I remember, Marie had said. I remember everything.
It turned out Marie had snuck out of the house one night, late, in those strange months following the accident.
She’d walked all the way to the police lot, where she could run her hands all over the car, its pocked and blistered metal. She even climbed inside and sat on the front seat, bisected, its stuffing shaking loose. She put her hand in the hole in the windshield where their father’s head had landed.
It was, she said, the closest I ever felt to them. To him.
Everyone had assumed their father was behind the wheel, and drunk. Dara assumed it, too, even after Charlie explained what the police said. Even when Marie told her how she could tell from that visit to the car, the driver’s seat thrust forward for their mother’s petite frame, the long strands of their mother’s hair caught in the windshield.
It was her, Dara. It was Mother.
Sometimes what happened just doesn’t feel like what really happened.
Behind the wheel and drunk, too, the end of a long tear, late for their anniversary dinner, to celebrate twenty years of tumult and terror, their mother refusing to leave for hours as she slowly, vengefully drained his holiday-bonus scotch.
Dara, don’t you see? It was her. It was always her.
No, Marie, she wanted to say. It was them. It was always both of them.
* * *
*
That night, the house felt different, drafty and forlorn.
They hadn’t slept or eaten or groomed themselves since it happened.
At last, the flood of feeling, the hard push of nerves had ended, had reached its end. Dara felt like a shell, a husk, the feeling after a performance, the dread sinking with the final curtain, settling inside her.
For Charlie, too, it seemed. When Dara watched him march up the carpeted stairs like the steps to the guillotine, he looked so much older than he’d ever looked before, drawn and bony and blue. For a second, a brief second, as the ceiling light hit him, he looked like their mother in those last few weeks, drinking all the time, slamming doors, and the heavy glass ashtray their mother threw, hooking their father in the chin, the mouth, knocking two teeth loose.
Oh, that, Dara thought. Remember that.
She was remembering so many things lately that she’d packed away long ago.
Without saying a word, Charlie disappeared into the upstairs bathroom, filling the claw-foot tub until the floor bulged with its weight.
Dara thought she could hear him talking to himself in there.
She climbed the stairs and put her ear to the door, wet from the steam.
His whisper, rising and falling, and all she could make out was it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
* * *
*
All evening, Marie left the den only once, appearing in the kitchen, looking for matches. She left as soon as she saw Charlie.
He was standing at the stove, making tea for the toddies, and he pretended he didn’t see her either.
As the tea steeped, he counted softly to himself, something he hadn’t done in years. The way, as a barely pubescent dancer, he couldn’t stop himself, his voice cracking slightly, his Adam’s apple rising and falling, a tremor as he counted off his pirouettes.
* * *
*
We’re never going to talk about it, Dara realized at some point. Neither Charlie nor Marie seemed strong enough to talk about it. To face it.
She felt, obscurely, like Clara in her nightgown, alone on the dark stage.
In the end, their mother used to tell her, hands on Dara’s shoulders as she waited in the wings, it’s only you out there.
In the end, you only have you.
* * *
*
It wasn’t until the final hour of that endless day that was really two days that it all fell on Dara. She lay in bed and her thoughts flung back to the things he’d said, the insinuations, the accusations, the lurid pictures he’d painted. But most of all the looks on Charlie’s and Marie’s faces as it happened.
It was a look that was uncannily familiar though she couldn’t place it.
She was touching the corners of something. She could feel it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She didn’t cry, not once. And she felt very strong, somehow. Something had happened at last, she thought. A pressure released. A valve turned, a window thrown open.
Marie was back home. They were all here again.
Everyone could forget.
DON’T LOOK
Once in the night, Charlie sleeping beside her, his throat thick with sleeping pills, breathing funnily, she woke to a piercing sensation beneath her right brow.
A flash came of some murky nightmare of eye sockets, rolling eyeballs, her slipper slipping over a jellied orb.