The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

His body had not been his own most of his life. He’d just as soon place it in a stranger’s hands.

The very things that first draw you to a person will eventually be the very things that drive you away. She’d

If you knew how easy it is. If you knew how little it took. If you knew, the meaner you are, the more they want you. (That she knew.)

First, it felt like a gift. How he needed her and she needed him. But then it also felt like a burden. As he slowly realized she wanted someone to save her.

He became not so much a person as this collection of bad things men do.

Slowly, it came to feel necessary, fated, urgent. The only plan, a rescue.

Two people, tightly twined, can begin to convince themselves of anything. There’s reality and then there’s the shared experience, which feels so much more real.

Two people, needing each other, can come to believe things. Can come to believe wanting something was the same as making it happen. That it wasn’t a choice, in the end, but the right thing to do, the fulfillment of some deeper calling.

The only thought in her head: He has to leave, he has to. The things he was saying, like a stain spreading. In this house, their home.

That body, how precious it was. And how rarely he offered it.

“Sometimes,” Marie said carefully, “you get desperate. Trapped. Sinking. It’s like quicksand in your mouth. You have to do whatever it takes to get out.”

It was like seeing someone who’s been away so very long, their face changed, the shadows heavy now, but in the eyes a flash of something ancient and pure.

There was no private world anymore. The larger world had turned itself inside out, was seeking to infiltrate every smaller, private one. The home, the family. Seeking to pass judgment. To prod and probe at a safe remove.

No one wanted to face the truth. That every family was a hothouse, a swamp. Its own atmosphere, its own rules. Its own laws and gods. There would never be any understanding from the outside. There couldn’t be.

They didn’t ever call anyone. That was not something any of the four of them ever did. It wasn’t what you did. You kept going.

People mostly behave in completely explicable ways. Until they don’t.”

“An ache that was not an ache.

Look, she said, seeing Dara in the mirror. Look. And Dara understanding, somehow, that their mother, like Drosselmeier in the ballet, seemed to be giving him to her. Passing him to her, the most special gift. An ache that was not an ache. And yet now it was.

“But the thing is, how often do you realize something’s a choice when you make it?”

“Sometimes,” Randi said, shrugging, “choices feel a lot like surviving.”

When Dara put her hand on his neck, cool and smooth as ever, and impossibly lovely, it reminded her of the snowy neck of a swan, exquisite and impossible.

She was thinking of that moment in The Nutcracker, the book. The part that made her stomach tighten, that gave her an ache that wasn’t an ache. How the heroine sees a spot of blood on the Nutcracker’s neck and begins rubbing it with her handkerchief until he suddenly grows warm under her touch and begins to move. How she brings him back to life.

But Charlie wasn’t going to move at all and was only cold, colder than ever before. Cold as the radiator below. Cold like marble church steps, Midnight Mass. Cold as a star.

He’d given her so much, after all. More than he had to give. But he’d ruined everything all the same.

Everything happens three times. Three times, the wicked queen tries to kill Snow White. Three times, Christ asks Peter if he loves him. Three times, Rumpelstiltskin spins the wheel.

More snow for The Nutcracker. Always more snow.

Inside, though, she had such clarity. The grieving, complicated as it would be, could come later.

It all came naturally, like smoke ribbons from her mouth. It was true, after a fashion. Nothing was ever simple.

Dara felt something stir in her chest, against her heart. She moved quickly past and heard a sound in her throat that felt like a scream. In the stairwell, in the parking lot, in the car, she tried to let it out, the scream, the cry, the breath. It never came.

The woman’s body twitched suddenly, as if remembering something, and she covered her mouth with a stiff mitten. Dara knew what it was. She’d felt it a dozen times that day already. The body remembering, contorting. He’s gone, he’s gone.

“You build this family. And it’s perfect. It’s everything you wanted. And then something goes wrong. Slowly or all at once. It was good and now it’s so bad, and it’s his fault. Or he started it. All the ripples from his bad behavior.”

“Sometimes, you think you’d do anything to get out, to be free.”

“You’re never free,” Dara said, realizing it as she said it.

When something goes wrong in a family, it takes generations to wipe it out.

“You blame everything on that one person. You think if that one person is gone, everything will be perfect and good.” She slid her sunglasses back on. “But in the end, that person is you.”

It was like a dream in that you could never recall specifics after. You could only recall, dimly, how it felt: like family, like home.

I’m burning. My body is burning.

Dara was listening, sort of, but she was mostly listening for Marie’s breathing, her mask fogging up. It was so soothing, like a metronome, like a promise.

You’ve never seen true longing until you’ve seen a theater of young girls gaze upon the opening moments of The Nutcracker.

In moments, they’ll all be transformed,

In a few minutes, the music would start. Audiences always forgot how well they knew it until it began.

Watching the audience, you can see them tunneling back, the ache of it all. Their hearts opening.

Everyone remembers that feeling, Dara thought. The tortuous waiting of childhood. Waiting for parents, forever, waiting while adults do their adult things. Wanting to understand, the doors always closed. Until the adults finally decide to open them and then there’s no shutting the door again.

The Nutcracker and The Nutcracker grants her everything. Her fantasy takes over the ballet. A dark and sumptuous world where she’s a hero and a queen. Where everything is new and strange and waiting for her. And home and family are now the foreign country and she need never go back.

“We must keep up traditions. They make us who we are.”

The entire time Tchaikovsky was composing The Nutcracker, Madame Sylvie told Dara once, he was mourning his beloved sister Sasha. He reanimated her through Clara. It explained the strange heaviness of the ballet, its grand melancholy, its piercing nostalgia. And the deathlessness of its vision of childhood, of innocence and escape. Our almost unbearable awareness that everything we’re seeing is disappearing even as we watch, fluttering past us as the dancers do, slipping away like smoke.

Dara remembered one parent telling her that prayers from the Russian funeral mass were hidden in its opening bars. We don’t hear it, he told her. But we feel it nonetheless.

The most recent sunbaked postcard came from Greece, which she’d found her way back to, to the beginning of civilization, before history, but not before family.

The gasps of excitement from the audience, the music sweeping over them, all eyes on the girl, the hero, at last.