It reminded her of Charlie years ago, barely fifteen, his skin like the skin of a peach, that dazed look he’d have in his eyes whenever he wasn’t dancing. How when he was dancing, he seemed to go some other place, exalted and forbidden. How when he stopped, he looked immediately lost and forlorn. Showing him where the towels were when he first moved in, showing him how to light the oven burner, to call his mother overseas on the landline.
Like a boy in a painting, their mother used to say, looking at him. Caravaggio.
It made her want to put her hand on his forehead, to put him to bed.
“Dara,” he said, “can we go home now?”
He drew his hands inside his sweater cuffs, rubbed a cuff against his face. Those tremulous hands.
She was the only strong one of the three of them.
* * *
*
That night, she sat at the kitchen table a very long time, alone.
Her head kept vibrating, her teeth. It was that woman, Randi Jacek, her hand on the staircase.
She was remembering something. Something that had been hovering there for days, weeks. Hovering just beyond reach, like a flicker in the corner of her eye.
At first the memory came in fits and starts, her hand on the railing, music floating from her mother’s radio on the third floor.
Crying out, Mother! Mother!
A feeling in her chest, an echoing in her ears.
Back, back, start again: Age fifteen, long-legged, coltish, running back late to the studio to tell her mother she’d been cast as a Dewdrop in the exalted Waltz of the Flowers for the Eastern Ballet Company’s regional production.
Age fifteen and puffed up with her triumph—a role earned, and all hers—she called out for her mother as she bounded through the dark and dust of Studios A, B, and C and to the back office, the opening to the third floor glowing, like the cutout mouth in a jack-o’-lantern.
Gripping the rail of the spiral staircase, she whipped around its three hairpin turns and emerged on the third floor, the smell of their mother’s black currant tea and the fuzz of her battered radio, tinny jazz, and it took a moment, a long, flickering moment, for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, the only light an old gooseneck lamp, curled and lying on its side, its narrow glare illuminating their mother on the futon.
Their mother half-reclining, her head thrown back and her legs flung apart, that bright blue vein snaking up her inner thigh. And something, someone kneeling before her, the soft blond thrush of his hair and the princely profile.
“Charlie,” Dara had said, the first time her voice full of wonder still.
“Charlie,” she’d said seconds later, watching their mother thrust the boy aside now, wrapping her legs back around herself, drawing up the tights that had slithered to her ankles.
“Charlie,” she’d said a third time, her voice changed now, changed forever. “Mother.”
* * *
*
Later, much later, Dara would wonder if it even happened. It felt more like a picture she’d once looked at in a book. It had happened, but had it happened to her? And what had she seen, really? What was their mother really doing with her fifteen-year-old student, with her own daughter’s beloved, what was she letting him—having him—do to her other than nestle his fevered head against her warm belly, her lovely thighs?
But at the time, it felt like everything. Because it was, of course.
None of them spoke of it in the days that followed. She never told Marie, or anyone.
That first night, Charlie slept on the sofa downstairs, but by the second, Dara had snuck down and climbed beside him, his body so hot on her skin and eager for forgiveness. Her hands gathering him hungrily, she found herself wanting him to forgive her, to forgive them.
Two days later, she and Charlie began making plans to leave, together. It was just too unbearable, all together in the studio, at that house. It was unbearable to pass one another in the hallway, at the bathroom, over the kettle on the kitchen stove. Dara couldn’t look her mother in the eye. Charlie couldn’t sleep or eat, taking long, scalding baths in the claw-foot tub. They had to go. Maybe to Charlie’s mother in England, or Charlie could take that apprenticeship in the Sarasota Ballet.
Immediately, they began paperwork, made calls. Tried to find out about passports, licenses. They’d even secretly lugged their mother’s rolling trunk from the basement and begun packing.
Maybe it’s too quick, Charlie said, watching her.
It’s not, Dara insisted. It was like one’s first grand jeté. How students were never ready until suddenly they were and they had to do it right away, or the moment would pass.
We have to go now. We have to.
Three days later, it was their parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary and their car careered into oncoming traffic and they were dead.
The morning after the funeral, Dara unpacked the trunk, Charlie watching. Down the hall, Marie was crying, had been crying for days. She couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat, her body like a broken bird. After, Dara dragged the rolling trunk back down to the basement, where she wouldn’t see it again for more than a decade, when Marie heaved it back up the stairs for her trip around the world.
See, Dara thought, I tried to leave once too, Marie. Long before you. It’s harder than it looks.
UNHEALTHY
Charlie’s back felt hot under her hand when she woke.
She felt a tickle in her throat, a feeling of something. It had hummed in her all night. All those conversations with Charlie, with Marie. Those half-conversations, all the past stirred up again. And now it wouldn’t leave her.
And she kept thinking about that word accident. What it meant, what it contained. They were killed in a car accident. He fell down the stairs in a terrible accident. I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident.
And when she reached out again Charlie’s back was hot, tortured. It felt like putting your hand on a tangle of lighting cables, illuminating everything.
* * *
*
Today was the first on-site rehearsal. Normally, Dara and Marie would focus on the stage, on the performances, while Charlie did everything else. Overseeing the backdrop load-in, meeting with the stage crew, making sure the snack packs arrive on time, corralling the hectic parent volunteers and managing their access to their nervous children.
But there was nothing normal about today, and Charlie could barely move from the bed, his body like a fallen statue, his face taut with pain.
“I don’t know how I could have done it,” he said. “I’ve been careful.”
But Dara knew. Those mad minutes the other night, she and Charlie scurrying around on the third floor, heaving the futon mattress in half, snapping the frame shut, hoisting garbage bags, wiping the place clean of Marie, of the contractor. All while one floor below the contractor’s lifeless body stiffened, his skin turning cold. All while Marie sat in their car, where they’d stowed her, her head resting against the window like a child waiting, waiting forever for her parents to remember she was there.
* * *
*
Lie back,” she said to him now. “Stay home. I’ll take care of it. And Marie . . . Marie will do her best.”
“Not a chance. I’m gonna rally here,” he whispered, even as his body was sinking back, his face contorted in pain. “I just need a few minutes. It’s just, with the cold weather, it . . .”
Slowly, slowly she let her hand drop away.
It would be her and Marie. It would have to be.
* * *
*
I’m gonna be all right today,” Marie said as they walked to their separate cars. “I promise.”
“Okay,” Dara said. “Okay.”
* * *
*
The Ballenger Center—a sleek, featureless lightbox of a building—had undergone its annual transformation. Wrapped in thousands of white lights like lace, dotted with shimmering gumdrops the size of church bells, trimmed with bright candy canes big as coat stands dangling from its roof.
Inside, the theater volunteers had clearly spent hours draping boughs and garlands in every corner. A fleet of the familiar two-story-high Nutcracker banners hung from the ceiling, swaying with each burst of forced heat.