by Megan Abbott
“He wanted to see it all,” she said. “You know. You know what I mean.”
Mrs. Bloom looked at Dara, her hand on her thighs, then one palm sliding between them.
“And I showed him,” she said, staring at Dara now, eyes big and confused. “I showed him everything.”
* * *
* * *
At some point, Mrs. Bloom had stopped talking. Or maybe Dara just couldn’t hear her anymore over the water, see her anymore through the steam.
Closing her eyes, listening to the hissing radiant heat, she was thinking of things, her brain soft and dreamy and strange. She was thinking of the Nutcracker Prince costume at yesterday’s final fitting with Svetlanka, their tailor since their mother’s day. They’d spent countless hours over the years watching her sew tutus, her tarnished thimble ring, her painted nails. Yesterday, running those nails across Corbin Lesterio’s chest, the deep-red waistcoat. Corbin distracted, his slender fingers stroking the gold trim, the epaulet fringe, reminding her of all the past Princes, back to Charlie even, all in the same costume, its velvet still bright and spry, sliding one finger beneath its tight, high collar, his blushing throat. There were so many of them, from their mother’s hands to hers, their bodies still unbroken, still growing, waiting, begging to be shaped, smoothed, perfected. Corbin looking down at Svetlanka’s silver-black hair, kneeling at his feet, needle in her mouth as she bid him to shush, shush, it’ll all be over soon. . . .
And then, Now show Madame Durant how handsome you look. Show her her Prince.
Corbin looking at her, face flushed.
* * *
* * *
I wanted him here all the time,” Mrs. Bloom was saying, her turtleneck hooked in her finger, her mouth still gasping for air. Just like Marie, Dara thought. I need him here all the time, Dara.
“It didn’t matter how slow the renovation was going,” she continued. “I wanted to feel him here. Don’t you see?”
Dara did not see. She would never see. It was just like Marie. Worse. This woman had a husband, a house. A daughter.
“When I think of it now,” Mrs. Bloom was saying. “The things I did for him. The things he made me want to do. I humiliated my husband. I humiliated myself.”
Dara’s eyes, the lids slick and wet, opened again.
The room was so hot, so hot like the steam bath their mother used to take them to at the Y. How can she stand it, Dara thought, looking at Mrs. Bloom in her wool trousers, her fuzzy turtleneck.
For a second, Dara thought she might faint. She reached for the bath tap, which came loose in her hand. It was so light, the gold peeling off in her hand.
That was when she saw the crack at the bottom of the tub. A long spiny crack like a spider leg, crooked.
She could feel Mrs. Bloom watching her.
Mrs. Bloom, her face red as a blister, looked so different, all her polish peeled off too. Her hair thicker, heavy, her hands closed into tight red balls.
“The drain leaks into the subfloor,” Mrs. Bloom said. “The toilet seal leaks. The first day, two tiles came off in my hands.”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Dara said. Her head felt tight, cramped. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”
She stepped out of the tub, her legs trembling, the heat from the floor rising up. She felt herself keeling like a ship in a storm. Holding on to the wall.
“And the floors are starting to warp,” Mrs. Bloom was saying.
Dara nodded drunkenly, scrambling for the dials, shutting off the radiant heat, the radiant everything.
“Once you turn it on,” Mrs. Bloom said, “it’s hard to get it to stop.”
Dara nodded again, her eyes shut.
“I wish I could burn it down,” Mrs. Bloom said. “I wish I could burn the whole place down.”
* * *
* * *
Panting over the kitchen sink, downing tall tumblers of icy water. Dara’s feet pulsing and damp in her boots.
“It kept happening,” Mrs. Bloom said. “He’d install a floor and the heat would crack it. There were leaks, a flood. It never stopped. Before I knew it, the bills were running into six digits and my husband started asking questions.”
Dara nodded and nodded, closing her eyes again, fingers on her temples.
“And Derek, he was getting more . . . demanding. He wanted things.”
“Like the truck?” Dara said. “You bought him that.”
“I wish it were only the truck,” Mrs. Bloom said, her face still so pink and wet from the bathroom, her makeup smeary. “How about all the money orders I gave him to help his mother, who had to move into a nursing home, the six thousand dollars I gave him for his marina fees for a boat I never saw that was going to launch his new business?”
“But you could have fired him. You could have ended things. That’s what I don’t get about you women—”
“You women,” Mrs. Bloom said, a grim laugh. “So he could tell my husband? My child? And there were all the things he had me tell our insurance company. All those lies. He warned me they might come after me. I believed him.”
Dara turned, setting her tumbler in the sink. Something cold settling inside her. She wanted to put on all her clothes, even though she was fully dressed.
“He would have taken it all,” Mrs. Bloom said, her voice low, her eyes black rings, like a ballerina taking off her mask. “Even the things I didn’t have to give.”
“But you got out. Eventually.”
“Did I?” she said. “Or did he just find someone else?”
Dara turned from her, reached for a paper towel, wiped her face. All this making her feel ugly. It was like being trapped in Mrs. Bloom’s life, her head. Cashmere and desperation.
“I will never understand,” Dara said. “With you or her. He . . . he’s just . . .”
Mrs. Bloom was watching her, her face so wet, the makeup bubbling off, the mascara blooming, smocking her eyes.
“You think I’m pathetic,” she said, “don’t you? You think we all are. You women.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
“Just you wait,” she said, “until it happens to you.”
* * *
* * *
They were walking to the door and Mrs. Bloom’s face had changed, had gone pale and slack, a handkerchief in her hand, the slow shuffle of a much older woman.
All Dara wanted was to leave. She had to get out of the sad, big house and its plush conveniences and its cracked tub and its slowly warping floors.
But she had this feeling there was still something here. There was something here and she’d missed it. It had eluded her, a snake tail sliding back in the muck.
Passing through the living room, Dara noticed for the first time the row of jaunty Nutcrackers arrayed across the mantelpiece, every color, different heights. A fur-hatted British solider with a long sword, a hussar with a riding crop, a crowned king with a scepter. But all with the same open mouth, baring two rows of painted teeth.
She thought of Marie, standing before the statue at the theater. The sense that her mind, her thoughts were veiled, remote. That she knew things she would never say. She didn’t have the words to say them.
Dara stopped, turning to Mrs. Bloom.
“Wait,” Dara said, “why did you do it, then? After all this. Why did you recommend him to us?”
“Pardon?”
“To us, as a contractor.”
Mrs. Bloom had a funny look on her face.
“I didn’t,” she said.
“You did. You showed Charlie the pictures. You . . .”
“No. You’re mistaken.” Mrs. Bloom kept looking at her, confused, troubled, her fingers at her brow bone. “I’m sorry.”
Something faint in the back of Dara’s head was slowly getting louder. The slither of that snake tail now emerging from the
muck. She looked at her watch. It was nearly nine.
“I have to go,” Dara said. “I have to go now.”
DO YOU NEED ME
In the driveway, the sharp night air a revelation, Dara stood at her car for a minute, two, figuring something out. She smoked a cigarette on Mrs. Bloom’s synthetic green lawn, scattering ash, fingers shaking.
Marie’s car came like the flare of a match on the horizon. Dara let the cigarette fall to the grass, a chemical hiss.
The hiss reminded her of something, the space heater after the fire. How it looked like a lava rock, with its cord scorched, like the fuse of a firecracker.
She’d thought for so long that Marie’s fire was how everything started. How it brought Derek to them. But now it seemed it wasn’t the fire. There was a fire before the fire.
The car pulled up the driveway, Marie’s hands on the steering wheel like little claws pressed together.
“Madame Durant,” Bailey said, jumping from the passenger seat, “we had ice cream, but I only had three bites.”
“And no whipped cream,” Marie said, looking at Dara with a worried expression. Sensing something, seeing something on her face.
“I have to go,” Dara said, moving to her own car. “Get some rest, Bailey. Kiss your mother.”
* * *
* * *
In the rearview mirror, they watched her drive away, Bailey in her ski jacket, her long legs still in her pink tights, vomit or brown blood streaked up one calf.
Marie shivering beside her in their father’s cardigan, her eyes like great moons.
* * *
* * *
The glass building by the highway. That’s what Mrs. Bloom had said.
It turned out there was more than one, an office park cluster of five, all with sweeping windows tinted blue, green, gold, part of the area’s sluggish gentrification.
Driving from one directory to the next, Dara stared numbly at the names, a distant buzzing in her brain: Hobart Partners, Glittman Technologies, Converged Network Services, Regan Logistics.
The lots sprawling and empty, except for the last one, a low-slung glass box, its interior blue like an aquarium. Etched across its darkened front were the words: Verdure Medical Spa. Beneath it, in smaller print: Physical Therapy • Occupational Therapy • Acupuncture • Medical Massage.
This is it, Dara thought. The acupuncturist, the wife.
She paused a moment. Waited. Five, ten minutes went by and then a Shamrock taxicab, bright and jolly, appeared, slowing to a halt at the front curb.
She didn’t move, the sound of her own breath filling the car.
* * *
* * *
The man exited the taxi, his navy peacoat buttoned high in the cold. The blaze of his blond hair, the litheness of his movements. The cold air piping color like a painter might, along his cheekbones, his handsome brow.
He moved gracefully, if carefully, his posture straight as a sword.
Spine to the heavens, s’il vous plait, their mother always told him. And straight down to Hades himself.
Because it was Charlie. Of course. It was Charlie.
* * *
* * *
The glass box lit up, the lobby instantly sapphire, as a woman in a coat, scrubs came rushing forward, opening the front door to him.
Opening her arms to him.
The two of them a dark jumble of hands, of clutches, Charlie’s head dipping against the woman’s dark hair, pressing against her throat. The woman smiling at him with her eyes until the moment her gaze shifted, seeing something. Peering into the dark parking lot where Dara’s car idled, smile fading as she pulled Charlie through the door, into the blue heart of the building.
There was a feeling inside Dara of something falling and falling as she watched.
* * *
* * *
Charlie. Charlie.
Dara stepped out of her car, the air sharp as needles, sharp as the sword.
Pausing at the sound of the car door, the woman scanned the parking lot from the doorway, her hand curled over her eyes against the streetlamps’ glare.
Charlie’s PT is Mrs. Bloom’s acupuncturist is Derek’s wife is Charlie’s . . .
Bun loosening, her feet crunching on the parking lot salt, Dara began moving toward the building, the lights blotching against her eyes, her chest aching from the cold.
Ahead, the woman cautiously unlatched the door, swinging it open again, calling out.
“Are you here for me?” she said as Dara moved closer, seeing the woman, her dark hair braided, a faded parka unbuttoned over maroon scrubs. “Do you need me?”
Dara stopped and looked at her. She needed to take it all in, her frumpy coat, salt streaked, her thick-soled shoes, her strong nose and brow even stronger than their mother’s.
“Are you here for me?” the woman said again, drawing the parka across herself as the wind kicked up and began moaning.
“Are you injured?” she said, or seemed to, the wind like a roar in Dara’s ears now. Waving her arm out, waving her in, as Dara slowly backed away, back to her car. “Do you need my help?”
* * *
* * *
In the car, her hands red from the cold, resting on the steering wheel, Dara thought she should cry, but she felt only blankness, like a cold, smooth stone. She hadn’t cried even at their parents’ funeral, holding herself rigidly, her chin high and everything shuttered away. Marie had done all the crying for both of them, that angry, jagged cry. The kind when you can’t tell the anger from the grief because they’re the same somehow. Something ending suddenly before you knew it could ever end at all.
And, as fated as the ending feels when it comes, you still never said okay. You never gave permission and it all came crashing down anyway.
SHOW YOUR TEETH
It’s not true,” Marie was saying, both of them with their coats still on, seated at the kitchen table. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care,” Dara said, reaching for the sour table wine, pouring it in yesterday’s glasses, their bottoms a sticky purple.
Dara had told her everything briskly, matter-of-factly. She told her what the detectives disclosed, what Mrs. Bloom shared. What Dara had seen.
After, Marie made her say it again, more slowly.
“But,” she said after, “it can’t be. Charlie—that’s not how he is. That’s not—”
“You really never knew,” Dara said, cutting her off, “he was married? The contractor. That he was married.”
Marie looked at her, eyes milky and strained.
“No,” she said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Her shoulders dropping, her body leaning back.
“It wouldn’t have mattered at all.”
* * *
* * *
A half hour passed, the wine draining from its bottle, and Marie, now in one of their mother’s billowy nightgowns, went on the hunt until she found another bottle, even older and the dubious color of cranberry punch, behind the encyclopedia volumes in their father’s den.
Dara never moved at all from her spot at the kitchen table, rooted there.
Dara and Marie, drinking wine and picking at Madame Sylvie’s Christmas cake, given to them every year and every year more pregnant with rum, thick with figs, slithery apricots. They plucked loose the studded fruit, the butter-glossed corners until Dara couldn’t bear Marie’s dirty fingernails and dug out an old bread knife, dull and striped with rust, from the kitchen drawer.
Neither wanted to say it aloud, to even ask it. Was it not an accident? Could Charlie have killed Derek on purpose? Could that have been the plan all along?
“I was so afraid,” Marie started tentatively, “that it was all my fault. That I’d made all this happen myself. That it was me. Like saying Bloody Mary in the mirror three times an
d then she appears.”
“Who says you didn’t?” Dara snapped. “We don’t know. We don’t know anything yet.”
And Marie looked at Dara, a look of such sadness it nearly shook Dara.
“Sister,” she said. “We do know. We do.”
* * *
* * *
Marie was staring at the clock.
“What are you going to do,” she whispered, sliding her arms inside the sleeves of the nightgown, French linen and old lace, and now half-ruined already, stippled with wine, its neck stretched. “About Charlie?”
Dara was looking at Charlie’s tea mug, still sitting there from that morning. The ring on the wood. His cluster of prescription bottles, his vitamins, his methocarbamol to relax his muscles, his benzodiazepines to help him sleep, his pentobarbital when the benzodiazepines didn’t work.
Charlie, his delicate body, his broken body. What does it mean to destroy your own body, to grind your bones down to soft powder? Those long-ago days when he was ascendant, before the injuries began. Those two golden years he spent as a “foot soldier” in the corps of that regional ballet company. Those years he spent rehearsing ten hours a day, performing two hundred times a year, the thousands and thousands of times he’d lifted dancers above his head, leapt and landed, on one foot, onto the hardest of floors. He was a good dancer, but he would never be a great one. Their mother admitted that once, to Dara. Then why, she wanted to ask their mother, are you keeping him here so long?
What are you going to do about Charlie?
Charlie. Her Charlie, their Charlie. Somewhere, in between everything they shared every day, their lives so utterly entwined since they were children, he’d become entangled with this woman, this married woman whom he let, over and over again, put her hands on his back, his body.
He’d lied about the referral from Mrs. Bloom. He’d brought the contractor—his lover’s husband—into their lives. He’d seemingly been plotting all along with this woman, this wife.
