by Megan Abbott
But at the time, it felt like everything. Because it was, of course.
None of them spoke of it in the days that followed. She never told Marie, or anyone.
That first night, Charlie slept on the sofa downstairs, but by the second, Dara had snuck down and climbed beside him, his body so hot on her skin and eager for forgiveness. Her hands gathering him hungrily, she found herself wanting him to forgive her, to forgive them.
Two days later, she and Charlie began making plans to leave, together. It was just too unbearable, all together in the studio, at that house. It was unbearable to pass one another in the hallway, at the bathroom, over the kettle on the kitchen stove. Dara couldn’t look her mother in the eye. Charlie couldn’t sleep or eat, taking long, scalding baths in the claw-foot tub. They had to go. Maybe to Charlie’s mother in England, or Charlie could take that apprenticeship in the Sarasota Ballet.
Immediately, they began paperwork, made calls. Tried to find out about passports, licenses. They’d even secretly lugged their mother’s rolling trunk from the basement and begun packing.
Maybe it’s too quick, Charlie said, watching her.
It’s not, Dara insisted. It was like one’s first grand jeté. How students were never ready until suddenly they were and they had to do it right away, or the moment would pass.
We have to go now. We have to.
Three days later, it was their parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary and their car careered into oncoming traffic and they were dead.
The morning after the funeral, Dara unpacked the trunk, Charlie watching. Down the hall, Marie was crying, had been crying for days. She couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat, her body like a broken bird. After, Dara dragged the rolling trunk back down to the basement, where she wouldn’t see it again for more than a decade, when Marie heaved it back up the stairs for her trip around the world.
See, Dara thought, I tried to leave once too, Marie. Long before you. It’s harder than it looks.
UNHEALTHY
Charlie’s back felt hot under her hand when she woke.
She felt a tickle in her throat, a feeling of something. It had hummed in her all night. All those conversations with Charlie, with Marie. Those half-conversations, all the past stirred up again. And now it wouldn’t leave her.
And she kept thinking about that word accident. What it meant, what it contained. They were killed in a car accident. He fell down the stairs in a terrible accident. I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident.
And when she reached out again Charlie’s back was hot, tortured. It felt like putting your hand on a tangle of lighting cables, illuminating everything.
* * *
* * *
Today was the first on-site rehearsal. Normally, Dara and Marie would focus on the stage, on the performances, while Charlie did everything else. Overseeing the backdrop load-in, meeting with the stage crew, making sure the snack packs arrive on time, corralling the hectic parent volunteers and managing their access to their nervous children.
But there was nothing normal about today, and Charlie could barely move from the bed, his body like a fallen statue, his face taut with pain.
“I don’t know how I could have done it,” he said. “I’ve been careful.”
But Dara knew. Those mad minutes the other night, she and Charlie scurrying around on the third floor, heaving the futon mattress in half, snapping the frame shut, hoisting garbage bags, wiping the place clean of Marie, of the contractor. All while one floor below the contractor’s lifeless body stiffened, his skin turning cold. All while Marie sat in their car, where they’d stowed her, her head resting against the window like a child waiting, waiting forever for her parents to remember she was there.
* * *
* * *
Lie back,” she said to him now. “Stay home. I’ll take care of it. And Marie . . . Marie will do her best.”
“Not a chance. I’m gonna rally here,” he whispered, even as his body was sinking back, his face contorted in pain. “I just need a few minutes. It’s just, with the cold weather, it . . .”
Slowly, slowly she let her hand drop away.
It would be her and Marie. It would have to be.
* * *
* * *
I’m gonna be all right today,” Marie said as they walked to their separate cars. “I promise.”
“Okay,” Dara said. “Okay.”
* * *
* * *
The Ballenger Center—a sleek, featureless lightbox of a building—had undergone its annual transformation. Wrapped in thousands of white lights like lace, dotted with shimmering gumdrops the size of church bells, trimmed with bright candy canes big as coat stands dangling from its roof.
Inside, the theater volunteers had clearly spent hours draping boughs and garlands in every corner. A fleet of the familiar two-story-high Nutcracker banners hung from the ceiling, swaying with each burst of forced heat.
Marie stood in the lobby’s center, in front of a brand-new decoration: a fifteen-foot-high Nutcracker statue of resin and fiberglass, his face a glossy rictus.
Gazing upward, Marie couldn’t take her eyes off it, not even noticing as all the students began tumbling in, tearing off wool hats, chattering softly, reverently, smoothing their hair back into their tight buns.
“Are you ready?” Dara asked, stirring Marie from her reverie.
Her sister turned and looked at her and smiled.
* * *
* * *
In seconds, the lobby was filled with students, the youngest ones nearly squealing as they moved through the carpeted space.
It was the first time at least a quarter of them had ever been behind the scenes at the Ballenger, a theater they’d all sat in, enthralled, their whole lives, tucked since ages three or four in the red plush seats, their candy- and saliva-coated palms pressed on the wooden armrests, their eyes unblinking, struck.
“I’m so nervous I could die. I could throw up and die.”
“Shut up. You’re making it worse.”
“What if Oliver drops me? Did you see his arm—”
“You-know-who makes me sick. Her toes curl under like claws.”
* * *
* * *
For the next four hours, as Dara stalked the stage, the theater aisles, it was a ceaseless assault: pitched laughter, stifled screams, and the teary strains of forgotten slippers, the tragedy of monthly bloat, a blackened toenail hanging by a strip of withered skin, and their Clara, Bailey Bloom, missing for a perilous half hour. Finally, Madame Sylvie found her locked in a lightless custodial supply closet, hysterical with fear.
“She said someone blindfolded her and locked her inside,” Madame Sylvie told Dara. “Some shadowy ‘they.’”
But Dara knew just who the “they” was, looking across the stage at all the unchosen Claras—Pepper Weston, Gracie Hent, Iris Cartwright—waiting to rehearse the Waltz of the Snowflakes, their faces aloof, watchful.
“The little darlings,” Dara said, sounding more like their mother than ever before. “I suppose they hoped we wouldn’t find her until after opening night.”
* * *
* * *
Did you see it?”
“Shhhh . . .”
“Let me look.”
Midway through the Waltz of the Snowflakes run-through, the energy corkscrewed, a scattering of students hovering over their phones in the dark wings.
It was a news article. The Durants hadn’t received a newspaper in twenty years, since the Tribune strike began and their father, a union man, called to cancel his subscription, harrumphing that he was no scab.
Dara got a copy from a stagehand perusing the sports page while, onstage, two dozen Snowflakes flitted and leapt.
contractor killed at area ballet school, the headline noted grimly, the photo of the studio just as grim, the weather-beat
en sign, its brick streaked with salt.
“Higher!” she could hear Madame Sylvie calling out. “In a week, you’ll be doing those assemblés in fifty pounds of snow!”
Behind the curtain, she read the article once, then twice.
Authorities are investigating the death of an area contractor whom police said died early Sunday after apparently falling down a staircase.
Police were called to the scene after the owners of the Durant School of Dance reported discovering Derek Girard, 49, of Roseville, at the foot of the staircase and unresponsive. Police arrived to find the man lying on his back, with visible injuries and his head surrounded by blood. He was reported dead on the scene, according to police reports.
A preliminary autopsy revealed that the cause of death was a complex skull fracture due to blunt force head trauma from the elevated fall, internal bleeding, and major intracranial bleeding due to eye perforation, according to the county coroner.
A final determination of the manner of death is pending toxicology and histology results. The police investigation is ongoing.
There really wasn’t any new information in the article, she decided. Everything was falling in line as it should. It would all be over soon.
Except: those words. Autopsy. Pending. Manner of death. Ongoing.
* * *
* * *
I thought autopsies were only for murder,” Liv Lockman was whispering.
The acoustics of the Ballenger were unforgiving and Dara could hear all of it, each little rosette of Snowflakes assembled, waiting, chattering, eager to hurl their minds to something other than their rigid and anxious bodies.
“It’s any unnatural death,” announced Gracie Hent, from some mysterious well of knowledge. “They do autopsies for any unnatural death.”
“What’s unnatural about it?” Liv Lockman said, her voice even lower, her eyes shining with excitement.
“Because it wasn’t supposed to happen,” Gracie said, looking less sure now. “But it did.”
Unnatural. The word like a cold lash. Once, twice, three times.
* * *
* * *
Later in the afternoon, when the parents began arriving, it seemed to be everywhere: the dreary gray page-three article, a few column inches but also a photograph of their studio, dark and stark as a crime scene.
“What are we going to do about this?” Dr. Weston said, looking dreary and gray himself as he approached Dara. Dr. Weston, there for rehearsal again. How did a doctor have so much leisure time?
“About what?” Dara said, playing distracted, focusing instead on a group of the Level IVs trying to hide in a lobby alcove, bent over a plastic tub of contraband rainbow cookies. Come try one, Bailey, someone was saying. They’re so good.
“This article. The picture.” He shook his head. “Aren’t you concerned?”
“It has nothing to do with us,” Dara said, feeling her face grow hot, avoiding his heavy gaze, watching as Madame Sylvie scolded the girls for their cookies. Do you think I don’t see, mes anges? I see everything.
“But it does,” Dr. Weston insisted, moving closer toward her.
Jesus, Dara thought. What could he know?
“I don’t see how . . .” she started.
Then, leaning even closer, he lowered his voice, pointing at the paper, “I mean, they haven’t even given us coverage for The Nutcracker yet. What kind of crap is that?”
Dara felt a hard smack of relief. The Nutcracker, what else was there?
“I have to get back,” she said abruptly, backing farther away.
“Well, it’s the world we live in,” he said, his voice echoing through the lobby as Dara turned and began walking away. “Sick, sick.”
* * *
* * *
Back in the cool dark of the theater, she tried to settle into the work, watching Corbin onstage donning the Nutcracker Prince mask, lurid and startling under the lights. The tufts of white hair on either side. The grin manic, the teeth two perfect lines.
While the lighting engineer made adjustments, bringing up the blue, Dara called Charlie, but there was no answer.
“Just checking in,” she said into the voicemail. “Call me.”
Behind her, she heard a voice, Marie. One row back, leaning close to Dara’s ear.
“Is he coming here?” she asked. “Charlie?”
“No,” Dara said. “But we should talk.”
“Okay,” Marie said.
The stage was flooded violet, Corbin adjusting the mask on his head.
Behind her, Dara could hear Marie breathing. Fast, then more slowly. Slower still.
* * *
* * *
It doesn’t mean anything,” she told Marie as her sister read the article, her fingers smudging.
They were in a dressing room, backstage. A half-dozen mouse heads perched on stands, the room smelling of glue, rubbing alcohol, cold cream, vomit.
“It’s okay,” Marie said, twisting her thumbnail between her teeth. “I’m okay.”
“They do them for everyone. Autopsies,” Dara said, even as she knew they didn’t.
Marie held out the newspaper, offering it back to Dara, her grip tentative, like it was a carton of eggs, or a box of firecrackers.
“I keep thinking of his face,” she said. “At the end. How surprised he looked.”
“Why are you doing this?” Dara said, letting the newspaper fall to the vanity. “We said we weren’t ever going to talk about this.”
Marie looked into one of the cloudy mirrors. “On the stairs. He looked so surprised.”
In that instant, Dara wondered if she’d looked surprised, too, watching Marie and Charlie on those stairs, their strange faces. She knew she had. It was the same.
“Surprised like he didn’t recognize us,” Marie said, eyes on the mirror. She and Dara twinned there. Dara was cool, but Marie was hot. Dara was dark, but Marie was light.
“Like we were these alien things.”
* * *
* * *
It was nearly seven. Everyone was tired. All the excitement eaten away by the rigors of the day, its small victories and humiliations.
The stage was bare except for Bailey Bloom, an unlit taper candle in her hand, gazing into the darkness. Though no one else was in costume that day, Bailey was wearing her Clara nightgown for the lighting crew. For the important moment Clara leaves her bed in the blue-black night to retrieve the Nutcracker, her longing for him so immense.
From her seat, Dara watched as Bailey, her pale tights glowing, bounded across the stage over and over again as they adjusted the fly rigs.
“Slow and big, Mademoiselle Bloom,” Dara called out. “The audience needs to be able to feel everything.”
Nightgown ballooning, Bailey streaked across the stage, scooped the abandoned Nutcracker into her arms. Sleeves like white wings, she hoisted it into the air like a totem, a godhead, then lifted herself into an elegant arabesque, her neck so long and her leg so high in the way you can when you’re fourteen, fifteen, your body both feather-light and molten, and everything is forever and nothing ever changes.
Dara felt her eyes fill. No longer thinking of articles, or autopsies, or Charlie, or even Marie, she was giving herself over to Bailey, who’d earned it, who needed it. As their mother so often gave herself over to her students. The gaze, hot and relentless, felt like love. It was love.
Bailey onstage, so small amid the darkness, her body whirling antically, seeking her Nutcracker, braving the unknown.
It was so beautiful, like the grainy production they used to watch on their mother’s portable black-and-white set. Their favorite Clara, a big-eyed waif, petal thin but impossibly strong. It was years before Dara realized they were watching their mother, recorded on videotape twenty years before.
“Bravo!” Madame Sylvie ca
lled out.
Onstage, her arms in a perfect port de bras, cradling the Nutcracker between them, Bailey looked out into the dark theater, her face blue in the spotlight. Her eyes wide and face open, with all Clara’s fear and wonder.
That’s it, Dara thought. That’s Clara.
“Shall we move on?” called out Madame Sylvie from the back of the house. Wanting to go home.
Dara looked up at Bailey, her chest still heaving, her collarbones pulsing.
“Not yet, please,” she said, her voice surprisingly strong.
Bailey, who hadn’t left the stage in hours, was lathered with sweat, the sweat of a longshoreman, the heels of her pointe shoes flecked with blood.
Bailey who said, “Once more, please?”
Dara nodded.
You had to let them keep going. Bailey knew to stop if she needed to. She knew to ask for first aid, to ask for Anbesol to numb her toes, to say she needed to rest.
But Bailey didn’t want to rest—I don’t have it yet. Please, one more time—and she kept going again and again, her face blazing under the lights, strands slipping from her immaculate bun. Chasséing across the stage again, one foot chasing the other, feet skimming the floor.
Dara heard the dull crack of feet pressed against seatbacks and turned, spotting the same spiky thicket of fellow Level IV girls—Pepper Weston, Gracie Hent, Iris Cartwright—their legs hanging over the seats, their heads dipping up and down from their phones to the stage. Pepper silently stitching elastic bands to her slippers and occasionally yawning.
They weren’t making any noise, but they were still asserting their presence and Bailey’s eyes kept flitting to their corner.
