by Megan Abbott
He was halfway down, the old steps groaning beneath him.
“She’s using you,” Dara called out, running to the top of the stairs. “She’s using you and when she’s done, she’ll come home to us.”
Derek stopped, turned.
“Come home to you?” he said. “Is that what you think is gonna happen? That poor kid. That poor goddamned kid.”
Dara felt a sharp pain in her back suddenly, profoundly. “What does that mean?” she asked, her voice gritty and strained. “What did she tell you?”
“Family secrets,” Derek said, his parting shot, “are the very worst kind, aren’t they?”
* * *
* * *
She watched from the hallway window until his truck pulled away, like an oil slick spreading.
When she was sure he was gone, she stood in the bedroom doorway where he’d stood. The Big Bad Wolf. She wanted to see what he’d seen. That most private space. That space of countless intimacies.
But all she saw was the shabby blond dresser and the bunkbed, which took up nearly the whole room, its footboard glinting from the hallway light.
Is this, she thought, what it looks like from the outside?
Is this all it looks like?
But then she couldn’t sit with the thought. The idea.
So she let it flit past and focused instead on what was in front of her: the gleam of Derek’s smeary palm print on the bunkbed, on its headboard.
* * *
* * *
Her fingers fumbling over the keys, she texted Charlie and he called immediately. He was nearly home, only blocks away, but he called, the sound of him clambering for a dropped phone on the other end.
* * *
* * *
What?” Charlie said, rushing through the front door, his breath still fogged from the night air. “I don’t . . .”
“He was in our bedroom.”
“Our bedroom?”
“No, our bedroom,” Dara said, confusing herself. “Marie and me. But he could have been everywhere.”
“How did he get in here? I mean—”
“Marie,” Dara said.
His coat half off, Charlie’s arms dropped.
“Is that what he told you? Does she even still have a key?”
“Of course. We didn’t force her to surrender her key to us.”
Then she remembered Marie earlier that evening, her head twitching when Dara explained to Madame Sylvie that Charlie wouldn’t be joining them that night.
“She thought we’d both be at the Ballenger. She gave him her key.”
“Dara, I don’t . . .” Charlie started but then stopped.
“He wasn’t getting anywhere with us on partnering to sell the house,” Dara said, “and now he’s got a new angle. She’s filled his head with crazy ideas.”
“Like what?”
“Like we took advantage of her. Like we stole the house out from under her.”
“Dara,” Charlie said, hands on her shoulders now, “we’ll fix this. We’ll . . . I’ll fix it.”
“We have to fire him,” Dara said. “Tomorrow.”
“Of course,” Charlie said, but he wouldn’t quite look at her.
How tentatively he walked, his back arched, his coat dragging behind him. His gait strained, stilted. His body stiff, like—as they used to joke years ago when it all still felt like it would go away soon—Frankenstein’s monster.
“I just need to think,” he said, heading for the stairs.
* * *
* * *
She waited for him to come to bed, but first he took a bath. Then she heard him moving through the house, checking all the locks, attaching the door chains.
Finally, late into the night, Dara crept downstairs and found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table. His back curved, the whiteness of his shoulders hunched. His legs spread wide and, before him, a plate of blobby pasta, untouched, spattered up the napkin tucked in his undershirt.
Something was wrong. He shouldn’t sit like that, not with his injuries. His half-broken body. But also a dancer—especially a dancer like Charlie—never sat like that, crooked, humped.
“I figured it out,” he said, not even turning around, his angel-blond head bowed.
Dara stepped inside, her eyes on the stove, red-spattered, broken sticks of stale spaghetti scattered across its top. Spaghetti that likely dated back more than a decade, her father’s love of Mueller’s with canned clams, or a pat of butter, ten raps from the grated-cheese can, emerald green and jumbo-size.
“Figured out what?” she said, spaghetti cracking like twigs under her feet.
He turned around, his head bobbing in a way that made her wonder if he’d taken too many of his pain meds, like he had once in the spring, after Marie left and they were fighting a lot and he’d torn the gutter off the side of the house and pulled a dead raccoon from inside. For months the smell had haunted them. They couldn’t find the source. Charlie kept saying it was the smell of death, death, and something was dead inside if he could only find it.
“Figured out what?” Dara repeated. But even as she asked, she realized, urgently, she didn’t want to hear what he might say. She found herself suddenly afraid of what he might say.
“He’s hypnotized her.”
“What?”
“The contractor. He’s hypnotized her. I read about it. It happens.”
Dara looked at him, wanting to pull that spattered napkin loose from his undershirt. She wanted to clean him up, straighten him up.
“Charlie, please,” she said. “Let me—”
She pulled the napkin with a hard yank and moved to the sink, turning on the hot water. Holding the napkin beneath it.
He looked up at her curiously, like a little boy waiting for his mother to wipe his mouth.
She watched as the napkin slid from her red hand, slid through the hungry black flaps of the garbage disposal. She looked down the black hole as Charlie kept talking, his words slipping from him before they were finished forming.
“But the good news is we can fix it. Like deprogramming. We just need to take her to a shrink, a therapist of some kind.”
She flipped the switch and the garbage disposal clattered on, the corner of the napkin slipping into the hole, the motor grinding, grinding, shredding the fabric until the napkin must’ve caught itself in its gears and the whole thing shuddered and stopped.
“Okay,” Dara said. “Maybe.”
She reached out, fingers on the switch again, trying to restart it, a current of electricity fuzzing through her hand, jolting her.
“Either that or we’re the ones,” Charlie said, more softly now, more like himself. “Either that or we’ve been hypnotized. Been hypnotized our whole lives.”
Dara turned and looked at him. She wanted to put her hands over her ears. These are the things I don’t want to hear.
“Dara,” he said, “we have to do something.”
Dara nodded, her hand shaking.
“Dara,” he said, “we have to do it now.”
* * *
* * *
Once, years ago, tucked in bed, they’d heard their father, drunk and ragged, cry out to their mother that he could do whatever he wanted in his house, that he could set the house on fire if he wanted.
I will do it, woman!
And their mother, cool and weary, smoking cigarette after cigarette at the kitchen table, saying, Stop waving that lighter at me, old man.
What if he does it, Marie whispered from above, her little hand clawed around her bunk.
He doesn’t have the guts, Dara told her, though she wasn’t sure herself.
You never knew what people would do. You never knew when blood ran hot. That was why it was always best, like their mother always said, to keep it cool. To not let it get to you. To still
your heart, or slow it down.
I can’t, Marie said, taking Dara’s hand from above, pulling it to her chest, the beating sound beneath her breastbone like a rabbit’s, fast and out of control.
UNNATURAL
The car ride—five minutes, less—pressing her hands against the heating vent on the dashboard, her breath catching and the air so cold it felt like sharp points against their faces.
Pressing her hands there and Charlie driving, his face blue under the streetlight, fingers clamped to whiteness on the steering wheel. Charlie driving, his arms moving to steer as if they were in an ocean liner, loose and wide, tires caterwauling and that feeling that the car was hovering above the ground, and Dara’s hands against the vents until they burned, the scorch in the air and Charlie telling her it all has to stop, stop, stop.
We have to stop him, he was saying. She’ll let him ruin everything.
He was saying things about Marie, and how they had to get her, had to go in and pull her out like she had fallen into quicksand, but hadn’t she?
Staring out at the darkness ahead, Dara could almost see her there, in the distance. Marie, emerging from the pitch black, waving her hands above her head like an SOS and crying.
Like Clara in her nightgown on the blackened stage, lost in her dream world, no way out, no way home.
* * *
* * *
The fog made everything shimmer.
The third-floor window of the studio glowed like a church steeple and below Derek’s truck glowed, too, a brilliant black marble alongside the hot candle of Marie’s car.
Everything looked slightly exaggerated, like the time Dara tried on another girl’s glasses and the world instantly drew into unimaginable focus. (Haven’t you had your eyes checked lately? the girl asked and Dara didn’t dare tell her, No, never.)
She couldn’t wait to take off the glasses, everything too bright, too sharp, everything hurting her eyes. Does the world look like this?
Charlie was ahead of her, a streak of white across the asphalt. His body moving as she hadn’t seen it in years, since before his injuries, since the days their mother would sigh and whisper, comme une panthère . . .
* * *
* * *
Inside, the gust of sawdust, sealants, spray foam everywhere, the radiators chugging, Charlie called out for Marie.
As they charged toward the back office, Derek emerged from the mouth at the top of the spiral stairs.
“Who’s there?” he called out as he wended down, the staircase vibrating beneath him. Dara feeling it under her feet, up her spine.
And then Marie emerged from behind him. An old cardigan wrapped around her, her legs bare and her feet, too, forever pink and pulpy.
Slowly, slowly she descended, her feet nearly missing every step, her eyes stunned, glossy.
* * *
* * *
It was hard to believe it was happening, the radiator filling the small space with gasps of heat, the smell of burning things, forgotten cigarettes on the windowsill, mittens left too long on the radiator pipes, the stench, still, of Marie’s tortured space heater, the fire that started it all.
“Now, what’s this all about?” Derek asked, picking up the old metal bill holder from their mother’s desk, spinning the wooden base with his meaty fingers. So much performance, Dara thought. So much stagecraft, this con artist, this swindler.
* * *
* * *
Did you think,” Dara was asking Marie, who had curled up in a corner, sweater and underpants, her legs red and scaly, “we’d just give it over to you, to him? Our family home. Like you gave away everything else.”
“What? No. That’s not—” Marie started, but then Derek lifted his arm in front of her, and Marie’s mouth closed.
It made Dara, suddenly, so sad. Seeing Marie’s mouth close.
Suddenly, Dara wanted to cry from it.
“Look, let’s just settle down here, friends,” Derek was saying, his thick fingers around the bill holder’s spike. “I think there’s been a little misunderstanding. And maybe a little alcohol.”
He was looking at Charlie and she knew he could smell it on him, all that wine, the jug from the fridge empty when they left. The room so small and Charlie’s face red from it.
“Charlie, my friend,” he said, “you’re the business corner of this little triangle, right? You’re the sweat and spit behind the Durant School of Dance. So I present this to you as a business opportunity. We can make that house of yours into a pot of gold. It’s not too late for us all to partner up. But it will be soon.”
“We’re not interested,” Charlie said. He had an expression that made Dara nervous, his jaw rigid.
“But your sister is,” Derek said. “And she’s the one who gets to decide, right?”
Like that first day, Dara thought. Derek asking them who decides and Marie, mute for the entire meeting, insisting, I do. I decide.
Except now she was silent, her head bowed, her cardigan slipping, her bare body beneath smeared with acid-bright bruises, baggy blisters, stage scars, a painter’s palette.
Oh, Marie, but you wanted it . . . you let him in. You whispered all our secrets in his ear.
“She’s a partner in the business,” Charlie said. “But not in the house. She sold her share.”
“She sold her share, you say?” Derek asked, wrapping his hand around the bill holder again, splaying his big jointy knuckles.
“You know she did,” Dara said.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Because, from what I hear, you gave her an itty-bitty amount of money. A few table scraps to get her out of your hair, but are you sure that was all aboveboard? I’m just curious because, according to the county register, there’s no record of a transfer of property.”
Ah, Dara thought, here it is. The call from earlier that day.
“Are you talking about your attempt to defraud us?” she said.
Derek’s eyebrows lifted.
“I know you called them,” Dara continued. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Not me,” Derek said, looking over at Marie. “She.”
Dara’s eyes darted to Marie, her head still bowed. Dara wanted to strangle her.
“You need to leave,” said Charlie, his face flushing now. His body tightening before Dara’s eyes.
Derek smiled grimly, shaking his head. “I read up on this. A little legal concept. Undue influence. Do you know it? It’s when a trusted person uses said influence to get another person, a vulnerable person, to sign over their rights.”
“I’m sure you know everything about undue influence,” Dara said. She could feel herself ramping up to something, an excitement in her chest. “You saw how she was that very first day. You saw your mark and you swooped in. And look at her now.”
They all turned to Marie, her bare-legged crouch. Her hands flew to her face like when she was ten, shutting her eyes, plugging her ears like they were still in their bunkbed, hearing everything, seeing everything, their father yelling, their father crying.
“They’re doing it again,” Marie said, turning to Derek. “They’re doing it.”
“What are we doing?” Charlie asked Marie, a stunned look on his face. Stumbling toward her now. “Jesus Christ, Marie—”
And Marie’s face folding ever so slightly, her hand trembling toward Charlie just as Derek swooped in.
“I don’t think you get it, friend,” he said, moving in between them as if Charlie were threatening Marie, as if Derek were the gallant. “What belongs to Marie belongs to me. You steal from her, you steal from me.”
“Jesus, Marie,” Dara said, “don’t you see what he’s doing?”
“Don’t talk to her,” Derek said. “Talk to me. If you’re not interested in a partnership, then we’re gonna have to make a deal. Some kind of arrangement. A reparation of so
rts. For how little you paid Marie the first time.”
So that was it, Dara thought. Right in the open at last.
“No,” Marie said, turning to Derek, voice rising, her hands fisted. “This isn’t what I wanted. I wanted out. Out. Out. Out. It took me thirty years to get out of that house. Thirty years and I . . .”
Dara moved toward her. “Marie . . .”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Marie said, moving toward the spiral staircase, Dara following. “I think I’m going to be so sick.”
* * *
* * *
On the third floor, Dara stood over Marie, Marie retching rusty saliva into a wire trash can, her voice scraping.
It was so strange being up there again after all these months, her eyes scanning the dark space—all their mother’s things from when this space was hers, her hideaway: the gooseneck lamp, the brittle old futon, their father’s pilling Pendleton flung across.
“Dara, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how bad it was. I . . .”
“Stop it,” said Dara, her ears ringing, all of it too much.
She didn’t want to be up there anymore, or ever, the heavy scent of bodies, of Derek’s body. Of Marie’s. Like sharing a room all those years, knowing even the smell of her tampons, stuffed in the trash. And most of all, the smell still of their mother’s Blue Carnation perfume.
Mother . . .
“Stop it,” Dara repeated, turning away, “while we clean up your mess.”
* * *
* * *
They could hear them in the office below, the fuzz of Derek’s voice.
“I have just as much an interest in that house as you,” Derek was saying. “And just as much a right. We both happen to be involved with women whose names are on that deed.”
“Dara’s my wife,” Charlie said, his voice strange and strangled, a voice she didn’t recognize. “Marie’s my sister.”
