The Turnout(53)

* * *



*

At the living-room window, she examined the Nutcracker head in the early morning light. It wasn’t as she remembered at all, its skull sunken slightly, dented on one side, its smell of dried paste, the fading red of his hat, the features on his face dulling, the twirling mustache rubbed away, the mesh over one eye torn.

But his bared-teeth grin loomed just as large. When the Prince turned his head for the first time, flashing that grin, it always sent all the little children in the theater hiding under their seats.

She supposed it was like all children’s stories, all fairy tales—always much darker, stranger than you guessed. Children themselves much darker, stranger than you guessed.

That was when she thought she saw something through the front windows, smeary with morning mist.

An orange flare, like maybe the neighbor burning leaves in his trash can again. But, moving closer, her hands curling around the Nutcracker head, she saw it was that car, Marie’s, its orange even more so amid the grim morning, the orange of an Elmer’s glue top.

“Marie . . .” she said aloud, her right hand reached out to the fogged window as if her sister could hear her. Is she coming home, is she . . .

There was an awful feeling in her chest, and before she could name it, the idling car leapt to life again.

As it hurtled past, into the morning mist, she saw him. She saw Derek behind the wheel. Derek alone.



* * *



*

I’m telling you,” she told Charlie the minute he woke up, “he was in her car and he was watching us. Spying on us.”

“Or the house,” Charlie said, rubbing his temples. He walked over to the window, drawing back one of their mother’s French-pleated drapes, the damask gray with dust.

“What do you mean?” Dara said, the Nutcracker head still in hand, the way little girls held baby dolls, resting on their forearms, their alarmed baby-doll faces forever staring up, eyes painted open, wondering, fearful.

“I don’t know,” Charlie said, his brow furrowed. “He asked me some questions about it. What year it was built. Had we ever thought of selling it. That kind of thing.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Dara said.

“I didn’t think . . . I mean, it’s his field,” Charlie says. “Maybe he . . .”

But Charlie’s voice trailed off, a slightly puzzled look on his face.

He has something he wants. That’s what Mrs. Bloom had said. The house. The things he seemed to know about it. And then there’d been Marie, just the day before: People have cars. That’s what they do. They move away. They buy a car, buy a house.

“It was just strange because we also got a call yesterday,” Charlie said, more awake now, more alert. “Some woman called for you. Something about the house.”

“What about the house?” Dara said. “Wait—”

“She was from the city or something,” he said. “I wrote her number down.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t important. I mean, it didn’t seem important.”

“Where’s the number?”

“At the studio.”

Dara sat down beside Charlie, the Nutcracker head between them. Both saying nothing.



* * *



*

She couldn’t tell what Charlie was thinking. She couldn’t tell how he felt. His eyes were cool blue and empty. It was how he’d always been as a dancer. All those years, all those bone spurs and labral tears, the stress fractures and torn tendons. Grinding his body to a fine powder. He didn’t let himself feel it, or anything. Or at least he never showed it.

You’re dancing yourself to death, his doctor said once, under his breath.

But Charlie wouldn’t stop. Until his body stopped for him. Until the hangman’s fracture that, surgery by surgery, forced him to stop dancing at all.

But it wasn’t that he didn’t feel things. When their parents died, Charlie was the one who broke the news to Dara and Marie. The state trooper punted it to him. And Charlie, older than his years, told them so gently, so cleanly.

A day later, while Dara and Marie were upstairs dressing for the funeral, he drove his hand through the kitchen window. He still had a scar the shape of a seashell in the meaty bit between his thumb and forefinger.

And, once a month, he still put lilies on their mother’s grave.





RICH AS CREAM


I need to talk to you later,” Dara said as she watched Marie slip down the spiral staircase that morning, her face blurry with sleep.

“Sure, boss,” she said, brushing past Dara. “But do we really have time? Don’t we need to get cracking those nuts?”

Insolent, Dara thought.

Even her voice didn’t sound like Marie’s voice. It was more gruff, throaty.

It was the things he was saying to her. The ideas he was putting into her head.

He’s like a mesmer, Dara thought. It’s like mind control.

It reminded her of those ads they used to have in the backs of her father’s magazines.

want the thrill of imposing your will on someone?

how to control women’s minds!



* * *



*