“You women,” Mrs. Bloom said, a grim laugh. “So he could tell my husband? My child? And there were all the things he had me tell our insurance company. All those lies. He warned me they might come after me. I believed him.”
Dara turned, setting her tumbler in the sink. Something cold settling inside her. She wanted to put on all her clothes, even though she was fully dressed.
“He would have taken it all,” Mrs. Bloom said, her voice low, her eyes black rings, like a ballerina taking off her mask. “Even the things I didn’t have to give.”
“But you got out. Eventually.”
“Did I?” she said. “Or did he just find someone else?”
Dara turned from her, reached for a paper towel, wiped her face. All this making her feel ugly. It was like being trapped in Mrs. Bloom’s life, her head. Cashmere and desperation.
“I will never understand,” Dara said. “With you or her. He . . . he’s just . . .”
Mrs. Bloom was watching her, her face so wet, the makeup bubbling off, the mascara blooming, smocking her eyes.
“You think I’m pathetic,” she said, “don’t you? You think we all are. You women.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
“Just you wait,” she said, “until it happens to you.”
* * *
*
They were walking to the door and Mrs. Bloom’s face had changed, had gone pale and slack, a handkerchief in her hand, the slow shuffle of a much older woman.
All Dara wanted was to leave. She had to get out of the sad, big house and its plush conveniences and its cracked tub and its slowly warping floors.
But she had this feeling there was still something here. There was something here and she’d missed it. It had eluded her, a snake tail sliding back in the muck.
Passing through the living room, Dara noticed for the first time the row of jaunty Nutcrackers arrayed across the mantelpiece, every color, different heights. A fur-hatted British solider with a long sword, a hussar with a riding crop, a crowned king with a scepter. But all with the same open mouth, baring two rows of painted teeth.
She thought of Marie, standing before the statue at the theater. The sense that her mind, her thoughts were veiled, remote. That she knew things she would never say. She didn’t have the words to say them.
Dara stopped, turning to Mrs. Bloom.
“Wait,” Dara said, “why did you do it, then? After all this. Why did you recommend him to us?”
“Pardon?”
“To us, as a contractor.”
Mrs. Bloom had a funny look on her face.
“I didn’t,” she said.
“You did. You showed Charlie the pictures. You . . .”
“No. You’re mistaken.” Mrs. Bloom kept looking at her, confused, troubled, her fingers at her brow bone. “I’m sorry.”
Something faint in the back of Dara’s head was slowly getting louder. The slither of that snake tail now emerging from the muck. She looked at her watch. It was nearly nine.
“I have to go,” Dara said. “I have to go now.”
DO YOU NEED ME
In the driveway, the sharp night air a revelation, Dara stood at her car for a minute, two, figuring something out. She smoked a cigarette on Mrs. Bloom’s synthetic green lawn, scattering ash, fingers shaking.
Marie’s car came like the flare of a match on the horizon. Dara let the cigarette fall to the grass, a chemical hiss.
The hiss reminded her of something, the space heater after the fire. How it looked like a lava rock, with its cord scorched, like the fuse of a firecracker.
She’d thought for so long that Marie’s fire was how everything started. How it brought Derek to them. But now it seemed it wasn’t the fire. There was a fire before the fire.
The car pulled up the driveway, Marie’s hands on the steering wheel like little claws pressed together.
“Madame Durant,” Bailey said, jumping from the passenger seat, “we had ice cream, but I only had three bites.”
“And no whipped cream,” Marie said, looking at Dara with a worried expression. Sensing something, seeing something on her face.
“I have to go,” Dara said, moving to her own car. “Get some rest, Bailey. Kiss your mother.”
* * *
*
In the rearview mirror, they watched her drive away, Bailey in her ski jacket, her long legs still in her pink tights, vomit or brown blood streaked up one calf.
Marie shivering beside her in their father’s cardigan, her eyes like great moons.
* * *
*
The glass building by the highway. That’s what Mrs. Bloom had said.