Bellweather Rhapsody (26 page)

The snow comes quietly in the night and covers everything.

It starts around three in the morning. Hastings is awake, but he isn’t looking out the window; he doesn’t see the storm rushing across the fields of Clinton’s Kill, a wall of tiny points of white light. He doesn’t see the wind pressing the high grass flat or bending the low branches on the trees. Snow falls in thick, silent sheets in the darkness, transforming the cars and hedges into earthbound clouds, frosting the houses like Victorian cookies.

Hastings, unable to sleep for Rome Cohen’s snoring, feels the storm in his knees and ankles and wrists as surely as if it were snowing in his room. So many terrible storms have battered the Bellweather, but she has borne them all with style. No one claims to remember how the hotel got its name—for all Hastings knows, it was a spelling error on the original deed—but he has always considered it a good omen. The worse the weather, the more inviting the glowing lights of the tower. The higher the drifts, the more they covered the patches on the foundation. Snow was kind to the Bellweather. It blurred her edges and made her beautiful.

Imagining how his hotel will sparkle in the morning, Hastings almost forgets to worry about the several hundred square feet of glass roof and several hundred souls sleeping beneath it—almost. Then he worries that his only friend in the world is an antisocial nutjob, that the love of his life left him to live on another continent, that there is a murderess and a (possibly) dead daughter somewhere in the hotel. In
his
hotel.

Hastings’s thoughts bury him until he can no longer hear his bunkmate’s snoring. Hands curled around old brown blankets, he joins Rome’s one-man chorus.

16

W
ELL, THIS WAS
unexpected.

Natalie tucks the covers between her shoulder and chin; she is warm and snugged tight. The other side of the bed looks impossibly empty without Fisher. She can hear him splashing at the bathroom sink and wishes he would hurry up and finish his story. He has been telling her, finally, how he lost his fingers. So far the tale has involved several German barmaids, a game of Russian roulette, and a dragon. She suspects he has taken some liberties.

Sex, now
that
she had expected. Natalie knew sex was where they were heading when he kissed her in the dark outside the hotel. No, earlier. When she climbed on the back of his bike. At the time she thought,
Of course he drives a motorcycle. With one and a half hands. In a blizzard.
Wasn’t the man you have an affair with required to be the opposite of your spouse in every respect? Emmett drove a Toyota Camry with antilock brakes. Was short and a little stocky. Taught science. Had ten fingers.

Since the break-in, sex had become something Natalie knew she ought to do but could never truly commit to, like going to the gym regularly, eating fiber, reading the classics she’d missed in school. She thought she’d simply lost her taste for it, the way she’d lost her taste for everything else. But tonight, here in this hotel, here with Fisher, she felt differently. (Ha ha, of course she felt differently; Fisher wasn’t her husband.) Sex might have been a foregone conclusion, but it was suddenly
interesting
to her again.

Natalie hadn’t been able to let go of his tattered hand as they crossed the quiet lobby. There was a youngish man at the front desk reading a book, and she’d thought of the kid in the gas station. (She can’t believe she held up a convenience store. For Hostess cakes. She is an armed robber, on top of everything.)

In the elevator, she had pressed the button for the sixth floor.

“Are you on the sixth floor too?” she asked Fisher.

“No.”

“What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“I’ve no idea.”

They got off at six.

“Fair warning,” she said, opening her door. “You know I’m armed.”

Fisher practically leapt on her as soon as she shut the door, the latch passing over the strike plate with a cold metal clap. Her first instinct was to laugh at the ferocity of his approach; it was charming, youthful, like something her high school boyfriend would have thought would blow her mind. She stumbled back on the bed hard enough to bounce, and then she did laugh, and something shifted deep inside her. She didn’t know Fisher, not really, not the way she’d known her other lovers, and yet she knew she was safe here with him in the dark. She couldn’t be hurt, not by him.

The sex was fast and desperately fun, and when it was over Fisher fell against her in a jumble of marionette limbs. After a long silence that began to feel more awkward with each exhalation, Natalie cleared her throat.

“Well,” she said, “now that
that’s
out of the way.”

That was hours ago. Hours and hours ago, hours spent talking. Telling each other stories, their own and others’. It was easier to do in the dark, in a strange room that was home to neither of them, where there was nothing to hold but each other’s version of the truth. Her belly is sore from laughing; Natalie has laughed more in the past three hours than she has in eight months. It tires her, it wears her out, she is exhausted but alive with desire. To share. To tell. To confess. He wants to know exactly who she is. He wants to hear her whole story, her entire ugly truth, and she wants to tell him.

That
she never saw coming.

The bathroom door opens in a bright flash. Fisher’s profile burns itself on her retinas for an instant and vanishes as he turns off the light. He climbs into bed and presses his knobby feet against her shins.

“Ice! Ice!” Natalie shrieks and kicks him away. “You are made of ice!”

“Now, where was I? Right. Dead drunk in Germany. Sixteen and angry.” He props himself on his elbow. “And very stupid, because I honestly thought my life was over. All I could imagine for all the years to come was more of the same. More of being herded, poked, and prodded, told what to do. More dancing when instructed to dance. I could barely comprehend what I was doing, let alone what I was
capable
of doing, of becoming, if I had the bloody chance to grow up. I was so tired of everything, and so very drunk and stupid, that I looked down into my third stein of horribly delicious German beer and wanted to smash the world. I thought if I broke my life, it would at least be my choice. It would be my doing. So I started with the man sitting beside me at the bar.”

He holds out his half hand and flexes it.

“I punched him in the ear. Landed well, since he wasn’t expecting it in the least, which made me want to punch him harder, and again, and finally he got tired, picked me up and tossed me over the bar like a twig. Into one of those big mirrors, you know, that they have behind bars, so you can see how sorry you look getting pissed? Shattered. I held out this hand to sort of—I don’t know. Stop myself? Don’t remember much of it, just the feeling of flying and how cold the mirror was when I punched it. After that . . . glass becomes crunchy when you break enough of it. I was sticky. There were sharp little bites all over my arms, my neck. Could have been worse. Could have died, if he’d thrown me harder, if I’d cut my throat, if they hadn’t rushed me to hospital. These two”—he wriggles his middle- and ring-finger stumps—“I dropped on the floor of the bar. A kind German doctor took care of the pinkie.”

Natalie brings Fisher’s hand to her mouth. She kisses his palm and presses it to the side of her face.

“Your turn,” he says, rubbing her cheek with his thumb.

“My turn to what?” she asks, as if she didn’t know.

“Your turn to share, love. See, I’ve been trying to figure what in the world could make a seemingly sane, professional woman of your caliber hold up a shop for a cupcake.”

Natalie blinks. Blue fire flickers up her spine.

“Does it have to do with our mutual friend?”

She blinks again. “In a manner of speaking.”

“So you’re saying there’s a concrete reason. You have a sob story of your own.”

“It’s not a sob story.”

Fisher frowns. “Didn’t mean anything by that.”

“You could say Viola was the beginning. And the end, in a way.”

“Once upon a time,” Fisher says. He turns on his back and spreads his fingers in the air, framing the scene. “There was a brave young peasant girl named Natalie and a wicked queen named Viola.” He looks at her sideways. “Am I close?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Natalie?” Fisher says quietly.

Her throat is full of everything. Everything she never even told Emmett. She tried to. She
tried,
she really did, in the hospital that very night. She had the whole truth all lined up in her mind, and then the first things Emmett said when he saw her weren’t questions—
What happened? Are you okay?
Instead he fed her statements, facts she didn’t have the heart to argue.
What you did was self-defense. That was the bravest thing anyone could have done.
And so she felt worse, sick down to her soul, and silent.

“Viola poisoned me,” she says. She pulls the sheet up to her chin and stares straight ahead. “She took the first thing I loved, the best part of myself, and she crushed it. I’ve never gotten over it. My heart broke and I never figured out how to fix it.” She takes his hand. “This is your last chance, Fisher. You can tell me right now you don’t want to know and I’ll shut up.”

“Don’t you dare,” he says, and in that moment Natalie loves him more than she’s ever loved anyone.

“Last spring.” She licks her lips. “Last spring a man broke into my house. Our house. On a Sunday night, after I’d gone to bed.”

She closed her eyes and smelled, not popcorn or Old Spice or any of the things her husband normally smelled like, but cigarettes—
Emmett was smoking again?—
and she opened her eyes and saw the man. She didn’t know who he was at first, thought dreamily,
Who is this? Do I know this person?
He was young and had a thick reddish beard spotted with acne and red-purple dents under his eyes. He was sitting on the bed with his back to her but had turned around at the sound of movement, his face half lit from the street outside.

Natalie’s first thought was
What an idiot, he’s going through Emmett’s bedside table, all the jewelry is in mine
. Her second thought was
Shit, oh shit,
because she had just remembered that in Emmett’s bedside table, hidden in one of those jokey hollow books, was a revolver, the .38 his father had given him. Because you never knew.

She woke up instantly. She dove across the man’s lap, desperate to beat him to the gun. The man, to his credit, quickly realized the situation was out of his control and rolled off the bed. Natalie threw the hollow book on the floor and wrapped her cold fingers around the gun, and her thumb, thinking for itself, cocked the hammer.

“Get out,” she growled. “Or I will shoot you.”

He looked so young. He could have been one of her students.

He—

“Hollis?” she whispered.

Ed Hollis turned several shades paler than he already was.

Ed Hollis, who graduated two years before—or would have if he hadn’t gotten kicked out in the spring of his senior year. Ed Hollis, a burnout, a loser, the kind of kid who was never in band but whom Natalie knew anyway, because you
always
knew kids like Ed Hollis. The ones who had to start shaving in the seventh grade, who were taller than their teachers, who were in and out of detention, as if it were an actual class, for bringing knives to school.

She officially met Ed Hollis in the band room one day after the final bell, where he was beating the holy hell out of the school’s drum set.

“Hollis!” she shouted at him, out of surprise more than anything else, and he immediately brought his drumsticks down with a clatter. “Ed Hollis, is that your name?”

They had never spoken before. He had bright blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, and looked genuinely shocked at having been caught. Innocent, almost. He passed a nervous tongue over chipped front teeth.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry, I was just . . . drumming.”

“Are you staying after with another teacher? Do you have a permission slip?” Of course he didn’t; he was Hollis. Hollis didn’t ask permission for anything.

He shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, I should have—I should have asked, I know, but. You see, I need to practice. And I can’t practice at home, my ma has to sleep during the day.”

“What are you practicing for?”

“Ryan and Mike and me, we’re starting a band. I’m the drummer.” Ryan Paulson and Mike Lucas, also burnouts, also losers. His tribe. “Would it be okay if I—sort of—practiced after school a few days? I know I should have asked first. I’m sorry.”

How could she refuse him? She was keeping him safe in her band room, off the tough suburban Minneapolis streets; or more like, she was keeping the Minneapolis streets safe from Hollis. “Tuesdays and Thursdays,” she said, and wrote him a permission slip to take the late bus.

All that fall and into the spring, every Tuesday and Thursday, Hollis came to the band room and smashed the shit out of the school’s drum kit and never improved, not one tiny bit. She offered him lessons. He halfheartedly listened and went right back to beating the snare, the toms, the bass into submission. He said they were a punk band, but when she tried to talk to him about the Stooges or the Sex Pistols he met her with a blank stare. The only time he didn’t look blank, in fact, was when he was pounding on the drums; then, and only then, he looked almost content. Controlled. The drums were doing something for Hollis, something real, something he needed, and as obnoxious as it was to listen to it every Tuesday and Thursday, Natalie let him play.

Hollis’s band booked their first gig that spring at an after-prom party. He added Wednesday to his practice rotation and began to talk to Natalie, constantly, incessantly, about what his life was going to be like when he was famous. He’d shout over the drums that he was first going to move to New York, just live in some shithole apartment, and they’d play all night long in shithole clubs until they got discovered, until they got found, and then it would be nothing but beer and girls and money, and more girls.