Bellweather Rhapsody (32 page)

In truth, he hadn’t been lying; before today, before he was in love, Fisher hadn’t given two shits for that movement of
The Planets.
It was all happy bouncy violins and syncopated brass and big swells of sound and chirpy little woodwinds, and it was enough to permanently put you off your lunch. But today he’s in love. He finds he has more patience and goodwill than he knows what to do with.

“Mars,” he says, “brings war. Venus, according to Holst, brings peace. And Jupiter? Jupiter brings jollity.” He clears his throat. “Lah-de-fuckin’-dah Jupiter. Aren’t we adorable.”

He catches Rabbit’s eye. He feels very protective of his Bunny Boy, and in a sudden and unexpected blush, eager for his approval. His sanction. Hatmaker’s nerve—his resistance to Brodie’s attempts to railroad him in that first rehearsal—was the first delight of this weekend, this increasingly astonishing weekend, and if Fisher were superstitious, he would feel he owed the boy a tithe. A sacrifice in grateful recognition of having reaped such fortune. He hardly ever felt Scottish—though Fisher’s ancestors may have come from just outside Glasgow, his personal homelands were the antiseptically welcoming Hiltons and Marriotts of the world—but perhaps there was a drop of old pagan blood in his heart after all.

Rabbit, who’s been working his double reed around in his mouth, moistening it, neatly affixes it to the end of his bocal and meets Fisher’s gaze expectantly.

“Let’s be jolly,” Fisher tells them. He raises his hands and they’re off. It’s every bit as obnoxious as he remembers. Rising and falling eighths in the trombones, the theme scampering like a drunken leprechaun from violins to winds to brass and then, like an overly obvious joke, a pompously grand countertheme rising from the horns. Fisher has always hated clowns. From childhood, he’d found them smug and unfunny, and it makes perfect sense that he’s always disliked this movement, because “Jupiter” is, essentially, the soundtrack to a massive clown orgy.
Oh ho-ho,
say the violins,
aren’t you a naughty jester!
What,
chirp the clarinets,
you want to put that pie
where? Despite his candy-floss heart and head full of Natalie, the music begins to grate, and he’s thankful when the flutes stumble over their own twee feet. They’ve never recovered from the loss of Jill Faccelli.

Fisher calls a halt.

“Egh,” he says. “I’ve got clown all over me. Flutes, you’ve got to—what’s the word. You’ve got to be disgusting. Revoltingly cute. You should be pretty good at that, being flutes. From the beginning.”

After the flutes, Fisher rehearses each section of the orchestra in turn. When he brings them all together again it’s almost flawless, wound tight as a music box, and he feels it pulling the edges of his lips back in a manic grin as it rolls cheerily along. Yet he’s unprepared when the first third of the piece quiets and the middle section begins.

He knew this, the
andante maestoso,
was coming. He has conducted
The Planets
several times before, after all. Fisher is a relatively sloppy conductor, technically speaking, but he isn’t entirely unprofessional; he’d studied the scores in the weeks leading up to Statewide. He knows that “Jupiter” is divided into three sections—the first and third are quick and cheerful,
allegro giocoso,
the essence of jollity (which Fisher finds hard to believe is actually a word). The middle is not silly. The middle is not syncopated. After some leftover tootling in the winds, the middle begins with strings moving together as one sonorous beast, slowly, majestically. The theme is restated, picking up winds and brass and percussion. It soars higher and higher until all the orchestra is reaching the same climactic phrase, released from gravity for only a moment, and gently falling back to earth.

It is a hymn, a prayer.

It’s the sound of several dozen souls singing the same song, and Fisher isn’t leading them. Fisher is one of them, part of them, his skinny arms swooping of their own accord. The middle doesn’t end so much as pause thoughtfully; more ridiculous merry bullshit is coming, but this feeling, this true joy, is always there. The winds make a halfhearted attempt to leap into the final clownish act, but no one is ready to move on quite yet. Fisher looks out at the orchestra, at his Bunny Boy, whose eyes are peaceful slits. At the bright-eyed blonde resting her cheek on her violin, breathing through her open mouth. Third-chair trumpet, who never looks forward, not when he can help it, is looking straight at Fisher and smiling. This has never happened before, not in any group Fisher has ever played in or conducted, this true synchronicity. They all felt this. Together. Music passed through them all and made them different.

And Fisher is transformed. He is things he has never been before: in love. Part of this orchestra, the way a nose is part of a face. The man who dreamed he died in his bed and burned, alone, is comforted. The young idiot who knew exactly what he was destroying when he punched a stranger in a German bar, who remembers how warm and comforting his bloody hand felt, is forgiven. The teenager who stood on a corner in New York and didn’t run. The boy who pulled his Auntie’s teeth from her mouth, who slept in all those hotels, bowed to all those conductors, heard all that applause and felt nothing nothing
nothing
—is alive.

Fisher’s broken heart only needed twenty years of music, one motorcycle, one Natalie, and one student orchestra to mend itself. He’s mad with joyful feeling, with the surety of knowing just what he needs to do. He can remake the world with a single sentence:
Run with me, Natalie
. It rhymes; of course it rhymes, it’s a song. It’s the song of Fisher Brodie’s life, the song he’s waited a lifetime to sing.

Don’t wait,
he wants to tell them.
Don’t wait. Use your hands while you have them.

Instead, he asks, “Who wants to play that again?”

The orchestra is a field of raised hands, gorgeous young wrists and palms and fingers fluttering, rippling like sweet spring grass.

II

“Toss me the bears?” Minnie asks, and Alice flings her a squishy bag of gummies, their bright paws pressed desperately against the cellophane. Unlike Alice, she hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. She hasn’t had the stomach or the heart.

“I am a
bad
detective,” she had muttered to Alice after Hastings blew up at her—Alice, who was still doing her bad-cop/disgruntled-sister act on the other side of the lobby. “I think we broke him.”

“I think he did it.” Alice pushed the elevator call button. “Or maybe he didn’t do it, but he
knows
something. He’s
hiding
something.”

“He called me Mrs. Wilson. Does that mean anything? It
does
.” Alice’s eyes had widened.

“He knows something we don’t.” Alice gnawed on her fingernail. “Hey,” she said, stage-poking Minnie with her elbow, “we make a pretty good team.”

Then why do I feel like such an asshole?
It was a good question Minnie felt would be almost mean to ask: the Robin to her Batman was giddy, pink with the excitement of their little adventure. Were all teenagers so heartless? No—it wasn’t heartlessness, not really. If Alice were heartless, she wouldn’t have agreed to help Minnie. It was more like . . . a willing suspension of disbelief so total, so consuming, it occluded all ethical and moral realities. Minnie frowned as they stepped back into her room.

“Say—say Hastings and Viola Fabian
are
in cahoots. Now we’ve tipped him off. Now he suspects us of knowing the score.”

“Now he suspects
Mrs. Wilson,
you mean.” Alice tossed off a dazzling stage grin. “This is the
best.
This weekend is—” She faltered, her face falling as she remembered everything this weekend was turning out to be. Not heartless after all; melodramatic, ridiculous, and a little selfish, but not heartless.

“Who knows what the hell this weekend is,” Minnie said. “Want to watch some TV about the storm?”

They watched the news, which wasn’t promising—the blizzard had slowed but was predicted to dump at least another foot and a half on them before it ran its course—and then they watched
Days of Our Lives
and
The Bold and the Beautiful,
and all the while Alice talked about her classes and the school musical she was rehearsing and that she’d die to get cast in a soap, not that she didn’t have grander aspirations, but lots of actors got their start there, there wasn’t any shame in it. Minnie started to feel less like an asshole and more like eating a handful of gummy bears.

Friends!
Other people who weren’t your relatives! Who weren’t four-legged and nonverbal! Minnie, before, had always been terrible at making friends. She had little interest in getting to know other people, and when she tried, she had some kind of horrible inverse friend radar. She was guaranteed to say hello to the one person in the room who had no interest whatsoever in saying hello back.

After Auggie, her brother Mike is probably her closest friend, which is sort of pathetic, since she can’t remember the last time they spoke. Once, she would have counted Henry as a friend too, but Henry moved to the West Coast after college and she doubted whether Mike, even, still heard from him. She had, in recent months, considered picking up the phone, calling information in San Francisco, and tracking down the Henry Wattersmiths (how many could there be?), but of course she’d never been brave or stupid enough to actually do it. What would she say?
Hi, Henry. I know you were just nice to me because I was Mike’s kid sister, but the only time I was happy as a teenager was when we were watching scary movies together.

Alice is unlike anyone Minnie has ever met, let alone tried to make friends with. When you look in her eyes they fix and look back instead of darting off to another corner of the room. She opens to people. Minnie folds in like an envelope; Alice erupts like a self-exploding piñata. She’s easy to be with, provided you don’t mind the constant chatter, the non-sequitur song cues, or her total lack of an indoor voice. Maybe this is what it would have been like to have a sister, a sister who wasn’t already grown up, moved out, and married by the time Minnie was ready for all-night candy binges and video marathons, for hand-me-down trashy romance novels with the juicy parts dog-eared at the corners. Minnie crosses her feet at the ankles and leans back on the bed against the pillows, chewing a green gummy bear.

“I have to take Aug for a walk,” Minnie says over the next commercial. “Want to come?”

Taking Auggie for a walk in a massive blizzard amounts to thirty shivering seconds in the shoveled semicircle outside the front doors, just long enough for him to do his business, and for Minnie to note Hastings’s absence from his post and feel both relief and embarrassment. The rest of the walk is a leisurely stroll through the hotel, up and down the tower.

They’re just getting into the elevator to return to the fourth floor when Alice says, “So this may come out of nowhere, but I’ve been thinking. I have to talk to someone about this and you seem like a really neat person, Minnie. I know you think you’re a big fat weirdo”—Alice stammers, which is enough to let Minnie know she didn’t mean to call her fat, not like that—“but you’re not. You’re cool. And you’re older and you’ve dealt with some crazy stuff in your life, and I—the future terrifies me. It scares me so much I’ve been daydreaming about dying young so I don’t have to deal with it. That’s screwed up, right? The only thing I’ve ever worked on, the only thing I love to do is sing and act and be a ham, and if I can’t spend my life doing that, then what the hell was the point of learning to love it? I’m not totally worthless otherwise, I can write an essay and I got a 1440 on my SATs, but it’s the thing I do
best.
It’s the work that I love, and what the hell am I going to be good for if I have to spend my whole life doing something else? What if letting my dream die makes me all bitter and angry and cranky—and if I never get to do and be the thing I love, how will anyone ever see me, or know me, or love
me?
”

The elevator doors close. Minnie doesn’t push any of the buttons and neither does Alice.

“What do you do—you said you work in a library?” Alice flutters. “Do you like it?”

“Mostly it’s shelving, reshelving, checking books in and out, helping people find what they’re looking for. Yeah, I like it fine.”

“Is it the thing you do best?”

“You know,” Minnie says, “I’m kind of the last person in the world to be giving advice about the future, considering I’ve been stuck on pause for so long. But—”

This is what it’s like to have a little sister. A super-talented, super-dramatic little sister.

“I have no idea what I do best. I haven’t figured it out yet. So you’re one step ahead of me. You’re one step ahead of a lot of people, I think. I can tell you to worry about a broken heart when it breaks and not before. And maybe try not to drink so much caffeine.”

“There’s something else too,” Alice says. “I’m a twin. My brother has always been the good twin, the sweet and kind and smart one, and so I’ve always been the bad twin, the loud and funny one who would probably run her own saloon if the Gold Rush were still on, and I am so afraid of who I’ll be when Bert isn’t there to remind me what my better self, my best self, is made of.”

This last sentence falls out so quickly and so softly—Alice barely whispers it—that Minnie almost makes the mistake of asking her to repeat herself. All it takes is one look at Alice to see what this admission has cost her. That’s what this torrential freak-out is about: Alice is horrified at the prospect of losing her grip on the most essential things in her life—her brother, her talent, her self—in the seismic shift known as life after graduation. She can’t imagine who she’ll be on the other side.

Minnie presses the button for four and the car falls. “I don’t mean to laugh,” she says, unable to stop herself from laughing, “but you don’t strike me as the type to peak in high school.”

She opens her arms and Alice falls in. It’s extraordinary to hug a person who desperately needs one, especially when she’s in so desperate need of a hug herself.