Bellweather Rhapsody (40 page)

She sits beside Brodie while Rabbit runs a fresh washcloth under the hot tap in the bathroom.

“Dr. Brodie? Are you asleep?” he asks again.

“Yes.”

“If it’s okay with you, I’m going to clean up your face.” Rabbit crouches on the other side of the bed, opposite his sister, and takes Brodie’s silence as permission. Rabbit thinks of his mother. How she would wrap her hand in a cooled cloth and press it against his hot forehead, his cheeks, his throat. This is kind of like that, only the cloth is beginning to turn pink with blood and he can feel Brodie’s beard prickling his palm, Brodie’s breath tickling his wrist. He traces his fingertips across Fisher’s brow, rubbing softly into his thick eyebrows. Tilts his chin gently to clean beneath his jaw. Alice watches him; he can feel her watching him, and if he betrays a certain tenderness that goes beyond compassion, he doesn’t care. He couldn’t care if he wanted to. He’s beyond that. All that matters is finding his Fisher again beneath this mask.

He rinses the washcloth in the sink, but it’s going to be pink forever.

Fisher is split down the middle. Cleaved. Crushed. His head—his head isn’t his head, it’s a watermelon that’s been worked over with the claw end of a hammer. Every part of him throbs, aches, or burns. His eyelids smart. His fingers pulse, swollen. His throat is raw meat.

But that’s only his body, the bag of blood and bones his mother carried and bore, struggling physically out of a sleep deep as death. His brain starts the critical systems first, all the moving bits and pieces, before it turns to recent memory. And when Fisher, on waking, remembers Natalie, the world stops. All the bodily pain he feels is tamped down by the memory of what happened to Natalie. What
did
happen to Natalie? He stepped in front of her, she pushed him, she was bleeding, unconscious by the time he pulled himself out of the pool—he still smells of chlorine, he reeks, he’s going to be ill—he remembers pounding on her chest, not that he knows how to do that sort of thing, but he’s seen enough movies and it was the only act he was capable of at the time. Beating her heart. She opened her eyes, yes, he remembers that. She opened her eyes and she reached for his face and pulled him down, pulled his face down against her neck. The rest is a bit blurry. He was shouting. They were pulling him away. Then they took
her
away—good, good, she wasn’t dead, at least not then—and the next thing he remembers is speaking with a woman in a uniform, a rather nice woman, a bit thick in the middle but comforting, a voice like warm brandy.

Then: Hatmakers.

Fisher doesn’t have the strength to sit up. The spirit is willing, the flesh dead weight. All he can manage is lifting his head off the pillow. Well, he’s still here. Here in this fucking hotel. He’s wearing the clothes he wore to dinner last night, and someone has thrown a pilly tan blanket, hotel-issue, over his lower half. His shoes are off. He smells maple syrup. Girl Hatmaker is eating pancakes from a tray on her lap as she watches closed-caption television in the corner of the room. She’s wearing a black skirt, black stockings, and a white blouse, because it’s concert day, and as ridiculous, insane, as it sounds, the show must go on.

“’lo,” he croaks.

Girl Hatmaker turns.

“Hello,” she says.

“Time is it?”

“Just past eleven. Do you want some breakfast? We ordered a ton.”

“We?”

“Me and my brother. Rabbit.” She swallows her pancakes. “He left a little while ago.”

“Is he coming back?”

She shakes her head and stands, smoothing out her skirt, and stacks her breakfast tray with the others on the desk. She brings an untouched one to the bed, hooks her fingertip through the hole in the metal cover, and removes it with a flourish, and the sight and the smell of all those eggs, all that bacon, all that sugar and fat and grease, make Fisher’s stomach turn itself inside out.

“Toast?” she says. “We have that too.”

He shakes his head. No food. No food ever again.

“I know it’s a really stupid question,” Girl Hatmaker says, “but how do you feel?”

“Like shit.”

“So you feel how you look,” she says with a small smile.

God bless Hatmakers.

“I have some things to tell you,” she says, tentative now, and Fisher’s innards seize.

“Tell me.”

She bites her lip, pauses, and finally sits calmly beside him, tucking her skirt around her legs. “The police stopped by this morning. You slept right through it. There’s . . . a lot. Are you ready?”

He isn’t. He nods.

“First: Dr. Fabian committed suicide last night.”

“What?”

“She poisoned herself. They found her this morning when the hotel staff tried to tell her about everything else that happened.”

“What?”

“They wouldn’t tell me any more than that. I guess maybe they think she killed her daughter, and then herself, out of remorse. Guilt.”

“Viola doesn’t have a remorseful bone in her body. Didn’t.” He shuts his eyes. How can Viola Fabian, of all people, be dead, and how can anyone think she would kill herself? He has to tell Natalie. He has to tell her Fabian’s dead, the wicked witch is dead, and then he remembers what Natalie told
him
last night while they were walking around the pool. That it was Viola who’d shut her out in the cold. The pieces are in front of him but they won’t fit together.

“Do you think Hastings had anything to do . . .” Alice trails off.

“No,” he says, because he honestly doesn’t.

She seems incredibly relieved to hear this.

“What else is there?” he asks. “You said there was a lot.”

“Okay, second: Mrs. Wilson made it through the night. She woke up this morning.”

He makes a small noise in the back of his throat, a helpless, happy noise.

“She doesn’t want to see you.” Girl Hatmaker blushes and looks away.

“What?”

“She told the police, who told me to tell you.” She still won’t look at him. “That she doesn’t want you to come to the hospital.”

“Those are two different instructions.” Fisher’s head buzzes. Ears ring. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. He died last night, he died and woke up in hell. “Does she not want to see me
at all,
or does she not want me to see her in hospital?”

Girl Hatmaker shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t—the exact words Officer Sheldrake said were ‘She doesn’t want to see him.’ I don’t know how much room for interpretation—”

“The hell do you know?”

She recoils. “I know she’s married. I know she got shot. I know I’d do what she told me.” Girl Hatmaker fumes. “There’s more.”

“Get on with it.”

“It didn’t come from the police, it came from my brother.”

“Old Bunny Boy.” He grits his teeth.

“It’s an invitation, asshole. They found another conductor for the orchestra, and the concert starts at noon. He said he has a surprise for you, a treat. To make you feel better. And FYI, I think he’s kind of in love with you, so if you disappoint him, if you for one second do not give my brother the respect he deserves, you’ll have
me
to answer to. I am the
bad
twin. My selfish guts are my ruling planet. If you cross or hurt someone I love, I will come down on you like a fucking house of bricks. You think
this
is a world of pain?”

The last thing Fisher wants to do in the face of this beautiful young creature, this teenage avenger, is laugh, but he can’t help it. His mouth splits open in a smile and he laughs. Because she’s young. Because she’s right without knowing how right she is. The world is nothing but pain. By the time she’s Fisher’s age, she’ll be used to it.

“Remind me what your name is,” he says.

“Alice,” she says.

“Right, right, Alice and Rabbit. I remember. What did you come here for? I mean
here,
Statewide.”

“Chorus.”

“May I hear? Would you sing for me? Angel of music and all that.” He knows he’s being a prat, but he can’t stop.

“No,” she says. “Take a damn shower.”

The heat and the steam of the shower feel incredible, wonderful, amazing, spectacular, all the adjectives in the world, until suddenly the world is slipping through his brain and he smacks his forehead against the tile. The blow brings him back. He spins the knobs all the way to freezing and then, and only then, is Fisher truly awake for the first time. He plots. He plans. After this concert, he’s going to dig Bonnie out of the snowdrift where she’s waited out the storm. He’s going to ride to the hospital, no matter what condition the roads are in. He’s going to find Natalie’s room (I’m her brother, her mailman, she’s the love of my life) and kneel by her bedside and tell her he meant it, he still wants to run away, with her and only her. He doesn’t care what she’s done. He doesn’t care that she didn’t want him to see her like this. He wishes she had let him take the bullet. He wants to be with her, run with her, and he’ll wait. He’s already waited a lifetime to find her; he’ll wait the rest of his life.

His legs are rubbery. Fisher has to take Alice’s proffered arm and running commentary (you should’ve eaten, even toast would have helped) to make it to the elevator, which is already full of kids in black bottoms and white tops. Some of them are orchestra kids. He recognizes the shape of their violin cases before he recognizes their faces. What have they been told? That he came down with food poisoning? That he had a seizure? They are too afraid to ask him face-to-face.

It’s ten to noon when they enter the auditorium, which is half full of teachers and musicians from the concert band and the chorus. Alice leads him down to empty seats in the front row, and when the kids in the orchestra notice that he’s arrived, they break out in a rumble of orchestral applause, pounding the stage with their feet. They smile at him. Some of them hoot and wave. He doesn’t wave back. He looks straight ahead, at the podium, at the black tuxedo–panted rear end of his replacement. It’s the same guy who’s conducting the concert band—Ralph something. Fisher can’t remember.

The concert begins. They play the Holst. They play well. Then they play the Handel and the Mendelssohn, all the shite he told them to throw away on the first day, and even though Fisher’s mind is on Natalie, on his plan to get to Natalie, he can’t help hearing how good they sound. How alive. Alice keeps shooting him sidelong glances. His face is still, stiller than his heart, which stirs more with each piece, and he knows he’s being a stingy git but he doesn’t care. The music is nice (it’s better than nice, it’s good—it’s true and good), but it isn’t going to help matters. It isn’t going to change anything.

“We have one more piece to play for you today,” says Ralph the replacement, turning to address the crowd from the podium (who does that, how déclassé). “It’s something of an experiment. I can’t say how Debussy would feel about certain liberties taken, but I certainly hope he’d respect our good intentions.”

Debussy?

Ralph whatever lifts his baton.

A bassoon takes flight out of the orchestra. The only sound on the stage, the only sound in the auditorium, is Rabbit, playing the flute solo that Fisher transcribed into tenor clef after the departure of Jill Faccelli. The solo swoops dizzily, sweetly. Fisher never believed he’d hear this. Never thought Rabbit would play it. He’d transcribed
Afternoon of a Faun
for fun, just to kill time, because something about Rabbit on that first day had moved him, and he thought,
Why not, have a go
. The strings dance alongside Rabbit, teasing him, pushing him around a bit. There should be a harpist, but of course there isn’t—this was a lark. This was never supposed to be performed. On flute, the solos are lovely; on bassoon, they’re haunting, lonely, sounds in search of something larger. The effect is so beautiful Fisher’s face gives up and synchs with his heart. Out of the corner of his eye he catches Alice smirking and doesn’t begrudge her a thing.

He sits closer to the edge of his seat.

Faun
is dreamy. Slow and sensual, with loopy flourishes and high held chords and a constant driving insistence that there’s only ever one afternoon, only one now. He told them on that first afternoon, when Jill Faccelli pitched her perfectly timed fit, that it was all about sex. The chase. The climax. Well. Yes, but—but. He covers his mouth with his fingertips and closes his eyes. Fresh green grass. Wind and warmth on the back of his neck. He can’t believe he missed it earlier when Alice said that her brother was in love with him. He’d heard her, but he didn’t piece the information together with the half memory, half dream of Rabbit cleaning the blood off his face last night. This performance is a second expression of that devotion. Fisher opens full eyes. The music slowly unwinds, folding itself up gently in its own arms. There is only ever one afternoon, and it ends. But one afternoon can hold so much beauty and so much love.

26

M
INNIE HANDS SHEILA
her room keys and her credit card. It’s not yet nine
A.M.
For the second time in her life, she’s scurrying out of the Bellweather as fast as her legs will carry her.

“Do you know where he is?” Sheila asks. She sets Minnie’s Visa neatly in the manual card imprinter and rams the shuttle back and forth with the flat of her hand. She doesn’t meet Minnie’s eyes when she returns the card.

“They took him to the hospital.”

“The one in Clinton?”

Minnie nods. At least that’s where they told her they were taking him. Hastings had barely been able to sit upright at the state police station, had been muttering and leaking tears and then shouting about Rome, telling Rome to get the hell away from him, to leave him alone. He needed clinical observation, not a cold cell where he could sleep it off.

Minnie signs the credit slip. Her hand aches. Why the hell does her hand—oh, right. Hastings. Hastings had squeezed her hand all the way to the police station, had let go only when they had him fingerprinted. She flexes her fingers. She makes a fist and considers popping Sheila in the face, but hands her the signed slip instead.

“Thanks, Erm—Ermin. How do you pronounce that?”