The Turnout(88)

Bun loosening, her feet crunching on the parking lot salt, Dara began moving toward the building, the lights blotching against her eyes, her chest aching from the cold.

Ahead, the woman cautiously unlatched the door, swinging it open again, calling out.

“Are you here for me?” she said as Dara moved closer, seeing the woman, her dark hair braided, a faded parka unbuttoned over maroon scrubs. “Do you need me?”

Dara stopped and looked at her. She needed to take it all in, her frumpy coat, salt streaked, her thick-soled shoes, her strong nose and brow even stronger than their mother’s.

“Are you here for me?” the woman said again, drawing the parka across herself as the wind kicked up and began moaning.

“Are you injured?” she said, or seemed to, the wind like a roar in Dara’s ears now. Waving her arm out, waving her in, as Dara slowly backed away, back to her car. “Do you need my help?”



* * *



*

In the car, her hands red from the cold, resting on the steering wheel, Dara thought she should cry, but she felt only blankness, like a cold, smooth stone. She hadn’t cried even at their parents’ funeral, holding herself rigidly, her chin high and everything shuttered away. Marie had done all the crying for both of them, that angry, jagged cry. The kind when you can’t tell the anger from the grief because they’re the same somehow. Something ending suddenly before you knew it could ever end at all.

And, as fated as the ending feels when it comes, you still never said okay. You never gave permission and it all came crashing down anyway.





SHOW YOUR TEETH


It’s not true,” Marie was saying, both of them with their coats still on, seated at the kitchen table. “I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care,” Dara said, reaching for the sour table wine, pouring it in yesterday’s glasses, their bottoms a sticky purple.

Dara had told her everything briskly, matter-of-factly. She told her what the detectives disclosed, what Mrs. Bloom shared. What Dara had seen.

After, Marie made her say it again, more slowly.

“But,” she said after, “it can’t be. Charlie—that’s not how he is. That’s not—”

“You really never knew,” Dara said, cutting her off, “he was married? The contractor. That he was married.”

Marie looked at her, eyes milky and strained.

“No,” she said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered.”

Her shoulders dropping, her body leaning back.

“It wouldn’t have mattered at all.”



* * *



*

    A half hour passed, the wine draining from its bottle, and Marie, now in one of their mother’s billowy nightgowns, went on the hunt until she found another bottle, even older and the dubious color of cranberry punch, behind the encyclopedia volumes in their father’s den.

Dara never moved at all from her spot at the kitchen table, rooted there.

Dara and Marie, drinking wine and picking at Madame Sylvie’s Christmas cake, given to them every year and every year more pregnant with rum, thick with figs, slithery apricots. They plucked loose the studded fruit, the butter-glossed corners until Dara couldn’t bear Marie’s dirty fingernails and dug out an old bread knife, dull and striped with rust, from the kitchen drawer.

Neither wanted to say it aloud, to even ask it. Was it not an accident? Could Charlie have killed Derek on purpose? Could that have been the plan all along?

“I was so afraid,” Marie started tentatively, “that it was all my fault. That I’d made all this happen myself. That it was me. Like saying Bloody Mary in the mirror three times and then she appears.”

“Who says you didn’t?” Dara snapped. “We don’t know. We don’t know anything yet.”

And Marie looked at Dara, a look of such sadness it nearly shook Dara.

“Sister,” she said. “We do know. We do.”



* * *



*

Marie was staring at the clock.

“What are you going to do,” she whispered, sliding her arms inside the sleeves of the nightgown, French linen and old lace, and now half-ruined already, stippled with wine, its neck stretched. “About Charlie?”

Dara was looking at Charlie’s tea mug, still sitting there from that morning. The ring on the wood. His cluster of prescription bottles, his vitamins, his methocarbamol to relax his muscles, his benzodiazepines to help him sleep, his pentobarbital when the benzodiazepines didn’t work.

Charlie, his delicate body, his broken body. What does it mean to destroy your own body, to grind your bones down to soft powder? Those long-ago days when he was ascendant, before the injuries began. Those two golden years he spent as a “foot soldier” in the corps of that regional ballet company. Those years he spent rehearsing ten hours a day, performing two hundred times a year, the thousands and thousands of times he’d lifted dancers above his head, leapt and landed, on one foot, onto the hardest of floors. He was a good dancer, but he would never be a great one. Their mother admitted that once, to Dara. Then why, she wanted to ask their mother, are you keeping him here so long?

What are you going to do about Charlie?

Charlie. Her Charlie, their Charlie. Somewhere, in between everything they shared every day, their lives so utterly entwined since they were children, he’d become entangled with this woman, this married woman whom he let, over and over again, put her hands on his back, his body.