The Turnout(14)

*

Slowly, Dara felt the certainty rising in her chest, like a sharp stone her lungs brushed up against with every breath.

Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe their mother—who’d put twenty years of toil and affliction into their cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer’s pointed foot—would want this.



* * *



*

Marie will be hard to convince,” Dara said. Marie didn’t like disruption or change or intruders from out there. None of the Durants did. Dara could only remember a handful of occasions—a meter reader once, an animal control officer that time a raccoon got caught in the screen door—when anyone outside of their family set foot inside their house their entire childhood.

Still, Charlie pointed out, Marie was the one who had in fact moved out of the house, taken a leap.

But, Dara replied, look how far she got.



* * *



*

    Charlie kept asking Dara and Dara kept saying it was best not to pressure Marie, which Charlie should know by now.

Marie didn’t like to think about things. Business decisions, all decisions, hung like a weight around her neck.

Marie didn’t like to sign papers, to put her name on things, to have too many keys.

Marie, who had so few attachments, obligations, connections that sometimes she felt like she was going to float away, ascend. But Dara could never tell if this was what she wanted, or her greatest fear.

Marie, who’d slept in their childhood bunkbed for years, only moving down the hall to the sewing room when she began having back pain from the slender mattress. She still said she didn’t know what to do in a full-size bed. She said she felt lost.



* * *



*

I’m the one who has to live with it,” Marie said, later that day.

Dara was watching Marie at the barre, stretching, her skin ruddy with heat.

“We’ll all be living with it,” Dara said. “We’ll have to rearrange our whole schedule around it. We might have to rent space at the Y to cover classes.”

The parents wouldn’t like it, and the younger girls—the five-, six-, seven-year-olds Marie taught—would use it as an opportunity for laziness, every disruption an excuse to giggle and play rather than practice.

“So then,” Marie said, “why do it?”

Marie watched herself in the mirror. Her body pulling itself into long, stretchy pieces of taffy. Not very elegant, Marie, Dara thought.

“Don’t you want more space,” Dara said. “Isn’t that why you moved here to begin with.”

Neither of them were questions exactly.

“Maybe this way,” Dara said, staring at Marie, bent over at the waist now, the whiteness near her scalp, so white against the ruby face, “we can avoid any more fires.”

Marie didn’t say anything. What could she say?



* * *



*

Later, Dara was tidying the changing room, collecting abandoned sweaters, twirls of toe tape, curls of elastic ribbon, scruffs of lamb’s wool popped loose from pointe shoes.

She could hear Charlie talking to Marie in the back office.

“It’s time,” Charlie was saying.

“Is it,” Marie said.

There was a pause, Dara leaning closer, trying to hear.

“It’s time for something,” Charlie said finally. “We need something.”



* * *



*

In the middle of the day, their claims adjuster, Bambi, a petite, solidly built woman of indeterminate middle age, arrived to review the damage.

She moved quickly, taking pictures with her phone.

“Have you hired someone yet?” she asked Charlie.

“No,” he said, but then he mentioned Derek and that maybe the adjuster knew him.

“Sure,” Bambi said, blinking. “I’m surprised you can get him. He’s in high demand.”

“Really?” Charlie said.

“He must’ve liked you,” Bambi said, handing Charlie her card as she began to leave. “He must’ve seen something he liked.”



* * *



*

That evening, Dara stayed late with a few students, including her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince, Bailey Bloom and Corbin Lesterio, both of whom wanted extra practice.

But even with all the windows open, one by one, they started coughing, Bailey’s peashoot body shaking from it.

The smoke was gone from the air, but it had tunneled in deep, sunk itself into the wood, the drywall. Corbin’s big dark eyes blurred with tears. The fire was gone, but it wasn’t.

It made Dara think about a story their mother told them once. About the famous ballerina in the nineteenth century, a gas lamp catching on her skirt, enveloping her in flames before the entire audience’s eyes. How she spun and spun, the blaze consuming her until she was rescued.

She lingered a few months after, her corset melted to her ribs.

The surviving scraps of her costume still hung in the Musée de l’Opéra in Paris.

That, their mother told them, is love.



* * *



*

The following morning, Dara and Charlie arrived to find Marie sitting on the floor of Studio B, her face sweaty, her long neck and chest glistening, her legs tangled up.