* * *
*
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.