Charlie threw the stub in the trash can, head down. “So someone filed a claim already?”
“I guess so,” Dara said. “His family must have.”
She’d forgotten how it all worked with her own parents. Getting the death certificate, the police report. Waiting for the check to come. How long it took and why.
“But she didn’t get into that with you?”
Dara shook her head.
“I think it’s okay,” she added, because Charlie was still looking at her expectantly. “She wasn’t here long. That’s probably the end of it.”
“Right,” Charlie said tentatively. “Construction workers get into accidents all the time, right?”
“Right,” Dara said.
The way he was looking at her. His heavy-lidded eyes blinking slowly, tenuously. Waiting for assurance, comfort.
It reminded her of Charlie years ago, barely fifteen, his skin like the skin of a peach, that dazed look he’d have in his eyes whenever he wasn’t dancing. How when he was dancing, he seemed to go some other place, exalted and forbidden. How when he stopped, he looked immediately lost and forlorn. Showing him where the towels were when he first moved in, showing him how to light the oven burner, to call his mother overseas on the landline.
Like a boy in a painting, their mother used to say, looking at him. Caravaggio.
It made her want to put her hand on his forehead, to put him to bed.
“Dara,” he said, “can we go home now?”
He drew his hands inside his sweater cuffs, rubbed a cuff against his face. Those tremulous hands.
She was the only strong one of the three of them.
* * *
*
That night, she sat at the kitchen table a very long time, alone.
Her head kept vibrating, her teeth. It was that woman, Randi Jacek, her hand on the staircase.
She was remembering something. Something that had been hovering there for days, weeks. Hovering just beyond reach, like a flicker in the corner of her eye.
At first the memory came in fits and starts, her hand on the railing, music floating from her mother’s radio on the third floor.
Crying out, Mother! Mother!
A feeling in her chest, an echoing in her ears.
Back, back, start again: Age fifteen, long-legged, coltish, running back late to the studio to tell her mother she’d been cast as a Dewdrop in the exalted Waltz of the Flowers for the Eastern Ballet Company’s regional production.
Age fifteen and puffed up with her triumph—a role earned, and all hers—she called out for her mother as she bounded through the dark and dust of Studios A, B, and C and to the back office, the opening to the third floor glowing, like the cutout mouth in a jack-o’-lantern.
Gripping the rail of the spiral staircase, she whipped around its three hairpin turns and emerged on the third floor, the smell of their mother’s black currant tea and the fuzz of her battered radio, tinny jazz, and it took a moment, a long, flickering moment, for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, the only light an old gooseneck lamp, curled and lying on its side, its narrow glare illuminating their mother on the futon.
Their mother half-reclining, her head thrown back and her legs flung apart, that bright blue vein snaking up her inner thigh. And something, someone kneeling before her, the soft blond thrush of his hair and the princely profile.
“Charlie,” Dara had said, the first time her voice full of wonder still.
“Charlie,” she’d said seconds later, watching their mother thrust the boy aside now, wrapping her legs back around herself, drawing up the tights that had slithered to her ankles.
“Charlie,” she’d said a third time, her voice changed now, changed forever. “Mother.”
* * *
*
Later, much later, Dara would wonder if it even happened. It felt more like a picture she’d once looked at in a book. It had happened, but had it happened to her? And what had she seen, really? What was their mother really doing with her fifteen-year-old student, with her own daughter’s beloved, what was she letting him—having him—do to her other than nestle his fevered head against her warm belly, her lovely thighs?
But at the time, it felt like everything. Because it was, of course.
None of them spoke of it in the days that followed. She never told Marie, or anyone.
That first night, Charlie slept on the sofa downstairs, but by the second, Dara had snuck down and climbed beside him, his body so hot on her skin and eager for forgiveness. Her hands gathering him hungrily, she found herself wanting him to forgive her, to forgive them.
Two days later, she and Charlie began making plans to leave, together. It was just too unbearable, all together in the studio, at that house. It was unbearable to pass one another in the hallway, at the bathroom, over the kettle on the kitchen stove. Dara couldn’t look her mother in the eye. Charlie couldn’t sleep or eat, taking long, scalding baths in the claw-foot tub. They had to go. Maybe to Charlie’s mother in England, or Charlie could take that apprenticeship in the Sarasota Ballet.