Bellweather Rhapsody (29 page)

“Have you seen my sister?”

“Have you seen the snow? It’s insane.”

“Did she come back here last night?” Rabbit asks. “How did I get in?”

“I let you in when I came back from the vending machine.” Dan shrugs past him into the bathroom and shuts the door. “I have no idea where your sister is.”

Everyone at Statewide has been called from breakfast into the auditorium—everyone except Jill Faccelli and Alice Hatmaker. If Rabbit was worried when he woke up, he has now reached an absolute zenith of anxiety. He can’t stop blinking. His head swings back and forth, back and forth like a pedestal fan, as he scans the crowd, hoping the doors will open again, praying he’ll pick out Alice’s dark bangs and eyes from the sea of faces.

He should never have let her go back to her room alone last night. Not when there was a killer prowling the hotel, which Rabbit believes now without doubt. Not when Alice was already sad about something she wouldn’t share with him. The first thing Rabbit will do when he sees his sister again, after making sure she’s not hurt, after giving her a hug, is tell her the truth. He’ll find a quiet corner and they’ll sit down and he’ll tell her he’s gay and that will be the end of
that
. That will be the end of lying. The end of pretending, the beginning of being. He’s wasted too much time, he’s wasted
seven years.
He will never forgive himself if, after seven years, he’s one night too late to tell the truth about himself to the one person who matters most.

She does matter the most. He knows it. She was there at the beginning, she’ll be there until the end. Even now, when she’s gone, Rabbit can feel that his sister exists. That he will see her again.

He jiggles his leg so violently against the seat in front of him that the sitter turns around and tells him to freaking cut it out.

The decibel level in the auditorium is incredible. Rabbit overhears worries about the snowstorm (are they going to be able to leave tomorrow?) and the concerts (what maniac parent would drive into a state-declared winter weather disaster area to hear them play?), gossip about who made out with whom the previous night (are you
kidding?
) and, more than any other topic, about the Bellweather Bride’s fifteen-year thirst for souls.

“I’m telling you, it’s the Bride. She’s a ghost. She’s walking these halls and she killed that girl, and now we’re all snowbound here with a ghost who’s pissed she got shot on her wedding day,” says the girl sitting next to him. Rabbit has never met her, doesn’t even know her name. She shivers theatrically. “
Jeez
. Freaky. You believe in ghosts, right?”

“No,” lies Rabbit.

“Whatever,” she says. “Where’s the fun in not believing in ghosts?”

“Ghosts don’t kill people.”

“How do you know?”

“She didn’t get shot,” Rabbit says. “She hanged herself.” He feels sick just saying the words. He can’t say them without feeling his own throat tighten, crushed, squeezed by rough rope.

“What?”

“You said she was pissed she got shot on her wedding day. She didn’t get shot. She shot her husband, then she hung herself.”

“Look who knows everything.”

Rabbit blinks. “I’m sitting somewhere else,” he says.

He finds an empty seat in the front row, which is a better vantage point to scour the crowd for Alice, to confirm that she’s nowhere to be seen. He sees everything else: kids staring at the ceiling, gray foam headphones over their ears, wires snaking to unseen Discmans. A nervous girl with a violin in her lap, running her fingers up and down the strings the way a little kid strokes a blankie. Girls in shapeless sweatshirts, curly hair swept back with mismatched plaid scrunchies. Statewide hookups—he can spot them a mile away—couples with too-red cheeks, faces smashed together by the urgent knowledge that this, and only this, weekend will be the entire span of their great love. Bleary-eyed teachers gripping disposable cups of coffee, so exhausted by the prospect of being trapped in one building with several hundred teenagers that they can barely look at each other, let alone discuss it.

Rabbit also sees things he can’t possibly see, flashes out of the corner of his eye: Pete the Tenor, sitting a few rows back, smoke wisping up from another joint. He sees his mother and father, toward the rear on the left. His mother is knitting one of the green and red slipper booties that have, without fail, shown up in his stocking every Christmas morning, and his father, like Rabbit, peers around furtively. Is he searching for Alice too? How does he know? How does he know Rabbit failed to look after his big (by three minutes and twelve seconds) sister?

They’re ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry, queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn’t the slightest interest in assuming he’ll ever understand or be able to solve. They’re simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility—a freak twister or a wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world—so ghosts, spirits, aliens, and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There’s a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable.

Rabbit has a much, much harder time placing his faith in other people. With the unknown world, there’s nonetheless a form, a shape, an internal consistency. With other people, there’s an illusion of expectation; there are rules of decency, of kindness, yet you still never know what you’re going to get. Whom you can trust. Who’s a nice guy coming on to you, and who’s a nice guy coming on to you to mess with your head.

Which is why he finds it impossible to believe in the Bellweather Bride. To accept that the ghost of a suicidal woman would take the life of an innocent girl in the same manner as she’d taken her own—it didn’t make sense. The generalities of belief are, of course, always easier to swallow than the specifics, but it’s more than that. It didn’t make
sense
for a suicide to return as a murderer—well, she’d killed her husband, but she
shot,
not hanged, him. Rabbit now believes that there is a real live
human
murderer on the loose, stuck with all of Statewide, bound together by snow. The Bellweather Bride is real, but she isn’t a ghost. He might have met her in the elevator yesterday. She might be named Minnie.

“Everyone—please, everyone—your attention, please.”

No one gives the woman in front of the stage any notice. Rabbit recoils when he recognizes Dr. Viola Fabian. Dangerous Viola Fabian; he’s more than happy to take Fisher Brodie’s word on the subject. He can see the tendons in her neck tensing from twenty feet away.

“—your attention—” Dr. Fabian clears her throat. “HEY.” She sucks in a breath.

The look in her eyes makes Rabbit’s chest freeze.

“SHUT UP!” she shouts.

The auditorium stills.

“Thank you,” she says mildly. “First of all, I would like to extend the sincere apologies of the Association for School Music to all of you, students, musicians, educators, and so on. For the first time in the history of the festival we have decided to cancel Statewide. Yes—” She holds her hands up over the immediate murmuring. “Yes, even though the conference is already half over. The . . . severity of this storm took us all by surprise, and now it’s simply too dangerous for travel to or from the hotel. We will not be holding our concert for the public tomorrow. You will, however, all follow the schedule as planned, including the performances, and you are welcome to attend those performances in which you are not playing. We hope the roads will be clear enough to send you home in the evening. If the snow stops sometime soon, that is.”

The auditorium has an air of mutiny, made righteous with disappointment. It buzzes and hums. Someone boos from the back. He catches words:
Stupid. Are you kidding? Fucking lame. Why me? Why
my
senior year?

“This is bullshit!” An anonymous girl’s voice rises above the din. “Statewide sucks!”

“Oh, grow up,” Dr. Fabian says. “It’s time to tell you a hard, uncomfortable truth that your parents, your guidance counselors, your big brothers and sisters, the movies, television, and the entire world is keeping from you.” She clears her throat and the disgruntled buzzing quiets. “You.” She points into the crowd, at no one, at everyone. “You’re not stars. You’re more talented than some, true, but you’re not
that
good. One less concert makes no difference to ninety-nine percent of you. Who did you think was going to be in the audience, two hundred talent scouts? How about two hundred mommies and daddies.” She smiles. “Your musical ‘skills’—in the real world, you will have to give them up. If you don’t want to starve or prostitute yourself,
you will give them up
. If you ever truly loved them, you’ll carry a hole in your heart, a little hole you’ll never be sure how to fill. The process of growing up is accepting that
this is life
in America. Your dreams are already over, already being lived by other people. If you don’t grow up, if you don’t accept this, your time on the planet will be a long, painful, dissonant drudge—living paycheck to paycheck, taking odd jobs to support your music, your dreams, your silly ambitions—until you die.”

Rabbit looks to his right and left. No one is reacting; no one knows
how
to react. He doesn’t know whether to hide under his seat or throw up.

“Don’t listen to her!”

All heads whip around and Rabbit sees Mrs. Wilson—Mrs. Natalie Wilson!—standing tall, straddling the seats with one foot planted on a cushion in each row, and he laughs when he realizes Fisher Brodie is sitting beside her, his arm wrapped around her leg for balance. It’s the first time he’s seen her since Thursday, and those missing two days have been good to her: her hair hangs loosely in curly red waves and she’s smiling, gleaming with flint in her eyes. She points at Dr. Fabian.

“Don’t listen to her. She’s miserable and she’s trying to take us down with her.” Natalie grins. “It doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be like that.
She’ll eat your heart with a smile on her face, so DON’T BELIEVE HER!”

For the first time all year, Rabbit likes his teacher.

Natalie is full of life.
Full,
of life, of heat, burning like a small sun. It wasn’t just the sex, though the sex was good (and good sex always had a way of making her feel that she would never die). It wasn’t just that she’d confessed to a soul who wanted to listen.
I killed a man,
she said.
I killed a boy, my student, twice. Once when I told him he wasn’t any good, and again when I shot him.
Fisher’s eyes grew wide enough for her to see the whites around his irises, but he didn’t speak. He didn’t flat-out deny, as Emmett had, the possibility that there was anything at all for her to feel guilty about.

Fisher opened his arms and held her.

Natalie is light, air and light.

And these
kids
in the auditorium. When she first walked in, Fisher’s cool knuckles brushing lightly against her arm, she felt them all around her, pulsing, purring. They were gorgeously, impossibly young. New. She hasn’t felt anything around young people in years—not hope, not pride, not anger or hatred—not before Ed Hollis, and certainly not after. Now they were coals, hot glowing coals, and Natalie walked through them, over them, across them, and radiated.

Until Viola’s diatribe struck a match across her breastbone.

“Don’t believe her!” she shouts again. She wobbles on the seats and Fisher tightens his grip around her leg. She smiles. She waves and wobbles again. She has to tell them. She has to tell them the truth. “My name is Natalie. I’m a teacher now but I used to be one of you.”

They’re staring at her goggle-eyed. Like any minute she’ll rip off her shirt and run around the room twirling it over her head.

“Viola Fabian was my teacher when I was your age.” Viola is still at the front of the auditorium, frozen, waiting. Natalie stands straighter. “She gave me that same speech, more or less, when I was eighteen years old. I believed her. I believed every word.”

“Mrs. Wilson, please sit down,” says Viola firmly. “This is unnecessary.”

“She’s not completely wrong. That’s the awful part. It’s hard, right? It’s
hard
to have a comfortable life, to be secure, to succeed, whatever that means, when you’re a good musician. It’s hard if you’re a
great
musician.” She catches a blond girl’s gaze and the girl’s eyes dart away, frightened as fish. “But being perfect is not the point. Playing first chair, getting into that conservatory, winning that solo—none of that is the point of playing music.”

“Then what
is
the point?” says a boy’s voice in the back. The auditorium ripples and Natalie smiles.

“Excellent question!” she says. “Maybe the point is that it’s good work. You get better, you learn. If you’re lucky, the point
becomes
that you’re good at it.” She’s dizzy. Hot. It’s warmer up here, eight feet off the ground, that much closer to the auditorium lights. “The point is that it might open a part of you that’s always been closed. The point is you might make yourself heard. You might reach someone. You might find you have a beautiful and terrible—you have a power.” Something is happening to her. Fisher—she feels him standing up beside her, bracing her. “We make music to—to find each other in the dark. And I have to believe the point is that we don’t—we don’t ever stop calling out—”

She sways. Her vision clouded with heat, Natalie sees bright eyes, bright young things, watching her. Hanging on her open mouth. Then she sees Viola, two red cheeks framed with a smeary white halo of skin and hair.

“And this woman.” She blinks. She stabs her thin finger at Viola. “This woman would leave you lost in the dark forever. This woman is—” She tries to swallow. Her throat shudders. “This woman is evil,” she says.

Viola’s eyes open as wide as Natalie has ever seen eyes open. They yawn into twin black pits and Natalie, leaning over, falls in.