“Stop!” a voice cried out. Dara looked up to see Marie descending from the mouth at the top of the stairs, wrapping her jonquil arms under Derek’s arms, pulling him back, Derek’s boots clattering, his legs giving out from under him.
* * *
*
Later, Dara would remember Marie’s face, how it was as wild and strange as Charlie’s. Marie and Charlie, those two childlike faces, twinning in her head.
It was fast, so fast. Marie’s and Charlie’s arms extended, four marble spires. Almost like they were one pair of arms, one pair of hands, their faces red and vivid, wild-eyed and avid.
The heels of Charlie’s hands on the dark expanse of Derek’s chest, Marie’s hands under Derek’s arms, small and clawed, Derek losing his footing, dropping to one knee. Their arms, those spires, were they pushing him away or pushing him over? How could you ever tell?
Derek stutter-stepping backward, his boots sliding, his body bending over the railing, so low and treacherous, his body twisting over the twisting staircase.
It was fast, and then it was slow, so slow, time stretching out infinitely. This monster, this Big Bad Wolf, this bloodsucker who never should have been let in, this stranger who never belonged, falling, falling to the floor.
His body larger, it seemed, than the staircase that held it, the kick-kick of his sliding feet and the force of their arms, thick with blasted muscle, fired by feeling. Some feeling.
Over the railing, he fell, his body spinning, and his head hitting the corner of the desk below, a muted crack.
His face catching something, a whistling sound in the air, his breath leaving him.
A hot spatter of blood and the mortal thud of his body landing on the floor below, his body curled like a cat, small and shabby. His body twitching, then still.
* * *
*
Later, Dara would remember this: Derek’s eyes catching hers, catching Dara’s, as it happened. As he fell.
Looking out at Dara, as if asking, begging for something.
As if warning her, as if saying, Wait, wait—
* * *
*
I don’t know how . . .” Charlie was saying, his voice low and foreign. “It happened so fast and I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
They were all standing over him now, standing over Derek, a crumpled heap on the floor, legs going the wrong ways. Charlie’s eyes glazed, his face stiff.
* * *
*
It was only after they’d turned him over they saw it.
Marie made a keening sound, like a fox, trapped.
Like a carnival trick, the rusted spike of the desk bill holder piercing his right eye, a starburst, a pinwheel, its center red and wet.
He needs an eyepatch, Dara thought, her brain not working, like Herr Drosselmeier.
It gave him the look of a perpetual wink, an eternal one. But the blood was dark and final.
THREE
THE NUTCRACKER
It was impossible to remember Christmas without it.
This is how we keep the lights on, their mother always told them. Those dreams of Clara are how we keep the lights on.
* * *
*
The Nutcracker, a young girl’s dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood and finding untold pleasures. Of the eye, of the mouth.
Because, foremost, The Nutcracker was a dream of hunger, of appetite.
Consider the exquisite torture of all those little girls never allowed to eat dancing as costumed Sugar Plums, as fat Bonbons gushing cherry slicks. Tutus like ribbon candy, boys spinning great hoops of peppermint, and everywhere black slathers of licorice and marzipan glistening like snow.
When they were too young to dance it, too young even to play a Candy Cane or one of the darling Polichinelles, their mother read them the E.T.A. Hoffmann story Nutcracker and Mouse-King. An old book that smelled like must and was illustrated with gaudy, frightening images—rodents with fierce claws, the Nutcracker’s teeth long and sharp.
A young girl named not Clara but Marie becomes fixated on the wooden doll her seductive godfather gives her. In bed with the doll, she drifts into a fantasy world of her own making and, at the end of her nocturnal adventures, is forbidden by her family to speak of them again.
You have to dance it long before you understand it, their mother always said.
But Dara could never remember a time she didn’t understand all of it.
It was a warning for those who become lost to desire. Because, at the end of the story, Marie awakens from her dream, changed. No one believes her when she tells her tale. They say it’s a fantasy and it’s time to let it go. And, at the end, she is unable to live in reality. She is lost in her dream.
In the ballet, though, the story ends with Clara still in her fantasy world, her dream world. She never has to come back at all.