Bellweather Rhapsody (24 page)

“Never fails,” Rabbit overhears him say. “Want to get girls dancing? Play the first songs they ever loved.”

“Shameless,” Pete says. “But brilliant.”

Rabbit tracks Pete’s gaze to a short girl with her hands over her head, swinging her head lazily from side to side. She’s a mass of hair, her face completely obscured, all bright blond waves and breasts.

Pete leans over to Rabbit and says, “She was looking over here. I think she was looking at you.”

Rabbit’s entire world slants. He nods vaguely and takes a slug of beer.

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” comes to an end and something else, equally dance-riot-inciting, begins. Alice gives one final head flick, hair swinging, and deflates, exhausted. Defeated. She rubs her eyes. “Have fun,” she tells Rabbit, and disappears into the dancing crowd.

Unlike last night, Rabbit heeds his natural impulse to go after his sister. He catches up to her by the door and taps her shoulder. When she turns, she doesn’t look like herself. She looks like—Rabbit almost laughs, because the first thing he thinks is that she looks like their mother.

“Here’s the, uh.” Rabbit digs into his pocket. “My key, Alice.”

Alice’s fist closes over his room key. She looks up at her brother.

“Be good,” she says. Then she does something she hasn’t done in years. She pops up on her toes to kiss him on the forehead.

She leaves, shutting the door behind her.

She is so clearly, genuinely sad that Rabbit, good Rabbit, decides to follow her back to his room. To ask her. To talk to her.

Pete Moretti appears out of nowhere.

“I like her,” Pete says. “She’s perky.” He raises his eyebrows. “Think next time you might introduce me?”

“I’m. I have to go,” Rabbit says. He reaches for the doorknob.

“Me too. It’s getting way too VH1
Big 80’s
in here for me.” Pete crosses in front and opens the door for him. “Come on, my room’s across the way.”

Rabbit, if he had whiskers, would be twitching like mad. He feels his pulse throb in his temples. The hallway is mostly empty. He’s surprised how well the noise of the party is muffled when the suite doors are shut. You could do anything in these rooms, these old, probably lead-lined rooms—play the drums, have crazy wild animal sex, shoot someone—and not a sound would escape.

Pete opens a door farther down the hall. “You smoke?” he asks. Rabbit shakes his head. “Well, you do now,” says Pete.

His room looks exactly like Rabbit’s. Two brown beds, fusty carpet, an ancient rabbit-eared television, and thick dark drapes. Rabbit’s every molecule is alive. He has no clue what to expect, what happens next. Pete waves him into the bathroom, where he’s already opened a small transom window, and once Rabbit is inside, Pete stuffs several towels in the crack of the door.

“I’ve been dying for this for hours,” Pete says. “These traveling things stress me out. I miss sleeping in my own bed.” Rabbit has seen enough movies to know that what Pete tips out of a metal Band-Aid box is a joint. He sniffs. Smoke makes him sneeze. “But they’re footing the bill, right? Pretty nice of the state to put us up in this shitbox of a hotel just in time for a huge snowstorm.”

This is peer pressure! At long last, Rabbit is experiencing one of those pivotal moments they warned him about in elementary school. He smiles, drunk on the adventure unfolding in this yellowed bathroom, because he is absolutely going to succumb to this particular peer’s pressure. Pete lights the joint and inhales as he continues to talk. “I shouldn’t complain. I mean, what else would I be doing this weekend? Going to a few parties. Smoking. Drinking. Might as well do it here instead of Buffalo for a little variety. If I were in Buffalo, I’d be studying for something or . . . think I have a paper to write. Art history.” A cloud of blue-white smoke floats from between his lips. “You know how funny art history is, Bert? It’s like, here’s a stick man some French caveman drew on a wall. And here’s a urinal some guy signed. Let’s look at pictures in a dark lecture hall until we fall asleep.” He passes the joint to Rabbit, cool as can be, and then kind of wrecks it when he says, “You know what to do?”

“I think so,” Rabbit says. He holds the joint between his dry lips and slowly, gently opens his lungs.

His body contracts. First he coughs, throat scalded. He drops the joint on the bathroom floor and sneezes six times in quick succession, high-pitched, fussy little honks, the likes of which never failed to send his sister into paroxysms of glee.

It has roughly the same effect on Pete. He doubles over, holding his stomach, and slides down the front of the vanity to pick up the smoldering joint. “Are you allergic or something?”

“Smoke. Makes me sneeze.” Rabbit snuffles, mortified. His head feels tight and balloony, but he can’t tell if it’s from the pot or the sneezing or the embarrassment or this guy standing not three feet from him. He is so confused by him. It
feels
as though Pete is interested. It
feels
as though he likes Rabbit. But what was that comment about the blond girl?

“I didn’t notice the girl,” Rabbit says. His brain feels slurry. “I don’t ever notice girls.”

“I did,” says Pete. He inhales again and passes the joint back. “Try again?”

Rabbit tries again. It’s awful, but at least this time he doesn’t sneeze. When he exhales his eyes fill with tears and his shoulders loosen. “I thought you,” he swallows. His tongue is wrong. “I thought you noticed me.”

Pete doesn’t respond for a while. They both lean against the vanity.

“I did,” says Pete.

“You noticed me or you noticed the girl?” Rabbit rubs his nose.

“Can’t I notice you both?” Pete turns, smiling. Rabbit feels the smile but doesn’t return it. A strange, sharp sensation is beginning to squeeze his body. It’s not the worst feeling in the world, but it isn’t exactly pleasant either. He sits up straighter. Blinks. Sniffs. Suddenly his hands and arms and feet need to move. Have to move. Must move.

“Where’s your roommate? Do you have a roommate?” Rabbit asks. “Is he coming back? When are you expecting him? Did you hear that?”

Pete sighs. Twin plumes cascade from his nostrils.

“Should’ve known,” he mutters.

“No, really,” says Rabbit. He stands up. The bathroom is too small. He paces anyway. “You don’t hear that? I hear—it’s like a little shuffle. Like
shuuuuurrrrrrfffff
. Like the sound a door makes when it passes over carpet. You really don’t hear that?” Shit shit shit shit shit. This is not what Rabbit wants to be doing, this is not what Rabbit wants to be feeling, but this
is
what he’s doing and feeling, and Pete thinks he’s a paranoid moron and maybe he is, maybe he’s a moron but maybe he’s right, maybe Pete’s roommate is outside the door and will catch them and will wonder what the hell is going on, and if Rabbit has learned anything at all at Statewide, it’s that everyone is watching him. Everyone knows who he is. And there are no such things as secrets.

“I have to go,” he says.

“Okay.” Pete sighs. “So go.”

Rabbit kicks the towels away from the bathroom door. Pete’s roommate is not outside in the room, they’re alone. “See?” says Pete, suddenly close. “We. Are. Alone.” His arms wrap around Rabbit from behind, around his middle, and it feels—Rabbit smiles—it feels good. “Unless you want to call your sister,” Pete says, and Rabbit yanks himself away as Pete begins to laugh at him. It was probably a joke, it has to be a joke, but Rabbit runs.

The elevator, a funhouse of blinky, twitchy Rabbits reflected in its mirrors, does nothing to ease his paranoia. He’s shaking by the time he gets to his room on the sixth floor. He just wants to be inside, curled into a ball, where he can sleep this shit off and get his brain back together.

“Alice!” he says. “Alice, open up!” He knocks. “Dan?” He knocks again, louder. With both hands. There is no response. Rabbit is terrified, alone and terrified, his heart higher in his chest than it has any anatomical right to be. The only thing he can think to do, the only thing that makes sense, is to sit down in front of his door. To wait right here, on the carpet, and not move, because eventually his roommate or his sister will come back and let him in and right now there is nowhere else he is meant to be.

15

F
ISHER ENTERS THE
hotel bar at twenty past five, grievously in need of a drink and a redhead. There are a handful of people clustered around the high-top tables and the bedraggled plush barstools. They look a little bored, a little lost; they have paunches and tired eyes, and when they talk, they talk with their hands. Music educators, always conducting. The bar itself is old and beautiful, wood burnished by hundreds of thousands of glasses and napkins and elbows. Is she here? She must be; she should be. Where is she?

Viola is at his side before he can blink.

“Fisher,” she says. Her grin is tight. “I’m so sorry you got involved in my daughter’s ridiculous bullshit. Let me make it up to you.” Her fingers press into his forearm as she leans close. “I want to introduce you to someone I’m certain you’ll enjoy.”

It’s her. It’s his redhead, his new Unavailable, suddenly in front of him on a seat at the bar, hunched over a double old-fashioned that she’s drained of everything but ice.

“Natalie,” Viola says, and Fisher’s heart pings at the revelation of her name. “I’d like you to meet Fisher Brodie. Old friend of mine.”

Fisher feels his face smile. He hears her voice, sees her lips part and close again over the word “hello.” He puts his insubstantial right hand into hers and squeezes instead of shakes. “Lovely,” he says, leaning in. “
Natalie.
How do you two—?”

“Natalie is a former student of mine. One of my first protégées.” Viola smiles and places a hand on Natalie’s back. It isn’t his imagination that Natalie’s spine jerks up straighter. “Fisher and I have been meeting on and off for years at things like these. Concerts. Conferences. Festivals.”

Fisher’s awareness may have been compromised by the abruptness of this unexpected pairing, but still, he notices that the room has quieted. He can hear Viola too clearly. People are listening to catch what she says. Viola must notice it too, because she drops her voice and clears her throat.

“Excuse me for a moment.” She turns to address the now silent crowd of adult conference attendees. “Everyone, may I have your attention?” Even from the back, Viola is commanding. Her shoulders say
Listen to me, I am talking
. “I’m sure many of you have heard the rumors, the spooky stories making their way around the hotel today. I cannot stress enough the importance of getting the facts straight. If any of your students speak of this to you, please tell them the truth. My daughter, Jill Faccelli, played a prank on me last night. Just a prank.”

This information has an immediate and puzzling effect on Natalie. She stiffens, eyes widening. Fisher stands beside her at the bar and she presses against him for balance.

Viola laughs low. “She’s a bit of a handful. Not unlike her mother. Now enjoy your cocktails. I’ll be coming through the crowd!” She turns back to Natalie and Fisher. “Have dinner with me?” she says. “I’d love to catch up with you both.”

As soon as Viola has drawn safely away to speak with other people, Fisher leans close to Natalie’s ear. “How do you really know her?”

“Like she said, she was my teacher,” Natalie says. “How do
you
know her?”

“Casually,” Fisher says, shrugging his shoulders.

“So you’ve slept with her.”

Fisher smiles. “I think she’s a sociopath, you know. A real, honest-to-God, clinical sociopath. Look how she works the room. Charming. Magnetic. You pay attention to her. You can’t
not
pay attention to her. Though she’d just as soon brain you with a shovel as shake your hand.” He shrugs again. “Or so I’ve heard. And she was your
teacher,
you say? What was it she taught you?”

Natalie looks into her empty drink. “That I’m not any good,” she says.

“At what, darts? Skittles? Playing the washtub?”

“Fisher Brodie.” God, but Fisher loves the sound of his name on her tongue. She rolls the
r
in Brodie. “What do you know about her daughter? Anything?”

Fisher sits on the stool beside her. “Flautist. First chair, orchestra. My orchestra, that’s what I’m here conducting. She made a fuss yesterday, and today she didn’t show. Supposed to have killed herself. Hanged.” He points up. “From the ceiling.”

“That’s a hell of a prank.”

“Viola’s a hell of a woman to have for a mother.”

“Or a lover. What did
you
learn from her?” Their hips are touching, one stool next to the other. He leans into her and Natalie presses back.

“To sleep with one eye open,” he says.

“Valuable.” Natalie finishes her drink. “Still, the world would be a better place without her.” Her voice catches.

“Let’s not talk about Viola Fabian,” says Fisher. “If we eat dinner with her, we’ll be talking about nothing but. Let’s talk about you, Natalie.”

“You never told me what happened to your hand.”

“Oh, it’s not that thrilling a tale,” he says.

“Why don’t I believe you?” She leans closer. “Let’s have another look.”

Fisher holds up his right hand, thumb and index finger splayed. He turns it in midair so she can examine each side, and spreads the left to compare the two. His hands are steady, fingers slender, palms soft and lined. The backs are lightly freckled. The nails are neat, even tiles, and the tips are round and pink. He keeps his hands as trim and tidy as he can, considering they are a constant reminder of what he’s lost, and that they are just so damned ugly.

She examines them, her fingertips cool and dry against his skin. She turns them over. Bends them back and forth at the wrists, straightens and extends one finger at a time. Then she takes both his hands and presses them against her own, palm to palm. She threads her fingers between his, wrapping them over the top of his stumps, and squeezes.

“Beautiful,” she says.

Fisher exhales slowly and Natalie smiles.

They talk of nothing but Viola Fabian at dinner. What Viola’s been doing with her life. The jobs she’s had, the concerts she’s played, the prizes she’s won, and the people she’s met. She never once mentions her daughter, and everyone else at the table—besides Natalie and Fisher, there’s an assortment of mousy teachers and turtley conductors from around the state—is too engrossed in her life story (or far too timid) to broach the subject. If Natalie weren’t there, Fisher would press the point. But Natalie
is
there, and for the bulk of the meal, Fisher is delightfully distracted by the presence of Natalie’s foot exploring his own like a nosy terrier.