She’d barely fallen into a tingly pitch-black sleep, her face pressed on the pillow beside her, which still smelled like Charlie and like Marie, when she heard something,
A slither of slippers along wood.
Charlie, she thought with a start.
* * *
*
Squinting down the long hallway, she spotted her sister at the far end.
Ghostly in their mother’s nightgown, Marie hovered at the threshold of their old bedroom, the very spot the contractor had stood less than a week ago.
She looked tentative, unsure, her face bright under the moon.
Dara moved toward her, gliding down the hall, her own feet seeming to make no sound.
It was almost as if she were sleepwalking, still dreaming, or they both were, and together, clasping hands, they stepped inside.
* * *
*
This room,” Marie said, the whiskey on her breath, coming off her skin now. “I hate this room.”
Dara didn’t say anything, her gaze snagging on things, the nicks in the paint where they’d whacked their pointe shoes into submission, the worn spot on the carpet from the time they spilled varnish for their pointe shoes, the smear on the bedpost where the contractor’s hand had been.
“It’s just a room,” Dara said, even as she remembered everything, remembered sneaking Charlie in here that first time, curled around her in the bottom bunk, the smell of sex and saliva everywhere, the damp bedspread.
“It wasn’t healthy here,” Marie whispered, shuddering in her nightgown, all her bruises illuminated by the streetlamp shining through the window. She looked, Dara thought, like the illustrated lady at the carnival. The ladies of the carnival.
“It wasn’t healthy for me,” she said again. “It wasn’t healthy for any of us.”
* * *
*
Reminding Dara of the day nearly ten months ago when Marie moved out, milk crates tattooing her arms, her eyes covered by sunglasses though it was the middle of the night. How she passed Dara on the way to her waiting cab and whispered, her chin dipped to her shoulder, You can’t even breathe in here. How can you breathe.
The house that was their childhood. The house they never left.
“We’ve always lived here,” Dara said. “We’ve lived here our whole lives.”
* * *
*
Are you remembering?” Marie was saying. “All those nights.”
“Which nights?” Dara asked, but she knew. She knew before Marie began.
“How we’d hide under the covers to make it stop,” Marie said. “Our hands pressed against our ears when the screaming started. Remember how she screamed at him? You are nothing to me. You mean nothing to me. You touch me and I feel nothing.”
“Why are you talking about this?” Dara said, moving for the door. The carpet smelled of old glue, felt like sandpaper under her feet.
“She got worse and worse,” Marie said, turning around and around in the cramped space. “She wouldn’t stop. Drinking almost as much as he was, that glass always curled in her hand. How she raged at him—”
“You mean how he raged at her,” Dara said, bristling. “How he pushed her, choked her?”
“She pushed him,” Marie said, eyes fixed on Dara with a look she’d never seen before. Determined, resolute, grave. “She slapped him. She tore out a hank of his hair. That time. Other times. She did things behind his back. You know.”
You know. It seemed cruel to say it now. It felt cruel with Charlie’s slippers still on the floor of their bedroom. Charlie who, three days before, had scrubbed this carpet for her, for them . . .
Dara’s head throbbed, Marie too close and smelling like the rancid whiskey, like old sweat. Dried spit.
There was something Marie was going to say. Dara could feel it. A thing that could never be unsaid. Maybe it was time.
“She never should have been driving that night,” Marie said.
“He always drove,” Dara said. “He always drove. I think he was driving.”
But he wasn’t. Everyone had told her that. Her mother flung up against the steering wheel so hard its shape tattooed her chest.
The day of the accident was a blur to Dara. Was lost to some furrow of her brain. She only remembered the night before. How her mother had sat her down on the bunkbed and tried to explain that what Dara had thought she had seen on the third floor—what she thought she’d seen her doing with Charlie—well, it wasn’t like that.
Dara didn’t say anything, a feeling in her chest like a sharp stone. It had been four days since she had walked in on them, four days in which she and Charlie plotted and schemed an exit, an escape. The impossible confidence of youth.