* * *
*
Marie’s favorite part of the book was when the little girl sees a spot of blood on the Nutcracker and rubs it with her pocket handkerchief.
How, slowly, as she rubbed the Nutcracker, he grew warm under her hand and began to move. How his mouth began to work and twist, and move up and down until he could speak. Until he could tell Marie what she needed to do.
No picture books! he insisted. No Christmas frock!
Instead: Get me a sword—a sword!
In their bunkbed at night she’d make Dara read it to her.
From below, Dara could see Marie’s girlish arm swing out and grab for the bedpost, to rub it like the Nutcracker, to summon it to life.
Dara would read and read and Marie would say again, again until Dara felt her stomach turn and flip, to work and twist like the Nutcracker’s mouth.
Oh, Dara, Marie would say, her fingers working the bedpost, we must get him his sword!
HE DIDN’T GO HERE
The police detective was waiting for her but Dara wasn’t ready yet.
Instead, she was standing in front of the dust-daubed mirror in the powder room.
This isn’t a matter of life or death. That’s what she used to tell herself back in her dancing days. Before a big performance, or after one. Before an audition, a solo. But your body doesn’t know the difference.
Because it was true. Those moments just before, standing in the wings, the floor humming from the orchestra, breath heavy and body heavy and how will it ever happen?
But it does, the body going into flight-or-fight mode, summoning all its energies to defeat the threat, to conquer the danger.
The body knows so much better than you do what it needs to survive.
* * *
*
In the seven, eight hours since it had happened, she hadn’t stopped moving, nor had Charlie.
Instead, she’d gone into the adrenaline-fired, cortisol-seething space of performance. A space of needle-sharp concentration, boundless energy, nerves jangling, senses elevated, her body taking over, her brain blank.
One breath, two breaths, she took a paper towel from the roll on the sink—
That sink, wobbling on its pedestal, flashes of Marie pressed up against it, the rutting bull, tearing it loose from its screws, tearing Marie—
Tank top stripped to her waist, she wet the paper towel, rubbing it across her skin, across the three sheets of sweat, the oldest now-gray flakes. The sweat like the sweat after a performance, three skins to shed to make oneself new again.
Somehow, all those hours had gone by. Seven, eight hours since they’d all stood over the fallen contractor, his body twisted and broken. Since Marie began moaning, her hair in her hands, her hands shaking against Charlie’s chest. Since Dara watched the two of them clinging to each other, assuring each other （it was an accident, oh god, he slipped, he fell）， while Dara looked down at the contractor, at Derek’s face, the spiral of his ruined eye. The other eye vacant and heaven-tilting. Reminding her of something she couldn’t quite name.
Now it was only when Dara closed her eyes that she saw him. Derek. The sprawl of his body, his ankles twisted upon themselves on the bottom step, almost daintily, almost like a sur le cou-de-pied, one foot wrapped like a scarf around the other.
His body in death had been surprisingly graceful. The fall like the descent of a majestic animal, a panther, a condor, its wings spread. The descent of a dancer from a grand jeté.
But then he was just dead, his shirt pulled up above his belly, his face like stiff paper, the awful red slick of his right eye, its jellied center.
He was dead and there was nothing they could do about it.
It was an accident, after all. And, as they would tell it, it was an accident he’d had alone.
If they stuck to the plan, everything would be okay.
* * *
*
That moment, staring down at him, had been the only pause. The only time Dara had given herself before she took a breath, turned to Charlie and Marie, and told them both there was no time for anything but correcting this.
Spine straight, chest lifted, eyes up, breathe, breathe, breathe. Make it perfect. Make it right.
“We’re going to take care of this,” she’d said. That was what you did. You kept it behind closed doors. Peeping Toms, voyeurs, their mother used to call them—neighbors, truant officers, social workers, police officers. It was no one’s business. No one else would ever understand.
“We were never here,” Dara had said to Charlie and Marie. “When it happened. We were never here and that’s all we know.”
Best to keep it simple. To keep themselves out of it. Dara made the plan in an instant. Someone had to.