The Turnout(51)

Dara still remembered the phone call in the middle of the night. A nurse from the local Methodist hospital called to say Marie had been in an accident.

Charlie told her it had to be a mistake. Marie was asleep down the hall, as she was every night. Every night the three of them padding up the stairs.

But Marie wasn’t asleep down the hall. Instead, she’d taken their shared Chrysler for a nighttime drive on some county road, her brights blaring, and ended up shearing off the front bumper on a guardrail only a few miles from the highway median their parents’ Buick had waltzed across ten years before.

It was a miracle, really, that she emerged with only a few bumps and bruises, and a sprained thumb.

That’s what the highway patrol officer told Dara at the hospital.

Seated on the gurney, Marie displayed for Dara her thumb, newly outfitted in an outsize splint, a neoprene glove with hooks and loops like a falconer or a fencer.

En garde, Marie said, as if reading her mind.



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Isaw them, she said after when they asked her what had happened. Mother and Father. They were ahead of me in the old Buick. They were going so fast. I had to keep up.

Dara felt herself grow cold.

I wanted to warn them. But it was like they were trying to lose me, leave me behind.

Marie’s legs shaking, her pupils jitterbugging.

But how can you rescue someone, she said, who doesn’t want to be saved?

Dara said she wasn’t making any sense and that she’d better start. Why did you crash into the guardrail, Marie? Where were you going anyway?

But Marie couldn’t answer, the pills making her silly, sick.

Her forehead was bulging, a goose egg right between her eyes, and Charlie kept trying to make her laugh, feigning to touch it, asking if it was soft-or hardboiled.

They didn’t want her to start talking about their parents again.

Don’t worry, Marie told Dara later. It wasn’t really about them.

It’s always about them, Dara thought, a realization that hovered there a moment, then was gone.



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Less than a week after, Marie made her announcement. She was going to go on a trip. A trip to far-off places. She needed to. Places like Budapest, maybe Croatia, or Trieste.

It was alarming, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was time.

Dara herself had almost left once, years ago. It was that time just before their parents died, and she and Charlie were so freshly in love. It was the kind of thing that seemed so urgent when you were very young. Far younger than Marie was now.

And it nearly happened. Until it didn’t.

But Marie was going, and maybe it was time.



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It seems to you like I just decided, Marie kept saying to them. It seems impulsive to you. It seems reckless to you. To you.

Just let her, Dara finally said to Charlie. Just let her.

Because Dara realized, suddenly, that she wanted Marie to go. A flicker in her head, the house without Marie. A family of only two. It was unimaginable and it made her heart go fast.

She doesn’t have any money, Charlie kept insisting. She can’t go anywhere.

We’ll give her money, Dara said. The studio wasn’t yet in the black, but Charlie had a little money left from his trust fund.



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That was how they came to the arrangement. They’d buy out Marie’s stake in the house, based on a fair estimate of their devising. Their parents had left it to both of them, but what did Marie need with a house if she was going to be traveling around the world?

It’s her choice, after all, Dara told Charlie, who wasn’t so sure.

And, of course, Dara said to Marie, we hope you’ll come back to us, come home.

A deed is just a piece of paper, Charlie added more urgently to Marie. You belong here.

There was a big party before she left—all the studio parents came, and the former students now grown—and Marie drank a bottle of champagne herself and ended up kissing one of Dara’s former students in the pantry, a twenty-year-old boy with a dashing blond forelock, and generally causing mayhem before collapsing in tears at the kitchen table after everyone had left. Charlie put her to bed, laid a cold washcloth on her face, a trash basket nearby in case.

She’s not going, Charlie told Dara. You’ll see.



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    But Marie did go, dragging their mother’s rolling trunk behind her.

“First stop, Greeeece!” That’s what the first postcard said, a week later.

The second one, from Rome, came a week after that and had only a few words scrawled across: “BEING GOOD. LOVE TO MY DARLINGS.”

There was no third one and, twenty-five days after she left, they woke to the sound of Marie’s battered feet pittering along the upstairs hallway, a duty-free bag with a half-eaten box of mandoles and three cans of halva ringed around her wrist. Their mother’s velvet trunk abandoned at the foot of the stairs, its wheels now stripped.

I had it all wrong, she said, clinging to Dara in bed that night, the two of them twinning, making Marie feel safe. I thought the voices inside were saying to go, go, go!

And what, Dara asked, did they really say?

They said don’t listen to the voices, Marie said and laughed, laughed so hard that she shook in Dara’s hands, in her arms, Dara holding her, this little bird, its beak sharp and cries small.