Good for her, Dara thought. Good.
* * *
*
Everyone was exhausted and they’d dismissed half the cast, Marie ordering a sheaf of pizzas for the rest, the smell of grease and cardboard and little-girl burps everywhere, because the six-and seven-year-old mice still needed to rehearse, which they should have done hours ago when they were still pitched and excited, stroking their acrylic mouse paws and dying to get onstage. Now they looked greasy, bloated, their bellies like pigeon breasts.
Dara slumped in fifth-row center as Marie and Madame Sylvie tried to rouse them, clapping and calling out the steps.
It was funny seeing Marie onstage, her fists sunk in the pockets of their father’s cardigan, her bleached hair the same whiteness as her face, her long, mottled neck. Mottled with brown bruises that lingered past the life of their maker, his thumbprints still on her somehow.
It was funny to see her up there, working, but it also felt natural, right.
Dara’s phone lit up and it was Charlie.
“I should be there,” he said. “I thought I’d feel better after I took the baclofen. I just . . .”
She started to tell him about the news article but somehow she couldn’t, his voice so fragile and eager.
“We’re nearly done,” Dara said, her eyes on the stage as “mice,” their wrists bent for flat paws, scurried under the lights more antically now, the recorded music booming. “Let’s try it with the heads now!” she shouted to the stage.
On the phone, Charlie was still talking.
“But I think I can still get a PT appointment,” Charlie was saying. “A late one. Nine o’clock.”
“Pay the extra,” Dara said. “Helga’s worth it.”
“Follow my voice,” Marie was saying onstage.
The mice were putting on their mouse heads, Marie standing over them, helping them with all the foam and fur. The heat underneath, which Dara still remembered from the years she was a mouse, blind and breathless.
“I miss you,” Charlie said, sounding so far away.
Onstage, all the little girls bobbing against one another, the mouse heads too big for their little bodies. Follow my voice. She remembered what it was like, your big moment and you’re missing everything.
“Me too,” Dara said into the phone, her eyes unaccountably filling. “Bye.”
* * *
*
It was over, everything. For the day. Until tomorrow, the stakes higher, higher every day until after opening night.
The students were packing up wearily, their limbs loose and lifeless. Backstage, Madame Sylvie was nipping at her annual “Nutcracker nog,” a pint tucked in the pocket of her tunic. Parents were arriving, the parking lot glowing with headlights.
The Level IVs carpool had, mysteriously, left without Bailey Bloom.
“It’s okay,” Bailey said. “My mom will text me back eventually.”
“No,” Marie said, sweeping her arm around Bailey, shepherding her through the darting mass of wool and fleece. “I’ll take you, honey. But first, ice cream.”
* * *
*
I never knew Marie drove,” Madame Sylvie said.
“She’s full of surprises,” Dara replied as they watched them disappear inside Marie’s creamsicle of a car.
Marie being so helpful, Marie being a grown-up, responsible. Was this what it took?
“Seat belts!” Dara called out. Then, more softly, “We need our Clara alive. We need both of you alive.”
* * *
*
Back in the lobby, Dara found herself stopping in front of the giant Nutcracker. The one Marie had been so transfixed by that morning.
He was so jolly, the brightly colored uniform, the handlebar mustache hanging over the tidy row of chunky teeth, its hinged jaw, the heavy lever of the mouth.
But her eyes kept landing on that black slash of his eyepatch. She’d never thought about it before, how his eyepatch matched the eyepatch of Drosselmeier, the sinister and seductive godfather who gives the Nutcracker to Clara and sets her on her adventure.
The eyepatch dominant, his other eye was colorless, the pupil swimming in the milky white.
There was something almost familiar about it, and then, the longer she looked, something upsetting. But she couldn’t put a name to it.
Until the picture came to her: of Derek, at the end. The dark pinwheel of Derek’s iris, red swirling from the center, filling his eye. The pupil punctured, the spike of the metal bill holder snug in its center.
“Ms. Durant. At last. We’ve been looking for you.”
Dara turned and saw the detective approaching.