The Turnout(44)

It was a breach. A betrayal.

“I suppose you and Charlie never talk about me when I’m not around,” Marie had said later.

“That’s not the same,” Dara had replied loudly, her voice strangling up her throat. “He’s my husband.”

Marie started shaking her head, over and over, as Dara went on, “And you know Charlie. Charlie loves you. We’ve all known each other since we were children. We grew up together. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s family, it’s . . .”

She went on and on, hating the sound of her own voice, high and strained and nothing like their mother’s. She always tried to match their mother’s soft, lush alto.

“We grew up together,” Dara finally repeated.

But Marie only looked at her and said quietly, “Did we? Grow up?”



* * *



*

That night, back in the warm confines of the house, cluttered and smelly and familiar, she wanted to tell Charlie everything. She wanted him to calm her down, to make her tea, to rub her feet with his strong hands.

But she couldn’t. They never talked about when Marie moved out, or why. It had been a strained time for all of them and there was no need to stir it all up again. That’s what was so enraging about it all, about that contractor bringing it up. About Marie having told him things.

I didn’t tell him that, Marie had insisted. But in that vague way that left you to wonder what she did tell him. And why.



* * *



*

When Dara finally fell asleep, two of Charlie’s yellow-and-green pills sinking her into some kind of swampy dream place, she had bad dreams. She dreamt she could hear them, Derek’s sly voice, Marie’s tittering laugh. Snide, insinuating, both of them. They were in the room, in her bedroom. They were standing in the bedroom door. No. They were huddled at the foot of the bed, their eyes dancing, hands over their mouths, snickering. They were right there! Watching!

Charlie, Charlie, she said, shaking him, hands clawing at his back.

But he didn’t wake up and she was never sure if he was in the dream or not. If he was in the dream and couldn’t hear her, or she’d woken up and he was lost in his own yellow-and-green-pill sleep, the sludge of Charlie’s sleep world, which was a distant place she longed to go.





THE FLOOD THIS TIME


Studio B was full of water, three inches in the corners, the brand-new floorboards soaked soft as tissue paper.



* * *



*

Dara could smell it before she saw what it had done. An unwell smell, an unhealthy one, like the dunk tank at the spring carnival when they were kids, the one their mother forbid their father from letting them in or they’d definitely get polio and never dance again.

She’d already been running late, struggling to get out of bed that morning. Charlie had gone to the studio ahead of her. He told her the walk would be good for his back anyway.

Take an extra half hour, he said. The studio will go on without you.

“It’s not as bad as it looks, ma’am,” Benny said as Dara walked in, an even stronger swampy stench in the air. He and Gaspar were ankle deep in brown water, working a utility pump and wet-vac over the half-finished floor, the freshly installed sprung panels submerged, waterlogged and buckling.

“Where is he?” Dara said, covering her mouth and nose.

“Ma’am, please, don’t be alarmed,” Benny kept saying as she stood in the corner of Studio B, her shoes filling with warm, murky water.

The feeling came over her.

“He’ll be here forever,” Dara said, to herself, to anyone. “We’ll never be rid of him.”



* * *



*

In the back office, she found Charlie on the phone, his face white.

“What happened?” Dara asked. “Why didn’t you call?”

“Busted pipe,” Charlie whispered, hand over the mouthpiece.

Derek had explained everything. It turned out someone—though both Benny and Gaspar denied it and Dara believed them—must’ve driven a nail into a pipe in Studio B. It must have been leaking all night, the subfloor now a sponge beneath their feet, an adjacent floor panel water-buckled. They would have to drill holes into it to dry out the cavity inside.

“And where is he now?” Dara asked, leaning against the door.

“Off to rent an industrial dehumidifier,” Charlie said miserably. “Before we get mold.”

Pipe repair, parts, and labor. Time. More time. Starting over with the new floor installation, waiting for a replacement panel. There were overruns already. And twelve hundred dollars for the permit Derek said they wouldn’t need but did and then had to pay a penalty too.

“This is what they do,” Charlie said, reaching for the stack of bills they’d been avoiding: equipment rental, concrete sealer, special adhesive specially ordered, something called polyplastic. “Con artists, all of them.”

Then, one by one, Charlie began impaling them on their mother’s ancient bill holder, its rusty metal spike.

Something has finally turned for him too, Dara thought.

“We made a mistake,” Charlie said, leaning back in the chair. His face so pale it looked like stage makeup, his eyes dark blotches. “With him.”