But it was worth it, the snow. It was the ahhhhh moment everyone always remembered.
“How’s it look?” she asked, holding the phone against her ear. His voice, hushed and reedy, still soothed her, summoning up safe, warm places.
“Like snow,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “Remember how your mother always kept some, after every performance?”
Dara smiled. “For her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince as a souvenir.”
“Our special secret,” Charlie said, his voice so soft now. “When I was the Prince, she gave it to me.”
* * *
*
It was nearly seven, long past when they were supposed to be at the Ballenger.
She hadn’t laid eyes on Marie in an hour or more. Chlo? Lin told Dara she saw her smoking in the parking lot and talking into her phone.
“She looked funny,” Chlo? said, pulling on her coat.
“Funny how? Be precise.”
But Chlo? only gave her a look of mild panic and would say no more.
Running back to the office, Dara called up the spiral stairs, but there was no answer. She had planned to talk to her on the drive over, or at the theater itself if she had to.
She didn’t know what she would say, but she would do it. Marie would have to answer for her actions. Was she really going to let this monster devour them?
Dara was reaching for her bag when she heard an engine starting outside. Looking out the window, she saw the orange car under the streetlamp, Marie at the wheel, her face so stark and white. Turning the engine, grinding the gears. A stutter start, a brake screech, the car finally lurching forward, Marie’s blond head shuddering behind the windshield.
Marie driving, Dara thought, a pinch in her chest. An old twinge, like when they first learned their jumps, watching Marie throwing herself into the air—turning, turning—for her partner to catch her. A blind turn, a blind leap into safety or the abyss.
Marie shouldn’t be driving.
Marie shouldn’t be out there, alone.
* * *
*
The Ballenger Center was a lit box flickering on the horizon. Like an enormous circus tent promising excitement inside.
Seeing it always reminded her of their father taking them to the traveling carnival that appeared one weekend every year in the parking lot of St. Joan’s. This was when she and Marie were very young and he still did things like that. Darkness would always be just falling and you could see the tents like great bright blobs on the horizon. When they walked past the ticket takers, they gasped because it was all so dazzling, the colorful costumes and the guess-your-weight booth and the ball-and-basket games their father said were a scam even before he sank sixteen dollars into one to win a two-dollar beanie toy for Marie.
There was, always, the sound of eyelash-curling screams coming from the dark ride, Deathbone Alley, where couples disappeared into the shadowy center of an enormous painted mouth lined with glistening silver teeth. Their father did not permit them to go inside.
The sideshow tent was their favorite anyway. Dara favored the Fire Eater, but Marie only had eyes for the Sword Swallower, swinging her golden hair back, in her hands an electrified sword made of glass that lit up her throat. How she threw her head so far back, it seemed to disappear. How she looked like she had no head at all, just throat, gullet.
I could do it, Marie kept saying, trying to shove her whole fist into her mouth. Experimenting for days with paintbrushes and wooden spoons.
Marie, who kept trying until she stuck a kitchen skewer down there, gagged, and threw up blood.
For years, she dreamt of objects caught in her throat: a knitting needle, the back-scratcher their father kept in the side pocket of his recliner.
For years, she’d wake up gasping for air.
* * *
*
Marie loved the Sword Swallower, but Dara loved the Fire Eater.
Flinging her head back, that curtain of black hair, tongue stuck out wide and flat, setting the wick of the torch on its pink center, her mouth forming an O.
How she tilted her head so far back, you could see all the flames climb up her throat. The flames like a scarf swallowing her throat.
The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare.
They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same.
THE DOOR FROM CHILDHOOD
All evening, Dara and Marie sat two rows apart, going over The Nutcracker cues with the Ballenger stage manager and with silver-haired Madame Sylvie, the head of the Mes Filles Ballet Company, their partner for more than a dozen holiday seasons and with their mother long before that. Madame Sylvie, who served as their legal guardian when their parents died and who signed the consent to let Charlie and Dara marry at the tender age of sixteen. Anyone who’s been through what you three have, she’d said, has wisdom far beyond your years.