And their mother would bring out that fur blanket, the one Dara had just found—wet and musky—on the basement floor. She’d remove it from her velvet trunk and tell them it had once been her own mother’s and was made from the fur of genuine Vienna Blue rabbits.
The blanket came out only once a year and smelled like lavender and olden days and felt on your fingers like the inside of a bunny ear. Dara could feel it now, how it felt then. Plush and electric, kicking off sparks.
Snuggling underneath it, drinking eggnog and laughing and tussling legs against one another and their eyes always still dusted with snow from the performance, it was their favorite night of the year, every year.
When Charlie came into their lives, he became part of it too. He carried the tray with the eggnog in the red reindeer goblets from the kitchen to the bedroom, never spilling a drop.
That very first year it was strange, maybe. But then it never was again.
Here was Charlie, a very shy thirteen with his Adam’s apple conscious on such an impossibly long neck, anxiously swinging his impossibly long arms.
Their mother lifting the edge of the blanket and inviting Charlie in.
Their mother’s raising it with such flourish, the white of her arm against the blue of the fur. The fur electric and irresistible, her eyes trained on Charlie.
Come in, come in, come in.
* * *
*
At last, Dara found the box she was looking for, the one with NUTCRACKER （OLD） written on the side in their mother’s familiar scrawl.
Inside was their rotting papier-maché Nutcracker head, the one they’d used for a dozen or more years of performances, every Nutcracker Prince sliding it over his boyish head.
In recent years, they’d turned to a newer one, its shellac chipping after only a dozen performances, its quality suspect. I will find the original one, le vrai bonheur, Dara had promised Corbin Lesterio.
Looking at it now, she thought of how happy he would be.
Distracted, she was hurrying for the stairs, the papier-maché head over her raised fist, when she nearly tripped on that fur blanket again, her foot sinking into it, warm with mold.
Her stomach turned.
Hurriedly, she kicked it away, to the far corner by the wheezing furnace.
* * *
*
At the living-room window, she examined the Nutcracker head in the early morning light. It wasn’t as she remembered at all, its skull sunken slightly, dented on one side, its smell of dried paste, the fading red of his hat, the features on his face dulling, the twirling mustache rubbed away, the mesh over one eye torn.
But his bared-teeth grin loomed just as large. When the Prince turned his head for the first time, flashing that grin, it always sent all the little children in the theater hiding under their seats.
She supposed it was like all children’s stories, all fairy tales—always much darker, stranger than you guessed. Children themselves much darker, stranger than you guessed.
That was when she thought she saw something through the front windows, smeary with morning mist.
An orange flare, like maybe the neighbor burning leaves in his trash can again. But, moving closer, her hands curling around the Nutcracker head, she saw it was that car, Marie’s, its orange even more so amid the grim morning, the orange of an Elmer’s glue top.
“Marie . . .” she said aloud, her right hand reached out to the fogged window as if her sister could hear her. Is she coming home, is she . . .
There was an awful feeling in her chest, and before she could name it, the idling car leapt to life again.
As it hurtled past, into the morning mist, she saw him. She saw Derek behind the wheel. Derek alone.
* * *
*
I’m telling you,” she told Charlie the minute he woke up, “he was in her car and he was watching us. Spying on us.”
“Or the house,” Charlie said, rubbing his temples. He walked over to the window, drawing back one of their mother’s French-pleated drapes, the damask gray with dust.
“What do you mean?” Dara said, the Nutcracker head still in hand, the way little girls held baby dolls, resting on their forearms, their alarmed baby-doll faces forever staring up, eyes painted open, wondering, fearful.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said, his brow furrowed. “He asked me some questions about it. What year it was built. Had we ever thought of selling it. That kind of thing.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Dara said.
“I didn’t think . . . I mean, it’s his field,” Charlie says. “Maybe he . . .”
But Charlie’s voice trailed off, a slightly puzzled look on his face.