by Megan Abbott
There was a pause. “You three, so close. Snug as three bugs in a rug. What guy stands a chance?”
“What does that mean?” Charlie said. “We’re family.”
“So it’s true, then?” Derek asked.
“What’s true?”
Marie, on her knees over the trash can, looked up at Dara. A sudden alertness, a knowingness. We need to go back down there. We need to go.
* * *
* * *
They were on opposite sides of the office, Derek spinning that bill holder again, spinning it by its rusty spike.
“Derek, stop this,” Marie was saying from the staircase, Dara pushing past her down the steps toward Charlie. “Come upstairs.”
“What’s true?” Charlie repeated, louder now. On his face that expression again, the one that made Dara nervous because she hadn’t seen it since they were teenagers, overhearing Dara’s parents fighting, her father smashing dishes, their mother threatening to throw herself out the window.
But Derek didn’t see it, didn’t know. “That you three,” he said, a funny kind of glitter in his eyes, “over on Sycamore, that you shared . . . things?”
“Shared things,” Charlie said. “Of course we—”
“Like a bed,” he said. “Like you shared a bed.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“Charlie, don’t,” Dara blurted. The feeling suddenly of a death blow coming.
“I mean, what do you even call that?” Derek said. “Tell me how it worked. ’Cause I’m picturing—”
“Derek, stop,” Marie called out from the top stair. “Derek, come up here, okay?”
Derek paused, the air heavy and stifling, before slowly curving his lips into a smile.
And then he set down the bill holder and moved toward the stairs. Dara let herself breathe again.
“Sure, honey,” he said. “I’ll come up.”
Starting up the stairs now, his gaze moving from Dara to Charlie to Marie at the top of the stairs and back again. “But, boy, I gotta say, watching the three of you here, those bodies of yours, always stripped half naked, touching each other all the time. Flesh pressing flesh.”
“No, no,” Marie called out. “Derek, come—”
“Ménage à Durant,” Derek continued, his tree-trunk arms pressing on the quivering stair rail. “It was bound to happen.”
“Shut up,” Charlie said, his voice suddenly icy cool, his gaze fixed on Derek. “Shut your mouth. I know about you. I know more than they do. I know who you are.”
There was a flicker of panic in Derek’s eyes.
Dara looked at Charlie, taken aback. “What do you know?”
“I know about you, brother,” Derek said, a ripple of anger in his voice now as he leaned over the stair rail. “I’ve seen some things. Served two years in Stuttgart. Spent a few lost weeks in Thailand. But the three of you—that’s a new one for me. I mean, the last taboo, right? Or is that cannibalism?”
He had a look, not a smirk, not even a smile. It was something else. It was very serious. He was very serious.
“And you,” he continued, turning to Dara now, his gaze hot. “You, my Dark Durant, are full of surprises.”
“Derek, don’t!” Marie was saying from the top of the stairs.
“Let me ask you,” Derek said to Dara, leaning over the railing, “did you give Marie to Charlie to keep him there, or Charlie to Marie to keep her—”
* * *
* * *
It was all so fast, Charlie charging up the stairs after Derek.
Charlie and Derek hurtling into each other, a crash of bravado, of machismo, of huffing and puffing and blowing the house down. Derek’s boot clacking against Charlie’s jaw, and Charlie butting hard into Derek’s crankcase chest, knocking him back, the slick bottom of Derek’s slick boots clattering down one, two steps.
His balance lost and Charlie reaching down for him with ropy arms, lifting him, improbably, Derek’s legs scrambling beneath him and the stair rail bending against his weight.
Heaving Derek up, ramming him against the rail, Charlie’s face like it used to look long ago, when he was dancing. Intent, afire. Before the injuries, the haze of pain, the chemical stupor. Before Marie left and left again, like a ghost in the night. Before their parents’ deaths, before their wedding, before everything. When he was only a boy, dancing.
* * *
* * *
Later, when she remembered it, when she pressed her fingers to her closed eyes and tried to remember it, it was as if, in those final seconds, they were dancing a pas de deux.
Their mother used to say, The beauty of dancing a pas de deux is that you are never alone. There’s always a hand outstretched to accept yours. Someone’s eyes seeking yours.
But you must never forget, a pas de deux is also about power, gaining it, losing it, giving it away.
How can it be both those things? Dara used to ask. How can it be both?
Why, Dara, their mother replied, it’s always about both.
* * *
* * *
It was fast, so fast. Like a pointe shoe slipping, a wrist softening, a body lurching, a knee thundering down onto the stage floor.
Charlie and Derek interlocked, and the loud squeak of Derek’s mud-stippled boots against the steps, Derek trying to right himself, freeing one arm, clambering for the stair rail, its spokes bending like matchsticks.
“Stop!” a voice cried out. Dara looked up to see Marie descending from the mouth at the top of the stairs, wrapping her jonquil arms under Derek’s arms, pulling him back, Derek’s boots clattering, his legs giving out from under him.
* * *
* * *
Later, Dara would remember Marie’s face, how it was as wild and strange as Charlie’s. Marie and Charlie, those two childlike faces, twinning in her head.
It was fast, so fast. Marie’s and Charlie’s arms extended, four marble spires. Almost like they were one pair of arms, one pair of hands, their faces red and vivid, wild-eyed and avid.
The heels of Charlie’s hands on the dark expanse of Derek’s chest, Marie’s hands under Derek’s arms, small and clawed, Derek losing his footing, dropping to one knee. Their arms, those spires, were they pushing him away or pushing him over? How could you ever tell?
Derek stutter-stepping backward, his boots sliding, his body bending over the railing, so low and treacherous, his body twisting over the twisting staircase.
It was fast, and then it was slow, so slow, time stretching out infinitely. This monster, this Big Bad Wolf, this bloodsucker who never should have been let in, this stranger who never belonged, falling, falling to the floor.
His body larger, it seemed, than the staircase that held it, the kick-kick of his sliding feet and the force of their arms, thick with blasted muscle, fired by feeling. Some feeling.
Over the railing, he fell, his body spinning, and his head hitting the corner of the desk below, a muted crack.
His face catching something, a whistling sound in the air, his breath leaving him.
A hot spatter of blood and the mortal thud of his body landing on the floor below, his body curled like a cat, small and shabby. His body twitching, then still.
* * *
* * *
Later, Dara would remember this: Derek’s eyes catching hers, catching Dara’s, as it happened. As he fell.
Looking out at Dara, as if asking, begging for something.
As if warning her, as if saying, Wait, wait—
* * *
* * *
I don’t know how . . .” Charlie was saying, his voice low and foreign. “It happened so fast and I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
They were all standing over him now, standing over Derek, a crumpled heap on the floor, legs going the wrong ways. Charlie’s eyes glazed, his face stiff.
* * *
* * *
It was only after they’d turned him over they saw it.
Marie made a keening sound, like a fox, trapped.
Like a carnival trick, the rusted spike of the desk bill holder piercing his right eye, a starburst, a pinwheel, its center red and wet.
He needs an eyepatch, Dara thought, her brain not working, like Herr Drosselmeier.
It gave him the look of a perpetual wink, an eternal one. But the blood was dark and final.
THREE
THE NUTCRACKER
It was impossible to remember Christmas without it.
This is how we keep the lights on, their mother always told them. Those dreams of Clara are how we keep the lights on.
* * *
* * *
The Nutcracker, a young girl’s dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood and finding untold pleasures. Of the eye, of the mouth.
Because, foremost, The Nutcracker was a dream of hunger, of appetite.
Consider the exquisite torture of all those little girls never allowed to eat dancing as costumed Sugar Plums, as fat Bonbons gushing cherry slicks. Tutus like ribbon candy, boys spinning great hoops of peppermint, and everywhere black slathers of licorice and marzipan glistening like snow.
When they were too young to dance it, too young even to play a Candy Cane or one of the darling Polichinelles, their mother read them the E.T.A. Hoffmann story Nutcracker and Mouse-King. An old book that smelled like must and was illustrated with gaudy, frightening images—rodents with fierce claws, the Nutcracker’s teeth long and sharp.
A young girl named not Clara but Marie becomes fixated on the wooden doll her seductive godfather gives her. In bed with the doll, she drifts into a fantasy world of her own making and, at the end of her nocturnal adventures, is forbidden by her family to speak of them again.
You have to dance it long before you understand it, their mother always said.
But Dara could never remember a time she didn’t understand all of it.
It was a warning for those who become lost to desire. Because, at the end of the story, Marie awakens from her dream, changed. No one believes her when she tells her tale. They say it’s a fantasy and it’s time to let it go. And, at the end, she is unable to live in reality. She is lost in her dream.
In the ballet, though, the story ends with Clara still in her fantasy world, her dream world. She never has to come back at all.
* * *
* * *
Marie’s favorite part of the book was when the little girl sees a spot of blood on the Nutcracker and rubs it with her pocket handkerchief.
How, slowly, as she rubbed the Nutcracker, he grew warm under her hand and began to move. How his mouth began to work and twist, and move up and down until he could speak. Until he could tell Marie what she needed to do.
No picture books! he insisted. No Christmas frock!
Instead: Get me a sword—a sword!
In their bunkbed at night she’d make Dara read it to her.
From below, Dara could see Marie’s girlish arm swing out and grab for the bedpost, to rub it like the Nutcracker, to summon it to life.
Dara would read and read and Marie would say again, again until Dara felt her stomach turn and flip, to work and twist like the Nutcracker’s mouth.
Oh, Dara, Marie would say, her fingers working the bedpost, we must get him his sword!
HE DIDN’T GO HERE
The police detective was waiting for her but Dara wasn’t ready yet.
Instead, she was standing in front of the dust-daubed mirror in the powder room.
This isn’t a matter of life or death. That’s what she used to tell herself back in her dancing days. Before a big performance, or after one. Before an audition, a solo. But your body doesn’t know the difference.
Because it was true. Those moments just before, standing in the wings, the floor humming from the orchestra, breath heavy and body heavy and how will it ever happen?
But it does, the body going into flight-or-fight mode, summoning all its energies to defeat the threat, to conquer the danger.
The body knows so much better than you do what it needs to survive.
* * *
* * *
In the seven, eight hours since it had happened, she hadn’t stopped moving, nor had Charlie.
Instead, she’d gone into the adrenaline-fired, cortisol-seething space of performance. A space of needle-sharp concentration, boundless energy, nerves jangling, senses elevated, her body taking over, her brain blank.
One breath, two breaths, she took a paper towel from the roll on the sink—
That sink, wobbling on its pedestal, flashes of Marie pressed up against it, the rutting bull, tearing it loose from its screws, tearing Marie—
Tank top stripped to her waist, she wet the paper towel, rubbing it across her skin, across the three sheets of sweat, the oldest now-gray flakes. The sweat like the sweat after a performance, three skins to shed to make oneself new again.
Somehow, all those hours had gone by. Seven, eight hours since they’d all stood over the fallen contractor, his body twisted and broken. Since Marie began moaning, her hair in her hands, her hands shaking against Charlie’s chest. Since Dara watched the two of them clinging to each other, assuring each other (it was an accident, oh god, he slipped, he fell), while Dara looked down at the contractor, at Derek’s face, the spiral of his ruined eye. The other eye vacant and heaven-tilting. Reminding her of something she couldn’t quite name.
Now it was only when Dara closed her eyes that she saw him. Derek. The sprawl of his body, his ankles twisted upon themselves on the bottom step, almost daintily, almost like a sur le cou-de-pied, one foot wrapped like a scarf around the other.
His body in death had been surprisingly graceful. The fall like the descent of a majestic animal, a panther, a condor, its wings spread. The descent of a dancer from a grand jeté.
But then he was just dead, his shirt pulled up above his belly, his face like stiff paper, the awful red slick of his right eye, its jellied center.
He was dead and there was nothing they could do about it.
It was an accident, after all. And, as they would tell it, it was an accident he’d had alone.
If they stuck to the plan, everything would be okay.
* * *
* * *
That moment, staring down at him, had been the only pause. The only time Dara had given herself before she took a breath, turned to Charlie and Marie, and told them both there was no time for anything but correcting this.
Spine straight, chest lifted, eyes up, breathe, breathe, breathe. Make it perfect. Make it right.
“We’re going to take care of this,” she’d said. That was what you did. You kept it behind closed doors. Peeping Toms, voyeurs, their mother used to call them—neighbors, truant officers, social workers, police officers. It was no one’s business. No one else would ever understand.
“We were never here,” Dara had said to Charlie and Marie. “When it happened. We were never here and that’s all we know.”
Best to keep it simple. To keep themselves out of it. Dara made the plan in an instant. Someone had to.
They both looked so relieved. They looked so grateful.
* * *
* * *
Moments later, at three a.m., Charlie and Dara had climbed that same staircase to the third floor.
No one can know about Derek and Marie, Dara kept saying. No one.
It would draw suspicion. It would complicate things. It might make Marie look guilty. It might make them all look guilty.
Swiftly, they’d gathered Marie’s belongings—a fistful of tank tops, a dark knot of tights, a mound of elastics, a pair of tangled, torn underwear that made Dara gasp—and thrown them into a garbage bag.
She had so little.
They took the sheets, the pillowcase with them.
Later, Dara would run them through the washing machine three times, putting her hands on them, scalding, after. Looking for any signs of him. A hair, a stain.
On her hands and knees, Dara scrubbed the shoe prints, which were everywhere.
Downstairs, Marie was throwing up in the powder room. Throwing up until the vomit came up red, sticky.
I can’t, she whispered when they told her she was coming home with them.
Too bad, Dara said, grabbing her coat, shoving one of the garbage bags in her hands.
* * *
* * *
As they’d turned down Sycamore, their breath fogging the old car, Marie covered her face in her hands.
At first, she wouldn’t go inside, her head tilting up like a child at a haunted house. Then, Dara shoving her across the threshold, she wouldn’t go upstairs. Finally, she disappeared soundlessly into the den, their father’s old domain.
In the bathroom, Dara examined Charlie’s face, neck, arms, body, for any marks from the struggle. A bruise was blossoming on his upper arm, but that was all.
For the next three hours, Dara and Charlie sat at the kitchen table, thinking it all through with cigarettes and instant coffee, waiting for dawn.
Once, Dara squinted through the den door crack to see Marie curled in their father’s recliner, sunk in some impossible sleep, her face so innocent and pure it nearly made Dara scream. And then it nearly made her cry.
“It was an accident,” Charlie kept saying, his neck clammy with sweat, his hands doing that trembling thing. There was something intent and feverish about him. Something punch-drunk, as their father used to say, beerily recalling getting his clock cleaned in his hockey days until he couldn’t count his fingers.
