Immediately, they began paperwork, made calls. Tried to find out about passports, licenses. They’d even secretly lugged their mother’s rolling trunk from the basement and begun packing.
Maybe it’s too quick, Charlie said, watching her.
It’s not, Dara insisted. It was like one’s first grand jeté. How students were never ready until suddenly they were and they had to do it right away, or the moment would pass.
We have to go now. We have to.
Three days later, it was their parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary and their car careered into oncoming traffic and they were dead.
The morning after the funeral, Dara unpacked the trunk, Charlie watching. Down the hall, Marie was crying, had been crying for days. She couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat, her body like a broken bird. After, Dara dragged the rolling trunk back down to the basement, where she wouldn’t see it again for more than a decade, when Marie heaved it back up the stairs for her trip around the world.
See, Dara thought, I tried to leave once too, Marie. Long before you. It’s harder than it looks.
UNHEALTHY
Charlie’s back felt hot under her hand when she woke.
She felt a tickle in her throat, a feeling of something. It had hummed in her all night. All those conversations with Charlie, with Marie. Those half-conversations, all the past stirred up again. And now it wouldn’t leave her.
And she kept thinking about that word accident. What it meant, what it contained. They were killed in a car accident. He fell down the stairs in a terrible accident. I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident.
And when she reached out again Charlie’s back was hot, tortured. It felt like putting your hand on a tangle of lighting cables, illuminating everything.
* * *
*
Today was the first on-site rehearsal. Normally, Dara and Marie would focus on the stage, on the performances, while Charlie did everything else. Overseeing the backdrop load-in, meeting with the stage crew, making sure the snack packs arrive on time, corralling the hectic parent volunteers and managing their access to their nervous children.
But there was nothing normal about today, and Charlie could barely move from the bed, his body like a fallen statue, his face taut with pain.
“I don’t know how I could have done it,” he said. “I’ve been careful.”
But Dara knew. Those mad minutes the other night, she and Charlie scurrying around on the third floor, heaving the futon mattress in half, snapping the frame shut, hoisting garbage bags, wiping the place clean of Marie, of the contractor. All while one floor below the contractor’s lifeless body stiffened, his skin turning cold. All while Marie sat in their car, where they’d stowed her, her head resting against the window like a child waiting, waiting forever for her parents to remember she was there.
* * *
*
Lie back,” she said to him now. “Stay home. I’ll take care of it. And Marie . . . Marie will do her best.”
“Not a chance. I’m gonna rally here,” he whispered, even as his body was sinking back, his face contorted in pain. “I just need a few minutes. It’s just, with the cold weather, it . . .”
Slowly, slowly she let her hand drop away.
It would be her and Marie. It would have to be.
* * *
*
I’m gonna be all right today,” Marie said as they walked to their separate cars. “I promise.”
“Okay,” Dara said. “Okay.”
* * *
*
The Ballenger Center—a sleek, featureless lightbox of a building—had undergone its annual transformation. Wrapped in thousands of white lights like lace, dotted with shimmering gumdrops the size of church bells, trimmed with bright candy canes big as coat stands dangling from its roof.
Inside, the theater volunteers had clearly spent hours draping boughs and garlands in every corner. A fleet of the familiar two-story-high Nutcracker banners hung from the ceiling, swaying with each burst of forced heat.
Marie stood in the lobby’s center, in front of a brand-new decoration: a fifteen-foot-high Nutcracker statue of resin and fiberglass, his face a glossy rictus.
Gazing upward, Marie couldn’t take her eyes off it, not even noticing as all the students began tumbling in, tearing off wool hats, chattering softly, reverently, smoothing their hair back into their tight buns.
“Are you ready?” Dara asked, stirring Marie from her reverie.
Her sister turned and looked at her and smiled.
* * *
*
In seconds, the lobby was filled with students, the youngest ones nearly squealing as they moved through the carpeted space.