“You don’t have to let it change you,” Dara said. “The adult stuff. That’s a choice. These are all choices.”
“Maybe,” Randi said. “But the thing is, how often do you realize something’s a choice when you make it?”
Dara started to open her mouth, but no words came out.
“Sometimes,” Randi said, shrugging, “choices feel a lot like surviving.”
* * *
*
She only knew the second before she saw him.
Oh, Charlie, her voice a whimper.
* * *
*
Do you mind?” Randi Jacek was saying, starting up the stairs, her breath little puffs now.
“The police said it’s dangerous,” Dara warned, moving toward her. “They’re not safe.”
But Randi was already heading up the steps and there was that sound, that lonely whistle she kept hearing, hissing harder now as they ascended.
“I just want to get a look up there,” Randi said, reaching the top as Dara stood tentatively on the bottom step, “to understand what he might have . . . Maybe that’s the sound he heard? Do you hear it?”
The rafters squeaking, squeaking and popping so loudly, and what was that whistling sound and why was it so loud here?
“Ms. Jacek, it’s not safe. . . .”
But Randi Jacek was already disappearing into the dark at the top of the stairs. Dara followed quickly now.
As she made that last turn onto the third floor, the cold coming hard as an ice sheet, Randi started screaming, really screaming, even as her mouth let forth only the smallest sound.
Her lips gone white and Dara pushing past her, and knowing suddenly, and how hadn’t she known before?
* * *
*
Oh, Charlie. Beautiful Charlie.
Charlie, hanging there, long and lean, his blond head dipped, his face hidden.
An orange cord was lassoed around one of the heating ducts and around that lissome neck of his, his weight dragging the duct to a silver V, dragging his body down so far his knees nearly brushed the floor.
When Dara put her hand on his neck, cool and smooth as ever, and impossibly lovely, it reminded her of the snowy neck of a swan, exquisite and impossible.
Behind her, Randi was on the phone and the bent heat duct was dipping lower and lower, the cord squeaking and Charlie’s body turning so Dara couldn’t avoid his face, a white smudge.
She was thinking of that moment in The Nutcracker, the book. The part that made her stomach tighten, that gave her an ache that wasn’t an ache. How the heroine sees a spot of blood on the Nutcracker’s neck and begins rubbing it with her handkerchief until he suddenly grows warm under her touch and begins to move. How she brings him back to life.
But Charlie wasn’t going to move at all and was only cold, colder than ever before. Cold as the radiator below. Cold like marble church steps, Midnight Mass. Cold as a star.
Randi was saying something beside her, reaching out, then stopping, wanting to touch Dara, something.
* * *
*
But Dara didn’t want to talk, to move. She only wanted to stay in this space a moment longer with this boy, this poor broken boy, the red-rimmed furrow she’d see on his neck once they lifted the cord loose, once they let her touch him, that swanling neck. He’d given her so much, after all. More than he had to give. But he’d ruined everything all the same.
A DISPUTE
Everything happens three times. Three times, the wicked queen tries to kill Snow White. Three times, Christ asks Peter if he loves him. Three times, Rumpelstiltskin spins the wheel.
Three times, police officers filled the studio. The fire, the fall, and Charlie.
Detective Walters, this time in a thick shearling overcoat, and Detective Mendoza talking to Randi and all of them talking to the medical examiner, wheezing and whistling once more into a mask clamped over his face.
Dara watched through the doorway as a gloved woman slipped the orange extension cord into a paper bag. The same cord that, the other night, they’d unplugged from Marie’s lamp and Charlie had wrapped it around and around the lamp base, like bright circus taffy, before hiding it away.
* * *
*
It turned out there was a note. Shoved in Charlie’s pocket, written on a Post-it, a word more than a note, written in Charlie’s cramped hand: Guilty.
The detectives were puzzling over the reverse side, another single word: Snow.
Only Dara knew that it was Charlie’s to-do list. More snow for The Nutcracker. Always more snow.
* * *
*
Is it possible your husband had a confrontation with the contractor?
They were trying to be gentle, respectful. She was the grieving widow, after all.