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 it 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.