Marie looked into one of the cloudy mirrors. “On the stairs. He looked so surprised.”
In that instant, Dara wondered if she’d looked surprised, too, watching Marie and Charlie on those stairs, their strange faces. She knew she had. It was the same.
“Surprised like he didn’t recognize us,” Marie said, eyes on the mirror. She and Dara twinned there. Dara was cool, but Marie was hot. Dara was dark, but Marie was light.
“Like we were these alien things.”
* * *
*
It was nearly seven. Everyone was tired. All the excitement eaten away by the rigors of the day, its small victories and humiliations.
The stage was bare except for Bailey Bloom, an unlit taper candle in her hand, gazing into the darkness. Though no one else was in costume that day, Bailey was wearing her Clara nightgown for the lighting crew. For the important moment Clara leaves her bed in the blue-black night to retrieve the Nutcracker, her longing for him so immense.
From her seat, Dara watched as Bailey, her pale tights glowing, bounded across the stage over and over again as they adjusted the fly rigs.
“Slow and big, Mademoiselle Bloom,” Dara called out. “The audience needs to be able to feel everything.”
Nightgown ballooning, Bailey streaked across the stage, scooped the abandoned Nutcracker into her arms. Sleeves like white wings, she hoisted it into the air like a totem, a godhead, then lifted herself into an elegant arabesque, her neck so long and her leg so high in the way you can when you’re fourteen, fifteen, your body both feather-light and molten, and everything is forever and nothing ever changes.
Dara felt her eyes fill. No longer thinking of articles, or autopsies, or Charlie, or even Marie, she was giving herself over to Bailey, who’d earned it, who needed it. As their mother so often gave herself over to her students. The gaze, hot and relentless, felt like love. It was love.
Bailey onstage, so small amid the darkness, her body whirling antically, seeking her Nutcracker, braving the unknown.
It was so beautiful, like the grainy production they used to watch on their mother’s portable black-and-white set. Their favorite Clara, a big-eyed waif, petal thin but impossibly strong. It was years before Dara realized they were watching their mother, recorded on videotape twenty years before.
“Bravo!” Madame Sylvie called out.
Onstage, her arms in a perfect port de bras, cradling the Nutcracker between them, Bailey looked out into the dark theater, her face blue in the spotlight. Her eyes wide and face open, with all Clara’s fear and wonder.
That’s it, Dara thought. That’s Clara.
“Shall we move on?” called out Madame Sylvie from the back of the house. Wanting to go home.
Dara looked up at Bailey, her chest still heaving, her collarbones pulsing.
“Not yet, please,” she said, her voice surprisingly strong.
Bailey, who hadn’t left the stage in hours, was lathered with sweat, the sweat of a longshoreman, the heels of her pointe shoes flecked with blood.
Bailey who said, “Once more, please?”
Dara nodded.
You had to let them keep going. Bailey knew to stop if she needed to. She knew to ask for first aid, to ask for Anbesol to numb her toes, to say she needed to rest.
But Bailey didn’t want to rest—I don’t have it yet. Please, one more time—and she kept going again and again, her face blazing under the lights, strands slipping from her immaculate bun. Chasséing across the stage again, one foot chasing the other, feet skimming the floor.
Dara heard the dull crack of feet pressed against seatbacks and turned, spotting the same spiky thicket of fellow Level IV girls—Pepper Weston, Gracie Hent, Iris Cartwright—their legs hanging over the seats, their heads dipping up and down from their phones to the stage. Pepper silently stitching elastic bands to her slippers and occasionally yawning.
They weren’t making any noise, but they were still asserting their presence and Bailey’s eyes kept flitting to their corner.
“Our Clara is relentless,” Madame Sylvie whispered over Dara’s shoulder.
“She’s sending a message,” Dara said.
The light board operator called for a pause and Bailey stopped a moment, hands on her hips, catching a breath, bending at the waist to steady herself.
From the thicket came the abrupt screech of a quickly suppressed laugh.
“Bailey,” Dara called out, “do you need five?”
Bailey paused, trying not to look at the Level IV girls, their low whispers, their prison-yard stares, Pepper’s slit-eyed gaze lifting to the stage.
“No,” Bailey insisted, lifting her body back in her arabesque, one impossibly long arm up, one out, holding the Nutcracker, her left leg in the air, her right leg planted still.
“Bailey,” Dara repeated, rising, moving down the aisle, thinking of the dazed, glassy look on the girl’s face after her time locked in the supply closet, after the pins in her shoes. “Let’s take a break.”
You have to leave them to it, their mother used to say about the plight of Claras every year. It’s jungle logic. You have to let them handle it amongst themselves.
“I don’t need it,” Bailey insisted, teeth gritted as Dara approached the lip of the stage. “I’m really fine.”
With that, her arms fell, the Nutcracker slipping from her hands, clattering to the stage floor just as Bailey leaned over at the waist and vomited.
* * *
*
You’ll be okay,” Dara said, both of them bent over the stagehand’s bucket, deep in the wings now. “Let’s take you to the restroom.”
Bailey didn’t say anything, her hands on her hips, taking long gulping breaths.
“Maybe it was something she ate,” someone said.
Dara turned and saw Gracie Hent lingering in the shadows, her face dark.
“Someone brought cookies from the deli at break,” Gracie added coolly, her eyes on Bailey. “The cookies had mold.”
There was such a boldness to the girl, a barbarism to her. This pink waif, her tidy bun.
“And how do you know that, Mademoiselle Hent?” Dara said sternly, moving toward her.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bailey blurted, reaching for Dara. “Forget it.” Clearing her throat, lifting her voice. “I’m fine now.”
Dara looked at the girl, her face wet and her eyes glittering, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
This was, Dara had to remind herself, the same girl who once burst into tears over a correction (Elbows ups! No chicken wings!), who had, for years, fretted openly over her body, the length of her neck, and burst into tears again when girls started calling her stub neck, nub neck. The girl who, just six weeks ago, had wondered over Clara, over her own talents—that girl was gone.
Good for her, Dara thought. Good.
* * *
*
Everyone was exhausted and they’d dismissed half the cast, Marie ordering a sheaf of pizzas for the rest, the smell of grease and cardboard and little-girl burps everywhere, because the six-and seven-year-old mice still needed to rehearse, which they should have done hours ago when they were still pitched and excited, stroking their acrylic mouse paws and dying to get onstage. Now they looked greasy, bloated, their bellies like pigeon breasts.
Dara slumped in fifth-row center as Marie and Madame Sylvie tried to rouse them, clapping and calling out the steps.
It was funny seeing Marie onstage, her fists sunk in the pockets of their father’s cardigan, her bleached hair the same whiteness as her face, her long, mottled neck. Mottled with brown bruises that lingered past the life of their maker, his thumbprints still on her somehow.
It was funny to see her up there, working, but it also felt natural, right.
Dara’s phone lit up and it was Charlie.
“I should be there,” he said. “I thought I’d feel better after I took the baclofen. I just . . .”
She started to tell him about the news article but somehow she couldn’t, his voice so fragile and eager.