The Turnout(87)

Passing through the living room, Dara noticed for the first time the row of jaunty Nutcrackers arrayed across the mantelpiece, every color, different heights. A fur-hatted British solider with a long sword, a hussar with a riding crop, a crowned king with a scepter. But all with the same open mouth, baring two rows of painted teeth.

She thought of Marie, standing before the statue at the theater. The sense that her mind, her thoughts were veiled, remote. That she knew things she would never say. She didn’t have the words to say them.

Dara stopped, turning to Mrs. Bloom.

“Wait,” Dara said, “why did you do it, then? After all this. Why did you recommend him to us?”

“Pardon?”

“To us, as a contractor.”

Mrs. Bloom had a funny look on her face.

“I didn’t,” she said.

“You did. You showed Charlie the pictures. You . . .”

“No. You’re mistaken.” Mrs. Bloom kept looking at her, confused, troubled, her fingers at her brow bone. “I’m sorry.”

Something faint in the back of Dara’s head was slowly getting louder. The slither of that snake tail now emerging from the muck. She looked at her watch. It was nearly nine.

“I have to go,” Dara said. “I have to go now.”





DO YOU NEED ME


In the driveway, the sharp night air a revelation, Dara stood at her car for a minute, two, figuring something out. She smoked a cigarette on Mrs. Bloom’s synthetic green lawn, scattering ash, fingers shaking.

Marie’s car came like the flare of a match on the horizon. Dara let the cigarette fall to the grass, a chemical hiss.

The hiss reminded her of something, the space heater after the fire. How it looked like a lava rock, with its cord scorched, like the fuse of a firecracker.

She’d thought for so long that Marie’s fire was how everything started. How it brought Derek to them. But now it seemed it wasn’t the fire. There was a fire before the fire.

The car pulled up the driveway, Marie’s hands on the steering wheel like little claws pressed together.

“Madame Durant,” Bailey said, jumping from the passenger seat, “we had ice cream, but I only had three bites.”

“And no whipped cream,” Marie said, looking at Dara with a worried expression. Sensing something, seeing something on her face.

“I have to go,” Dara said, moving to her own car. “Get some rest, Bailey. Kiss your mother.”



* * *



*

In the rearview mirror, they watched her drive away, Bailey in her ski jacket, her long legs still in her pink tights, vomit or brown blood streaked up one calf.

Marie shivering beside her in their father’s cardigan, her eyes like great moons.



* * *



*

The glass building by the highway. That’s what Mrs. Bloom had said.

It turned out there was more than one, an office park cluster of five, all with sweeping windows tinted blue, green, gold, part of the area’s sluggish gentrification.

Driving from one directory to the next, Dara stared numbly at the names, a distant buzzing in her brain: Hobart Partners, Glittman Technologies, Converged Network Services, Regan Logistics.

The lots sprawling and empty, except for the last one, a low-slung glass box, its interior blue like an aquarium. Etched across its darkened front were the words: Verdure Medical Spa. Beneath it, in smaller print: Physical Therapy ? Occupational Therapy ? Acupuncture ? Medical Massage.

This is it, Dara thought. The acupuncturist, the wife.

She paused a moment. Waited. Five, ten minutes went by and then a Shamrock taxicab, bright and jolly, appeared, slowing to a halt at the front curb.

She didn’t move, the sound of her own breath filling the car.



* * *



*

The man exited the taxi, his navy peacoat buttoned high in the cold. The blaze of his blond hair, the litheness of his movements. The cold air piping color like a painter might, along his cheekbones, his handsome brow.

He moved gracefully, if carefully, his posture straight as a sword.

Spine to the heavens, s’il vous plait, their mother always told him. And straight down to Hades himself.

Because it was Charlie. Of course. It was Charlie.



* * *



*

The glass box lit up, the lobby instantly sapphire, as a woman in a coat, scrubs came rushing forward, opening the front door to him.

Opening her arms to him.

The two of them a dark jumble of hands, of clutches, Charlie’s head dipping against the woman’s dark hair, pressing against her throat. The woman smiling at him with her eyes until the moment her gaze shifted, seeing something. Peering into the dark parking lot where Dara’s car idled, smile fading as she pulled Charlie through the door, into the blue heart of the building.

There was a feeling inside Dara of something falling and falling as she watched.



* * *



*

Charlie. Charlie.

Dara stepped out of her car, the air sharp as needles, sharp as the sword.

Pausing at the sound of the car door, the woman scanned the parking lot from the doorway, her hand curled over her eyes against the streetlamps’ glare.

Charlie’s PT is Mrs. Bloom’s acupuncturist is Derek’s wife is Charlie’s . . .