“Dara,” Charlie said, touching her wrist, “he can’t do anything we don’t want to. It’s our house.”
She looked at him. She was thinking of the things she hadn’t told him. The implication that Marie somehow had the house taken away. And those insinuations. For years, the three of you playing house. Kinda an odd setup.
“He said other things too.”
Charlie paused a second, his body stiffening. “What kinds of things?”
Dara paused, looking at Charlie’s back, its beautiful shape, its secret fragility.
“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t remember.”
But Charlie was no longer listening, staring at a piece of paper.
“What is it?”
“I called to see why we still haven’t received any checks from the insurance company,” he said, brow tight.
“And?”
“Apparently,” Charlie said, not looking at her, “we did.”
“Apparently? Did you deposit them?”
“The money doesn’t go to us,” Charlie said, still reading the paper in his hand. “In these cases.”
“What cases? Who does it go to?” even as she felt a sinking feeling inside.
“To the contractor.”
“Wait, why? We would never agree to that.”
But it turned out they had.
Charlie handed her the piece of paper. A copy of a form that read “Assignment of Benefits.” Dara recognized it. Remembered telling him to give it to Charlie. Charlie signed for everything.
“He said it was standard,” Charlie said, shaking his head helplessly.
“So it all went straight into his pocket,” Dara said, feeling her body sinking, too, a weight hovering inside. “All the insurance money so far. It’s all his.”
Charlie nodded. “I mean, he was laying out money for all this material, the flooring . . .”
“How could you . . .” she started, her voice shaking. But what could she say? She hadn’t read the form either. She never looked at forms, there were so many.
“Dara,” Charlie started, but he didn’t finish.
* * *
*
Dara was on the phone for hours with the insurance company, an endless touch-tone maze, one chirpy voice after another, all assuring her they could change the payee, they could give her a record of payments made, but it would take time and would delay further payments, possibly incur new charges . . .
“I don’t care,” she said. “We’re long past caring about that.”
* * *
*
A trap had been set. They were in it. Dara was sure of it now.
Charlie didn’t say anything, taking a stack of new bills and piercing them on the spike of the bill holder.
“It’s escalating, don’t you see?” Dara said to Charlie, stiff-backed behind his desk, heating pad steaming while he snuck a smoke, the cigarette perched on an open drawer.
Couldn’t he see?
Looking at her, she saw, finally, he could.
THE FIRE EATER AND THE SWORD SWALLOWER
That night, Dara sat in the bathtub a long time, running her fingers along its chipped rim, the dent when their mother slipped that one time, after too much wine.
This was all she had left, their home. Her home.
It was big and old, but all that bigness and age mattered. It was their whole world, their whole history. The Durant history.
The contractor had taken over the studio, an invasion and a deconstruction. He had taken over Marie, an invasion and a deconstruction.
But this. He couldn’t touch this. He never would.
It was where everything had begun, everything. For the first few years of the Durant School of Dance, their mother even taught classes in the house, in its sprawling damp basement, its floors laid with special vinyl.
Upstairs, Dara and Marie shared a bedroom so the two other bedrooms could be combined into yet another studio space, their father knocking down the wall with his claw hammer. Drinking Narragansett all day, crunching cans under his work boots, he kept going, swinging and swinging until there was nothing left, finally catching the claw on his cheek.
Marie found them in the bathroom, blood on the sink, the towels, the bath mat, their mother sewing up her father’s face. （The skin was like crinkly brown paper, she told Dara after.）
After, they disappeared into the bedroom, their mother’s turntable stuttering chansons, Dara and Marie huddled on Dara’s bunk, trying to listen through the wall, but there were too many walls and they couldn’t hear anything except once their mother’s laughter, like a bell, and then crying after, for hours. Crying after their father had stomped back downstairs and disappeared into the dark of the front lawn. Dara and Marie watched him from the window, the streetlamp like a spotlight, the neon flare of a cigarette, his face in his hands.