A flash then of another, Derek running up the spiral staircase and suddenly their mother running down, darkly luminous in a nightgown as white as Clara’s.
Their mother, her long hand twined around the iron railing, and then Derek was gone, their mother falling. Falling, slumping, her nightgown mounded around her like a sunken flower.
Don’t look, Charlie was saying. Don’t look at her eyes.
* * *
*
In the kitchen, she poured a splash of the cream brandy their Nutcracker lighting vendor gave them every year into their morning coffee and watched Charlie shuffle around numbly.
At some point in the night, he’d slunk out of bed, down the hall, down the stairs to the sofa bed where she found him, mummy-tight in the old afghan, crocheted snowflakes yellowed with age.
“We can do this,” he kept saying, but he seemed less sure today. No longer fired by adrenaline, the snaky spring of fear.
The blue of the veins at his temple, his skin nearly translucent in the morning light.
She would never not want to touch him, to stroke his skin, to fondle and caress. He was too beautiful and also half-forbidden, that half-broken body.
Charlie, Charlie, she thought and remembered their mother once saying, So beautiful, like spider silk, and not strong enough by half.
* * *
*
They had both heard Marie at four a.m.
“I thought I was dreaming,” Charlie said, rubbing his eyes, “that she was coming after us with a hammer.”
It was a hammer, pounding, pounding. That singular cacophony of her sister taking what sounded like a ball-peen to a pair of pointe shoes.
Waking them both up, keeping them up.
“Are you going to stop her?” Charlie had asked.
“No,” Dara had replied tiredly, wanly. “Let her. Let her.”
* * *
*
The ritual would soothe her. Soothed all dancers, Dara thought.
The shoes, the shoes. The shoes were everything.
Pink satin fantasies from afar, from the audience, enthralled. But if you moved too close, you’d see that they’d already been battered, scored, disemboweled.
Those shoes, so intimate, soaked with your sweat until they sealed themselves to your feet, until, soon after, they fell to pieces.
Pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded.
Pink satin fantasies created to give pleasure but destroyed in the process.
This, their mother said when she held out Dara’s very first pointe shoe, is what we are.
This, she said, handing her the shoe, Dara’s stubby nine-year-old fingers touching it, feeling a static charge, is you.
* * *
*
She’s in no condition to work today,” Charlie was saying as they finished their coffee. “We can’t have her in front of parents.”
Dara didn’t say anything, holding on to the last sly tang of brandy, trying to calm herself, when Marie appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Hair glossed back wetly and wearing an outsize oxblood cardigan sweater Dara recognized as their father’s, she held a pair of gleaming pointe shoes, Freed of London, size four, toe glue-slicked, shank cut, sole scored, satin hardened, their toes mysteriously crusted with dirt.
“Marie,” Charlie said, “are you okay?”
Because Marie’s feet were bare and red, like little stumps.
“I was dancing,” Marie said, setting the shoes on the table. “I forgot what it felt like. I can’t believe I forgot.”
“Where were you dancing?” Charlie said.
“In the backyard. On the icy grass, like the Waltz of the Snowflakes. I danced until my feet were on fire. I was on fire.”
Her voice high and faint, a voice that had always meant bad things. Meant Marie not sleeping for days, making bad choices like running their car into a guardrail, booking a last-minute trip around the world.
“Marie,” Dara said, “you can’t do this, not now. I can’t worry about you right now.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Marie said, blinking at Dara. “I’m here, aren’t I? Back in this house. I’m here.”
The way she was blinking, eyes glinting, Dara was worried her sister might start crying. It was enraging.
“Like you’re doing us a favor,” Dara said. “Marie, do not forget: You got us into this. You’re here because of you.”
“Dara,” Charlie said. “She’s . . . she lost someone.”
There was a heavy silence. They both looked at Marie, hands dug deep into the cardigan’s pockets. Dara wondered if those pockets smelled like their father’s cigarettes.