It happened sometime in the night. That very night, the Nutcracker schedule finalized and the air outside crisp and cutting.
It happened while Dara, unable to sleep, was pacing their mother’s familiar insomniac route from the master bedroom to the sewing room, to their dusty childhood bedroom, its maple bunkbed gleaming from the hall light, their old furnace chugging as the temperature fell.
It happened while Charlie was lost in slumber, the dreamy haze of his sleeping pill, flat on his back, hands folded on his chest like a tragic young prince in his burial state.
Exactly two miles away, all the lights off at the studio except the gooseneck lamp on the third floor where Marie was squatting, it happened.
* * *
*
The fire was a big mouth,” Marie had said on the phone, her voice dizzy with shock. “A big mouth swallowing everything.”
By that point, the firefighters were already there and the sprinkler system spouting old brown water everywhere.
And by the time Dara and Charlie had pulled into the parking lot, there was only smoke left, a great fog from which emerged a baby-faced fireman carrying an old metal space heater, its center mussel-black.
Now, hours later, they stood in the morning mist, the parking lot slowly filling. Charlie’s arm around Dara, Marie shuddering under the Pendleton blanket, all three of them soaked from the fire hoses. Charlie on the phone with the insurance company, some humorless agent named Van who kept asking about candles and flat irons, cigarettes and kitchen grease.
* * *
*
It was the space heater, of course. That ancient contraption their father used to drag from room to room when he’d forgotten the heating bill. The one with the coils that ran so lovely red that you wanted to touch them until you did. Their mother had eventually brought it to the studio, keeping it on the third floor, where she liked to take naps and think. The third floor that Marie had now made her own.
“Isn’t it cold up there?” Charlie had been asking lately, worried as the nights grew cooler, as fall wore on.
But, Dara supposed, Marie would figure something out. She did, of course. Charlie found her one recent morning sleeping in Studio B, shivering in a sleeping bag, and the Pendleton blanket curled with dust.
That evening, he’d brought down the space heater and planted it beside her.
He told her she was being foolish. Dara heard them through the doorway.
“Who’s the fool here,” Marie had replied, taking the space heater under her arm.
There had been a coolness between Charlie and Marie ever since she’d left, a distance. It wasn’t only with Dara. She’s being silly and stubborn, Charlie kept insisting. She should just come home.
* * *
*
Marie claimed she didn’t even remember turning the space heater on. She’d been sleeping when she smelled smoke. The curtains had gone up in a glorious flash, ashes catching across her face.
“But not Dad’s blanket,” Dara said, curling her fingers around the Pendleton’s scratchy wool, pulling it off Marie’s shoulders with a hard yank, letting it fall to the ground.
* * *
*
The fire investigators stayed for hours. Marie followed them around the studio, smoking the loose cigarettes she bought from the deli with all the cats on Fourth Street.
“Maybe now is not the time to smoke,” Charlie kept saying under his breath.
* * *
*
The investigators told them they were lucky the firefighters had arrived so quickly, containing the blaze mostly to Studio B. They put little flags and big cones on the floor and up the walls. They took photographs and video. They bagged up the space heater, its coils rattling, now harmless as a child’s toy.
They gave Marie a lecture about the three-feet rule and frayed cords and sparks.
Dara could tell the investigators didn’t like the look of it. Who could?
But Marie merely nodded obediently. Marie, who, their whole childhood, was always knocking over house plants, breaking things, leaving the water running in the claw-foot tub until the ceiling bulged below.
* * *
*
It was so big I was sure they couldn’t stop it,” Marie said later as they surveyed the damage, the floorboards like wet paper.
“If you wanted them to stop it,” Dara asked Marie, “why did you start it?”
“Dara,” Charlie said, surprised, “that’s not what happened.”
But Marie only gazed up at the ceiling sticky with smoke, a shine on her lip like she’d just eaten something very fast, or was about to.
* * *
*
All around them, all day, were swarms of incoming parents and students, even ones without Sunday classes but who’d heard about the fire, or some, recalling the death of the original Madame Durant and her husband, looking for fresh evidence of some kind of “Durant Curse.”
Oh, no and my god and no one’s safe as they snuck peeks into Studio B, its volcanic core.
“We’ll get everything back to normal as quickly as possible,” Charlie assured them. “We have contractors coming today.”
“But, Madame Durant,” Bailey Bloom said, echoing what was surely a pervasive fear, “what about The Nutcracker? What about Clara?”
“Bailey,” Dara said, loud enough so everyone could hear, “have you ever heard of a year without a Nutcracker?”
“No, Madame Durant,” Bailey said.
“Nothing will change,” Marie added, slinking up to them, her hair smelling like smoke. “Nothing changes here.”
It reminded Dara of something their mother used to say, Ballerinas are girls forever. Nothing ever changes. Ballet is like Eden that way.
ENTER DEREK
He was coming at seven a.m.
There was no time to waste. Despite their assurances to parents, they couldn’t afford to lose one of their three studios, not during Nutcracker season. Something had to be done to Studio B, streaked black, its floorboards like a soaked sponge.
He was coming at seven, Dara and Charlie arriving early and opening all the windows, the smell of the fire and the fresh mold mingling with the usual smells of sweat and adolescence, of feet and urine and funk.
They’d already had appointments with two other contractors, one of whom was ninety minutes late before staying for ten minutes only to jot down a series of astonishing figures on a Post-it and slap it in Charlie’s hand. The other never showed at all, then requested they send him photos of the damage first, making some joke about them needing more space for tutus.
“Third time’s a charm, right?” Charlie said nervously, lighting a cigarette in the back office, waving away the telltale smoke.
He was coming, the contractor was on his way. Derek something. Someone recommended him. Dara couldn’t remember at first, but wasn’t it Mrs. Bloom? Bailey’s mother, more vested than any other parent, given her daughter was this year’s Clara and thus was everything.
“She said he’s the only honest contractor she’s ever worked with,” Charlie had said. “Which probably means just honest enough.”
All they wanted was someone to repair the blackened floor, to ferret out any mold, to get rid of the soot and the ash that burned in their throats constantly, but first to deliver a fair estimate to their insurance company, to their claims adjuster, a humorless woman named Bambi, who was immune to any charms.
“Mrs. Bloom said he can do anything,” Charlie said. “She was extravagant in her praise.”
Dara thought about Mrs. Bloom, her crested blazers, her impeccably manicured nails, perfect half-moons, her bountiful donations to the annual Nutcracker fund, the care taken over her daughter Bailey’s immaculate bun, never a hair loose, not even a slim tendril.
She thought, He must be good.
* * *
*
Do I have to be there?” Marie asked, calling down the spiral staircase from the third floor. “I don’t think I need to be there.”
Charlie made a face to Dara, a face that said, Maybe she doesn’t have to . . .
“You have to be there,” Dara said, standing at the foot of the stairs, Marie’s face hovering above. “Because you nearly burned us all down.”
* * *