by Megan Abbott
Still, someone who lies so freely, who hustles so ceaselessly . . .
Part of her must have known, but had Marie?
* * *
* * *
Dara didn’t remember saying her goodbyes to the detectives. Didn’t remember them shuffling ahead of her back down the stairs from the light booth. The stairs like the spiral stairs at the studio, shuddering under their weight, the thick-soled shoes of the policemen.
She was thinking of this wife, this mysterious wife. What kind of woman would be married to Derek? But then she started to create a picture in her head, a passive hausfrau, a doormat. Or, she thought, maybe a former stripper, a pole dancer on the decline.
But what mattered, she reminded herself, was the threat this posed. Someone new to reckon with. Someone who wanted things, wanted money. Another intruder in their lives, another hostile invader. First Derek and now Derek’s wife. Another stranger who could ruin everything for all of them.
* * *
* * *
Charlie,” Dara said into his voicemail, wondering if he was already on the way to his PT. “I have to talk to you. Call me.”
She tried Marie next, and her sister answered amid a blast of noise—wind rushing, radio panting, Bailey’s chirping voice.
“What is it?” Marie kept saying, but she couldn’t hear Dara at all and instead started explaining that Bailey had never been to the Chocolate Shoppe and had never had a hot fudge cream puff, could you believe it.
“Call me after,” Dara finally said, thundering into the phone. “Call me.”
* * *
* * *
It doesn’t matter, she thought. The fact of the wife. It didn’t change things. All it proved was what she already knew. The contractor was bad. A liar. A dangerous person.
But there was something behind it. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
After their parents’ deaths, the life insurance money came through quickly, but their father’s accidental death benefit payout took months and months. The attorney they’d hired told them the insurance company had to make sure it wasn’t suicide, or murder-suicide. Because, he told them, some people will in fact run their cars into buildings, off cliffs, into other vehicles. And then there was the role of alcohol in the crash.
But, in the end, the money came.
In the end, no one could prove their parents had wanted to die. Didn’t everything prove that? Marie had asked. Didn’t their whole lives prove that?
The money came because their father hadn’t been driving drunk. Their mother had. That was something Dara was told, but she couldn’t make it fit. So she chose not to remember it at all.
The money came, but only once the insurance company was satisfied that the death was an accident.
* * *
* * *
There she is!”
Dara looked up with a start.
At the far end of the emptying lobby stood a Nutcracker Prince—not the statue, but the Prince himself, in tunic and tights, his papier-mâché head large and impossible, the jabbing mustache, the teeth big as playing cards, the eyepatch severing his face.
“Madame Durant!” the voice came again.
And, as if in a dream, he lifted his own head free, revealing Corbin Lesterio, his rosy face and that lustrous forelock, raking his fingers through it as teenage boys have done throughout time, spurring the deep, low-down sighs of all admirers in sight.
“Madame Durant,” he said, then whirled himself into an impromptu pirouette. “It was better, right? It was good? I was good today? Un gentil prince.”
As she moved closer, the sounds of his breath, the breathlessness of beautiful young boys—it made her forget, just for a second—an exquisite, piercing second—the low hum of death in her ear.
Here was this young and perfect thing, and the way he looked at her, his eyes bright with awe and desire—what could ever go wrong? What could ever be ruined or die? Everything is as it should be forever, no snakes in the garden, no temptation, no loss.
That’s what it does, their mother always told them. Ballet. It stops death.
* * *
* * *
She walked Corbin to his father’s car, the rush of the boy’s words spilling into her hands.
“I’ve never been so excited,” he was telling her, his breath a silver cloud. “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Dara smiled and waved to Mr. Lesterio, seated snugly in his overheated Plymouth.
“I guess I better enjoy it,” he said, moving to the passenger door, his face falling so fast. “Like you always tell me, there’s only one first. You never get it back.”
Dara looked at him, struck.
She didn’t remember saying that. She didn’t remember saying that at all.
* * *
* * *
Bailey!” The voice tight and humming like a violin string. “Are you here, Bailey?”
Dara turned and saw a figure shimmering through the cascade of white lights, the enormous Christmas wreaths hanging from the lobby windows.
“Madame Durant! I’m late. Did I miss her?”
The princess coat, seal gray, the dark glasses, the shining bob. The careless mother. The contractor’s former client. He has something he wants. He’ll hold it close until he’s ready.
It was Mrs. Bloom, the elusive Mrs. Bloom, looking for her daughter, and Dara would not let her get away this time.
YOU WOMEN
Mrs. Bloom didn’t want to talk in the lobby, or her car, or a nearby diner.
She didn’t want to talk at all, but Dara was insistent.
“It’s very important,” she said. “About your daughter.”
Finally, she said Dara could follow her home. They could speak there, in private.
It was four miles away, a large brick house with the gleaming white columns of a wedding cake.
There wasn’t much time. But Bailey would be at least an hour with Marie.
Marie, Dara thought. Marie. Suddenly, she had this memory of her sister, age three or four, her music box open, reaching for the pirouetting ballerina, the net of her miniature tutu. And then snapping the ballerina loose. Staring at it in her dimpled hand.
* * *
* * *
They sat in the Bloom living room, cream-colored and feminine with candles everywhere and the smell of crushed flowers.
They both held thick-banded glasses clinking with vodka and ice from the bar cart.
It burned Dara’s throat, reminded her of the Fire Eater. Everything did lately. Those ladies, Dara had thought the first time they’d seen the Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower, they’re not afraid at all.
“Tell me about Bailey,” Mrs. Bloom asked, leaning back on her sofa, her eyes glassy and her head bobbing slightly. “I must admit, I haven’t been as attentive as usual. I’ve been dealing with some personal issues.”
“She’s coming into her own. She’s going to be a very fine Clara.”
“She will be, won’t she?” she said softly, a sip from the rattling glass. “But that isn’t why you’re here.”
“No.”
Mrs. Bloom set her glass down on the sofa arm, a ring forming immediately, and spreading.
“You came about him,” she said.
“Yes.”
She took a breath. “I heard what happened to him. Bailey told me. Then I read it in the paper . . .”
“That time I saw you at his truck,” Dara said abruptly, “you had an envelope you left there.”
“I owed him some money,” she said coolly. “But I don’t see how that’s your—”
“Why didn’t you mail it?”
Mrs. Bloom shook her head wearily and reached for her glass again.
“Because Derek didn’t operate like that,” she said, her voice looser, her
shoulders slumping. “He didn’t want checks sent to his house. He wanted cash in hand. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“Why were you still giving him money?”
She took a long sip. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Was he blackmailing you?”
First, Mrs. Bloom smirked a little. Then she sat very still, setting her highball glass on her knee, a new water ring forming on her wool pants.
“I’m so ashamed,” she said at last, nearly a whisper, even though they appeared to be alone in the house. “So ashamed.”
Dara felt pinpricks on her neck, her wrists, her hips. Something was happening.
“Did you know about the wife?”
Mrs. Bloom looked up.
“That,” she said slowly, carefully, “was the hardest part.”
“Because he didn’t tell you.”
“No, because I knew her first.”
* * *
* * *
It had begun nearly two years ago. She’d been having these migraines ever since Bailey was born. So bad she’d vomit, so bad she couldn’t open her eyes for days. A friend recommended acupuncture. She found a woman she liked at a medical spa, a little place inside that big glass building by the highway.
“And this was her?” Dara said. “His wife?”
Mrs. Bloom nodded. “She understood my body so well. By the end of the first session, my body felt like liquid. My head felt clear and strong. Then she told me about this special bathtub that would help. Her husband could install it. I’d been thinking of a renovation anyway, so I hired him.”
Mrs. Bloom took a long sip from that rattling glass, leaning back, her lipstick slightly smudged.
“But then, one day, weeks into the renovation, she shows up at my front door. In her scrubs. She looked like she’d been crying for hours. She’d found some things on his phone . . . some texts, some . . . photos. Things he promised me he wouldn’t keep.”
There it was. There it was. Mrs. Bloom and Derek, the furtive sex, the bleached hair, the ensnarement, the money, the manipulation, the trap.
“What did you say to her? The wife?”
“I denied it. But it was all there.” Mrs. Bloom’s face reddened, even at the memory. “But then she just started begging me. Telling me how she needed him. They were deep in debt, about to lose their house. She had to hide her car in a coworker’s garage so they wouldn’t repossess it. And then she started talking about the children.”
“Children?” Dara felt the cold of her glass in her hand. She took another sip, feeling the fire again. There was always something new now. Something new and incredible.
“Four. One with some kind of . . . problem. It was all so terrible. I needed her to leave. I ended up writing her a check.”
“Why?”
“I would have given her anything,” Mrs. Bloom said. “Anything.”
“That’s when you ended it?”
Mrs. Bloom looked at her like Dara hadn’t been listening at all.
* * *
* * *
They were moving soundlessly up the carpeted stairs.
“You need to see it,” Mrs. Bloom kept murmuring as Dara hurried behind her, up the stairs and down a long hallway, “to understand.”
The pocket door slid open soundlessly. Inside, the walls, the carpet, the towels, were all dark pink and strongly scented, such that it was like stepping into the center of a blooming rose.
“I never come in here anymore,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
It was Mrs. Bloom’s master bathroom—the one they’d heard about. The contractor’s dazzling work. Imagine what he could do for you!
Everything looked new and shiny. All the fixtures and hardware, like the cellophane hadn’t yet been pulled off. The walk-in shower with gold taps and jets studded up and down like fat jewels. A vessel sink suited for Cleopatra. Gold-plated towel warmers thick with white swaddlers. A cream-white tub shaped like an elegant slipper, curved low in the center, its ends dipping upward like a pointe shoe turned on its side.
It made her think of their mother’s claw-footer, rust rings around its faucets, sides coated with lime. The only bath she’d ever known, her whole life.
“This is what he did,” Mrs. Bloom said. “Derek.”
It was like a little girl’s fantasy of a bathroom, Dara thought. Like she herself imagined as a child, bubble baths and fur rugs to wiggle your toes in.
It made her think of Derek that first day, promising a ballerina palace.
. . . why not dream bigger? I can give you all the things you want.
“Take off your shoes,” Mrs. Bloom said, her hands dancing along a control board on the rose-colored wall.
Dara would just as soon spread her legs as show her bare feet to this woman, not a dancer, and in this bathroom—his creation.
“You want to understand,” Mrs. Bloom said, her tone harder, steely, an insistent mother doling out a lesson. “You want to know why, how. So take off your shoes.”
Dara slid off her boots slowly, her toes like overripe cherries on the white carpet.
“Feel that?” Mrs. Bloom said.
And suddenly Dara felt something tickling the bottoms of her feet, even through her cowhide-thick skin. The carpet was humming warmly, tickling along her arches.
“Radiant heat,” Mrs. Bloom said. “He insisted.”
Dara closed her eyes. The feeling was too much somehow. She wanted to cover her face.
“For every pleasure,” Mrs. Bloom said as if reading her mind, “we pay a price.”
* * *
* * *
Get inside it,” she told Dara, turning on the taps.
Mrs. Bloom wanted to show her the bath jets.
Without thinking Dara stepped in the tub, peering inside, its center pink, a blush pink like the inside of a seashell.
The water was a hot gush on Dara’s feet. There was no stopping it.
Mrs. Bloom in her proper turtleneck, her blown-straight hair, sunk down to the carpet, her hand gripping the side of the tub.
Mrs. Bloom, her voice gone low and throaty, knelt against the lowest dip in its lip, running one hand, her wrist, her forearm into the water, its heat and energy.
Standing there, Dara let it happen, surrendered to it. The hot jets thundering against her blood-struck, bruise-mottled feet, she couldn’t stop it if she wanted to. She didn’t want to.
And that was when Mrs. Bloom told the story.
* * *
* * *
She was drawn to him that very first day. A man so different from her husband—soon to be ex-husband—with his Brooks Brothers suits, his tight shoes and cool eyes. Her husband, who traveled constantly and who hadn’t held her hand in half a dozen years.
But the contractor . . .
She never thought of him as her acupuncturist’s husband, not once. He erased that in an instant that very first day. He was such a big presence. And how persuasively he spoke—about what she could have, what she deserved. This should be your most private space, he said. It should be classy and sensual. It should be pristine and safe.
It was exciting having him in the house. Knowing he was down the hall. Sometimes she would even lie on her bed, under her duvet, and think about how close he was. What he was doing. The walls vibrating with him, his noise and power.
A man in her house and her husband forever out of town, like every glossy paperback on the library spinner rack. There was a reason those books were so worn, their covers peeling.
One day, she discovered him working long after she thought he’d left for the day. He was kneeling beside the tub, fondling its new gold taps with such delicacy.
To see such a big, hulking man handle such dainty things stirred something inside her. Those hands of his, great, big things like a sea captain might have. How they seemed
to enclose all her small, fine things.
A man who dominated the house every time he was in it, tracking mud and leaves into her kitchen, never shutting the powder room door all the way when he used it, and never seeming to wash his hands at all, the guest towels always hanging pristinely in place.
A man who, once or twice, she caught looking at her through lidded eyes, snake eyes. Like the men on the street when she was fourteen and too big for her training bra.
She watched from a distance. If he noticed, he didn’t let on.
* * *
* * *
The day he finished installing the tub, he invited her to see. There was something obscene about it, the suggestive shape and color, its fleshly pink center.
And the way he ran his hand inside it, showing her his work. His fingers.
Without thinking, she said she wondered if that was how he touched a woman.
She covered her mouth the minute she said it.
But he merely looked up and asked if she’d like to see.
The answer, it turned out, was yes.
* * *
* * *
He told me to take off all my clothes,” she said, Dara listening and nodding, her ankles and feet tingling in the water, the steam making her drowsy, confused.
“I couldn’t wait to do it. I was so excited. He told me to slow down because I was going too fast. I was trying to cover myself.” Mrs. Bloom touched her pinkening face. “Doing all the locker room tricks.”
Slow, he said, like you mean it. Like you want me to see all of it.
