The Turnout(62)

“How she came to lose it. Her piece of it.”

Here it is, Dara thought. It had been coming for so long. Dara saw it now. If he couldn’t win it, he’d try to take it.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know what she told me,” he said. There was something heavy in his voice even though he was smiling. “She was in a vulnerable state. That’s how it sounded to me.”

“Marie’s lived her whole life in a vulnerable state,” Dara said. “And this is none of your business.”

“Marie’s business is my business,” he said quickly, icily—a tone Dara had never heard from him before.

“Why?” she replied. “Because she opens her legs to you? She opens her legs forty times a day for a living and it doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.”

“You got a mouth on you,” he said, tight and cool. “Quite a mouth.”

“Get out,” Dara repeated. “Go. Or I call the police.”

Derek looked at her. For the first time, she thought she could feel a little desperation on him, a slick of dampness growing on his brow.

“I’ve seen everything I need to,” he said. Dara let herself breathe.

But as he turned, he took one last look into the bedroom behind him. His eyes darting.

“I like to imagine you two in there,” he said wetly, like his mouth was resting on a bottle neck. “Two of you, two little ballerinas, like the tops of a music box. Pink and perfect, tucked tight into a little boy’s bunkbed.”

How do I get him to leave? How will I ever get him to leave? Dara thought, suddenly, of their mother crying over her father, all those nights. How can I get him to leave, which always sounded like, Will he never come home? Those two, their endless tango . . .

“My brother and me had a bunkbed just like it,” he said. “Except it was a ship’s wheel instead of a wagon wheel.”

He paused, then grinned widely. “We had this routine. My brother would do this voice, Miss Touissant, the hot French teacher at De La Salle. Parlez en fran?ais, mes garcons! And we’d both jack off—lower bunk, upper bunk—in time.”

He looked at her, then added, “One time, I came so hard I kicked out a slat on the footboard.”

Dara’s breath caught. In a flash, she was ten again, her own foot snapping, the crack of the wood, the slat darting across the room like a bat.

“Snapped it right in half,” he continued, watching her. “How about that? Told a girlfriend once and she said there was something sick about it. My brother and me. Something unnatural. I told her, if that’s unnatural, sign me up.” He paused. “Do you, Madame Durant, think that’s unnatural? Any of it?”

Dara reached out for the wall, her legs shaking. Thinking of the broken slat, Marie’s face peeking through.

Marie, she thought, her mind racing, Marie, you gave it all away. You gave us all away.



* * *



*

That’s the greatest trick women ever pulled on us,” he said. “Making us believe they’re different.”

He was halfway down, the old steps groaning beneath him.

“She’s using you,” Dara called out, running to the top of the stairs. “She’s using you and when she’s done, she’ll come home to us.”

Derek stopped, turned.

“Come home to you?” he said. “Is that what you think is gonna happen? That poor kid. That poor goddamned kid.”

Dara felt a sharp pain in her back suddenly, profoundly. “What does that mean?” she asked, her voice gritty and strained. “What did she tell you?”

“Family secrets,” Derek said, his parting shot, “are the very worst kind, aren’t they?”



* * *



*

She watched from the hallway window until his truck pulled away, like an oil slick spreading.

When she was sure he was gone, she stood in the bedroom doorway where he’d stood. The Big Bad Wolf. She wanted to see what he’d seen. That most private space. That space of countless intimacies.

But all she saw was the shabby blond dresser and the bunkbed, which took up nearly the whole room, its footboard glinting from the hallway light.

Is this, she thought, what it looks like from the outside?

Is this all it looks like?

But then she couldn’t sit with the thought. The idea.

So she let it flit past and focused instead on what was in front of her: the gleam of Derek’s smeary palm print on the bunkbed, on its headboard.



* * *



*

Her fingers fumbling over the keys, she texted Charlie and he called immediately. He was nearly home, only blocks away, but he called, the sound of him clambering for a dropped phone on the other end.



* * *



*

What?” Charlie said, rushing through the front door, his breath still fogged from the night air. “I don’t . . .”

“He was in our bedroom.”

“Our bedroom?”

“No, our bedroom,” Dara said, confusing herself. “Marie and me. But he could have been everywhere.”

“How did he get in here? I mean—”

“Marie,” Dara said.