“Figured out what?” she said, spaghetti cracking like twigs under her feet.
He turned around, his head bobbing in a way that made her wonder if he’d taken too many of his pain meds, like he had once in the spring, after Marie left and they were fighting a lot and he’d torn the gutter off the side of the house and pulled a dead raccoon from inside. For months the smell had haunted them. They couldn’t find the source. Charlie kept saying it was the smell of death, death, and something was dead inside if he could only find it.
“Figured out what?” Dara repeated. But even as she asked, she realized, urgently, she didn’t want to hear what he might say. She found herself suddenly afraid of what he might say.
“He’s hypnotized her.”
“What?”
“The contractor. He’s hypnotized her. I read about it. It happens.”
Dara looked at him, wanting to pull that spattered napkin loose from his undershirt. She wanted to clean him up, straighten him up.
“Charlie, please,” she said. “Let me—”
She pulled the napkin with a hard yank and moved to the sink, turning on the hot water. Holding the napkin beneath it.
He looked up at her curiously, like a little boy waiting for his mother to wipe his mouth.
She watched as the napkin slid from her red hand, slid through the hungry black flaps of the garbage disposal. She looked down the black hole as Charlie kept talking, his words slipping from him before they were finished forming.
“But the good news is we can fix it. Like deprogramming. We just need to take her to a shrink, a therapist of some kind.”
She flipped the switch and the garbage disposal clattered on, the corner of the napkin slipping into the hole, the motor grinding, grinding, shredding the fabric until the napkin must’ve caught itself in its gears and the whole thing shuddered and stopped.
“Okay,” Dara said. “Maybe.”
She reached out, fingers on the switch again, trying to restart it, a current of electricity fuzzing through her hand, jolting her.
“Either that or we’re the ones,” Charlie said, more softly now, more like himself. “Either that or we’ve been hypnotized. Been hypnotized our whole lives.”
Dara turned and looked at him. She wanted to put her hands over her ears. These are the things I don’t want to hear.
“Dara,” he said, “we have to do something.”
Dara nodded, her hand shaking.
“Dara,” he said, “we have to do it now.”
* * *
*
Once, years ago, tucked in bed, they’d heard their father, drunk and ragged, cry out to their mother that he could do whatever he wanted in his house, that he could set the house on fire if he wanted.
I will do it, woman!
And their mother, cool and weary, smoking cigarette after cigarette at the kitchen table, saying, Stop waving that lighter at me, old man.
What if he does it, Marie whispered from above, her little hand clawed around her bunk.
He doesn’t have the guts, Dara told her, though she wasn’t sure herself.
You never knew what people would do. You never knew when blood ran hot. That was why it was always best, like their mother always said, to keep it cool. To not let it get to you. To still your heart, or slow it down.
I can’t, Marie said, taking Dara’s hand from above, pulling it to her chest, the beating sound beneath her breastbone like a rabbit’s, fast and out of control.
UNNATURAL
The car ride—five minutes, less—pressing her hands against the heating vent on the dashboard, her breath catching and the air so cold it felt like sharp points against their faces.
Pressing her hands there and Charlie driving, his face blue under the streetlight, fingers clamped to whiteness on the steering wheel. Charlie driving, his arms moving to steer as if they were in an ocean liner, loose and wide, tires caterwauling and that feeling that the car was hovering above the ground, and Dara’s hands against the vents until they burned, the scorch in the air and Charlie telling her it all has to stop, stop, stop.
We have to stop him, he was saying. She’ll let him ruin everything.
He was saying things about Marie, and how they had to get her, had to go in and pull her out like she had fallen into quicksand, but hadn’t she?
Staring out at the darkness ahead, Dara could almost see her there, in the distance. Marie, emerging from the pitch black, waving her hands above her head like an SOS and crying.
Like Clara in her nightgown on the blackened stage, lost in her dream world, no way out, no way home.
* * *