by Megan Abbott
“Isn’t it cold up there?” Charlie had been asking lately, worried as the nights grew cooler, as fall wore on.
But, Dara supposed, Marie would figure something out. She did, of course. Charlie found her one recent morning sleeping in Studio B, shivering in a sleeping bag, and the Pendleton blanket curled with dust.
That evening, he’d brought down the space heater and planted it beside her.
He told her she was being foolish. Dara heard them through the doorway.
“Who’s the fool here,” Marie had replied, taking the space heater under her arm.
There had been a coolness between Charlie and Marie ever since she’d left, a distance. It wasn’t only with Dara. She’s being silly and stubborn, Charlie kept insisting. She should just come home.
* * *
* * *
Marie claimed she didn’t even remember turning the space heater on. She’d been sleeping when she smelled smoke. The curtains had gone up in a glorious flash, ashes catching across her face.
“But not Dad’s blanket,” Dara said, curling her fingers around the Pendleton’s scratchy wool, pulling it off Marie’s shoulders with a hard yank, letting it fall to the ground.
* * *
* * *
The fire investigators stayed for hours. Marie followed them around the studio, smoking the loose cigarettes she bought from the deli with all the cats on Fourth Street.
“Maybe now is not the time to smoke,” Charlie kept saying under his breath.
* * *
* * *
The investigators told them they were lucky the firefighters had arrived so quickly, containing the blaze mostly to Studio B. They put little flags and big cones on the floor and up the walls. They took photographs and video. They bagged up the space heater, its coils rattling, now harmless as a child’s toy.
They gave Marie a lecture about the three-feet rule and frayed cords and sparks.
Dara could tell the investigators didn’t like the look of it. Who could?
But Marie merely nodded obediently. Marie, who, their whole childhood, was always knocking over house plants, breaking things, leaving the water running in the claw-foot tub until the ceiling bulged below.
* * *
* * *
It was so big I was sure they couldn’t stop it,” Marie said later as they surveyed the damage, the floorboards like wet paper.
“If you wanted them to stop it,” Dara asked Marie, “why did you start it?”
“Dara,” Charlie said, surprised, “that’s not what happened.”
But Marie only gazed up at the ceiling sticky with smoke, a shine on her lip like she’d just eaten something very fast, or was about to.
* * *
* * *
All around them, all day, were swarms of incoming parents and students, even ones without Sunday classes but who’d heard about the fire, or some, recalling the death of the original Madame Durant and her husband, looking for fresh evidence of some kind of “Durant Curse.”
Oh, no and my god and no one’s safe as they snuck peeks into Studio B, its volcanic core.
“We’ll get everything back to normal as quickly as possible,” Charlie assured them. “We have contractors coming today.”
“But, Madame Durant,” Bailey Bloom said, echoing what was surely a pervasive fear, “what about The Nutcracker? What about Clara?”
“Bailey,” Dara said, loud enough so everyone could hear, “have you ever heard of a year without a Nutcracker?”
“No, Madame Durant,” Bailey said.
“Nothing will change,” Marie added, slinking up to them, her hair smelling like smoke. “Nothing changes here.”
It reminded Dara of something their mother used to say, Ballerinas are girls forever. Nothing ever changes. Ballet is like Eden that way.
ENTER DEREK
He was coming at seven a.m.
There was no time to waste. Despite their assurances to parents, they couldn’t afford to lose one of their three studios, not during Nutcracker season. Something had to be done to Studio B, streaked black, its floorboards like a soaked sponge.
He was coming at seven, Dara and Charlie arriving early and opening all the windows, the smell of the fire and the fresh mold mingling with the usual smells of sweat and adolescence, of feet and urine and funk.
They’d already had appointments with two other contractors, one of whom was ninety minutes late before staying for ten minutes only to jot down a series of astonishing figures on a Post-it and slap it in Charlie’s hand. The other never showed at all, then requested they send him photos of the damage first, making some joke about them needing more space for tutus.
“Third time’s a charm, right?” Charlie said nervously, lighting a cigarette in the back office, waving away the telltale smoke.
He was coming, the contractor was on his way. Derek something. Someone recommended him. Dara couldn’t remember at first, but wasn’t it Mrs. Bloom? Bailey’s mother, more vested than any other parent, given her daughter was this year’s Clara and thus was everything.
“She said he’s the only honest contractor she’s ever worked with,” Charlie had said. “Which probably means just honest enough.”
All they wanted was someone to repair the blackened floor, to ferret out any mold, to get rid of the soot and the ash that burned in their throats constantly, but first to deliver a fair estimate to their insurance company, to their claims adjuster, a humorless woman named Bambi, who was immune to any charms.
“Mrs. Bloom said he can do anything,” Charlie said. “She was extravagant in her praise.”
Dara thought about Mrs. Bloom, her crested blazers, her impeccably manicured nails, perfect half-moons, her bountiful donations to the annual Nutcracker fund, the care taken over her daughter Bailey’s immaculate bun, never a hair loose, not even a slim tendril.
She thought, He must be good.
* * *
* * *
Do I have to be there?” Marie asked, calling down the spiral staircase from the third floor. “I don’t think I need to be there.”
Charlie made a face to Dara, a face that said, Maybe she doesn’t have to . . .
“You have to be there,” Dara said, standing at the foot of the stairs, Marie’s face hovering above. “Because you nearly burned us all down.”
* * *
* * *
The contractor arrived on time. His name was Derek something, a big man, maybe fifty, fifty-two, with a face and neck tan as a butterscotch candy, in an ill-fitting blazer with chalk marks on both sleeves, belt pulled too tight, giving him the overall look of a former high school athlete gone to seed. On his feet were a pair of natty Chelsea boots caked with mud that he tracked through the studio like a deer hunter.
He held two phones in one outsize hand—a bear paw but fuzzier, Dara thought—and extended the other immediately to Charlie, all the while raking his eyes across Dara and Marie once, then twice, before smiling with hundreds of teeth.
“Nice place, nice place,” he said, striding through their mirror-lined space with its pointe-shoe posters and graying walls. Arriving in Studio B, its floor charred, its walls soot-scattered, he looked around and sucked his teeth. The spot where the space heater had sat was a mean scorch Marie kept stroking with one foot.
“It’s a damn shame, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head, looking at Marie. “What nature can do.”
* * *
* * *
The fire, brilliant and bright, had gnawed its way through Studio B and the storage room behind it, eating the floor and spitting out kindling shards in its wake. It had mercifully been extinguished before it reached the changing room, where, every day, hundreds of little girls with bobbing buns slipped in and out of downy wool coats and softly fraying leg warmers, rubbing their palms anxiously on puckered leotards and scratchy tights.
They needed it all fixed, Charlie explained to the contractor, they needed it now. They couldn’t cancel any more classes, couldn’t hang tarps and open windows and hope they weren’t giving their pin-thin students, their tender-lunged kindergartners emphysema.
I think it smells nice, Marie had whispered that very morning, and Dara had wanted to smack her.
“I get it,” the contractor said, rolling back on his natty heels after he’d walked through the entire studio once, clicking his pen, clicking his tongue. “Short-term, quick fix. You gotta; you’re small businesspeople. You want to be fully operational as quickly as possible. I can do that. I can do that for you. But first . . . can I ask you a question?”
“Okay,” Charlie said warily.
“Have you ever heard the one about the Phoenix rising from the ashes?”
“Sure.”
“Why can’t that be you?”
He explained that he could remove and replace the sooted drywall, the blistered floorboards, the burned window casings, the radiator covers now melted to the crumply black of a tin ashtray. He could clean the HVAC system ducts of smoke, have the whole studio smoke-lacquered. These were easy things. Surface solutions.
But, given the ample check sure to come from the insurance company and given his own estimate, which would be fair, of course, but that would obviously point out various concerns (These old buildings, they’re tinderboxes, aren’t they?) . . .
. . . why not think bigger?
Had they thought of expanding? Knock down that wall and get rid of the storage room behind it, make Studio B nearly twice its size. Even raise the ceiling. There were so many possibilities.
“Why sell yourself short?” he said, clicking his pen. “Grab that brass ring.”
* * *
* * *
My, what a big voice you have, Dara thought. Big and booming. And the way he stalked their careworn, dust-moted space with his pointy, muddy boots, leaving mud membranes across the soft-beaten floor.
Marie didn’t even seem to be paying attention, forever tugging at the cuff of her sweater, fingers tangling in its fray. Such a child, Dara thought, forever a six-year-old girl.
* * *
* * *
I know it’s your job to upsell,” Charlie said. “But even with the insurance—”
“You make the money back twice over,” the contractor said, spinning around the space on one heel. Squinting at the pocket doors that didn’t pull shut and up at the spreading brown stain on the ceiling, the one Marie thought looked like a king rat. The rat, she said every snowfall, is collecting more followers.
“You have a little inconvenience, but after, you throw a big champagne-busting, get a little notice in the local paper, you got more new customers than you got tutus.”
He smiled at all three of them. Dara folded her arms.
He paused a moment, eyes on Dara. Then he began talking again, but this time he looked only at her.
“I’ll be honest: What I know about ballet you could fit on the head of a nail. But I do know this: Every little girl loves it. They’re all born with it—the same big pink dream. And their mommys have it, too, and will pay big bucks to walk into a place that feels special. That feels, well, magical.”
Charlie cleared his throat, sneaking a glance at Dara.
“You’re not just businesspeople. You’re artists,” the contractor continued, eyes still flickering on Dara. “I’m just a guy who works with his hands, but I like to think there’s a creativity to what I do. An art, maybe.”
Charlie nodded politely. Dara was looking over at Marie, whose eyes were fixed on the ceiling, the king rat stain.
“Bottom line,” the contractor continued, “I don’t think artists should have a limit—a timeline, a dollar figure—on their dreams. I don’t think you should.
“So why not dream bigger?
“I can give you all the things you want.”
* * *
* * *
As he talked, their Studio B—the smallest of the three—seemed even smaller. Maybe because he’s so big, she told herself, twice as thick as each of them and dwarfing even Charlie. And now that he’d directed their eyes to the ceiling’s brown weeping corners, it reminded Dara how, the prior year, the eaves leaked into the studio all winter long.
He knew how to talk. He knew how to flatter, to play the humble service worker, the clumsy male amid a space so . . . female, he noted, nodding respectfully at Dara and Marie. Dara, who kept her arms folded across her chest.
Marie, who turned her head away.
Marie, who seemed even quieter than usual, more recessed, head bowed, like an empty bowl.
* * *
* * *
They ended up in the back office, the strong smell of the cigarettes all three of them snuck there between classes and at day’s end, the rickety wooden desk, its blotter studded with errant scorches. Mingling still with the distinctive scent of their mother’s Gauloises, like burning tires on a black night, she once said. A relief from the contractor’s aftershave, like pressing one’s face into a bucket of limes.
“This,” the contractor said, reaching out, wrapping his hand around the rail of the narrow spiral staircase that snaked up to the third floor, the dormer space. “This should be the first to go.”
“No,” Dara said immediately. “Absolutely not.”
He looked at her, and then at the staircase—iron, spiky, relentless.
Dara could feel Marie watching her intently.
“We’ll get you a new one,” he said. “With a warm wood, real nice. Smooth on your feet, smooth like a baby’s bottom.”
“No,” Dara repeated. “That stays.”
Charlie cleared his throat, shifting his feet uncomfortably.
“It’s unsafe,” the contractor said, sliding his finger along the slender rail, the pad of his index finger landing in the sunken dent that had been there a decade, more. “And busted.”
He gave it a hard tug, the railing rattling in his hands.
A gasp—quick and high—escaped from Marie’s mouth. Marie, who had not said a single word since the contractor arrived.
And one more tug, as if he might tear the whole staircase loose like a fairy-tale monster.
“The staircase stays,” Dara said.
It was the only time she saw his mask drop, the contractor. That little slash of something—overreach? Irritation? Anger?—stamping his brow.
It was there, then it was gone, the smile returning. The big teeth.
* * *
* * *
Dara excused herself. Said she needed to take a call.
Walking to the lobby, she felt her breath catching, but she didn’t know why.
Their mother loved that spiral staircase. Their mother said it was cosmopolitan. Bohemian. Recherché.
Their mother, that swan neck, those elegant arms. Her dark hair gathered up tightly with her grandmother’s dragonfly combs. So dignified, so refined, carrying so much inside all the time. Surrounded all day by mirrors and never letting anyone see.
* * *
* * *
When she returned to the office, the contractor was writing something on a pad of paper, looming over slight Marie and slender Charlie as they waited, two pale figurines, cut like glass.
“I got a tight, lean crew that works like beasts,” he was saying as he wrote. “Sweetheart deals with the best suppliers. They trust me. Your insurance company trusts me. Your claims adjuster, Bambi, we go way back.”
“That’s fine, but—” Charlie started.
“You can go cheap and easy,” he said, slapping the paper into Charlie’s hand. “Or you can transform your little school into that ballet palace you always wanted. Make every little girl’s fantasy come true.”
* * *
* * *
Suddenly,
he had to go, he was in a hurry. His phones were ringing, his beeper. He shook his head like, What can I do, so popular, everyone wants me.
“We’ll let you know,” Charlie said, walking him out. “But it sounds like more than we have in mind.”
* * *
* * *
Halfway out the door, the contractor stopped, hand on the jamb, one last aftershave gust.
“So,” he said, grinning, eyes dragging across all three of them, “who decides?”
“We’re partners,” Dara said. “We make decisions as a—”
“I do,” Marie said, her voice low but insistent. “I decide.”
Derek looked at her and laughed.
Then Charlie laughed, too, the hollow, soundless laugh he used when mothers asked if he could help them correct their posture. Dara didn’t laugh. Marie didn’t laugh either.
“I thought so,” Derek said to Marie, grinning, opening the door, his eyes now only on her. “I thought you were the one.”
* * *
* * *
So you’re the big boss now,” Dara said after, her lip curled, both of them smoking feverishly, the visit feeling so big, “Princess Marie?”
“I wanted him to look at me,” Marie said.
Dara looked at her.
“The Big Bad Wolf,” Marie said, her cigarette shaking slightly in her hand.
Dara shook her head. “Well, it’s all over now.”
“Yes,” Marie said, flicking tobacco from her trembling thumb. Taking another long drag. Smoking for dear life.
