* * *
*
It was the space heater, of course. That ancient contraption their father used to drag from room to room when he’d forgotten the heating bill. The one with the coils that ran so lovely red that you wanted to touch them until you did. Their mother had eventually brought it to the studio, keeping it on the third floor, where she liked to take naps and think. The third floor that Marie had now made her own.
“Isn’t it cold up there?” Charlie had been asking lately, worried as the nights grew cooler, as fall wore on.
But, Dara supposed, Marie would figure something out. She did, of course. Charlie found her one recent morning sleeping in Studio B, shivering in a sleeping bag, and the Pendleton blanket curled with dust.
That evening, he’d brought down the space heater and planted it beside her.
He told her she was being foolish. Dara heard them through the doorway.
“Who’s the fool here,” Marie had replied, taking the space heater under her arm.
There had been a coolness between Charlie and Marie ever since she’d left, a distance. It wasn’t only with Dara. She’s being silly and stubborn, Charlie kept insisting. She should just come home.
* * *
*
Marie claimed she didn’t even remember turning the space heater on. She’d been sleeping when she smelled smoke. The curtains had gone up in a glorious flash, ashes catching across her face.
“But not Dad’s blanket,” Dara said, curling her fingers around the Pendleton’s scratchy wool, pulling it off Marie’s shoulders with a hard yank, letting it fall to the ground.
* * *
*
The fire investigators stayed for hours. Marie followed them around the studio, smoking the loose cigarettes she bought from the deli with all the cats on Fourth Street.
“Maybe now is not the time to smoke,” Charlie kept saying under his breath.
* * *
*
The investigators told them they were lucky the firefighters had arrived so quickly, containing the blaze mostly to Studio B. They put little flags and big cones on the floor and up the walls. They took photographs and video. They bagged up the space heater, its coils rattling, now harmless as a child’s toy.
They gave Marie a lecture about the three-feet rule and frayed cords and sparks.
Dara could tell the investigators didn’t like the look of it. Who could?
But Marie merely nodded obediently. Marie, who, their whole childhood, was always knocking over house plants, breaking things, leaving the water running in the claw-foot tub until the ceiling bulged below.
* * *
*
It was so big I was sure they couldn’t stop it,” Marie said later as they surveyed the damage, the floorboards like wet paper.
“If you wanted them to stop it,” Dara asked Marie, “why did you start it?”
“Dara,” Charlie said, surprised, “that’s not what happened.”
But Marie only gazed up at the ceiling sticky with smoke, a shine on her lip like she’d just eaten something very fast, or was about to.
* * *
*
All around them, all day, were swarms of incoming parents and students, even ones without Sunday classes but who’d heard about the fire, or some, recalling the death of the original Madame Durant and her husband, looking for fresh evidence of some kind of “Durant Curse.”
Oh, no and my god and no one’s safe as they snuck peeks into Studio B, its volcanic core.
“We’ll get everything back to normal as quickly as possible,” Charlie assured them. “We have contractors coming today.”
“But, Madame Durant,” Bailey Bloom said, echoing what was surely a pervasive fear, “what about The Nutcracker? What about Clara?”
“Bailey,” Dara said, loud enough so everyone could hear, “have you ever heard of a year without a Nutcracker?”
“No, Madame Durant,” Bailey said.
“Nothing will change,” Marie added, slinking up to them, her hair smelling like smoke. “Nothing changes here.”
It reminded Dara of something their mother used to say, Ballerinas are girls forever. Nothing ever changes. Ballet is like Eden that way.
ENTER DEREK
He was coming at seven a.m.
There was no time to waste. Despite their assurances to parents, they couldn’t afford to lose one of their three studios, not during Nutcracker season. Something had to be done to Studio B, streaked black, its floorboards like a soaked sponge.
He was coming at seven, Dara and Charlie arriving early and opening all the windows, the smell of the fire and the fresh mold mingling with the usual smells of sweat and adolescence, of feet and urine and funk.