by Megan Abbott
The blanket came out only once a year and smelled like lavender and olden days and felt on your fingers like the inside of a bunny ear. Dara could feel it now, how it felt then. Plush and electric, kicking off sparks.
Snuggling underneath it, drinking eggnog and laughing and tussling legs against one another and their eyes always still dusted with snow from the performance, it was their favorite night of the year, every year.
When Charlie came into their lives, he became part of it too. He carried the tray with the eggnog in the red reindeer goblets from the kitchen to the bedroom, never spilling a drop.
That very first year it was strange, maybe. But then it never was again.
Here was Charlie, a very shy thirteen with his Adam’s apple conscious on such an impossibly long neck, anxiously swinging his impossibly long arms.
Their mother lifting the edge of the blanket and inviting Charlie in.
Their mother’s raising it with such flourish, the white of her arm against the blue of the fur. The fur electric and irresistible, her eyes trained on Charlie.
Come in, come in, come in.
* * *
* * *
At last, Dara found the box she was looking for, the one with NUTCRACKER (OLD) written on the side in their mother’s familiar scrawl.
Inside was their rotting papier-mâché Nutcracker head, the one they’d used for a dozen or more years of performances, every Nutcracker Prince sliding it over his boyish head.
In recent years, they’d turned to a newer one, its shellac chipping after only a dozen performances, its quality suspect. I will find the original one, le vrai bonheur, Dara had promised Corbin Lesterio.
Looking at it now, she thought of how happy he would be.
Distracted, she was hurrying for the stairs, the papier-mâché head over her raised fist, when she nearly tripped on that fur blanket again, her foot sinking into it, warm with mold.
Her stomach turned.
Hurriedly, she kicked it away, to the far corner by the wheezing furnace.
* * *
* * *
At the living-room window, she examined the Nutcracker head in the early morning light. It wasn’t as she remembered at all, its skull sunken slightly, dented on one side, its smell of dried paste, the fading red of his hat, the features on his face dulling, the twirling mustache rubbed away, the mesh over one eye torn.
But his bared-teeth grin loomed just as large. When the Prince turned his head for the first time, flashing that grin, it always sent all the little children in the theater hiding under their seats.
She supposed it was like all children’s stories, all fairy tales—always much darker, stranger than you guessed. Children themselves much darker, stranger than you guessed.
That was when she thought she saw something through the front windows, smeary with morning mist.
An orange flare, like maybe the neighbor burning leaves in his trash can again. But, moving closer, her hands curling around the Nutcracker head, she saw it was that car, Marie’s, its orange even more so amid the grim morning, the orange of an Elmer’s glue top.
“Marie . . .” she said aloud, her right hand reached out to the fogged window as if her sister could hear her. Is she coming home, is she . . .
There was an awful feeling in her chest, and before she could name it, the idling car leapt to life again.
As it hurtled past, into the morning mist, she saw him. She saw Derek behind the wheel. Derek alone.
* * *
* * *
I’m telling you,” she told Charlie the minute he woke up, “he was in her car and he was watching us. Spying on us.”
“Or the house,” Charlie said, rubbing his temples. He walked over to the window, drawing back one of their mother’s French-pleated drapes, the damask gray with dust.
“What do you mean?” Dara said, the Nutcracker head still in hand, the way little girls held baby dolls, resting on their forearms, their alarmed baby-doll faces forever staring up, eyes painted open, wondering, fearful.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said, his brow furrowed. “He asked me some questions about it. What year it was built. Had we ever thought of selling it. That kind of thing.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Dara said.
“I didn’t think . . . I mean, it’s his field,” Charlie says. “Maybe he . . .”
But Charlie’s voice trailed off, a slightly puzzled look on his face.
He has something he wants. That’s what Mrs. Bloom had said. The house. The things he seemed to know about it. And then there’d been Marie, just the day before: People have cars. That’s what they do. They move away. They buy a car, buy a house.
“It was just strange because we also got a call yesterday,” Charlie said, more awake now, more alert. “Some woman called for you. Something about the house.”
“What about the house?” Dara said. “Wait—”
“She was from the city or something,” he said. “I wrote her number down.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It wasn’t important. I mean, it didn’t seem important.”
“Where’s the number?”
“At the studio.”
Dara sat down beside Charlie, the Nutcracker head between them. Both saying nothing.
* * *
* * *
She couldn’t tell what Charlie was thinking. She couldn’t tell how he felt. His eyes were cool blue and empty. It was how he’d always been as a dancer. All those years, all those bone spurs and labral tears, the stress fractures and torn tendons. Grinding his body to a fine powder. He didn’t let himself feel it, or anything. Or at least he never showed it.
You’re dancing yourself to death, his doctor said once, under his breath.
But Charlie wouldn’t stop. Until his body stopped for him. Until the hangman’s fracture that, surgery by surgery, forced him to stop dancing at all.
But it wasn’t that he didn’t feel things. When their parents died, Charlie was the one who broke the news to Dara and Marie. The state trooper punted it to him. And Charlie, older than his years, told them so gently, so cleanly.
A day later, while Dara and Marie were upstairs dressing for the funeral, he drove his hand through the kitchen window. He still had a scar the shape of a seashell in the meaty bit between his thumb and forefinger.
And, once a month, he still put lilies on their mother’s grave.
RICH AS CREAM
I need to talk to you later,” Dara said as she watched Marie slip down the spiral staircase that morning, her face blurry with sleep.
“Sure, boss,” she said, brushing past Dara. “But do we really have time? Don’t we need to get cracking those nuts?”
Insolent, Dara thought.
Even her voice didn’t sound like Marie’s voice. It was more gruff, throaty.
It was the things he was saying to her. The ideas he was putting into her head.
He’s like a mesmer, Dara thought. It’s like mind control.
It reminded her of those ads they used to have in the backs of her father’s magazines.
want the thrill of imposing your will on someone?
how to control women’s minds!
* * *
* * *
The only succor the day offered was that Derek didn’t appear at all.
“Where is he?” Dara asked Benny, who shrugged, his face dark with sweat.
“He makes you do all the work,” Dara added.
Benny took off his cap, wiping his face.
“Madame Durant,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Dara asked.
Gaspar, working the belt sander in the corner, looked at Benny, who then paused. Taking a breath.
“For this,” he said, shaking his head.
And it wa
s unclear if he was referring to Studio B, a space that now looked as if it had swallowed itself, the floor sunken and the air above heavy with grit, or something else, something larger, and deathless, of which Dara could only see the dark corners, the creeping edges. The growing thing that had sunk its claws into the studio, into Marie, into everything.
* * *
* * *
All day, Dara waited for a chance to get Marie alone, but they were both consumed with rehearsals, with the one-on-one and small-group work as they slowly stitched the ballet together.
The older ones were truly Dara’s now, giving themselves over to the throbbing feet, the blistered blood, the smell everywhere of bandages, rot.
Mademoiselle, entendez! Swiftly, Dara moved from correction to correction. Tailbone down! Over toes, not over heels! There was no more room for error. They were all hungry for correction. Desperate to be stretched, yanked.
All eyes on her all day, all those eager faces, those plaintive expressions, those hungry looks. The twitchy neediness of the girls, their bodies never leaner, never stronger, but a darkness hovering behind their eyes. This is what happens, Dara thought, when you’ve entered the ballet. When you’ve finally gone beyond your old ideas of your body’s limits, of what you would push yourself through.
The pain is real and abiding.
The pain is bracing and makes you feel alive.
The pain is your friend. The pain is you.
* * *
* * *
The pleasure came later, when Dara brought out the Nutcracker head, which she’d set on the windowsill all day to air out the mold, the basement funk.
Its painted face was slick with condensation.
“Madame Durant,” Corbin Lesterio said, taking it from her, holding it in his hands like an enormous gem. “I’ve been waiting for this for so long.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Dara said, trying not to smile. “Like everything else in ballet, it’s hot and it smells.”
Corbin lifted it over his head with trembling fingers. Remembering all the young men who’d worn it, Dara felt a heat behind her eyes.
That was when she heard the faint sound of laughter. In the far corner, several of the Level IVs had gathered to watch, a few hiding giggles behind their hands.
“What’s funny here?” Dara said. “I’d like to know.”
Everyone went quiet, heads down, except Pepper Weston, who said, “It’s just . . . it’s silly.”
“No, it’s not,” someone said.
It was Bailey Bloom. A rare interjection from their Clara, who was mostly mute these days, avoiding the wrath of her rivals.
Pepper looked at her, clicking her tongue malevolently.
“I think,” Bailey said, more shyly now, “it’s beautiful.”
Corbin turned his bobble head toward her. The painted grin seemed to smile at her.
Dara watched as Bailey blushed.
* * *
* * *
It was nearly two before Charlie finally found the phone message he’d jotted down from the day before. It was just a phone number with “House?” scrawled next to it.
The noise from Studio B a constant rumble, Dara ducked downstairs to sneak a smoke in the narrow space between their building and its neighbor while she returned the call.
But after she punched the number into her phone, she was met with a tinny message announcing the user’s mailbox was full.
Sighing, she put the phone away and plucked the cigarette she’d tucked beneath her tank strap.
“Spying on me?”
Dara looked up, startled. It was Derek, lurking behind a dumpster, vape pen in his hand like her emaciated sixteen-year-olds.
“Who’s the spy?” she said, whipping around. “Asks the person sitting outside our house this morning.”
His eyebrows lifted. She’d surprised him.
As if stalling for time, he pulled a handsome brass lighter from his pocket and extended it to her. Reluctantly, she took the light.
“This is what I miss most about cigarettes,” he said, looking at the lighter. Then, gesturing to his vape pen. “No class.”
But Dara was in no mood, her phone hot in her hand.
“I saw you,” she said. “In my sister’s car this morning. I think you saw me. That’s why you drove off.”
He paused a second, then seemed to gather himself, to put on something like a mask, his features softening, a smile forming itself—easy and winning.
“Guilty as charged,” he said, hands in the air. “Your house interests me.”
Dara’s hand shook, the cigarette ashing. She wished she hadn’t started things. Now it was too late.
“We’re not interested in your thoughts about our house,” Dara said.
“Look, we got off on the wrong foot. I know that house is special to you. But it could be so much more. Maybe you’re too close to see it.”
“We fell for your upsell once,” Dara said. “Not again.”
Derek smiled, his teeth like an accordion, unstretched.
“No upsell. I promise. You know, I own some properties downriver. It’s in my interest to keep my eye on the market. I did some research. A hobby of mine. That’s a house with marquee value. High ceilings. Original plaster, that big old fireplace, louvered doors, good light if you ever pulled back those Addams Family drapes over there,” he said. “Sure, we’d have to knock down a lot of walls—that house is all walls. We build out a big open modern kitchen, en suite bathrooms . . .”
“We’re not knocking down any walls,” Dara said, throwing her cigarette to the ground. “And how do you know so much about our house? You’ve never been inside it.”
“I know what Marie’s told me.”
“What did she tell you?” Dara demanded.
But Derek was already talking over her, insisting, “I’ve been in other houses just like it. You lift the ceiling, lose those old beams, strip out the wooden window sashes and panes, install modern ones. Strip out the knotty pine and all this old-fashioned gingerbread trim. People don’t want that. They want things new and shiny, like the wrapping’s still on. We take that big old drafty coffin and make it look new and shiny, you know what happens?
“We all get rich as cream.”
Dara felt something cold pass up her body, her cigarette tightening in her hand.
“There is no we here,” she said.
“No?” Derek said, moving closer to her. Moving very close and lowering his voice, a sudden confidence. “Because there’s only room for three in a marriage?”
Dara felt herself stumble back one, two steps.
“If you’re under the impression that we have any interest in ever working with you again—” she started.
“I know it’s tricky,” he said quickly, smiling again. “Family stuff always is. I didn’t mean to step on any toes. Excuse the pun.”
Dara threw her cigarette to the pavement and moved past him.
“Worked out pretty good for you and Charlie, though,” he said, his smile going flat now. “Marie moves out and now you two are sitting on a pot of gold, aren’t you? Why not work together, make that pot even bigger?”
Dara began walking away.
“Hey, I don’t judge,” he said as she walked to the fire exit. “And I respect a smart dealmaker.”
Dara pulled open the old metal door, a gust of steam-heated air in her face. She could picture Marie, her lips pressed to his ear. What had she told him; it could be anything.
“I don’t judge,” Derek repeated. “I only look for new opportunities, new partnerships.”
Inside now, she rested herself flat against the door, the cigarette stealing her breath.
* * *
* * *
Where is she?” Dara asked, moving among the seven- and eight-year-olds spilling from the changing
room, little-girl sweat that smelled oddly sweet, their mouths open and aching for air. “Where’s Mademoiselle Durant?”
“She let us go,” a braided redhead lisped. “She said we’d worked hard enough.”
A dubious look fell across her face and Dara sighed, moving toward the back office.
* * *
* * *
Why are you doing this?” she said to Marie, finding her perched on the fire escape.
“Doing what?” Marie said.
“He was in your car this morning.”
“My car is his car,” she said, her hand on her thigh, a new bruise there, red and tight. “He can do anything he wants with it.”
“Like stalking our house?”
Marie paused, clamping her fingers over her toes. This was news to her sister. Dara could tell.
“What did you tell him about the house?” Dara asked. “He seemed to know an awful lot about it. You know there’s no way we’d ever hire him to do anything after this. You know damn well we’d never sell that house.”
Marie was looking at her thigh, pressing her fingers into the bruise. Her fingers where his had been, her eyes closing.
“Marie,” Dara said, “he’s using you. He wants something.”
He has something he wants. He’ll hold it close until he’s ready.
“Everyone,” Marie said, staring at her bruise, stroking it with one finger, “wants something. Even you.”
“What did you tell him?” Dara said, more loudly now. “About the house.”
“I tell him everything, Dara,” she said. “I tell him everything he wants to know. Everything he asks.”
“He’s a thief.”
“And what are you?”
The question felt like a sharp smack. “What does that mean?” Dara said. “Marie, you wanted out. You wanted the money. And you don’t even live there anymore.”
