“You really never knew,” Dara said, cutting her off, “he was married? The contractor. That he was married.”
Marie looked at her, eyes milky and strained.
“No,” she said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Her shoulders dropping, her body leaning back.
“It wouldn’t have mattered at all.”
* * *
*
A half hour passed, the wine draining from its bottle, and Marie, now in one of their mother’s billowy nightgowns, went on the hunt until she found another bottle, even older and the dubious color of cranberry punch, behind the encyclopedia volumes in their father’s den.
Dara never moved at all from her spot at the kitchen table, rooted there.
Dara and Marie, drinking wine and picking at Madame Sylvie’s Christmas cake, given to them every year and every year more pregnant with rum, thick with figs, slithery apricots. They plucked loose the studded fruit, the butter-glossed corners until Dara couldn’t bear Marie’s dirty fingernails and dug out an old bread knife, dull and striped with rust, from the kitchen drawer.
Neither wanted to say it aloud, to even ask it. Was it not an accident? Could Charlie have killed Derek on purpose? Could that have been the plan all along?
“I was so afraid,” Marie started tentatively, “that it was all my fault. That I’d made all this happen myself. That it was me. Like saying Bloody Mary in the mirror three times and then she appears.”
“Who says you didn’t?” Dara snapped. “We don’t know. We don’t know anything yet.”
And Marie looked at Dara, a look of such sadness it nearly shook Dara.
“Sister,” she said. “We do know. We do.”
* * *
*
Marie was staring at the clock.
“What are you going to do,” she whispered, sliding her arms inside the sleeves of the nightgown, French linen and old lace, and now half-ruined already, stippled with wine, its neck stretched. “About Charlie?”
Dara was looking at Charlie’s tea mug, still sitting there from that morning. The ring on the wood. His cluster of prescription bottles, his vitamins, his methocarbamol to relax his muscles, his benzodiazepines to help him sleep, his pentobarbital when the benzodiazepines didn’t work.
Charlie, his delicate body, his broken body. What does it mean to destroy your own body, to grind your bones down to soft powder? Those long-ago days when he was ascendant, before the injuries began. Those two golden years he spent as a “foot soldier” in the corps of that regional ballet company. Those years he spent rehearsing ten hours a day, performing two hundred times a year, the thousands and thousands of times he’d lifted dancers above his head, leapt and landed, on one foot, onto the hardest of floors. He was a good dancer, but he would never be a great one. Their mother admitted that once, to Dara. Then why, she wanted to ask their mother, are you keeping him here so long?
What are you going to do about Charlie?
Charlie. Her Charlie, their Charlie. Somewhere, in between everything they shared every day, their lives so utterly entwined since they were children, he’d become entangled with this woman, this married woman whom he let, over and over again, put her hands on his back, his body.
He’d lied about the referral from Mrs. Bloom. He’d brought the contractor—his lover’s husband—into their lives. He’d seemingly been plotting all along with this woman, this wife.
Maybe it’s a mistake, Charlie had said that first day Derek made his pitch, to always play it safe.
It all unfurled like a mink from a femme fatale’s shoulders in an old film noir. All those tales of a taloned beauty with expensive tastes, her callow lover, the unwitting husband, a staged accident for a big insurance payout. They never ended well.
Suddenly, Dara felt a coldness inside. It was all so tacky, so déclassé, a voice inside said. It was all so cheap. So unbearably sad.
* * *
*
Did you hear that?” Marie said, pulling back the window curtain. Dara took a breath before she rose and looked too.
There it was, a Shamrock taxi pulling up out front of the house, the puff of its silvery exhaust. There he was, Charlie, exiting the car, his head down, then hurrying up the front walk.
For a fleeting second, Dara pondered if he’d ever been injured at all. If she hadn’t been there through the surgeries, through the rehabilitation and the experimental treatments and then the new surgeries, she would have doubted all of it. Everything he’d ever said, or done.
He had never really been one of them, she decided. And, like Marie, he’d left, abandoned her too. He’d left without ever leaving, which was worse.