The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  “It was an accident,” Dara repeated. Over and over again. “We found him there. We don’t know how it happened. But it did.”

  * * *

  * * *

  They couldn’t bring Marie to the studio.

  Dara had tried, coaxing her to the bathtub, pushing her head under the running spout. Trying to clean her up, get her straight. But Marie wasn’t making sense yet, her teeth chattering, talking ceaselessly about the Fire Eater at the carnival who swallowed a neon tube and lit up like a glowworm. (That was the Sword Swallower, she told Marie. You always get everything wrong. You always ruin everything.)

  Marie was not okay. Marie, could she even be trusted?

  Charlie told Dara to stay home with her sister. He would make the discovery, call the police.

  Marie could not be trusted.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie returned to the studio at six a.m. At seven, he called Dara at the house. She could hear police radios buzzing in the background.

  Dara, something happened, he said. The police are here. They think our contractor fell down the stairs. . . .

  Charlie’s voice was shaking.

  He was very convincing.

  Oh my god, Dara said, even though no one could hear her but Charlie. Oh my god.

  * * *

  * * *

  Now it was nearly noon and Dara had spent all morning with the paramedics and the police, then with Benny and Gaspar, who exchanged glances when Charlie told them the news. Both were surprised and Gaspar took his hat off, crossing himself. We didn’t know him well, Benny said vaguely. But it is very sad.

  Charlie had done everything right, posting the signs, calling the parents of students scheduled later in the day. Saying the right things. (Still, they came. Charlie told them not to come, but they came. Half grim curiosity, half Nutcracker panic.)

  Charlie was sharp and focused with the police, with everyone. It was only Dara who saw his shaky hands, the tremor in his wrist, the spasm at his neck.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was wondering: Is he okay? Would he be okay after what he’d done? But there wasn’t any time.

  * * *

  * * *

  And when you arrived, you saw him at the foot of the stairs?”

  Dara had finally emerged from the powder room and joined the detective in Studio C.

  In the back office, a woman was taking pictures, writing things down, showing things to the medical examiner, who couldn’t stop coughing, red-faced and wheezing from construction dust. Earlier, Dara had seen the woman leaning over the contractor’s muddy shoe treads, the tight triangles of his natty boots.

  “Yes,” Dara said. “My husband called me after he called you. Like I said.”

  The police detective, a creasy-eyed white man of indiscriminate middle age, wore a tan trench coat like a detective in a movie. He had, Dara noticed, a smear of toothpaste on his shirt collar.

  “Was it typical of your contractor to be working already at that hour? What, six a.m.?”

  “They’d fallen behind. They were trying to pick up the pace,” Dara said. “We’re very busy here. We need that space.”

  “How about back there?”

  “There?”

  “In the office. You weren’t having any work done there, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “What about upstairs, that attic? You keep equipment, a fuse box, something, up there?”

  “No. My husband showed you. He—”

  “So any idea what the guy might’ve been up to? He was either going up or coming down. Looks like coming down based on the angle of the body.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe . . .”

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe he heard a sound, or something. We didn’t know him very well.”

  We didn’t know him very well. But there you go.

  The detective looked at her, nodded.

  “Well,” he said, shrugging, sliding his notebook into his pocket, “do any of us really know anyone?”

  * * *

  * * *

  The medical examiner came out, a dust mask pressed to his face, and the woman who took all the pictures followed, a heavy case in her hand.

  It was all ending, nearly. Or at least this part was.

  The body was gone, carried out in that big black bag with a zipper. Dara and Charlie had both turned their heads.

  “Someone should’ve torn out that staircase years ago,” the medical examiner said to no one in particular. “Death trap.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The detective spoke to Benny and Gaspar, but not for long. Everything seemed pro forma.

  After, Dara told them they could go home for the day.

  “Thank you,” Benny said, standing in the middle of Studio B, his hand tentatively touching the saw bench.

  Gaspar began packing up, but Benny didn’t move at all for several seconds.

  “Benny,” Dara said, “we’re all so sorry. About the accident.”

  Benny looked at her and Dara found herself looking away.

  “It’s very sad,” he said finally. “But we keep going.” Taking off his cap, he slid in his foam earplugs and reached for the table saw. “That’s how we get paid.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I don’t know,” Dara said to Charlie later. “I think it’s fine.”

  “But they probably knew. About Marie.”

  “Maybe,” Dara said, pulling her hair back into a bun.

  “We should,” Charlie said, “make sure they got paid.”

  * * *

  * * *

  All the younger girls were crying in little clumps across the studio. The five- and six-year-olds, tugging at their leotard crotches, whimpering softly, sneaking glances at the door to the back office, the police tape crisscrossed.

  The older girls were, as ever, dry-eyed, cool. Speculating, whispering in corners to one another, guessing about canceled rehearsals, biting their fingers and cracking their toes.

  Older than most of their fathers, the dead contractor was only a voice through the walls, a constant obstruction as they navigated the makeshift path through Studio B. A dad type, with a thunderous voice and a mercurial schedule, strolling past everyone in his shiny boots, shouting to Benny every time a circuit broke.

  They’d likely noticed him far less than Benny, who arrived every day on a candy-orange motor scooter and was always so nice, even when he unclogged the toilet for them, and Gaspar, who was charming with his little habits, like setting a jug of milk on the sill of the open window, not drinking it until it was icy, or the time he played Crazy Eights with a few of the younger girls, their carpool parent late for the day’s pickup.

  They had no feelings for the dead contractor and, besides, The Nutcracker began in ten days.

  * * *

  * * *

  Everything felt surprisingly normal, even as both students and parents were in a frenzy. Perhaps because they were in a frenzy. The turbulence of the contractor’s death in these very rooms merely seemed an extension and an intensification of the turbulence of Nutcracker season. Gossip, anxiety, paranoia churning, and two six-year-olds vomiting in the powder room, one in the sink, after another girl claimed there was still blood on the floor where the contractor’s body had fallen. It was terrible! she kept saying. I can smell it!

  If only, Dara thought, they’d seen the back of his head when the paramedic turned him over, spongelike and ravaged from hitting the desk’s sharp corner, the unforgiving floor. If only they’d seen the dark hole where his eye had been.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was scared of him,” Chloë Lin confided at one point to Dara.

  “Why?”

  Chloë took a deep breath, her eyes dragging to Stu
dio B once, then twice.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t go here.”

  “Go here?”

  “He . . . he didn’t belong.”

  No, Dara thought, momentarily gratified. He didn’t.

  * * *

  * * *

  Few of the students could conjure any specific encounter with the dead contractor, other than Ivy Neuman’s long recounting of the time he helped her untangle her wool scarf from the power cords stretched across Studio B.

  Of all the things competing for their students’ attention—which were almost entirely the varied and countless ways they could fail disastrously and on an epic scale onstage—Derek was the least.

  Still, everyone had taken notice when they’d carried the body through the studios, the clatter of the gurney, the black monolith of the contractor, the body bag zipper glistening.

  Everyone had stepped out of the way, the students grim-faced, hands folded, heads down as if for a fallen solider.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie was steady and reassuring with the parents. Promising them that, while this surely was not ideal timing, in some ways it would have been worse if it had happened a few weeks ago. Now they were nearly ready to move to on-site rehearsals at the Ballenger and maybe they could even expedite the process. Move off the premises until everyone felt comfortable again. You see, it was a very sad thing—tragic, really—but they all knew how much The Nutcracker meant to the students and how hard they’d been working. The show must go on, to coin a phrase.

  * * *

  * * *

  Finally, everyone was gone, the parents having stuffed their children back into overheated cars, the back office emptying out after being swollen for hours with detectives, with the medical examiner and his watering eyes, with the woman taking photographs, scraping the floor, that thick smear of blood, brown like a coffee rind. Putting things in paper bags, sealing them, packing them in her kit. Metal fragments from the bent and buckled stair rail. The bill holder, its newly bent spike.

  All of it was gone now.

  There was nothing here to see.

  It was all going to be fine.

  In a few days, the swirl of Nutcracker madness, everyone would move on.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara found Charlie seated at the desk, staring at the worn and pitted floor, the fresh gouges in the wood. A stray glove, acid blue, like a deflated balloon.

  “They said we can clean it up now,” Charlie murmured. “They took all the pictures. They took all the statements.”

  The stoic face he’d worn all day had vanished. He looked hollowed out, raw.

  “So that’s it,” Dara said, reaching for him. “It’s over.”

  Charlie didn’t say anything. He just opened the closet, reached for the gallon of peroxide, and began pouring.

  * * *

  * * *

  The yellow stain on the hardwood after—a wobbly shape like a giant puzzle piece—would stay forever. They could sand it away, brush it with darker stain. But, with the volcanic force of The Nutcracker, there was no time for it, so they left it, tiptoeing around it.

  The next day, Charlie would drag the desk over the spot, even though its diagonal meant there was no way to move comfortably in the space.

  The police told them not to use the spiral staircase, stretching hazard tape across it. It rattled dangerously with any weight at all, the force of the fall yanking the center pole loose from its moorings.

  You couldn’t go up or down safely, so Marie would have to stay with them.

  * * *

  * * *

  It all made Dara remember the car accident, her parents. How the police department impounded what was left of their father’s Buick, its twisted, zigzagging frame, its ashy center, like one of their mother’s Gauloises, bent and crumpled in her tin ashtray.

  After, they kept the ruin on display in the lot as they did all the drunk-driving fatalities, their own vehicular Death Row. It was meant to be cautionary, which Dara supposed it was. Not just for drunk driving, though the heavy, liquored smell of the wreckage made that clear, but for everything else. For all the damage two people staying together can do. Two circling rivals locked in an endless, fatal embrace.

  Years later, Dara asked Marie if she remembered all that time the Buick remained in the lot’s center spot before being dethroned by a pulverized stretch limousine, prom corsages exploded across its dashboard and the cloying smell of Southern Comfort, cheap weed.

  I remember, Marie had said. I remember everything.

  It turned out Marie had snuck out of the house one night, late, in those strange months following the accident.

  She’d walked all the way to the police lot, where she could run her hands all over the car, its pocked and blistered metal. She even climbed inside and sat on the front seat, bisected, its stuffing shaking loose. She put her hand in the hole in the windshield where their father’s head had landed.

  It was, she said, the closest I ever felt to them. To him.

  Everyone had assumed their father was behind the wheel, and drunk. Dara assumed it, too, even after Charlie explained what the police said. Even when Marie told her how she could tell from that visit to the car, the driver’s seat thrust forward for their mother’s petite frame, the long strands of their mother’s hair caught in the windshield.

  It was her, Dara. It was Mother.

  Sometimes what happened just doesn’t feel like what really happened.

  Behind the wheel and drunk, too, the end of a long tear, late for their anniversary dinner, to celebrate twenty years of tumult and terror, their mother refusing to leave for hours as she slowly, vengefully drained his holiday-bonus scotch.

  Dara, don’t you see? It was her. It was always her.

  No, Marie, she wanted to say. It was them. It was always both of them.

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, the house felt different, drafty and forlorn.

  They hadn’t slept or eaten or groomed themselves since it happened.

  At last, the flood of feeling, the hard push of nerves had ended, had reached its end. Dara felt like a shell, a husk, the feeling after a performance, the dread sinking with the final curtain, settling inside her.

  For Charlie, too, it seemed. When Dara watched him march up the carpeted stairs like the steps to the guillotine, he looked so much older than he’d ever looked before, drawn and bony and blue. For a second, a brief second, as the ceiling light hit him, he looked like their mother in those last few weeks, drinking all the time, slamming doors, and the heavy glass ashtray their mother threw, hooking their father in the chin, the mouth, knocking two teeth loose.

  Oh, that, Dara thought. Remember that.

  She was remembering so many things lately that she’d packed away long ago.

  Without saying a word, Charlie disappeared into the upstairs bathroom, filling the claw-foot tub until the floor bulged with its weight.

  Dara thought she could hear him talking to himself in there.

  She climbed the stairs and put her ear to the door, wet from the steam.

  His whisper, rising and falling, and all she could make out was it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.

  * * *

  * * *

  All evening, Marie left the den only once, appearing in the kitchen, looking for matches. She left as soon as she saw Charlie.

  He was standing at the stove, making tea for the toddies, and he pretended he didn’t see her either.

  As the tea steeped, he counted softly to himself, something he hadn’t done in years. The way, as a barely pubescent dancer, he couldn’t stop himself, his voice cracking slightly, his Adam’s apple rising and falling, a tremor as he counted off his pirouettes.

  * * *

  * * *

 
We’re never going to talk about it, Dara realized at some point. Neither Charlie nor Marie seemed strong enough to talk about it. To face it.

  She felt, obscurely, like Clara in her nightgown, alone on the dark stage.

  In the end, their mother used to tell her, hands on Dara’s shoulders as she waited in the wings, it’s only you out there.

  In the end, you only have you.

  * * *

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the final hour of that endless day that was really two days that it all fell on Dara. She lay in bed and her thoughts flung back to the things he’d said, the insinuations, the accusations, the lurid pictures he’d painted. But most of all the looks on Charlie’s and Marie’s faces as it happened.

  It was a look that was uncannily familiar though she couldn’t place it.

  She was touching the corners of something. She could feel it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  She didn’t cry, not once. And she felt very strong, somehow. Something had happened at last, she thought. A pressure released. A valve turned, a window thrown open.

  Marie was back home. They were all here again.

  Everyone could forget.

  DON’T LOOK

  Once in the night, Charlie sleeping beside her, his throat thick with sleeping pills, breathing funnily, she woke to a piercing sensation beneath her right brow.

  A flash came of some murky nightmare of eye sockets, rolling eyeballs, her slipper slipping over a jellied orb.