*
The Durant School of Dance was an institution. Children, teens came from three counties to take classes with them. They came with sprightly dreams and limber bodies and hard little muscles and hungry, lean bellies and a desire to enter into the fairy tale that is dance to little girls and a few special little boys. They all wanted to participate in the storied Durant tradition set forth by their mother thirty or more years ago. Encore, échappé, échappé, watch those knees. Their mother, her voice subdued yet steely, striding across the floor, guiding everything, mastering everything.
But now it was Dara’s and Marie’s voices—Dara’s low and flinty (Shoulders down, lift that leg, higher, higher . . .) and Marie’s light and lilting, Marie calling out Here comes the Mouse King! to all her five-year-olds and bending her feet and hands into claws, the girls screaming with pleasure . . .
Charlie in the back office listening to parents bemoan their child’s lack of discipline, the exorbitant cost of pointe shoes, the holiday schedule, Charlie nodding patiently as mothers spoke in hushed tones about their own long-ago ballet aspirations, of the mad fantasy of tutus and rosin, satin and tulle, floodlights and beaming faces, leaping endlessly into a lover’s waiting arms.
Everything worked, nothing ever changed.
And yet gradually the Durant School of Dance, decades after opening in a former dry goods store with a drooping ceiling, had become a major success.
“I always knew it could be,” Charlie said.
* * *
*
Which one does your daughter have? Dara or Marie?
They look so much alike, but Dara’s dark to Marie’s fair.
They look so much alike, but Dara has the long swan neck and Marie the long colt legs.
Both carry themselves with such poise. They show our daughters grace and bearing.
They bend and twist our squirmy, pigeon-breasted little girls into lithe and lissome dancers. Our girls walk into the Durant School shrill and strident, with the clatter of phones and the slap of flip-flops, and an hour later, they have been transformed into the strong, sweated stillness of an empress, a czarina, a Durant.
* * *
*
Our daughters love them both, especially Marie.
Marie, because she taught the younger ones. Because she would get down on the floor with them, would fix their loose braids and, when they burst into tears, secretly give them strawberry sugar wafers. After class, she might even teach them how to do that dance like their favorite pop singer if they showed her first on their phones. At day’s end, Dara would peek into Marie’s studio, the pastel crush of wafer crumbs, the abandoned hair ribbons and bent bobby pins, and wonder if Marie understood little girls too well.
Dara followed their mother’s model. In her studio, she stood queen-like, her chin jutting like a wolf’s—that’s how Charlie described it—quick to correct, quick to unravel them, the girls with the lazy extension, the girls pirouetting with bent knees.
Someone had to keep up the tradition of rigor, of firm discipline, and it inevitably fell to Dara. Or suited her best. It was hard to tell the difference.
But, for the most part, to all the little girls, their faces upturned, their matching pink tights and scuffed leather slippers—still more to their parents who crowded the lobby, who steamed up the windows, unwrapping their children from fuzzy, puffy coats and nudging them, gently, into the studio—Dara and Marie were the same, but different.
Dara was cool, but Marie was hot.
Dara was dark, but Marie was light.
Dara and Marie, the same but different.
* * *
*
Every girl wants to be a ballerina . . .”
It was always the photograph that first drew them in. Dark Dara and pale Marie, their heads tilted against each other, matching buns, their feet in relevé. The photograph was the first thing you saw when you walked into the studio lobby, or clicked on the website, or picked up the community circular or the sleek lifestyle magazine and saw the glossy ad in the back.
Charlie had taken the photograph and everyone talked about it.
So striking, everyone would say. E-theeeer-real, some would even venture. The littlest girls, padding in in their ballet pinks, would stare up at the photo mounted in the lobby, fingers in their mouths.
Like fairy princesses.
So Charlie took more photos. For the local paper, which featured them regularly, for their marketing materials as the school grew in size. But the photos were always, fundamentally, the same. Dark Dara and pale Marie, poised, close, touching.
Once, a marketing person offered them a free consultation. After observing them in the studio one summer day, sweating in the corner, wilting on the high stool they’d given him, he spoke to Charlie under his breath for a long time. That was how they ended up with the photo of Dara and Marie at the end of a long day, after dancing together in the quiet studio, their bodies loose, their leotards soaked through.
Charlie shot them collapsed upon each other on the floor, their faces pink with pleasure.
“Move closer,” he said from behind the camera. “Closer still.”
Closer still. Back then, it seemed impossible to be any closer. The three of them, so entwined. Charlie was Dara’s husband, but he was also so much more. Dara, Marie, and Charlie, their days spent together at the studio, their nights in their childhood home. Back then.
After the shoot, looking at images on Charlie’s computer, Dara hesitated, imagining what their mother might say of the photos, their bruises and blisters and blackened toenails hidden, their bodies so smooth and perfect and bare. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“They tell a story,” Charlie said.
“They sell a story,” Marie added, snapping her leotard against her damp skin.
* * *
*
Dancers have short lives, of course. What happened to Charlie—his crushing injuries, his four painful surgeries—never left their minds. His body, still as lean and marble-cut as the day their mother brought him home, was a living reminder of how quickly things could turn, how beautiful things could be all broken inside. One had to plan, to make a trajectory. That was what made Dara and Charlie different from Marie, from their parents.
Marie always seemed ready to bolt, but never for long and never far. How far could one get if one still struggled to remember a bank card pin number, and left gas burners lit wherever she went.
So, when Dara and Charlie did marry—at city hall, he in an open-collar shirt and back brace and she in a tissue-thin slip dress that made her shudder on the front steps—he brought with him a small trust fund from his long-deceased father, to be broken open at last like a platinum piggy bank on his twenty-first birthday. The amount was modest, but they used it to pay off the mortgage for the studio building, drooping ceiling and all. They owned it outright. It was theirs.
We’ll do it together, he said.
And Marie.
Of course, he said. We three. We means three.
* * *
*
It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.
THE HAMMER
Is it time? Those were the words humming in her head that morning.
Their mother’s kitchen clock, its aluminum yellowed with grease, read six forty-five.
She took a breath, long and wheezing, her body tight and heavy from sleep.
Still, Dara couldn’t quite move from her seat, her palms resting on the drop-leaf table, the walnut whorls she’d known since childhood.