The Turnout(3)

But, for the most part, to all the little girls, their faces upturned, their matching pink tights and scuffed leather slippers—still more to their parents who crowded the lobby, who steamed up the windows, unwrapping their children from fuzzy, puffy coats and nudging them, gently, into the studio—Dara and Marie were the same, but different.

Dara was cool, but Marie was hot.

Dara was dark, but Marie was light.

Dara and Marie, the same but different.



* * *



*

    Every girl wants to be a ballerina . . .”

It was always the photograph that first drew them in. Dark Dara and pale Marie, their heads tilted against each other, matching buns, their feet in relevé. The photograph was the first thing you saw when you walked into the studio lobby, or clicked on the website, or picked up the community circular or the sleek lifestyle magazine and saw the glossy ad in the back.

Charlie had taken the photograph and everyone talked about it.

So striking, everyone would say. E-theeeer-real, some would even venture. The littlest girls, padding in in their ballet pinks, would stare up at the photo mounted in the lobby, fingers in their mouths.

Like fairy princesses.

So Charlie took more photos. For the local paper, which featured them regularly, for their marketing materials as the school grew in size. But the photos were always, fundamentally, the same. Dark Dara and pale Marie, poised, close, touching.

Once, a marketing person offered them a free consultation. After observing them in the studio one summer day, sweating in the corner, wilting on the high stool they’d given him, he spoke to Charlie under his breath for a long time. That was how they ended up with the photo of Dara and Marie at the end of a long day, after dancing together in the quiet studio, their bodies loose, their leotards soaked through.

Charlie shot them collapsed upon each other on the floor, their faces pink with pleasure.

“Move closer,” he said from behind the camera. “Closer still.”

Closer still. Back then, it seemed impossible to be any closer. The three of them, so entwined. Charlie was Dara’s husband, but he was also so much more. Dara, Marie, and Charlie, their days spent together at the studio, their nights in their childhood home. Back then.

After the shoot, looking at images on Charlie’s computer, Dara hesitated, imagining what their mother might say of the photos, their bruises and blisters and blackened toenails hidden, their bodies so smooth and perfect and bare. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“They tell a story,” Charlie said.

“They sell a story,” Marie added, snapping her leotard against her damp skin.



* * *



*

Dancers have short lives, of course. What happened to Charlie—his crushing injuries, his four painful surgeries—never left their minds. His body, still as lean and marble-cut as the day their mother brought him home, was a living reminder of how quickly things could turn, how beautiful things could be all broken inside. One had to plan, to make a trajectory. That was what made Dara and Charlie different from Marie, from their parents.

Marie always seemed ready to bolt, but never for long and never far. How far could one get if one still struggled to remember a bank card pin number, and left gas burners lit wherever she went.

So, when Dara and Charlie did marry—at city hall, he in an open-collar shirt and back brace and she in a tissue-thin slip dress that made her shudder on the front steps—he brought with him a small trust fund from his long-deceased father, to be broken open at last like a platinum piggy bank on his twenty-first birthday. The amount was modest, but they used it to pay off the mortgage for the studio building, drooping ceiling and all. They owned it outright. It was theirs.

We’ll do it together, he said.

And Marie.

Of course, he said. We three. We means three.



* * *



*

It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.





THE HAMMER


Is it time? Those were the words humming in her head that morning.

Their mother’s kitchen clock, its aluminum yellowed with grease, read six forty-five.

She took a breath, long and wheezing, her body tight and heavy from sleep.

Still, Dara couldn’t quite move from her seat, her palms resting on the drop-leaf table, the walnut whorls she’d known since childhood.

That morning, she’d woken fast from a dream about the Fire Eater their father took them to see at the spring carnival when they were very small. The way the woman gripped the bluing torch, how the flames seemed to draw up her throat, her long face, her startled eyes.

The dream was still in her, more or less, still fluttering her eyes, and when she rose from the table to turn off the gas burner, she waited three, four, five seconds to see the blue flame flicker and disappear.

Marie, she thought suddenly. All these months later and she still expected to turn and see Marie, face pleated with sleep, stumbling toward her, empty mug outstretched.

Tea in hand, Dara lowered herself back into her chair, then stretched her torso forward, arms out, her head dropping lower and lower, her arms reaching down her calves, grabbing her ankles, all the blood joining. All the nerves radiating.

We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It’s our friend, our lover.