The door opened with a cold whoosh, all the dust in the house unsettling and settling again.
“Marie, can you leave us—” Dara started, but Marie was already gone, disappearing down the hall, into their father’s pocket of a den.
“Dara.”
She could feel him standing in the kitchen doorway, but she couldn’t quite turn her head. She thought if she looked, she might disintegrate.
But then she did.
The way he was standing, in his navy peacoat, his cheeks too red from the cold, his eyes too bright, she thought suddenly of the Nutcracker, of all the Nutcrackers.
For a split second, she thought he might open his mouth and show two rows of sharp white teeth.
“Is everything,” he said, his breath catching, eyes darting, “okay?”
“I thought we’d let a monster in,” she said, rising to her feet.
Charlie nodded. “We did,” he said. “But he’s gone now. He’s—”
“—but it turned out the monster was you.”
BAD THINGS MEN DO
Sitting across from her at the kitchen table, slowly removing his gloves, he could not look her in the eye.
The carcass of the rum cake sat between them, the saber of the rusty knife, stray maraschino studs, the wax paper oil glossed, Marie’s sticky prints on the glacé.
He wouldn’t look at her, and his hands looked so clean and smelled of sanitizer.
Part of her had expected he’d fall to his knees, beg forgiveness. But some deeper part of her had hoped urgently that he’d tell her she’d gotten it all wrong, that it was all a lie, a misunderstanding, a bad dream, a nightmare.
Instead, he set his gloves down, his eyes cast low and inaccessible.
Oh, she thought, watching him. It had been the last hope she’d hidden deep inside herself. It hurt so much to lose it.
But then he looked up and she could see it all on his face. He’d been hiding so much for so long, but now he looked laid bare, skinned, tender and raw and exposed.
“It wasn’t like you think,” he said, his voice first small and tentative and then rushing faster. “It just . . . happened and then other things happened and suddenly, everything was happening and there was no stopping it.”
Which, Dara realized now, was how Charlie had viewed everything his whole life.
* * *
*
It began last winter, when that cold snap made Charlie’s nerve pain even greater. He’d overheard Mrs. Bloom raving about her new “physiotherapist,” a “miracle worker” with “magic fingertips.” Charlie made an appointment, expecting very little. His body had not been his own most of his life. He’d just as soon place it in a stranger’s hands.
It turned out, though, that she did have a magical touch—no, almost holy. Well, that was how it felt to him, under her hands, gnarled fingers and broad-heeled. He hadn’t been shy about it. He’d told Dara. His new PT’s touch had changed his life.
And her voice, there was something about her voice. So calming, assuring, nurturing. She asked him questions, worried for him. It made him feel so cared for, tended to, safe.
Gradually, their conversations before and after their sessions became just as important as the feeling of those strong hands, thick-knuckled and wide-palmed. He would tell her about his abandoned ballet career—so promising, such an ascent—and how he felt at war with his body, how it had turned on him after giving him so much. In turn, she began sharing more, too, talking about her children, little Whitney’s big spelling-bee win, Sammi who was learning the flute.
And, slowly, he began to learn about her husband.
It started that day he arrived to find her crying. The sheriff’s office had called late. Her husband had been arrested in a mall parking lot, caught having sex in his car with some twenty-six-year-old bank teller. But she was only the latest, usurping the nameless drywall supplier who left her threatening phone messages (He’s my man now, bitch!), the insurance adjuster named Bambi, whose fiancé showed up at the house with a baseball bat. (She’d had to talk him down while her husband hid in the toolshed.)
He was always sorry after—splashy flowers and promises and tickets to Aruba they couldn’t afford—but it always happened again.
Was that better or worse, she wondered to Charlie, than the collection service sending people to the house, or the local grocery store cutting up their credit card while her neighbors watched?
And yet she didn’t know how to escape it, to escape him. There was, always, the children, and the debt, and God, and everything—not the least of which her own relentless hopefulness, not yet worn away.
When they met, high school rivals at a bonfire, foamy beer and kisses and his hands down her jeans. Even then, he had big plans, schemes. In the haze of first love, she saw them as dreams. He was gonna buy up all the old, ruined houses downriver, collect them like Monopoly pieces, renovate and sell them, and become a billionaire off blight. All he needed to do was attract investors and maybe even her parents might be interested?
The very things that first draw you to a person will eventually be the very things that drive you away. She’d read that once. Maybe Charlie could understand?
Now, nearly thirty years together and four kids and he’s never home, off “on jobs” at least a few nights a week, and they’re still renting a house and owing everyone, including the government, sixty-two thousand in back taxes, and he couldn’t keep it in his pants, never could. He once told her, late one night after fighting for hours until they were hoarse, If you knew how easy it is. If you knew how little it took. If you knew, the meaner you are, the more they want you.
(That she knew.)
They loved all of it, he told her. Some of them even loved the way—once in a while, seven times over thirty years for her—he might backhand them, or shove them, or cuff them at the dinner table, though always apologize with flowers, deli daffodils, rejected carnations sputtering across the floor.
She should have seen it all years ago, because people never really change, and it was all still like high school, when she caught him elbow-deep up Janis Truski’s jean skirt behind the batting cage. She’d long ago given up on fidelity, and almost everything else, but now they were in arrears and her little Sammi needed a special breathing machine for her asthma and their oldest needed a reading tutor or he’d be held back, but her husband kept draining their bank account and had gotten meaner, rougher, more unkind . . .
Hearing it all had affected Charlie so much.
He hated her husband, this Derek, for making her feel this way. And it meant so much how happy Charlie seemed to make her just by listening, caring—well, that was the greatest feeling. He’d forgotten about that feeling.
It had never been intimate. Not really. There were physical . . . acts. But no intercourse. They never left the privacy, the cocoon of the small treatment room, its cool blues and soft simulated wood, the diffuser huffing eucalyptus.
First, it felt like a gift. How he needed her and she needed him. But then it also felt like a burden. As he slowly realized she wanted someone to save her.
He wished he knew now how it had turned. How they’d started talking about him all the time. He became not so much a person as this collection of bad things men do.
He never seemed real, exactly. He seemed like a cartoon villain, a comic book lothario, a cheap paperback brute, a thug. She’d fantasize, they both would, about him getting arrested, sued, even, Charlie once joked, shot in the back by a jealous husband.
Somehow, someday, he would be gone and goodness could return to the land, and should we really pay the price our whole lives for bad decisions made in the heat-thick swarm of adolescence?
She got the idea from the space heater fire. She said, Bring my husband in. Bring him in to fix your studio. Maybe the next time it will burn him to ashes. It was a joke, a dark joke, maybe a bad one.
It was a joke until it wasn’t.