The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  Maybe it’s a mistake, Charlie had said that first day Derek made his pitch, to always play it safe.

  It all unfurled like a mink from a femme fatale’s shoulders in an old film noir. All those tales of a taloned beauty with expensive tastes, her callow lover, the unwitting husband, a staged accident for a big insurance payout. They never ended well.

  Suddenly, Dara felt a coldness inside. It was all so tacky, so déclassé, a voice inside said. It was all so cheap. So unbearably sad.

  * * *

  * * *

  Did you hear that?” Marie said, pulling back the window curtain. Dara took a breath before she rose and looked too.

  There it was, a Shamrock taxi pulling up out front of the house, the puff of its silvery exhaust. There he was, Charlie, exiting the car, his head down, then hurrying up the front walk.

  For a fleeting second, Dara pondered if he’d ever been injured at all. If she hadn’t been there through the surgeries, through the rehabilitation and the experimental treatments and then the new surgeries, she would have doubted all of it. Everything he’d ever said, or done.

  He had never really been one of them, she decided. And, like Marie, he’d left, abandoned her too. He’d left without ever leaving, which was worse.

  * * *

  * * *

  The door opened with a cold whoosh, all the dust in the house unsettling and settling again.

  “Marie, can you leave us—” Dara started, but Marie was already gone, disappearing down the hall, into their father’s pocket of a den.

  “Dara.”

  She could feel him standing in the kitchen doorway, but she couldn’t quite turn her head. She thought if she looked, she might disintegrate.

  But then she did.

  The way he was standing, in his navy peacoat, his cheeks too red from the cold, his eyes too bright, she thought suddenly of the Nutcracker, of all the Nutcrackers.

  For a split second, she thought he might open his mouth and show two rows of sharp white teeth.

  “Is everything,” he said, his breath catching, eyes darting, “okay?”

  “I thought we’d let a monster in,” she said, rising to her feet.

  Charlie nodded. “We did,” he said. “But he’s gone now. He’s—”

  “—but it turned out the monster was you.”

  BAD THINGS MEN DO

  Sitting across from her at the kitchen table, slowly removing his gloves, he could not look her in the eye.

  The carcass of the rum cake sat between them, the saber of the rusty knife, stray maraschino studs, the wax paper oil glossed, Marie’s sticky prints on the glacé.

  He wouldn’t look at her, and his hands looked so clean and smelled of sanitizer.

  Part of her had expected he’d fall to his knees, beg forgiveness. But some deeper part of her had hoped urgently that he’d tell her she’d gotten it all wrong, that it was all a lie, a misunderstanding, a bad dream, a nightmare.

  Instead, he set his gloves down, his eyes cast low and inaccessible.

  Oh, she thought, watching him. It had been the last hope she’d hidden deep inside herself. It hurt so much to lose it.

  But then he looked up and she could see it all on his face. He’d been hiding so much for so long, but now he looked laid bare, skinned, tender and raw and exposed.

  “It wasn’t like you think,” he said, his voice first small and tentative and then rushing faster. “It just . . . happened and then other things happened and suddenly, everything was happening and there was no stopping it.”

  Which, Dara realized now, was how Charlie had viewed everything his whole life.

  * * *

  * * *

  It began last winter, when that cold snap made Charlie’s nerve pain even greater. He’d overheard Mrs. Bloom raving about her new “physiotherapist,” a “miracle worker” with “magic fingertips.” Charlie made an appointment, expecting very little. His body had not been his own most of his life. He’d just as soon place it in a stranger’s hands.

  It turned out, though, that she did have a magical touch—no, almost holy. Well, that was how it felt to him, under her hands, gnarled fingers and broad-heeled. He hadn’t been shy about it. He’d told Dara. His new PT’s touch had changed his life.

  And her voice, there was something about her voice. So calming, assuring, nurturing. She asked him questions, worried for him. It made him feel so cared for, tended to, safe.

  Gradually, their conversations before and after their sessions became just as important as the feeling of those strong hands, thick-knuckled and wide-palmed. He would tell her about his abandoned ballet career—so promising, such an ascent—and how he felt at war with his body, how it had turned on him after giving him so much. In turn, she began sharing more, too, talking about her children, little Whitney’s big spelling-bee win, Sammi who was learning the flute.

  And, slowly, he began to learn about her husband.

  It started that day he arrived to find her crying. The sheriff’s office had called late. Her husband had been arrested in a mall parking lot, caught having sex in his car with some twenty-six-year-old bank teller. But she was only the latest, usurping the nameless drywall supplier who left her threatening phone messages (He’s my man now, bitch!), the insurance adjuster named Bambi, whose fiancé showed up at the house with a baseball bat. (She’d had to talk him down while her husband hid in the toolshed.)

  He was always sorry after—splashy flowers and promises and tickets to Aruba they couldn’t afford—but it always happened again.

  Was that better or worse, she wondered to Charlie, than the collection service sending people to the house, or the local grocery store cutting up their credit card while her neighbors watched?

  And yet she didn’t know how to escape it, to escape him. There was, always, the children, and the debt, and God, and everything—not the least of which her own relentless hopefulness, not yet worn away.

  When they met, high school rivals at a bonfire, foamy beer and kisses and his hands down her jeans. Even then, he had big plans, schemes. In the haze of first love, she saw them as dreams. He was gonna buy up all the old, ruined houses downriver, collect them like Monopoly pieces, renovate and sell them, and become a billionaire off blight. All he needed to do was attract investors and maybe even her parents might be interested?

  The very things that first draw you to a person will eventually be the very things that drive you away. She’d read that once. Maybe Charlie could understand?

  Now, nearly thirty years together and four kids and he’s never home, off “on jobs” at least a few nights a week, and they’re still renting a house and owing everyone, including the government, sixty-two thousand in back taxes, and he couldn’t keep it in his pants, never could. He once told her, late one night after fighting for hours until they were hoarse, If you knew how easy it is. If you knew how little it took. If you knew, the meaner you are, the more they want you.

  (That she knew.)

  They loved all of it, he told her. Some of them even loved the way—once in a while, seven times over thirty years for her—he might backhand them, or shove them, or cuff them at the dinner table, though always apologize with flowers, deli daffodils, rejected carnations sputtering across the floor.

  She should have seen it all years ago, because people never really change, and it was all still like high school, when she caught him elbow-deep up Janis Truski’s jean skirt behind the batting cage. She’d long ago given up on fidelity, and almost everything else, but now they were in arrears and her little Sammi needed a special breathing machine for her asthma and their oldest needed a reading tutor or he’d be held back, but her husband kept draining their bank account and had gotten meaner, rougher, more unkind . . .

  Hearing it all had affected Charlie so much.

  He hated her husband, this Derek, for making her feel this way. And i
t meant so much how happy Charlie seemed to make her just by listening, caring—well, that was the greatest feeling. He’d forgotten about that feeling.

  It had never been intimate. Not really. There were physical . . . acts. But no intercourse. They never left the privacy, the cocoon of the small treatment room, its cool blues and soft simulated wood, the diffuser huffing eucalyptus.

  First, it felt like a gift. How he needed her and she needed him. But then it also felt like a burden. As he slowly realized she wanted someone to save her.

  He wished he knew now how it had turned. How they’d started talking about him all the time. He became not so much a person as this collection of bad things men do.

  He never seemed real, exactly. He seemed like a cartoon villain, a comic book lothario, a cheap paperback brute, a thug. She’d fantasize, they both would, about him getting arrested, sued, even, Charlie once joked, shot in the back by a jealous husband.

  Somehow, someday, he would be gone and goodness could return to the land, and should we really pay the price our whole lives for bad decisions made in the heat-thick swarm of adolescence?

  She got the idea from the space heater fire. She said, Bring my husband in. Bring him in to fix your studio. Maybe the next time it will burn him to ashes. It was a joke, a dark joke, maybe a bad one.

  It was a joke until it wasn’t.

  Slowly, it came to feel necessary, fated, urgent. The only plan, a rescue.

  But whatever notion she’d had, they’d had together, went to pieces because of Marie. Because of the thing with Marie.

  He’ll ruin her, she warned him. He’s done it before. One threatened to kill herself if he didn’t leave me. She swallowed kitchen bleach right there on the phone with me.

  That was when they began imagining new ways he might disappear from their lives. A burst pipe, a sunken ceiling. A fall. Then there was that time a pipe had burst, as if all their wishing had somehow made it so, the unstoppable pressure of their need and wants. But, ultimately, it only succeeded in flooding the studio, elongating the nightmare even further.

  In the end, it wasn’t planned or plotted at all. At least not the specifics, that night.

  Instead, Charlie found something in himself, or something inside Charlie found him. He never would have thought he could have done it. Until he did.

  * * *

  * * *

  Don’t you see?” he said to Dara now, pressing his fists onto the tabletop. “I had to. We all know I had to. He was going to ruin us. He was going to bring the whole house down on us.”

  It had been the sight, unbearable, profane, of seeing the contractor parade down those spiral stairs, the stairs that led to the third floor, once and always the first Madame Durant’s private space. In his head—hot, jumbled—Charlie could even hear their mother calling out. He could hear her voice and she was calling to him. He could hear her calling. Calling until he came. Those stairs that carried all this meaning for him, meaning he couldn’t explain.

  (“Don’t,” Dara said. “Don’t bring her into this.”

  She remembered, of course. She remembered climbing those stairs, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, and then, a blur of limbs, seeing them both, seeing the serene pleasure on her mother’s face, all her nakedness laid before Charlie, a mere boy . . .)

  * * *

  * * *

  He never would have thought he could have done it, he said once more, shaking his head.

  But it turned out he could.

  And now he couldn’t believe himself. Didn’t understand himself.

  The relief in her voice when he called to tell her what had happened, what he’d done. Her husband, the villain, was gone. It was something almost like happiness. (Even as there was a funny briskness to her after, wanting to get off the phone with him so quickly, saying she needed to start taking care of things. Reminding him they shouldn’t be talking on the phone anyway but especially not now and he’d better not come around for a while. Maybe a long while.)

  Two people, tightly twined, can begin to convince themselves of anything. There’s reality and then there’s the shared experience, which feels so much more real.

  Two people, needing each other, can come to believe things. Can come to believe wanting something was the same as making it happen. That it wasn’t a choice, in the end, but the right thing to do, the fulfillment of some deeper calling.

  Two people, even three, a family, he said, looking at Dara, can make their own world.

  * * *

  * * *

  You forgot one thing,” Dara said, her fingertips tracing the cake crumbs, sliding along the wax paper, the serrations of the old bread knife.

  “What?” Charlie looked at her, tender, lips like a bow. Like a little doll. A wooden doll, with pointed teeth.

  “The money.”

  Charlie paused.

  “What money?” he said finally.

  Dara looked at him and he looked away. It was so disappointing—crushing, really.

  “The insurance policy,” she said, her voice creaking. “The fat payout you’re both expecting. That you’ll share, I guess.”

  Charlie paused again. Then, his expression dazed, impenetrable, he said, “I don’t know about that. We never talked about that at all.”

  * * *

  * * *

  They sat for a long moment. Dara thought she could hear someone moving somewhere. Marie. That floorboard in the front hallway that creaked all winter long.

  Maybe Charlie didn’t know about the insurance. The payout. Or maybe he did, but only in part.

  She didn’t care, not now. She didn’t care and he could see it on her face.

  “Dara, you have to understand,” he said, voice high and desperate now, “it’s not my fault.”

  Dara’s eyes lifted toward him, not even quite believing that he’d said it.

  “Don’t you dare,” Dara said, her voice such a boom that Charlie nearly jumped.

  “I mean, it is. It is,” he said, reaching for her hand before she pulled it away. “But, Dara, please.”

  “You need to leave,” Dara said. “Leave before I scream fire. Before I start a fire right here.”

  She could hear Marie breathing from the hallway, shallow, fast breaths like a little girl.

  “We’ve all been trapped here and I never even asked,” Charlie was saying, softly, fumblingly, his head in his hands. “I never asked to be here forever. I was just a kid and your mother, she . . .”

  The only thought in her head: He has to leave, he has to. The things he was saying, like a stain spreading. In this house, their home.

  “Don’t. Don’t,” she said.

  “But, Dara,” he said, head lifting, eyes searching again for hers. That wet-eyed-waif look she knew so well. The same one he had when he first arrived, nearly twenty years ago. When he was that wet-eyed waif, uncorrupted and hungry for love. “She was your mother. You saw what she was doing.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about her. Don’t you dare bring our mother into this—”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, his voice speeding up now. “You were afraid of her. Afraid of both of them. We all were. We wanted to leave, remember? You and me. And then they were gone, so we stayed. But they were still here, weren’t they? They’re still here now. And we just live inside it.”

  “Stop—”

  “You forgot somehow. You forgot why you wanted to leave, why we had to leave if we wanted to live. You forgot and just kept going. But I couldn’t. Marie couldn’t—”

  “Get out!”

  Charlie rose abruptly, his chair skidding back, and faced Dara.

  But looking at him was impossible. That face, like a statue, hopelessly perfect. That body, how precious it was. And how rarely he offered it.

  “Get out,” came a voice and it was Marie standing in the doorway. “
Get out. Get out. Get out.” Over and over again, rising to a scream.

  Charlie turned to Dara, panicky now.

  “But,” he said, and his face, his voice—suddenly he was thirteen years old again, “where will I go?”

  Looking at him, that boy face, Dara felt a well of feeling—messy, tangled—rise in her. Don’t, she told herself. Don’t.

  “I don’t care,” Dara said, Marie walking over, reaching for her hand, and adding, “We don’t care at all.”

  * * *

  * * *

  He was gone. Charlie was gone, but something he said kept vibrating through her head for hours, all night.

  I could hear her calling, he’d said about their mother. Their mother waiting for him on the third floor, her voice tantalizing, insistent. I could hear her calling. Calling until I came.

  And, secretly, Dara knew what he’d meant. In some ways she could hear their mother calling too. Could always hear her calling, her whole life.

  * * *

  * * *

  When did it happen?” Dara said to Marie later that night, both of them huddled in Dara and Charlie’s bed, the emptying bottle between them and Marie with a spooked look about her. Maybe it was being in their mother’s domain again. Even before she moved out, she rarely set foot in this room, saying it gave her hives.

  “When did it happen,” Marie repeated, her mouth purple from the old wine.

  “When did he become this . . . other thing.”

  For so long, he’d been one of them. We three. For so long she thought it would be forever. But then, without her ever knowing, he’d turned into . . . But she couldn’t finish the thought, her eyes blurred.

  “Sometimes,” Marie said carefully, “you get desperate. Trapped. Sinking. It’s like quicksand in your mouth. You have to do whatever it takes to get out.”