“Fuck that Tchaikovsky guy,” Charlie said, making her smile, promising her he’d be back to help her tomorrow, that day’s PT session leaving him “liquid-y and grand.”
It was hard not to marvel at the magic Charlie’s PT seemed to conjure. Dara remembered Mrs. Bloom raving about her once, later recommending her to Charlie.
No, she couldn’t tell Charlie. She couldn’t bear it, to have him know. Charlie, who loved Marie like his sister, and protected her—from assailing parents, from telemarketers, from aggressive drivers, from street leers when they’d go into town, Marie in her cropped top, her bodysuit. Like his sister.
No, Charlie couldn’t know.
Besides, it was probably already over, an impulsive act, like so many of Marie’s impulsive acts. Like that first time she’d left five years ago, her big “trip around the world.” Once she’d landed on the idea, she wanted, needed to go immediately. The Acropolis could be gone one day. The Spanish Steps in Rome might close. And wasn’t Venice sinking? She would not be stopped. Don’t you dare, she kept saying whenever Charlie tried to reason with her, to caution her against rash decisions. Don’t you dare stop me.
They didn’t stop her and, less than a month later, she came back. Marie always came back.
* * *
*
Standing at the office window, Dara watched the final straggling students scurry or limp off to waiting cars, their tailpipes pluming exhaust, followed by Benny and Gaspar, hurrying to their motor scooters. And finally, Derek himself walking to his truck, that slightly limpy gait—like John Wayne gone to seed, Dara thought. She could’ve sworn that before disappearing inside that truck, he looked up once, to the studio, to the office window open just enough for Dara to sneak a smoke. To watch.
“I’m staying late tonight,” Dara told Charlie, having decided something. “I have one more thing I have to do.”
ME AND MY SHADOW
Dara waited outside the powder room, pouncing on Marie as she opened the door, pulling her wrap sweater across her chest.
“Oh!” Marie said, startled. “I thought you left.”
For a moment, Dara couldn’t speak, her eyes fixed on two vivid bruises between her sister’s collar bones.
The bruises were yellow, like she’d run a buttercup across herself. Like when they were little, standing in the weedy yard, hold the buttercup beneath your chin . . .
In an instant, she pictured the hard thrust of the contractor’s fingers and thumb that morning. That very morning.
Except, Dara thought, except. It took more than a day for a bruise to look like that. It took many days for a bruise to fade to yellow. Every dancer knows that, always one or more toenails gone black and blue, forever spreading arnica on the starburst over an elbow that hit the floor.
What she’d seen behind that plastic curtain had not been the first time.
“What have you done?” Dara said so loudly Marie instinctively backed against the powder room door, her head hitting it hard. “What have you done, sister?”
* * *
*
Oh, the look on Marie’s face. Dara had never seen it. Thirty years of watching her sister’s face and she’d never seen this look.
Her skin. Like it was radiating. Like it was on fire. Like it had been pressed in acid and shorn itself and formed itself anew.
* * *
*
It’s been going on for days,” Marie was saying, rubbing her wrists, a smile creeping up her face.
They were in the back office now, Marie seated on top of the desk, red knees, her legs hanging like the limbs were all broken.
“Your exploits don’t interest me,” Dara said.
Dealing with Marie was like dealing with a disruptive student, a student who demanded all the attention and would do anything to get it.
“It’s happened three times,” Marie said, grinning. “My god. I bled the first time. I bled.”
Dara gave her a cool stare and began packing her bag, her misty water bottle, bobby pins, toe pads, her calf compression sleeves.
Inside, though, Dara could cry from it. From seeing Marie on that desk, saying such filthy things. Their family desk, black cherry mahogany with three cigar marks on the top and front edge from their grandfather’s Cohibas. From the sight of Marie sprawled so crudely on that desk, no tights, only her bare thighs so lately used by rough hands.
“I could barely walk after,” Marie said, her legs swinging off the desk like a metronome. “I can barely walk now.”
“Did you think I’d be shocked,” Dara said, her face growing hot, zipping her bag shut, then unzipping it again. The bag was packed.