Dara remembered wanting to hold the Nutcracker too. It seemed like a magic totem. A totem that becomes a boy, the Nutcracker Prince.
“C’est très érotique,” Madame Sylvie was saying, voice low and cracking now. “She becomes fixated with her little Nutcracker. So fixated she sneaks back out to find him after the family goes to bed. She falls asleep with it in her arms, lost in fantasy until the doll comes alive as a full-size man. It’s a parable, no? Of first sexual experience. The pleasure and danger. Drosselmeier seduced her. And she is glad.”
Madame Sylvie’s needles tick-ticked and Marie’s pencil flew.
“But you can’t let the Claras know any of this, of course,” Madame Sylvie said. “We must keep their innocence intact. That’s what we must do with our Claras. But on some level they already know, don’t they?”
Two rows apart, but Dara could hear Marie breathing. She could feel her like a little girl panting, overworked. Like their father used to say to Marie, a day of dancing, her body whirring and unstoppable, Little girl, you run so hot, you’re gonna burn up.
“You know who he is? Drosselmeier?” Madame Sylvie said, smiling into her knitwork.
Dara wanted to leave suddenly.
“He’s the promise of what’s beyond the door,” Madame Sylvie said, her voice husky now, pointed. “The door from childhood.”
* * *
*
When they were finally finished, close to ten o’clock, Madame Sylvie pulled Dara aside and said, smiling, “I lost a husband and two lovers during Nutcracker season. I’m sure you and Marie will make up on the other side of Clara.”
* * *
*
All Dara wanted was to get Marie alone, to get some answers. What did she mean by calling the county register? What do you—what does he want with our house?
But by the time they moved through the last set of cues, the elaborate sleigh flight that takes Clara away to unknown lands, she couldn’t find her.
Hurrying to the lobby, she looked through the large glass walls only to see Marie disappearing into the evening mist like a phantom. Her orange car receding in the distance, like a faint flame.
HE’S IN THE HOUSE
Moments later, Dara turned down Sycamore, the street fogged and furtive, inching along until she saw their big old house, its bleary windows, roof tiles loose like whiskers.
It made her chest ache suddenly. Most of the time, you never truly saw your own house from the outside. It was impossible. But she was seeing it now. Seeing her home, her childhood, her family. Drafty, pocked, hungry.
This is ours. It is ours. No one can take it. Never.
She needed, urgently, to be inside. To sit with Charlie at the kitchen table, with their tumblers of wine, now fully replacing the fenugreek, the chamomile, their new nightly routine, Charlie’s shiny orange medicine bottles, his pills and vitamins plotted on the table like a tic-tac-toe game. Together, they were a family. Together, they would protect their home, everything.
* * *
*
But when she arrived at the front door, she saw the note taped to the graying green paint. Charlie had gotten the last available PT appointment. He wouldn’t be home for another hour or more.
* * *
*
She poured some wine for herself then, balancing the tumbler in the crook of her arm, headed upstairs to wait in the bedroom. They had to band together now. They had to. And she’d felt so close to him on the phone earlier, remembering about the snow.
Maybe Charlie’s back would feel better. Maybe he would come back into the bed that night. Maybe he’d let her hands rest on him, find him again in the blue-dark of the late night, his pills working their gentle ministrations.
The thought made her instantly feverish, and the warmth dipped to her hips, between her legs as she climbed the stairs. Charlie.
Halfway up, in the band of light from a second-floor window, she saw the first one.
A footprint, faint but muddy, on one of the carpeted steps.
Looking up, she saw another. Tracks, like tracking a mountain lion, a great black bear.
But these tracks were familiar, the gray-brown slurry she knew so well, trailed daily across the floors of their studio. She even recognized the shoe print, the natty toes of the contractor’s natty boots.
He’s in the house, a cry racing up her throat.
Reaching the top step, she saw the open door at the end of the dark hall. Their childhood bedroom.
She never left that door open. She seldom went in there at all, except maybe once a year to dust it, to polish the old wood of the furniture set—the dresser and, of course, the bunkbed. The bunkbed, Marie on top, Dara on the bottom, like a pair of twins pressed tight in the womb. The bunkbed, with Marie’s teeth clicking in her sleep, and Dara, restless, her foot kicking against the footboard slats, her arches wrapping around them, her thoughts drifting to that year’s Drosselmeier, the feel of his hipbone against hers as she brushed past, her foot pressing, pressing on the slat, as she pushed into the feeling . . .