The only room left untouched was the den, their father’s sanctuary, with the cabinet TV he refused to throw away, insisting even the tubes were valuable antiques, and the shag carpet that offended their mother and the Igloo cooler alongside the furry nubbed recliner, the autumn floral with the corduroy ridges that Marie liked to run her hands along, sitting on their father’s lap, sharing popcorn from the foil dome and watching their dad’s monster movies, dubbed to English and with great spouts of the thickest, reddest blood she’d ever seen.
Marie was the only one allowed to join him in there, the only one permitted to talk to their father at all while he was “unwinding” from his day and it was best to avoid him. Marie, who would curl up in his Pendleton blanket and watch Night Stalker reruns until their father drifted into a beery snore and their mother dispatched Dara to get her sister to bed.
Dara didn’t want to spend time in there anyway. The room smelled funny and there were always crumbs in the carpet that she felt under her feet. Dara would so rather sit at their mother’s dressing table and put her fingers in all the lotions and creams and tonics and watch their mother do stretches on the floor and tell her stories about the time she danced at the Royal Opera House in London and drown in the perfumes and loveliness of their mother’s attentions.
* * *
*
Soon enough, Dara began sneaking Charlie into the bunkbed with her, both of them curled together, their bodies locked. They did all kinds of things, figuring it all out. If their mother knew, she never said.
Marie sleeping like a kitten in the bunk above.
Or so they thought. A few weeks later, Marie spilled all to their father too. He raged for days, telling their mother she had only herself to blame, turning their house into a brothel. Their father took Charlie into the garage and had a long talk with him and Charlie returned an hour later, his face white and his wrists red.
He told me, Charlie confided to Dara years later, that I would never be any kind of man if I stayed here. He told me that no man could be any kind of man in this house. And then he started to cry.
A boy was a valuable thing.
* * *
*
Charlie had moved in and never left. Finally, Dara always said, explaining it to others, one of us had to marry him.
And so, they went to city hall one year to the day of the car accident, their father’s Buick drifting across the icy-ribbed highway into oncoming traffic.
The driver behind them dazedly told a reporter it would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so terrible. Watching, he said, it looked like their parents’ car was almost flying.
* * *
*
When I was a child and she was a child, recited Charlie, the poem that became their vow. It was their mother’s favorite poem and you didn’t usually read poems at city hall weddings, but Charlie insisted.
We loved with a love that was more than love—
* * *
*
Marie had served as witness, wearing glitter on her eyes and their mother’s rabbit blanket as a fur stole, and had cried endlessly at the Italian restaurant after. Had cried and held on to her sister and crawled onto her lap.
Marie, who they promised would live with them forever.
Dara and Charlie moved into her parents’ room, even slept on their sheets that first night, their wedding night, before Dara took them all to Goodwill the next day.
FIRE, FIRE
It happened sometime in the night. That very night, the Nutcracker schedule finalized and the air outside crisp and cutting.
It happened while Dara, unable to sleep, was pacing their mother’s familiar insomniac route from the master bedroom to the sewing room, to their dusty childhood bedroom, its maple bunkbed gleaming from the hall light, their old furnace chugging as the temperature fell.
It happened while Charlie was lost in slumber, the dreamy haze of his sleeping pill, flat on his back, hands folded on his chest like a tragic young prince in his burial state.
Exactly two miles away, all the lights off at the studio except the gooseneck lamp on the third floor where Marie was squatting, it happened.
* * *
*
The fire was a big mouth,” Marie had said on the phone, her voice dizzy with shock. “A big mouth swallowing everything.”
By that point, the firefighters were already there and the sprinkler system spouting old brown water everywhere.
And by the time Dara and Charlie had pulled into the parking lot, there was only smoke left, a great fog from which emerged a baby-faced fireman carrying an old metal space heater, its center mussel-black.
Now, hours later, they stood in the morning mist, the parking lot slowly filling. Charlie’s arm around Dara, Marie shuddering under the Pendleton blanket, all three of them soaked from the fire hoses. Charlie on the phone with the insurance company, some humorless agent named Van who kept asking about candles and flat irons, cigarettes and kitchen grease.