even though its diagonal meant there was no way to move comfortably in the space.
The police told them not to use the spiral staircase, stretching hazard tape across it. It rattled dangerously with any weight at all, the force of the fall yanking the center pole loose from its moorings.
You couldn’t go up or down safely, so Marie would have to stay with them.
* * *
*
It all made Dara remember the car accident, her parents. How the police department impounded what was left of their father’s Buick, its twisted, zigzagging frame, its ashy center, like one of their mother’s Gauloises, bent and crumpled in her tin ashtray.
After, they kept the ruin on display in the lot as they did all the drunk-driving fatalities, their own vehicular Death Row. It was meant to be cautionary, which Dara supposed it was. Not just for drunk driving, though the heavy, liquored smell of the wreckage made that clear, but for everything else. For all the damage two people staying together can do. Two circling rivals locked in an endless, fatal embrace.
Years later, Dara asked Marie if she remembered all that time the Buick remained in the lot’s center spot before being dethroned by a pulverized stretch limousine, prom corsages exploded across its dashboard and the cloying smell of Southern Comfort, cheap weed.
I remember, Marie had said. I remember everything.
It turned out Marie had snuck out of the house one night, late, in those strange months following the accident.
She’d walked all the way to the police lot, where she could run her hands all over the car, its pocked and blistered metal. She even climbed inside and sat on the front seat, bisected, its stuffing shaking loose. She put her hand in the hole in the windshield where their father’s head had landed.
It was, she said, the closest I ever felt to them. To him.
Everyone had assumed their father was behind the wheel, and drunk. Dara assumed it, too, even after Charlie explained what the police said. Even when Marie told her how she could tell from that visit to the car, the driver’s seat thrust forward for their mother’s petite frame, the long strands of their mother’s hair caught in the windshield.
It was her, Dara. It was Mother.
Sometimes what happened just doesn’t feel like what really happened.
Behind the wheel and drunk, too, the end of a long tear, late for their anniversary dinner, to celebrate twenty years of tumult and terror, their mother refusing to leave for hours as she slowly, vengefully drained his holiday-bonus scotch.
Dara, don’t you see? It was her. It was always her.
No, Marie, she wanted to say. It was them. It was always both of them.
* * *
*
That night, the house felt different, drafty and forlorn.
They hadn’t slept or eaten or groomed themselves since it happened.
At last, the flood of feeling, the hard push of nerves had ended, had reached its end. Dara felt like a shell, a husk, the feeling after a performance, the dread sinking with the final curtain, settling inside her.
For Charlie, too, it seemed. When Dara watched him march up the carpeted stairs like the steps to the guillotine, he looked so much older than he’d ever looked before, drawn and bony and blue. For a second, a brief second, as the ceiling light hit him, he looked like their mother in those last few weeks, drinking all the time, slamming doors, and the heavy glass ashtray their mother threw, hooking their father in the chin, the mouth, knocking two teeth loose.
Oh, that, Dara thought. Remember that.
She was remembering so many things lately that she’d packed away long ago.
Without saying a word, Charlie disappeared into the upstairs bathroom, filling the claw-foot tub until the floor bulged with its weight.
Dara thought she could hear him talking to himself in there.
She climbed the stairs and put her ear to the door, wet from the steam.
His whisper, rising and falling, and all she could make out was it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
* * *