“Derek. Why did you tell him personal things?”
“What things?”
“About your moving out of the house. He said you told him I wanted you to leave.”
The corners of Marie’s mouth seemed to lift ever so slightly, a ghost smile.
“I didn’t tell him that,” she said. “That’s not what I told him.”
Now Dara couldn’t stop, an awful feeling in her chest.
“And about the way we lived,” she said, stumbling over the words.
“What about the way we lived, Dara?” Marie said, looking up at Dara, her palms across her breasts. Her eyes vacant, guileless.
Dara paused, watching her sister. Was it her sister, even. This creature possessed.
“The way he said it, the way you told him about us,” Dara continued. “He twisted it all around like there was something wrong about it. Something . . .” She fumbled to find the word. “Unseemly.”
Marie looked at her, a faux blankness that made Dara want to scream.
“What?” Dara said, her voice rising. Marie and her little silences, her cryptic smiles. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not thinking anything,” Marie said, rubbing her arms with her hands, a giddy look on her face.
Dara’s arm thrust out, grabbing Marie’s elbow hard, yanking it.
“Don’t worry,” Marie said, staring down at Dara’s fingers, red on her skin. “I won’t tell him about you.”
* * *
*
That night, Dara couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of the two of them—that snide contractor and her remote sister—sharing confidences. Whispering about her, about their private matters. This was new, Dara thought. This was the turning, the deepening she’d been feeling.
It was a breach. A betrayal.
“I suppose you and Charlie never talk about me when I’m not around,” Marie had said later.
“That’s not the same,” Dara had replied loudly, her voice strangling up her throat. “He’s my husband.”
Marie started shaking her head, over and over, as Dara went on, “And you know Charlie. Charlie loves you. We’ve all known each other since we were children. We grew up together. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s family, it’s . . .”
She went on and on, hating the sound of her own voice, high and strained and nothing like their mother’s. She always tried to match their mother’s soft, lush alto.
“We grew up together,” Dara finally repeated.
But Marie only looked at her and said quietly, “Did we? Grow up?”
* * *
*
That night, back in the warm confines of the house, cluttered and smelly and familiar, she wanted to tell Charlie everything. She wanted him to calm her down, to make her tea, to rub her feet with his strong hands.
But she couldn’t. They never talked about when Marie moved out, or why. It had been a strained time for all of them and there was no need to stir it all up again. That’s what was so enraging about it all, about that contractor bringing it up. About Marie having told him things.
I didn’t tell him that, Marie had insisted. But in that vague way that left you to wonder what she did tell him. And why.
* * *
*
When Dara finally fell asleep, two of Charlie’s yellow-and-green pills sinking her into some kind of swampy dream place, she had bad dreams. She dreamt she could hear them, Derek’s sly voice, Marie’s tittering laugh. Snide, insinuating, both of them. They were in the room, in her bedroom. They were standing in the bedroom door. No. They were huddled at the foot of the bed, their eyes dancing, hands over their mouths, snickering. They were right there! Watching!
Charlie, Charlie, she said, shaking him, hands clawing at his back.
But he didn’t wake up and she was never sure if he was in the dream or not. If he was in the dream and couldn’t hear her, or she’d woken up and he was lost in his own yellow-and-green-pill sleep, the sludge of Charlie’s sleep world, which was a distant place she longed to go.
THE FLOOD THIS TIME
Studio B was full of water, three inches in the corners, the brand-new floorboards soaked soft as tissue paper.
* * *
*
Dara could smell it before she saw what it had done. An unwell smell, an unhealthy one, like the dunk tank at the spring carnival when they were kids, the one their mother forbid their father from letting them in or they’d definitely get polio and never dance again.
She’d already been running late, struggling to get out of bed that morning. Charlie had gone to the studio ahead of her. He told her the walk would be good for his back anyway.