How could anyone look at Derek, his wooly arms and spreading belly, his whitened teeth and his winking ways, and at Charlie and think they were both the same anything?
* * *
*
We don’t have to like him,” Charlie said as they prepared to leave that night, sawdust thick in the air and the thumps of Europop still galloping from the boom box in Studio B. “No one likes their contractor.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
“Besides,” Charlie said, gesturing to the clear vinyl curtain now hanging in the doorway to Studio B, “he takes orders pretty well.”
Dara walked over. She’d imagined something more discreet, a zip door or a tented partition. But it was only strips of heavy plastic, like at the car wash.
It made everything inside Studio B look a little like a funhouse.
She could see Derek, stripped to his T-shirt white as his whitened teeth. The plastic rippling, he looked enormous, a funhouse Derek, holding a large rubber mallet, swinging it like a caveman club.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” Dara said.
Charlie smiled, one hand on Dara’s shoulder, lightly kneading it.
“But,” Dara said, “I don’t like him.”
“Here’s an idea,” Charlie said, hands on both her shoulders now, turning her away. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”
* * *
*
That night, Charlie’s back spasmed.
Dara had been watching him sleep, his bare, broad back, the V of his waist. She couldn’t help herself, her hand reaching out to touch his shoulder blade, to draw him close, that skin so cool and soothing to her. The instant her fingers touched his skin, it came: a violent stiffening, and immediate, urgent, violent retreat.
A terrific jolt, reminding Dara of sleeping with Marie, who resided in the bunk above her all those years. Marie and her restless legs. Ma chère Marie’s dancing in her sleep, their mother used to say.
She yanked her hand back as if she’d touched an open flame.
* * *
*
Seeing the look on her face, he apologized even as he was instantly immobile with pain.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, closing his eyes. “I knew it was coming. I tried to get in to see my PT today, but . . .”
“Let me,” Dara said. “Please.”
He paused a moment, mouth tight in a grimace. But then, surprisingly, he let her.
Gingerly, she helped him flip over on his stomach.
“I’ll be so careful,” she said.
“I know.” His voice muffled in the pillow.
And he let her, her fingers hard on his hot mangled back, the heel of her hand driving hard between his shoulder blades, white and wide like wings cresting.
She liked touching it and it was the only time she felt allowed, as if his spine were so delicate—like a slender fishbone—after the four surgeries, the halo neck brace, the rehabilitation.
She liked to run her fingertips across it, liked to dig her clenched fist into it.
She went harder that night, grinding herself into him, elbows forging downward, sharp and relentless.
She was chasing the pain, she told him sternly.
It made her dizzy, and damp between the legs.
You, he murmured finally, his feet arching with pleasure, his forehead sticky, hands reaching behind for her, finding that place between her legs. You have all the power.
* * *
*
In the morning, she slid his shirt over his head, tentatively dressing him, his body rigid and afraid. This part was always sad.
It was like he’d given her something and then taken it away.
It would, she knew, be weeks or months before it came again. The lightning bolt splitting his shoulder blades. The lightning bolt that brought them, fleetingly, right to the center of things, shuddering them both to life. You shouldn’t wish for such things. Yet Dara did.
* * *
*
You will never have to reckon with pain, their mother told them long ago. You both understood it from the start.
They never even thought of it as pain.
Once in a while, their mother came to breakfast with a purple hinge of skin over one eye, or a bruised cheek. Their father at the coffee maker with tiny marks like red stitches up his neck, blaming the cat, even though the cat had no claws and had disappeared days ago anyway.
No one said anything, though sometimes Marie would want to touch their mother’s face, her heavy-lidded eye, her twisted elbow, and then she would cry.
Never cry over pain, their mother told them. Those are wasted tears.
She explained how, if you were a dancer, you were always protected.
Feet strapped into pointe shoes, body strapped into a leotard and tights, hair strapped into a bun—no one could touch you, your entire life.