Bellweather Rhapsody (12 page)

Natalie has little experience fending off male interest (she’s never been the kind of teacher teenage boys yearn for), but that doesn’t mean she’s lost the ability to tell when she’s being flirted with. The thin man’s interest is particularly obvious—obvious and entitled, as though he has little experience fending off female interest, but not from want of receiving it.

“I’m sure you would,” she says. “They say I’m memorable.”

“That you are. You’re soaked to the skin and reeking of chlorine, for starters. The hell you been up to tonight?”

“I’m mostly dry. Now,” she says. “You should have seen me when I first got out of the pool.”

“Been wondering where the pool was hiding in this great gray beast of a hotel.” He blinks rapidly. “Did you fall in?”

“Voluntarily. I was exploring this great gray beast of a hotel.” She smiles, because she realizes she’s still exploring, that this strange man is an extension of the hotel itself. Maybe that’s what he reminds her of: they are both full of dark corners, odd places, possibly ghosts. “What are
you
up to tonight?”

“You know. Transcribing. Communing with the muse. Keeping dry.” He rubs at his hairline with the eraser end of his pencil. “I’m with Statewide. I presume you can say the same.”

She nods. “District chaperone.”

“Oi,
liar
.”

“Excuse me?” Natalie feels herself tilt.

“That’s a lie,
liar,
” he says gleefully. “You’re a ‘district chaperone’ the same way I’m a ‘conductor.’ Let’s not waste our breath. Who are you
really?
”

She lifts her head and looks at the thin man and feels more awake than she’s felt in ages. She’s been waiting for someone to ask her this question for months, for years, for half her life.

“I was a pianist,” she says. Her throat catches. It’s been so long since she’s thought of herself that way, so long that it’s barely who she is anymore.

“Thought I sensed a kindred.” The thin man eyes her steadily.

“Who are
you
really?” she asks.

He smirks at her. He is so dark and wiry, a nerve stretched taut. So unlike Emmett, her sandy, smiling Redford of a husband. He holds up his right hand and wiggles the stumps of his missing fingers. “I was a pianist too.”

“What happened?”

“Nibbled by a rabid piccolo player.”

“Oi,” Natalie says. “
Liar.
” She holds out her own hands. “Can I—see?”

The thin man pauses. Then he moves to the far left of the piano bench. Natalie accepts the invitation and sits beside him. He shows her what remains of his right hand—a thumb and index finger, a deeply lined palm, and three pink, puckered stumps where his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers ought to have been. He waits until she’s sandwiched his hand between both of hers to wriggle the stumps, and laughs when she laughs.

“Most people run screaming when it comes to life,” he says.

“Can you play at all with this hand?”

He shrugs. “Nothing like I
could,
once.”

She passes his arm around her side and rests his torn right hand on the back of her complete one, her full fingers extending over the keys.

“How about now?” she asks.

She’s surprised him. He tenses for a moment, and then slowly passes his thumb over hers. He whispers close in her ear. “Play when I press your hand, like this. It’s slow and strange, so don’t worry when it sounds wrong. It’s supposed to be odd. It’s supposed to sound like church bells in an asylum, or perhaps what bells would sound like to a man who’s gone mad.”

The fine golden hairs on the back of Natalie’s hand prickle with the chords, which do sound, and not by suggestion alone, like the slow, sad chiming of bells warped by an unquiet mind. But for all the strange dissonance and rhythms, there is a clear, deep longing that builds in urgency and volume until it rings itself out, leaving only a minor echo hanging in the air. She feels the last flash of a desperate light pass between them. She knows it by taste, by feel, by name: it’s a cousin to the fierce sadness that has been quietly devouring her for months. This strange man lost some vital part of himself, and then lost any hope that he might ever get it back. And
that’s
how she knows him.

The auditorium swallows the last of the sound. They sit in silence, breathing, until the thin man jerks his hand from hers as though he’s only just realized he’s burning.

“Who are you,” he whispers, “really?”

Natalie wants nothing more than to answer him truthfully, or, barring that, take him somewhere—to the swimming pool on the roof, where they can drown together in their sad shared electricity. But not tonight. Tonight she can still save him the trouble of knowing everything she is.

“No one,” she says, and walks away.

8

E
VERYTHING IS WRONG.

This is what was supposed to happen: Alice, on the first night of Statewide, was going to put on a cute top and sticky pink lip-gloss, use her eyelash curler, and go to someone’s room for a party that would start as a bunch of cool people just hanging out, nothing major. Alice was going to drink someone else’s cheap beer and flirt with enough boys to forget that Jimmy Kopek used to be her boyfriend. She was going to introduce everyone to her famous roommate, and then laugh with her famous roommate later about everyone she was introduced to. Rabbit was going to be at her side, eyes wide and shy, and Alice would be fun and make people want to know who she was. At some point after midnight, at the peak of the party, the three of them would decide (well, mostly Alice would decide) it was time to leave. There were two more nights to go, Friday and Saturday. Tonight was merely the prologue, the pitch, the promise of things to come.

This is what is actually happening: Alice, on the first night of Statewide, is sitting in her hotel room, in her pink pajamas since nine-thirty, stomach rumbling from not eating enough at that disgusting dinner. Her journal is open on the bed in front of her, but she can’t bring herself to write anything. It would be too embarrassing for her posthumous memoirist to come to this chapter, after all the triumphant foreshadowing, and see
this
Alice Hatmaker—lonely and hungry Alice Hatmaker, her brother at a party that starts as just a bunch of cool people hanging out, nothing major, without her. While her famous roommate is God knows where and didn’t think to invite her along. And the television in her room doesn’t get cable, and the only station it can pick up with its stupid bunny ears is one that’s showing reruns of
Matlock,
and Alice has seen enough movies and played enough lovelorn ladies in musicals to know what it means to be heartbroken, but still. Still.

She never dreamed it would hurt like
this.

She never dreamed that “heartbreak” was a literal description of how it would feel, physically, when your boyfriend said he didn’t want to be your boyfriend anymore. When you were left all alone, abandoned by your
twin
on a night you’d been looking forward to for weeks. Stupid Jimmy. Stupid Rabbit.

Heartbreak had once been a pretty sort of shorthand, a way to say in a single word that one felt sad and regretful, that one didn’t want to talk about it anymore, that one wanted to eat a half gallon of ice cream and wear sweatpants for an entire weekend. But when Jimmy called—called!—and said they were over,
finito,
done forever, Alice felt the two sides of her heart leap from her body in opposite directions, one toward and one away from Jimmy, far away, as far as it could get, so he would never be able to say such things to her again. Her heart tore itself in half, ripping into two jagged hunks of meat straight down the middle, unable to function. Not for loving someone, not even for beating.

Her malfunctioning heart had been one of Jimmy’s reasons for breaking up with her. “I know you don’t love me. I know you can’t,” he had said over the phone. “Because you don’t have a heart.”

If only that were true. She can understand how Jimmy would think that she is actually heart
less,
but Alice does have a heart, and it tugs the wound a little wider every time she remembers her Jimmy in the beginning, how he used to pay attention and tell her jokes and kiss her. The way he’d look at her, smile spreading wider and wider, as she practiced her solos for the spring chorus concert—forever ago, last May.

The other reason was even more ridiculous. “You don’t have any
room,
Alice,” he’d said. “You don’t have any room in your head for anyone or anything that isn’t you. You’re lost in your own wonderland.”

Alice isn’t entirely sure she knows what that means, other than that Jimmy Kopek is the kind of jerk who makes obvious jokes about her name.

She wishes the bag of blood and bones that is her body could turn to fairy dust and feel as light and charmed and perfect as she can imagine herself to be, as she is when she sings. She slaps her journal shut, and sticks and unsticks and sticks and unsticks the Trapper Keeper flap over the top. She is too heartbroken even to cry.

The door opens.

Alice sits up. She’s so happy that someone is here, anyone, that it’s impossible for her to contain her eagerness, and when she realizes it’s Jill Faccelli—of course it’s Jill Faccelli, who else would come back to their room this late at night?—it’s all she can do not to leap at her like a Golden Retriever.

“Hi, Jill!” she says. She sits back on her heels and the bed squeaks. “How are you? How was dinner? I didn’t see you in the banquet hall. I was looking.”

“Dinner was fine. I ate with my mom.”

“Is that what you’re just coming from? From your mom’s room?”

Jill squeezes her eyes shut as if she has a tremendous headache. “Yeah,” she says. “We ate dinner for about twenty minutes and then she yelled at me for three hours. I am the single most ungrateful girl in the world, and I am
going
to rehearsal tomorrow morning, where I will apologize profusely, and I mean
profusely,
to both the
esteemed
conductor Fisher Brodie—do I have any idea who I’ve insulted today with my arrogance?
Do I?—
and to all of my fellow musicians, whose time I have wasted so selfishly.” She kicks off her sneakers. She pulls off her socks, which she wads together in a ball and whips fiercely at the wall. “Then I’m going to stab myself with my own flute and swan-dive into the orchestra pit.”

Jill stands at the foot of her bed and stares it down like a gunslinger. “Like this,” she says. Spreading her arms out wide, she falls listlessly forward, face-first onto the bed. Her shiny dark hair fans out around her head like a pool of black oil.

“You can cry if you want to,” Alice says quietly. “Or I’ll leave. I’ll . . . go in the bathroom and turn on the water if you want some space.” This is actually the exact opposite of what she wants to do. Let Rabbit be famous for tonight, among his cool new friends at Statewide. Jill is the real deal, famous every day of her life, not for a single out-of-character stunt but because she is who she is. Alice wants nothing more than to know this other misery, so much more exotic than her own.

Jill turns her head sideways and looks at Alice. Her eyes are clear. “I don’t feel like crying. I feel like . . . screaming.”

“You can do that too. I don’t care.”

“You want to know the funny thing? I love
Afternoon of a Faun.
I would die to play it.” Alice has no idea what this has to do with anything, but it’s not the time for questions. “I would die to play it, I really would. But I resent—I hate—being told. Being manipulated. The way Brodie sprang it on us, I
hate
that. My mother does that . . . she’s done it my whole life. That’s all she’s ever done. Soon as she realized there was something I could do well—really well, like, phenomenally well, freak-of-nature well—I never had a single choice of my own to make again. God forbid I try to make one anyway.”

Now Jill’s eyes change: they go from clear to too bright, too shiny, but they don’t blink and they don’t move from Alice’s. “She calls it having tea,” Jill says. “‘Put out the teacups, Jill. Plug in the kettle. Get out the spoons and the sugar. Let’s have a cup of tea and chat about everything you’ve ever done wrong, everything you’re not good enough at. Everything you’re ungrateful for, you stupid girl.’”

Alice doesn’t understand. It’s so beyond her own experience as a child, as a daughter and a human, that at first she thinks Jill is joking. But it isn’t a joke. It isn’t a joke at all. Jill blinks once and the brightness disappears from her eyes, as if it were never there.

“Tea is for little old ladies and the Queen of England,” Jill says. “And my mother, when she wants to remind me what a piece of shit I am.”

She should do something. Rush over and take Jill’s hand? Hold her hair back and let her cry it out? She doesn’t have much experience consoling others, real others with real problems not scripted in plays. Jill doesn’t say anything.

“What’s your dad, um,” Alice stammers. “D-do you have a—”

“No,” says Jill. “I’m the immaculate conception.”

“I didn’t mean.” This is going from bad to worse. “I didn’t mean to—”

Jill rolls on her back and stares at the ceiling. “I had a dad for a little while. A stepdad. He adopted me and everything. But he didn’t figure out my mom until it was too late.”

“What happened?”

“They say he killed himself.”

“That’s . . . awful.” Alice’s arms instinctively hug her twisting stomach. “What do you mean ‘
they
say’?”

“You should ask Viola,” Jill says. She exhales.

Alice wants to say she’s sorry but can’t form the words. They’re not enough on their own; they’re laughably not enough.

“Fortunetellers,” she blurts.

“Fortunetellers?”

“Tea is for little old ladies and the Queen of England and fortunetellers. They drink tea to read the leaves. Ever had your fortune told?” Alice pads over to her dresser and reaches into the top drawer for a small packet wrapped in a purple silk scarf. It had once belonged to her grandmother; devout every day of her life, Gram would be scandalized to know her granddaughter kept her deck of tarot cards in the same silk scarf she wore to Sunday services.