Bellweather Rhapsody (28 page)

“Auggie loves pancakes,” Minnie says.

“His name is Auggie?” Alice presses the pad of her thumb over the fork’s tines. Fairly sharp.

Alice tosses the dog a small square of pancake and he snaps it out of midair. For such a friendly-looking creature, his teeth are white and wicked as a wolf’s. She can’t believe she’s doing this. Here she is, brave, stupid Alice, stringing her prime suspect along while she arms herself with forks, acting as if they’re going to form some sort of grand crime-fighting, mystery-solving duo in the hopes that—what? Minnie will slip and incriminate herself? Minnie will crack and murder Alice too?

Alice has no idea what she hopes for anymore. Not for Minnie, not for Jill, not for Rabbit, and least of all for herself. Ever since that stupid field party, when she realized her brother would leave her and she ended up kissing Eric Cole, Alice has been on autopilot. She swims through one day and the next and the next, like a salmon pushing mindlessly upriver, biologically instructed to ignore the current, to look neither left nor right, to press on. But now Alice has reached open water and she has no idea what to do but swim in a small circle.

“What were you doing in my room last night?” Alice asks. This sudden episode of philosophy fills her with questions. “How did you even get in?”

“Picking a lock is surprisingly easy.” Minnie grins. “You’d be surprised.”

“But what were you
doing
there?”

“Sleeping. I have nightmares—that’s why I wake up swinging if you disturb me—and, I don’t know, I was kind of hoping being back there, sleeping, maybe having a nightmare in that room, would cancel everything out. Erase and reboot me. It seemed like the scariest possible thing I could do, trying to fall asleep in
that
room, especially after what happened yesterday.”

“And you did fall asleep.”

“Auggie helped. He snores. It’s soothing. Like one of those noisemaker alarm clocks that let you fall asleep to rainfall or ocean waves or crickets. It’s the most peaceful thing, watching his belly rise and fall. He’ll curl up right here”—Minnie places her hand flat to her side—“like a really big cat. And that’s how we get to sleep.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.” Minnie pops a bite of bacon in her mouth.

“Ten years older than me.”

Minnie shrugs. She reaches for another strip of bacon.

“What did you dream of,” Alice asks, “when you were my age?”

Minnie’s hand stops, hovering over the breakfast tray. She sighs. “I don’t remember. But I’m sure they were all bad.”

Alice has never been a particularly compassionate person. Her drama directors were constantly dinging her for not connecting to a character’s “truth,” whatever the hell that meant. She could belt their songs into next week, but apparently that wasn’t enough to make people care about what happened to a character, wasn’t enough to make people believe a character was real. “Nancy is trapped,” Joe Shipman, who directed the Ruby Falls production of
Oliver!
when Alice was in the tenth grade, told her three nights before dress rehearsal. “She knows she’s trapped—she’s trapped in poverty, but more than that she’s trapped in love with a bad man, a rough man, an evil man who is going to kill her, and she knows it. She knows it and she can’t do anything about it. How does that make you feel?”

Alice, wearing her bright red barmaid’s costume for the first time and more than a little in love with the incredible things it did to her chest, shrugged. “Sad.”

“Listen to the
words
you’re singing.” Joe’s hands always spoke louder than his voice. His two clenched fists shook with suppressed emotion. “Nancy believes this brute needs her, even though she knows he treats her terribly. He’s violent. She’s afraid to show him how much she cares. That isn’t love, but it’s the only love she has. And the way
you
sing it—Alice, you sing it like Nancy thinks being trapped like a rat is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to her. You sing it like it’s ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade.’ If you were trapped like Nancy, how would you feel?”

“Pathetic,” Alice said, running her fingers up and down the corset boning. She remembers Joe Shipman frowning at her and saying that would have to do, that she certainly had talent but wasn’t living up to her potential, and no one other than Joe said a damn thing to her about her supposed inability to portray the gravity of Nancy’s predicament. Further proof that Nancy’s predicament had nothing to do with Alice’s potential.

But it did. It does. It has taken Alice almost two years to see it, but finally she gets it, her mouth full of room service pancakes on a bright Saturday morning, watching the local news, which Minnie has turned on. Everything is about the storm—how many feet of snow fell, how many more are yet to come—and as the anchors drone on and Minnie watches, rapt, cutting dainty pieces of sausage patty for her own breakfast, Alice imagines what it would be like if she were Minnie. If she had witnessed a murder-suicide as a child. If every night she had nightmares so awful she woke from them ready to fight for her life, and the only time she knew peace was while watching her dog sleep. If the only way she could ask for help was to tie a stranger up in a closet.

Alice doesn’t think it’s the stress or the hunger or the fact that she still has to pee. She thinks the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes are evidence of her first truly compassionate experience. She feels fuller, brighter, like she’s been given an extra note on the upper and lower ends of her vocal register. This is what Joe Shipman meant when he said she could never be a great performer if she didn’t learn to empathize: you simply couldn’t understand all the shades, variations, and intricacies of human experience until you felt them for other people.
Through
other people, regardless of whether they were real or made up. And you had to let those feelings stay with you, change you, before you could use them as part of your own paint box.

“I’ll help you,” Alice says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t know how or what we’ll do, but I’ll help you. We’ll do it together.”

Minnie turns from the television. “Really? You mean—are you crying?”

“No,” says Alice, mopping her now runny nose on her sleeve.

“You’re crying.” Minnie, smiling, looks like she might cry too. Auggie props his tiny front paws on Alice’s knee, and when she leans closer, he licks her teary cheeks.

All of the stitches holding Alice’s heart together disintegrate. Whether it’s true compassion or Stockholm syndrome hardly seems to matter.

18

R
ABBIT IS UP,
watching the sun. He can see it on the edge of the horizon, out his bathroom window, casting pale, perfect light. The world glows blue. Nothing has touched it since the snow began falling. Not a dog, not a deer, not a soul with a shovel or a snowblower. The land, blue-white and shimmering, is floating. Rabbit feels himself bouncing on the balls of his feet, as though the hotel has been set adrift on a sea of Marshmallow Fluff.

He isn’t sure why he’s having a religious experience looking at snow this morning. He’s seen a lot of snow in his life. He’s sledded through it, made balls and forts and men with it, shoveled it and brushed it off cars. Snow has dripped down the back of his neck, melting off trees; snow has given him frostbite, trapped against his skin under the wrists of puffy winter coats. Snow is a given, a fact of life. When snow isn’t serving a purpose—providing material for balls, forts, and men, or canceling school—it’s a pain in the ass. Until this snow, this morning. This strange blue and white morning after a boy named Pete came on to him—
a boy named Pete came on to him,
for real, for REAL, Rabbit is remembering something that
has actually happened to him
—is a new morning, a new world with new snow. It belongs to Rabbit. Whatever he may have done, however painfully stupid he may have acted the night before (he’s quite sure, as soon as he turns away from this beauty, he’s going to remember every idiot thing he did and said), Rabbit knows he can start over.

It’s been seven years, but Rabbit remembers this feeling.

Every summer growing up, he took swimming lessons with his sister at the community pool, ostensibly to get out of the house but truthfully because their mother had a morbid fear of her children drowning. She’d never mentioned this fear directly, but Rabbit and Alice had independently come to the same conclusion. It made sense: her own brother David had died at twelve when he hit his head on the underside of a floating dock on Oneida Lake, at the vacation home the twins’ grandfather still owned but never visited. Rabbit and Alice hadn’t been given the full details. Possessing only the barest outlines gave the story a fairy-tale quality, as if it had happened to some other family, in some other, made-up world. (
Once upon a time, there was a boy who drowned.
) Forced swimming lessons every summer vacation were, then, less a paranoid remembrance of their forever-unknown Uncle David and more a boring waste of time.

Until the summer before fourth grade, when Mattie DeLuca showed up poolside. Rabbit, at ten, had never had a real crush. He liked plenty of kids at school, but his social default was always his sister, who adored having a sidekick. There was one girl, Kelly McCallister, who was always leaving notes and trinkets in his desk, who had invited him to her birthday party, in fact—which turned out to be Kelly, Rabbit, and three other girls from school who did nothing but giggle themselves into fits while Kelly and Rabbit spun each other around, blindfolded, to pin the tail on the My Little Pony.

Kelly clearly thought he was her boyfriend after that, though Rabbit didn’t spend any more time with her at school than anyone else, so he didn’t understand how she’d come to that conclusion. He didn’t mind her, not really, and he even tried to kiss her once just to see how it felt, during recess on a cool spring day. They were tucked neatly in the shadows behind the high steps of the gymnasium’s rear entrance, the concrete damp and clammy with dew. The gigglers had seen them disappear and had formed a loose barrier from the rest of the playground—“So we can be alone,” Kelly had whispered to him—and Rabbit thought,
Well, here we go,
and moved in with pursed lips. Kelly hadn’t been expecting it. She made a squeaky noise and pulled away, then closed her eyes and darted her head like a cobra, planting her lips on his with a loud smack. Rabbit assumed it would get better after he hit puberty, though he remembered doubt tugging at his heart as he looked at Kelly, her cheeks coloring with the thrill of it all. His first thought was
I’m sorry
.

And then came Mattie. Mattie DeLuca, with his toothy white grin and his dark eyes, his city-cool attitude, his skinny brown limbs. Rabbit noticed him immediately, backflipping off the side of the pool exactly like he wasn’t supposed to. They were in the same swim group and frequently paired because of their heights. Mattie took to Rabbit right away, saw him as the perfect straight man, which he was, thanks to years of his sister’s grooming. They played pranks all summer long. They stole the lifeguard’s trunks from his locker and taped them to the edge of the tallest diving board like a flag. They filled his whistle with peanut butter. Rabbit distracted their instructors while Mattie unwrapped a Snickers bar and tossed it into the kiddie pool. None of the staff, who had known Rabbit for years, believed him capable of being Mattie’s sidekick, and Rabbit was so madly in love with Mattie DeLuca that he barely noticed he was irritating nice people he’d known practically since birth. Rabbit Hatmaker was a good kid to the very core, but around Mattie,
he just didn’t care.

He didn’t know it was love—that this, not Kelly McCallister’s smacky kisses, was what Rabbit would feel in his heart—until the final week of lessons. A radio was set up poolside while they had free swim. Rabbit was acutely aware that his friendship with Mattie had an expiration date of five days. There was no way he could persuade his parents to drive him in to Syracuse to hang out with Mattie—not the kid who’d famously been a pain in the ass all summer. And there was no way he could persuade Mattie to visit him in Ruby Falls, because who wanted to go out to the sticks? There was no mall, no movie theater, so what the hell would they do? And while he was wondering what they would do together if they were left to their own devices, The Bangles struck.

The radio was tuned to the local pop station and the song reverberating in the openness of the pool was “Eternal Flame,” but Rabbit wouldn’t know the title or the artist for years. He would know it only as the song that revealed to him what he felt for Mattie DeLuca—that it was love, romantic love, the kind they write poems about. The kind Hallmark sells every Valentine’s Day, the kind that makes people do crazy things. His heart was beating; he wanted Mattie to understand. Did he feel the same, or was Rabbit only dreaming? All other sounds diminished, all splashing and echoing voices fell away, and Rabbit heard the words
I don’t want to lose this feeling.

This was him. He loved Mattie. He wanted to touch Mattie and hold him. He felt his heart would crush itself, would collapse with the intensity of everything he wanted. He had been hanging on the edge of the pool, kicking his feet behind him, and he pushed himself under to try to even the pressure. The song was far away but still playing in the world above, and Rabbit didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The pool swallowed both.

Rabbit closes his eyes to that memory and breathes in the cold promise of a new and waiting world. When he opens them, the sun is that much higher, the sky that much lighter. He shuts the window and catches himself in the bathroom mirror, and remembers every idiot thing he did and said the night before.

What is
wrong
with him?

There’s a knock on the door.

“—a minute,” he says. His voice is a crackle. He turns on the faucet and scoops cold water into his filmy mouth. He smoked pot. Lamely. He ran away. And when he got back to his room, he couldn’t get in because he gave his key to Alice—

He opens the door. His roommate, Dan, is on the other side, rubbing his eyes.