The Turnout(43)

A man who cares about where he puts his hands, Marie had replied.

“I’m busy,” Dara repeated abruptly. “Do you mind?”

He took a sip from his coffee cup and made no move to leave.

“You all used to live together, right? In that big old spookhouse on Sycamore?”

There was something strange about the phrasing of it. Live together. Or maybe it was just the way he said it, sotto voce, like a sly secret.

“We grew up there,” Dara said. “Is this about the house again? Because—”

“You and Marie. You two grew up there.”

“And Charlie.”

“You know, when I first got here, I couldn’t tell. Is Charlie your husband,” he said, tossing his cup in the trash, “or your brother?”

Dara looked at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I’m just curious,” he said. “It’s kind of unusual. Two sisters, one husband. How’s the math work there?”

She didn’t like the way he was watching her.

“For years,” he said, tilting his head, resting it on the door jamb, “the three of you playing house. Kinda an odd setup. Non-traditional, if you will.”

Dara didn’t say anything.

“So close. So private,” he said. “I guess it worked until it didn’t.”

Dara stood up, began moving.

“Your sister told me about it.” He paused a second, looking at Dara, waiting for something. “She told me you wanted her to leave.”

Dara’s mouth opened, then closed.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. Feeling dizzy all of a sudden, the smack of Derek’s aftershave.

“No,” she repeated, stepping backward, uneasy on her feet. “I didn’t want her to leave. And she didn’t leave.” Then, more softly, “She abandoned us.”





FOXY


She told me you wanted her to leave.

All day it buzzed in Dara’s brain. Was he lying, bluffing? Or was Marie, foxy Marie?

Dara stood in her studio, hands clawed around her tea mug, calling out commands to her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince—Lengthen the spine, don’t tuck. Lengthen the neck and lower the shoulders. Turn the head without tilting. Bailey. Bailey. Bailey, attendu!—but all she could think of was Marie.

She thought about calling Charlie, who was over at the Ballenger Center meeting with Madame Sylvie, but she didn’t know what she would say. She wasn’t sure she could make him understand.

Later that day, the rain-heavy gutter in the front of the building gave way, tumbling dead leaves, twigs, mud, to the parking lot below, spattering three exiting students in ballerina pink.

Later, Gaspar found a dead bat among the debris, wings splayed. It had gotten caught, snared.



* * *



*

    In Studio A, she found Marie stretched on the floor, her arms above her head, her barely-breasts disappearing into her bony chest.

Dara stood above her, her hands drifting down to her own breastbone, feeling the hard chop of her rib cage. Their strange, strange bodies. All the heat and fire was in the feet, stamped and lined and mangled and engorged. . . .

“Why did you talk to him about us?” Dara said, her feet near Marie’s head. “Why?”

Marie looked up at Dara but didn’t say anything. That cool blond hair of hers—the talk of the studio for days after—was already starting to look strangely green, frayed.

“Derek. Why did you tell him personal things?”

“What things?”

“About your moving out of the house. He said you told him I wanted you to leave.”

The corners of Marie’s mouth seemed to lift ever so slightly, a ghost smile.

“I didn’t tell him that,” she said. “That’s not what I told him.”

Now Dara couldn’t stop, an awful feeling in her chest.

“And about the way we lived,” she said, stumbling over the words.

“What about the way we lived, Dara?” Marie said, looking up at Dara, her palms across her breasts. Her eyes vacant, guileless.

Dara paused, watching her sister. Was it her sister, even. This creature possessed.

“The way he said it, the way you told him about us,” Dara continued. “He twisted it all around like there was something wrong about it. Something . . .” She fumbled to find the word. “Unseemly.”

Marie looked at her, a faux blankness that made Dara want to scream.

“What?” Dara said, her voice rising. Marie and her little silences, her cryptic smiles. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking anything,” Marie said, rubbing her arms with her hands, a giddy look on her face.

Dara’s arm thrust out, grabbing Marie’s elbow hard, yanking it.

“Don’t worry,” Marie said, staring down at Dara’s fingers, red on her skin. “I won’t tell him about you.”



* * *



*

That night, Dara couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of the two of them—that snide contractor and her remote sister—sharing confidences. Whispering about her, about their private matters. This was new, Dara thought. This was the turning, the deepening she’d been feeling.