by Megan Abbott
“Our Clara is relentless,” Madame Sylvie whispered over Dara’s shoulder.
“She’s sending a message,” Dara said.
The light board operator called for a pause and Bailey stopped a moment, hands on her hips, catching a breath, bending at the waist to steady herself.
From the thicket came the abrupt screech of a quickly suppressed laugh.
“Bailey,” Dara called out, “do you need five?”
Bailey paused, trying not to look at the Level IV girls, their low whispers, their prison-yard stares, Pepper’s slit-eyed gaze lifting to the stage.
“No,” Bailey insisted, lifting her body back in her arabesque, one impossibly long arm up, one out, holding the Nutcracker, her left leg in the air, her right leg planted still.
“Bailey,” Dara repeated, rising, moving down the aisle, thinking of the dazed, glassy look on the girl’s face after her time locked in the supply closet, after the pins in her shoes. “Let’s take a break.”
You have to leave them to it, their mother used to say about the plight of Claras every year. It’s jungle logic. You have to let them handle it amongst themselves.
“I don’t need it,” Bailey insisted, teeth gritted as Dara approached the lip of the stage. “I’m really fine.”
With that, her arms fell, the Nutcracker slipping from her hands, clattering to the stage floor just as Bailey leaned over at the waist and vomited.
* * *
* * *
You’ll be okay,” Dara said, both of them bent over the stagehand’s bucket, deep in the wings now. “Let’s take you to the restroom.”
Bailey didn’t say anything, her hands on her hips, taking long gulping breaths.
“Maybe it was something she ate,” someone said.
Dara turned and saw Gracie Hent lingering in the shadows, her face dark.
“Someone brought cookies from the deli at break,” Gracie added coolly, her eyes on Bailey. “The cookies had mold.”
There was such a boldness to the girl, a barbarism to her. This pink waif, her tidy bun.
“And how do you know that, Mademoiselle Hent?” Dara said sternly, moving toward her.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bailey blurted, reaching for Dara. “Forget it.” Clearing her throat, lifting her voice. “I’m fine now.”
Dara looked at the girl, her face wet and her eyes glittering, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
This was, Dara had to remind herself, the same girl who once burst into tears over a correction (Elbows ups! No chicken wings!), who had, for years, fretted openly over her body, the length of her neck, and burst into tears again when girls started calling her stub neck, nub neck. The girl who, just six weeks ago, had wondered over Clara, over her own talents—that girl was gone.
Good for her, Dara thought. Good.
* * *
* * *
Everyone was exhausted and they’d dismissed half the cast, Marie ordering a sheaf of pizzas for the rest, the smell of grease and cardboard and little-girl burps everywhere, because the six- and seven-year-old mice still needed to rehearse, which they should have done hours ago when they were still pitched and excited, stroking their acrylic mouse paws and dying to get onstage. Now they looked greasy, bloated, their bellies like pigeon breasts.
Dara slumped in fifth-row center as Marie and Madame Sylvie tried to rouse them, clapping and calling out the steps.
It was funny seeing Marie onstage, her fists sunk in the pockets of their father’s cardigan, her bleached hair the same whiteness as her face, her long, mottled neck. Mottled with brown bruises that lingered past the life of their maker, his thumbprints still on her somehow.
It was funny to see her up there, working, but it also felt natural, right.
Dara’s phone lit up and it was Charlie.
“I should be there,” he said. “I thought I’d feel better after I took the baclofen. I just . . .”
She started to tell him about the news article but somehow she couldn’t, his voice so fragile and eager.
“We’re nearly done,” Dara said, her eyes on the stage as “mice,” their wrists bent for flat paws, scurried under the lights more antically now, the recorded music booming. “Let’s try it with the heads now!” she shouted to the stage.
On the phone, Charlie was still talking.
“But I think I can still get a PT appointment,” Charlie was saying. “A late one. Nine o’clock.”
“Pay the extra,” Dara said. “Helga’s worth it.”
“Follow my voice,” Marie was saying onstage.
The mice were putting on their mouse heads, Marie standing over them, helping them with all the foam and fur. The heat underneath, which Dara still remembered from the years she was a mouse, blind and breathless.
“I miss you,” Charlie said, sounding so far away.
Onstage, all the little girls bobbing against one another, the mouse heads too big for their little bodies. Follow my voice. She remembered what it was like, your big moment and you’re missing everything.
“Me too,” Dara said into the phone, her eyes unaccountably filling. “Bye.”
* * *
* * *
It was over, everything. For the day. Until tomorrow, the stakes higher, higher every day until after opening night.
The students were packing up wearily, their limbs loose and lifeless. Backstage, Madame Sylvie was nipping at her annual “Nutcracker nog,” a pint tucked in the pocket of her tunic. Parents were arriving, the parking lot glowing with headlights.
The Level IVs carpool had, mysteriously, left without Bailey Bloom.
“It’s okay,” Bailey said. “My mom will text me back eventually.”
“No,” Marie said, sweeping her arm around Bailey, shepherding her through the darting mass of wool and fleece. “I’ll take you, honey. But first, ice cream.”
* * *
* * *
I never knew Marie drove,” Madame Sylvie said.
“She’s full of surprises,” Dara replied as they watched them disappear inside Marie’s creamsicle of a car.
Marie being so helpful, Marie being a grown-up, responsible. Was this what it took?
“Seat belts!” Dara called out. Then, more softly, “We need our Clara alive. We need both of you alive.”
* * *
* * *
Back in the lobby, Dara found herself stopping in front of the giant Nutcracker. The one Marie had been so transfixed by that morning.
He was so jolly, the brightly colored uniform, the handlebar mustache hanging over the tidy row of chunky teeth, its hinged jaw, the heavy lever of the mouth.
But her eyes kept landing on that black slash of his eyepatch. She’d never thought about it before, how his eyepatch matched the eyepatch of Drosselmeier, the sinister and seductive godfather who gives the Nutcracker to Clara and sets her on her adventure.
The eyepatch dominant, his other eye was colorless, the pupil swimming in the milky white.
There was something almost familiar about it, and then, the longer she looked, something upsetting. But she couldn’t put a name to it.
Until the picture came to her: of Derek, at the end. The dark pinwheel of Derek’s iris, red swirling from the center, filling his eye. The pupil punctured, the spike of the metal bill holder snug in its center.
“Ms. Durant. At last. We’ve been looking for you.”
Dara turned and saw the detective approaching.
THE COUNT
It was the same one from before, from that first morning, wearing the same tan trench coat like a Hollywood private eye.
He moved toward her as arriving and departing parents swirled past, trailing winter scarves, grabbing sparkly backpacks abandoned in the lobby’s corners, as their daughters and the few scant sons, exhausted, struggled to put on their heavy coats, unbearab
ly hot against their sweat-stuck bodies.
He moved swiftly, easily, as if no parent could touch him, as if he didn’t even see them, not even the half-dozen with the enormous mouse heads hooked under their arms, handing them to Madame Sylvie’s assistant for safekeeping.
“Ms. Durant,” the detective said.
Another man, slightly younger, with a brush cut and a ski vest, joined from a nearby water fountain, rubbing his mouth on the back of his sleeve like a teenage boy.
“Can I help you?” Dara said as they approached.
“Maybe,” the detective said. “Let’s see.”
* * *
* * *
Everything about it felt wrong, the way the older one, a Detective Walters, was looking at her, tapping his pen on a flip notebook in his hand. His face, up close, reminded Dara of a baked potato.
His partner, Mendoza, looked uncomfortable, eyes darting from the older girls, a few stripped down to their dance bras as they waited in the overheated lobby.
“We went by your studio first,” Detective Walters said. “Finally tracked you down by the trail of tutus.”
Dara didn’t smile. Trying to avoid the eyes of any stray parent.
“We’re very busy right now,” she said to Walters. “The Nutcracker.”
As if on cue, both men looked up at the towering statue behind her, suddenly more sinister-looking, its clownish colors, the hard spikes of its gold crown.
“You know,” Detective Walters said, tapping his pen again, an old Bic with a chewed blue top, “I never really got the Nutcracker thing until I had a daughter. Girls love that shit.”
“So is that what this is about?” Dara said. “Comp tickets for your daughter?”
Detective Walters grinned, his potato face crinkling.
* * *
* * *
They had a few more questions, that was all. Some clarifications, mostly. Maybe there was a quiet place they could talk?
Dara led the way, vining them through the swarm, the air muzzy with that familiar studio mix of sweat, funk, hairspray, camphor oil, urine, vomit, this grand and stately theater completely contaminated by the Durant School of Dance in just six hours.
She used the three- or four-minute walk to try to center herself. To bring herself together the way one did before performing, drawing all one’s energies and spiky fears into one sharp point, a mighty saber, an immutable and unfeeling thing.
Everyone loves a pretty dancer, their mother used to say. But strong is better.
* * *
* * *
They crowded into the lighting booth, away from the whir of the custodial staff working below. Through the window, you could see them clearing away all the dirty Band-Aids, the browning apple cores, the frills of torn elastic straps, errant toe pads and toe pouches like pale rose petals gathering, the stray ruffs of lamb’s wool like the aftermath of an animal fight, a beast and prey standoff.
“We told you all we know,” Dara said. “But go ahead if you must.”
Walters and Mendoza exchanged looks.
“Most people,” Walters said, a grin back in his voice, “are a little intimidated by the police.”
“Most people are guilty,” Dara said. “Of something, at least.”
Walters looked at her, that pen out again, the mangled cap. “Clean living for you, huh?”
“That’s the way our mother raised us.”
* * *
* * *
Below, onstage, one last custodian swirled a giant tentacled mop like a sailor swabbing a deck. The puddled remnants of Bailey Bloom’s fluorescent vomit, like a gasoline rainbow, disappearing. The creamy brown of the stage turned dark, luminous.
The two detectives were asking her the same things as before, the contractor’s schedule, his comings and goings, and was it typical for him to be there at such an early hour and alone, and why might he have ended up in the back office, the staircase. Wasn’t that all a bit strange?
“Maybe,” Dara said. “I didn’t know him.”
Mendoza threw Walters a look, but Walters didn’t blink, his eyes on Dara.
“I just don’t see the point in all this,” Dara said. “The insurance investigator already came by.”
“We know.”
“She seemed satisfied.”
“The bulldog,” Walters said to Mendoza, with a wink.
“Pardon?”
“Never mind. We love Randi.”
* * *
* * *
Dara began doing eight-counts in her head—six, seven, eight—her tongue tapping on her palate like a metronome. Counting off imaginary piqué turns. Keeping her cool. They didn’t know anything. They couldn’t.
“And you said the third floor—what did you say you used that for?”
“Storage,” Dara said.
“And this . . . accident with the contractor,” Walters said, a definite pause in the middle. Cinq, six, sept, huit—“that’s the third recent incident on the site. Is that correct?”
Dara stopped her silent count. “I’m sorry?”
“Let’s see. You had a flood on October thirtieth?”
They hadn’t asked about that before. Why would they ask about that? Dix, onze, douze.
“Well, yes,” Dara said. “That was related to the renovation. They hit a pipe. How did you—”
“And the contractor—he was injured, correct?”
“No,” Dara said. “I mean, I guess. Some minor burns. He was fine.”
Walters looked at her a moment, then looked back down at his notepad.
“And then a fire on September fifteenth?”
The fire. Dara tried not to look at them. Tried to concentrate only on the steadiness of the voice.
“The fire, yes, but that was before the construction. That’s why we hired him. To repair the damage.”
“Right,” Walters said, nodding, an opaque expression on his face. Mendoza’s eyes wandered to the stage below.
Dara looked too. Other than the lone custodian, his trailing bucket, the stringy spill of his mop, all was still below, the black maw of the theater.
There was a pressure at her temple, the detective’s talc tickling her nose.
Dara looked at her watch. “Excuse me,” she said abruptly, “but what does this have to do with what happened?”
Walters looked up from his notebook. Even more interested now.
“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Space heater, right?”
Dara could feel her spine tighten, like a crank turning. Cinq, six, sept . . .
“Yes.”
“Call came in . . . your sister called it in to nine-one-one. Four a.m.?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“What was she doing there at that hour?”
Dara took a breath. “Marie goes in early, stays late. We don’t punch a clock.”
“Report says she’d been sleeping there that night,” Walters said, flipping his notebook shut.
Dara paused. Mendoza turned and looked at her.
“She’d camp out in her studio once in a while,” Dara said, “if it was late. But not recently. With the construction, there’s always dust, noise.”
“How about on the third floor?” Mendoza said abruptly. It was the first time he’d spoken since they’d begun. Walters looked as surprised as Dara. “She ever camp out up there?”
Dara paused again, thinking. Remembering squinty-eyed Pepper Weston, her impudent mouth: Is it true that Mademoiselle Durant sleeps in the attic now?
“That was our mother’s space,” Dara said carefully. It wasn’t an answer but sounded like one. “It was just for her.”
There was a brief silence, the booth so small, the smudgy black console, fingerprints glowing in the light. Making Dara think of prints, evidence. A feeling in her chest like a valve t
ightening. What was behind these questions? And all this attention to Marie . . .
“Okay. Now if we can have a word with her,” Walters said. “Your sister.”
Mendoza was looking at Dara, a long, uninterrupted gaze.
“She left,” Dara said. “Look, what’s this about? I read the paper. The autopsy’s done. The man fell. Accidents at construction sites—that has to happen, right?”
“Sure,” Walters said, nodding. “All the time.”
“So—”
“That’s why contractors tend to load up on insurance policies,” he added, looking at Mendoza with something like a wink. “Especially if they have a family.”
“Well,” Dara said, watching them, “it’s a dangerous business.”
“For some,” Walters said. “Look, we’re doing our due diligence. Don’t like to get shown up by a claims man. Or woman.”
Dara got it suddenly. “This is about that Randi woman.”
“Bulldogs gonna sniff,” Mendoza said, smiling at Walters.
“She’s just doing her job,” Walters said. “Insurance companies, they’re crap shooters. They make a bet with you and, most of the time, they win. But once in a while, the dice come up snake eyes for them. Suddenly, all they wanna do is slow the roll.”
Mendoza nodded. “That poor guy probably paid those premiums for, like, decades. Now he takes a header on the job and they hold out on his grieving widow—”
Dara looked up. “Widow?”
“Sure,” Walters said, closing his notebook. “And widows like to get paid.”
* * *
* * *
The widow. Derek’s widow. Derek’s wife.
DEATHLESS
Part of her must have known.
He’d never talked about a family, a home to go to. He’d stayed over so many nights on the third floor.
He’d never worn a wedding band, but not all married men did. Their father didn’t, not after one of his electrician colleagues was working on a hot panel with his ring on and a jolt tore right through him. Professional hazard, he always told them, showing them the band once, tucked beneath a pile of handkerchiefs in the top drawer of his dresser. So he claims, their mother always added, under her breath.
