The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning, her fears were confirmed.

  She’d arrived at the studio before seven and he was tumbling down the spiral stairs from Marie’s lair, his hair still gleaming from the stand-up shower, his breath mints blasting—it made her sick.

  His smell, his cleanness made her sick.

  She so preferred the smells of the studio—sweat and feet and tiger balm, the musk of feet and boys’ crotches and the occasional whiff of ammonia from the little ones, their tights stinging with urine—and the smells of the house, their home—camphor and tea and wet plaster and the burnt furnace stench and, still, in every carpet fiber, every pine whorl, their mother’s scent. Perfume and desperation.

  “Morning, sis,” he said, bolder than ever.

  “I’m not your sister,” Dara said.

  “I guess no one has a chance, do they?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You three,” he said, his voice wet from sleep, “thick as thieves.”

  He was standing before her now, coffee cup half crushed in his big meaty hand.

  “I’m busy,” Dara said, on hold with the insurance company, trying to get some answers about their claim payment.

  “Hey, I get it. Family is everything,” he said, leaning against the jamb. “Marie explained.”

  Explained? Dara thought. What does that mean? And she didn’t like the way he was watching her. It felt like he was poking her with his manicured fingers.

  What kind of man gets a manicure, she’d said to Marie.

  A man who cares about where he puts his hands, Marie had replied.

  “I’m busy,” Dara repeated abruptly. “Do you mind?”

  He took a sip from his coffee cup and made no move to leave.

  “You all used to live together, right? In that big old spookhouse on Sycamore?”

  There was something strange about the phrasing of it. Live together. Or maybe it was just the way he said it, sotto voce, like a sly secret.

  “We grew up there,” Dara said. “Is this about the house again? Because—”

  “You and Marie. You two grew up there.”

  “And Charlie.”

  “You know, when I first got here, I couldn’t tell. Is Charlie your husband,” he said, tossing his cup in the trash, “or your brother?”

  Dara looked at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “I’m just curious,” he said. “It’s kind of unusual. Two sisters, one husband. How’s the math work there?”

  She didn’t like the way he was watching her.

  “For years,” he said, tilting his head, resting it on the door jamb, “the three of you playing house. Kinda an odd setup. Non-traditional, if you will.”

  Dara didn’t say anything.

  “So close. So private,” he said. “I guess it worked until it didn’t.”

  Dara stood up, began moving.

  “Your sister told me about it.” He paused a second, looking at Dara, waiting for something. “She told me you wanted her to leave.”

  Dara’s mouth opened, then closed.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. Feeling dizzy all of a sudden, the smack of Derek’s aftershave.

  “No,” she repeated, stepping backward, uneasy on her feet. “I didn’t want her to leave. And she didn’t leave.” Then, more softly, “She abandoned us.”

  FOXY

  She told me you wanted her to leave.

  All day it buzzed in Dara’s brain. Was he lying, bluffing? Or was Marie, foxy Marie?

  Dara stood in her studio, hands clawed around her tea mug, calling out commands to her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince—Lengthen the spine, don’t tuck. Lengthen the neck and lower the shoulders. Turn the head without tilting. Bailey. Bailey. Bailey, attendu!—but all she could think of was Marie.

  She thought about calling Charlie, who was over at the Ballenger Center meeting with Madame Sylvie, but she didn’t know what she would say. She wasn’t sure she could make him understand.

  Later that day, the rain-heavy gutter in the front of the building gave way, tumbling dead leaves, twigs, mud, to the parking lot below, spattering three exiting students in ballerina pink.

  Later, Gaspar found a dead bat among the debris, wings splayed. It had gotten caught, snared.

  * * *

  * * *

  In Studio A, she found Marie stretched on the floor, her arms above her head, her barely-breasts disappearing into her bony chest.

  Dara stood above her, her hands drifting down to her own breastbone, feeling the hard chop of her rib cage. Their strange, strange bodies. All the heat and fire was in the feet, stamped and lined and mangled and engorged. . . .

  “Why did you talk to him about us?” Dara said, her feet near Marie’s head. “Why?”

  Marie looked up at Dara but didn’t say anything. That cool blond hair of hers—the talk of the studio for days after—was already starting to look strangely green, frayed.

  “Derek. Why did you tell him personal things?”

  “What things?”

  “About your moving out of the house. He said you told him I wanted you to leave.”

  The corners of Marie’s mouth seemed to lift ever so slightly, a ghost smile.

  “I didn’t tell him that,” she said. “That’s not what I told him.”

  Now Dara couldn’t stop, an awful feeling in her chest.

  “And about the way we lived,” she said, stumbling over the words.

  “What about the way we lived, Dara?” Marie said, looking up at Dara, her palms across her breasts. Her eyes vacant, guileless.

  Dara paused, watching her sister. Was it her sister, even. This creature possessed.

  “The way he said it, the way you told him about us,” Dara continued. “He twisted it all around like there was something wrong about it. Something . . .” She fumbled to find the word. “Unseemly.”

  Marie looked at her, a faux blankness that made Dara want to scream.

  “What?” Dara said, her voice rising. Marie and her little silences, her cryptic smiles. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not thinking anything,” Marie said, rubbing her arms with her hands, a giddy look on her face.

  Dara’s arm thrust out, grabbing Marie’s elbow hard, yanking it.

  “Don’t worry,” Marie said, staring down at Dara’s fingers, red on her skin. “I won’t tell him about you.”

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, Dara couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of the two of them—that snide contractor and her remote sister—sharing confidences. Whispering about her, about their private matters. This was new, Dara thought. This was the turning, the deepening she’d been feeling.

  It was a breach. A betrayal.

  “I suppose you and Charlie never talk about me when I’m not around,” Marie had said later.

  “That’s not the same,” Dara had replied loudly, her voice strangling up her throat. “He’s my husband.”

  Marie started shaking her head, over and over, as Dara went on, “And you know Charlie. Charlie loves you. We’ve all known each other since we were children. We grew up together. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s family, it’s . . .”

  She went on and on, hating the sound of her own voice, high and strained and nothing like their mother’s. She always tried to match their mother’s soft, lush alto.

  “We grew up together,” Dara finally repeated.

  But Marie only looked at her and said quietly, “Did we? Grow up?”

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, back in the warm confines of the house, cluttered and smelly and familiar, she wanted to tell Charlie everything. She wanted him to calm her down, to make her tea, to rub her feet with his strong hands.

 
But she couldn’t. They never talked about when Marie moved out, or why. It had been a strained time for all of them and there was no need to stir it all up again. That’s what was so enraging about it all, about that contractor bringing it up. About Marie having told him things.

  I didn’t tell him that, Marie had insisted. But in that vague way that left you to wonder what she did tell him. And why.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Dara finally fell asleep, two of Charlie’s yellow-and-green pills sinking her into some kind of swampy dream place, she had bad dreams. She dreamt she could hear them, Derek’s sly voice, Marie’s tittering laugh. Snide, insinuating, both of them. They were in the room, in her bedroom. They were standing in the bedroom door. No. They were huddled at the foot of the bed, their eyes dancing, hands over their mouths, snickering. They were right there! Watching!

  Charlie, Charlie, she said, shaking him, hands clawing at his back.

  But he didn’t wake up and she was never sure if he was in the dream or not. If he was in the dream and couldn’t hear her, or she’d woken up and he was lost in his own yellow-and-green-pill sleep, the sludge of Charlie’s sleep world, which was a distant place she longed to go.

  THE FLOOD THIS TIME

  Studio B was full of water, three inches in the corners, the brand-new floorboards soaked soft as tissue paper.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara could smell it before she saw what it had done. An unwell smell, an unhealthy one, like the dunk tank at the spring carnival when they were kids, the one their mother forbid their father from letting them in or they’d definitely get polio and never dance again.

  She’d already been running late, struggling to get out of bed that morning. Charlie had gone to the studio ahead of her. He told her the walk would be good for his back anyway.

  Take an extra half hour, he said. The studio will go on without you.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks, ma’am,” Benny said as Dara walked in, an even stronger swampy stench in the air. He and Gaspar were ankle deep in brown water, working a utility pump and wet-vac over the half-finished floor, the freshly installed sprung panels submerged, water-logged and buckling.

  “Where is he?” Dara said, covering her mouth and nose.

  “Ma’am, please, don’t be alarmed,” Benny kept saying as she stood in the corner of Studio B, her shoes filling with warm, murky water.

  The feeling came over her.

  “He’ll be here forever,” Dara said, to herself, to anyone. “We’ll never be rid of him.”

  * * *

  * * *

  In the back office, she found Charlie on the phone, his face white.

  “What happened?” Dara asked. “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Busted pipe,” Charlie whispered, hand over the mouthpiece.

  Derek had explained everything. It turned out someone—though both Benny and Gaspar denied it and Dara believed them—must’ve driven a nail into a pipe in Studio B. It must have been leaking all night, the subfloor now a sponge beneath their feet, an adjacent floor panel water-buckled. They would have to drill holes into it to dry out the cavity inside.

  “And where is he now?” Dara asked, leaning against the door.

  “Off to rent an industrial dehumidifier,” Charlie said miserably. “Before we get mold.”

  Pipe repair, parts, and labor. Time. More time. Starting over with the new floor installation, waiting for a replacement panel. There were overruns already. And twelve hundred dollars for the permit Derek said they wouldn’t need but did and then had to pay a penalty too.

  “This is what they do,” Charlie said, reaching for the stack of bills they’d been avoiding: equipment rental, concrete sealer, special adhesive specially ordered, something called polyplastic. “Con artists, all of them.”

  Then, one by one, Charlie began impaling them on their mother’s ancient bill holder, its rusty metal spike.

  Something has finally turned for him too, Dara thought.

  “We made a mistake,” Charlie said, leaning back in the chair. His face so pale it looked like stage makeup, his eyes dark blotches. “With him.”

  At last, Dara thought. At last he sees.

  He looked at her. “We made a terrible mistake.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Mrs. Durant, we are very sorry,” Benny told her later, pulling up the subfloor with a crowbar. Everything smelled marshy, waterlogged. “We did everything we could.”

  Dara said that she was sure he had.

  * * *

  * * *

  Marie didn’t want to talk about it.

  She told Charlie that Derek had nearly been hurt while trying to stanch the leak, a pipe hitting his head, spraying scalding water over him, his arm pink and blistered.

  “What a shame,” Charlie said dryly. “You would think a contractor would know better.”

  There was something thrilling about Charlie’s new chilliness.

  But Marie didn’t seem to notice, plundering the ancient metal first-aid kit for ointments, salves.

  As the day wore on, however, Dara noticed a new contentment on Marie’s face as she led her students through their barre work, through sur le cou-de-pied, Marie crouching beside her seven-year-olds, reaching over and manually adjusting their pink feet, squeezing the toes around the ankle.

  “Wrap that leg, that foot. Like a scarf, you see? Rotate from your hip to your toenail. And no sickling, mes anges. Pristine pointed toes, s’il vous plait.”

  Of course, Dara thought with a chill. She thinks now he’ll stay longer. She’s trapped him here in her sticky Marie web.

  * * *

  * * *

  These things happen,” Derek explained to Charlie later. “But that’s what insurance is for.”

  Dara could hear them in the back office, Derek’s big-man voice, his reassurances. She stood at the door, listening.

  “Is that so?” Charlie said. “Because we don’t have that kind of insurance. We’re just a small business.”

  “Don’t you worry, friend,” Derek said. “Between my liability insurance and your policy, we’ll be rock solid. I’ll talk to your adjuster myself. Bambi and I go way back. Hasn’t everything worked out so far?”

  “What, like the flood?”

  “Listen,” Derek said, “I hear your worry. But I’m gonna do you right, friend. That’s a promise. I’m gonna do you right. And your wife. And, of course, your sister-in-law. All of you.”

  It felt like a sucker pledge, a con man’s guarantee. But then also something else.

  And your wife. And, of course, your sister-in-law.

  Charlie didn’t say anything. Dara thought she could hear him through the door, breathing.

  * * *

  * * *

  We have to fire him,” Dara said later. “You see it now. How he is. We have to fire him.”

  Charlie looked at her, then leaned back into his chair.

  “In the middle of Nutcracker season?”

  “That’s exactly why we need to fire him,” Dara said. “Fires, floods. Why wait for the locusts? We can’t get through the season like this.”

  “I’m not any happier about it than you are, but I don’t see what choice we have. Do you want to spend the day calling up new contractors? Getting bids? Starting from scratch?”

  Dara didn’t say anything. She was looking at the new raft of Nutcracker bills on the desk. The costume rentals, the tailoring services, the backdrop rental, the photographer, a new sound technician this year, the heaping mound of pointe shoes and on and on.

  “He says he’s going to front us all the expenses,” Charlie said.

  “To pay for the damage he did?” Dara said. “And why would he do that?”

  “Because he quote-unquote trusts us,” Charlie said wryly. “That
’s what he said.”

  Dara’s head was still throbbing from last night’s yellow-and-green pills, from Marie’s impish laughter all day, that mood she’d been in, flittering around her six-year-olds like she was one of them, loud and silly as she showed them how to scurry, paws in the air, as the Nutcracker mice.

  Marie, who seemed elated at the setback that would keep her lover on-site for even longer, for what seemed to Dara to be an infinite time. She could nearly picture Marie taking the hammer she used to demolish her pointe shoes and punching it into that pipe itself.

  “He trusts us,” Dara said coolly. “Lucky us.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The flood became an excuse for chaos, for falling behind. For a huddle of Level IVs dawdling in the changing room, for the Neuman sisters sneaking out for a donut from the deli, for the contraband gum Dara found stuck to her studio floor, purple and obscene looking and leading to a fruitless sweep of all students’ cubbies that took another twenty minutes from their day.

  This was why you needed routine, rigidity, timeliness. One slip, a wrist turned too far, a pointe shoe sliding from a dancer’s heel, a faulty space heater, and everything could change in an instant. Everything could fall apart.

  “Eyes in front! Attention!” Dara said firmly, her ten-year-olds distracted, whispering to one another between exercises. Grave looks and rolling eyes.

  “Is this it?” Dara said, folding her arms, giving them all a look, walking alongside them, their legs like pink pistils trembling. “Is this what you intend to do onstage, with hundreds of audience members, all dressed up in suits and ties and holiday velvet? Because I have a studio full of Level Threes who would be happy to take your spots.”

  “No, Madame Durant,” they all said.