The Turnout(63)

His coat half off, Charlie’s arms dropped.

“Is that what he told you? Does she even still have a key?”

“Of course. We didn’t force her to surrender her key to us.”

Then she remembered Marie earlier that evening, her head twitching when Dara explained to Madame Sylvie that Charlie wouldn’t be joining them that night.

“She thought we’d both be at the Ballenger. She gave him her key.”

“Dara, I don’t . . .” Charlie started but then stopped.

“He wasn’t getting anywhere with us on partnering to sell the house,” Dara said, “and now he’s got a new angle. She’s filled his head with crazy ideas.”

“Like what?”

“Like we took advantage of her. Like we stole the house out from under her.”

“Dara,” Charlie said, hands on her shoulders now, “we’ll fix this. We’ll . . . I’ll fix it.”

“We have to fire him,” Dara said. “Tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Charlie said, but he wouldn’t quite look at her.

How tentatively he walked, his back arched, his coat dragging behind him. His gait strained, stilted. His body stiff, like—as they used to joke years ago when it all still felt like it would go away soon—Frankenstein’s monster.

“I just need to think,” he said, heading for the stairs.



* * *



*

She waited for him to come to bed, but first he took a bath. Then she heard him moving through the house, checking all the locks, attaching the door chains.

Finally, late into the night, Dara crept downstairs and found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. His back curved, the whiteness of his shoulders hunched. His legs spread wide and, before him, a plate of blobby pasta, untouched, spattered up the napkin tucked in his undershirt.

Something was wrong. He shouldn’t sit like that, not with his injuries. His half-broken body. But also a dancer—especially a dancer like Charlie—never sat like that, crooked, humped.

“I figured it out,” he said, not even turning around, his angel-blond head bowed.

Dara stepped inside, her eyes on the stove, red-spattered, broken sticks of stale spaghetti scattered across its top. Spaghetti that likely dated back more than a decade, her father’s love of Mueller’s with canned clams, or a pat of butter, ten raps from the grated-cheese can, emerald green and jumbo-size.

“Figured out what?” she said, spaghetti cracking like twigs under her feet.

He turned around, his head bobbing in a way that made her wonder if he’d taken too many of his pain meds, like he had once in the spring, after Marie left and they were fighting a lot and he’d torn the gutter off the side of the house and pulled a dead raccoon from inside. For months the smell had haunted them. They couldn’t find the source. Charlie kept saying it was the smell of death, death, and something was dead inside if he could only find it.

“Figured out what?” Dara repeated. But even as she asked, she realized, urgently, she didn’t want to hear what he might say. She found herself suddenly afraid of what he might say.

“He’s hypnotized her.”

“What?”

“The contractor. He’s hypnotized her. I read about it. It happens.”

Dara looked at him, wanting to pull that spattered napkin loose from his undershirt. She wanted to clean him up, straighten him up.

“Charlie, please,” she said. “Let me—”

She pulled the napkin with a hard yank and moved to the sink, turning on the hot water. Holding the napkin beneath it.

He looked up at her curiously, like a little boy waiting for his mother to wipe his mouth.

She watched as the napkin slid from her red hand, slid through the hungry black flaps of the garbage disposal. She looked down the black hole as Charlie kept talking, his words slipping from him before they were finished forming.

“But the good news is we can fix it. Like deprogramming. We just need to take her to a shrink, a therapist of some kind.”

She flipped the switch and the garbage disposal clattered on, the corner of the napkin slipping into the hole, the motor grinding, grinding, shredding the fabric until the napkin must’ve caught itself in its gears and the whole thing shuddered and stopped.

“Okay,” Dara said. “Maybe.”

She reached out, fingers on the switch again, trying to restart it, a current of electricity fuzzing through her hand, jolting her.

“Either that or we’re the ones,” Charlie said, more softly now, more like himself. “Either that or we’ve been hypnotized. Been hypnotized our whole lives.”

Dara turned and looked at him. She wanted to put her hands over her ears. These are the things I don’t want to hear.

“Dara,” he said, “we have to do something.”

Dara nodded, her hand shaking.

“Dara,” he said, “we have to do it now.”



* * *



*

Once, years ago, tucked in bed, they’d heard their father, drunk and ragged, cry out to their mother that he could do whatever he wanted in his house, that he could set the house on fire if he wanted.

I will do it, woman!

And their mother, cool and weary, smoking cigarette after cigarette at the kitchen table, saying, Stop waving that lighter at me, old man.