What is she doing? Dara thought, rapt.
A heavy metal door slammed somewhere and Mrs. Bloom seemed to jump to life, turning, ducking behind the truck for a moment. Her whole body in an animal crouch.
Dara turned and looked through the open door to see if Derek had left. The lights were finally off in Studio B.
When she returned to the window, Mrs. Bloom was gone. And there was Derek striding to his truck, that John Wayne swagger of his. That rooster strut.
Mrs. Bloom.
Sinking down to the desk chair, she took three breaths and wondered if she’d imagined the whole thing.
Six, seven, eight, she counted until she was jolted, the sound of Derek’s truck starting like a shotgun pressed between her shoulder blades.
* * *
*
Well,” Charlie said at home that night, “he worked for her.”
“So she doesn’t show up at the studio for a month, then sneaks up to his car after dark like some kind of Peeping Tom?”
He shrugged, his eyes rung brown with weariness. He was so tired. And his back . . .
“Maybe she owed him money,” he said. “Doesn’t everyone owe him money? People just keep sending him checks. Our insurance company, his. That guy’s really got it all figured out.”
“You say it like there’s nothing we can do about it,” Dara said.
Charlie looked at her, palming his pills, lifting them to his mouth.
“You want to do something, Dara,” he said, like ice, “do it.”
* * *
*
After, Dara took a bath. She wondered if she should tell Charlie about the things Derek had said, about Corbin. The insinuations. But Charlie wouldn’t see it the way it was, she thought. That was Derek’s greatest trick. You could never prove anything. But every provocation felt like a deeper threat. You couldn’t prove it, so he was going to just keep going. Until he got what he wanted.
They prepared for bed in silence, Charlie doing his stretches, Dara with their mother’s pearl-backed hairbrush in hand, doing her nightly one hundred strokes.
* * *
*
It wasn’t until late into the night that Charlie’s hand found hers under the sheets, the duvet. His hand cool and clamped over hers. Clamped tight.
His breath so familiar, the same as hers. All his smells, her smells.
She moved against him, her right hand in his, her left palm on his chest.
She could feel his heart beating, slow and sluggish, but there.
A BUTCHER’S THUMB
The next morning, Dara and Charlie arrived at seven and saw an unfamiliar car in the lot, its girth straddling two spots. So new it still had the window sticker.
Low slung and burnt orange, it was impossible to miss. It looked, obscurely, like a big, wide thumb. Like Derek’s thick tanned thumb, a butcher’s thumb. That’s what their father would have called it. Outsized and curved like a scythe. There was something obscene about it.
“Derek,” Dara said, approaching the car.
“But he drives a truck . . .” Charlie started, his voice trailing off.
“He told her to do it,” Dara said, peeking in the car windows, smoked and ridiculous, “and she did it.”
She looked up at the building, all the way up to the third-floor dormer window.
“Marie!” Dara called out. “Sister dearest!”
“Dara,” Charlie cautioned, hand on Dara’s shoulder. “Dara, don’t—”
“Marie, explain yourself!”
Explain yourself, the words echoed in her head, their mother’s old dictum—to tardy students, to disruptive ones. Sometimes, when she was feeling dangerous, to their father. That time she found him passed out in the garage, seated behind the wheel, having driven home from his local, high on Molson and maple whiskey. The car still on, the garage full of exhaust.
Explain yourself, she kept saying over and over, pounding the car window with the heel of her hand. Dara, standing behind their mother, watched him shake himself awake, his handsome chin and jaw streaked with vomit, something.
Explain yourself and nearly crying as she said it and Dara would never forget the look on her father’s face: One of bewilderment and shame. One that would turn in moments to something else, jumping out of the car, pulling their mother by the hair—her long, shining swoop—even as she didn’t stop. Explain yourself, explain yourself.
Who, Marie once said, an aside to Dara, could ever explain oneself?
“This car,” Charlie was saying, walking around the vehicle, “looks really expensive.”
But Dara was barely listening. Neck arched, she gazed up at the third floor again, feeling suddenly drunk in the frigid morning, her wool cap covering her ears, the heat in her face and the dizziness of gazing up, up, up.