The Turnout(70)
*
The medical examiner came out, a dust mask pressed to his face, and the woman who took all the pictures followed, a heavy case in her hand.
It was all ending, nearly. Or at least this part was.
The body was gone, carried out in that big black bag with a zipper. Dara and Charlie had both turned their heads.
“Someone should’ve torn out that staircase years ago,” the medical examiner said to no one in particular. “Death trap.”
* * *
*
The detective spoke to Benny and Gaspar, but not for long. Everything seemed pro forma.
After, Dara told them they could go home for the day.
“Thank you,” Benny said, standing in the middle of Studio B, his hand tentatively touching the saw bench.
Gaspar began packing up, but Benny didn’t move at all for several seconds.
“Benny,” Dara said, “we’re all so sorry. About the accident.”
Benny looked at her and Dara found herself looking away.
“It’s very sad,” he said finally. “But we keep going.” Taking off his cap, he slid in his foam earplugs and reached for the table saw. “That’s how we get paid.”
* * *
*
I don’t know,” Dara said to Charlie later. “I think it’s fine.”
“But they probably knew. About Marie.”
“Maybe,” Dara said, pulling her hair back into a bun.
“We should,” Charlie said, “make sure they got paid.”
* * *
*
All the younger girls were crying in little clumps across the studio. The five-and six-year-olds, tugging at their leotard crotches, whimpering softly, sneaking glances at the door to the back office, the police tape crisscrossed.
The older girls were, as ever, dry-eyed, cool. Speculating, whispering in corners to one another, guessing about canceled rehearsals, biting their fingers and cracking their toes.
Older than most of their fathers, the dead contractor was only a voice through the walls, a constant obstruction as they navigated the makeshift path through Studio B. A dad type, with a thunderous voice and a mercurial schedule, strolling past everyone in his shiny boots, shouting to Benny every time a circuit broke.
They’d likely noticed him far less than Benny, who arrived every day on a candy-orange motor scooter and was always so nice, even when he unclogged the toilet for them, and Gaspar, who was charming with his little habits, like setting a jug of milk on the sill of the open window, not drinking it until it was icy, or the time he played Crazy Eights with a few of the younger girls, their carpool parent late for the day’s pickup.
They had no feelings for the dead contractor and, besides, The Nutcracker began in ten days.
* * *
*
Everything felt surprisingly normal, even as both students and parents were in a frenzy. Perhaps because they were in a frenzy. The turbulence of the contractor’s death in these very rooms merely seemed an extension and an intensification of the turbulence of Nutcracker season. Gossip, anxiety, paranoia churning, and two six-year-olds vomiting in the powder room, one in the sink, after another girl claimed there was still blood on the floor where the contractor’s body had fallen. It was terrible! she kept saying. I can smell it!
If only, Dara thought, they’d seen the back of his head when the paramedic turned him over, spongelike and ravaged from hitting the desk’s sharp corner, the unforgiving floor. If only they’d seen the dark hole where his eye had been.
* * *
*
I was scared of him,” Chlo? Lin confided at one point to Dara.
“Why?”
Chlo? took a deep breath, her eyes dragging to Studio B once, then twice.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t go here.”
“Go here?”
“He . . . he didn’t belong.”
No, Dara thought, momentarily gratified. He didn’t.
* * *
*
Few of the students could conjure any specific encounter with the dead contractor, other than Ivy Neuman’s long recounting of the time he helped her untangle her wool scarf from the power cords stretched across Studio B.
Of all the things competing for their students’ attention—which were almost entirely the varied and countless ways they could fail disastrously and on an epic scale onstage—Derek was the least.
Still, everyone had taken notice when they’d carried the body through the studios, the clatter of the gurney, the black monolith of the contractor, the body bag zipper glistening.
Everyone had stepped out of the way, the students grim-faced, hands folded, heads down as if for a fallen solider.
* * *
*
Charlie was steady and reassuring with the parents. Promising them that, while this surely was not ideal timing, in some ways it would have been worse if it had happened a few weeks ago. Now they were nearly ready to move to on-site rehearsals at the Ballenger and maybe they could even expedite the process. Move off the premises until everyone felt comfortable again. You see, it was a very sad thing—tragic, really—but they all knew how much The Nutcracker meant to the students and how hard they’d been working. The show must go on, to coin a phrase.