Bellweather Rhapsody (11 page)

Bad Rabbit is out.

7

N
ATALIE IS SKEWERED.
Pierced, shish-kebabed. Viola Fabian instructed her to
Get over yourself, Natalie,
and for hours she’s been walking around with a spear through her guts. She’s surprised she didn’t clothesline anyone while she was filling her dinner plate with sad brown food (and come to think of it, the sad brown food is likely making her feel worse). Now she’s lying on her bed, staring at the flaking ceiling and prodding the sore point of entry with her fingertips, wondering if she’s inadvertently toothpicked herself to this mattress, like a slice of tomato in a club sandwich.

Get over yourself,
Natalie
. Get
over
yourself, Natalie. The whole time they were standing in the elevator, Viola knew who she was. But of course she knew: Viola Fabian was omniscient. Is omniscient. Is here in this hotel.

Dr. Danny would think this is fate. He would call this an “opportunity for healing.” Natalie is starting to think it is fucking
hilarious,
that maybe she ought to give more serious thought to the handgun on her nightstand in conjunction with Viola Fabian’s sudden reappearance in her life. Surely this can’t all be a coincidence; it could, in fact, be the universe’s way of suggesting a course of action. She’s already got blood on her hands. What’s a little more?

Is this the first weekend she’s had by herself, alone without Emmett, since the break-in? Natalie cocks her head back into the pillows and jiggles her legs. It
is
. It
is
the first weekend on her own; the first hours, the first day that is totally and completely her own. Since.

She sits up on the edge of the bed, belly and back aching, and surveys her room, anxious, desperate for a detail that might derail her brain. The room is not without its charms. All the furniture is old and heavy, made from dark, knotty wood, and the bedding and curtains are warm and thick, the color of overripe apples. It smells odd, shut-up and unaired. Is she the first person to stay in this room since last year’s Statewide? There’s no way a hotel this enormous, a
resort,
essentially, in a town this remote and depressed, could be fully occupied year-round, at least not since the middle of the century, when she can imagine families coming up from New York to spend their vacations in the country. Her skin prickles and she stands. A tomb. That’s what it reminds her of—a mausoleum. Nicely appointed, but not meant to be lived in so much as lain in, forever.

She’s cold suddenly, cold and shivering, and she has to get up. She has to get out. She pulls on a pair of jeans and a plain black shirt and leaves her crypt, shoving the key in her back pocket and the
Do Not Disturb
hanger on the doorknob. When she was a kid—the kind of kid who went to recitals not unlike this—she and her friends would giggle whenever they passed a
Do Not Disturb–
tagged room, knowing, in their infinite teenage wisdom, that it was code for
Do Not Disturb the Sex We Are Having.
Today her tag is code for
Do Not Disturb My Firearm.
If nothing else, being a grownup meant having the freedom to speak euphemistically.

She walks down the hall. The farther she gets from her room, the more the sharp pain in her middle subsides. As a child she loved to explore, to peer into the deep cupboards and closets at her grandfather’s farmhouse in the Central Valley. There were very few old places—by East Coast standards—in the Bay Area; California looked like it had been built in the twenties and repainted once in the sixties. When she came east as a teenager with her parents to visit her father’s sister in Boston, she had been shocked by how old everything felt, how lived in and wise, marked by the people who came before. The past was layered under the present like sheets of tissue paper, still visible if you focused your attention long enough to see below the surface.

The elevator panel tells her she’s in the main tower of the hotel, that the tower has eleven guest floors, one basement, one lobby, and one rooftop lounge. She presses the top button. The car, after a gut-dipping moment of weightlessness, ascends.

For the second time that day, she’s unprepared for what the parting doors reveal. She’d assumed the lounge would be an abandoned general-use area—an ancient, chugging sauna reeking of chlorine, an assortment of treadmills and stair steppers all turned toward one television, closed captioning scrolling—but it is a jungle. A forest. She allows herself a short befuddled laugh and walks into a giant greenhouse. The ceiling is made of glass panels held in place by a web of cast iron. Around the perimeter are ferns in enormous clay pots and shrubs and bushes, heavy with flowers, planted in low beds sunk into the tile floor. The moon is full (she frowns, knowing the seething mass of hormones on the floors beneath her will be powerless to resist its tidal pull) and illuminates the lounge with cold light. Stars wink across the surface of an enormous round swimming pool in the center of the room, blue-tinted bulbs wobbling just below the surface.

Natalie might as well be standing on that moon. She feels light. She feels—she swallows—she feels almost good. It’s a physical memory, this feeling: a phantom stirred up. Standing in this bizarre and beautiful moonlight, high above the hotel, alone and unknown, she almost remembers how it feels to—

How it feels to be—

She raises her arms and dives headfirst into the pool. The water is icy, sharp, and every part of her shrieks happily. Her clothes are made of lead. She didn’t even take off her shoes. They tug her down but all the rest of her resists. It’s incredible to feel so lifted, so buoyant. She opens first her mouth, strange chemical water rushing over her tongue, and then her eyes. She twists onto her back and looks up at the night sky through the water and the high glass roof. The sensation of coldness is starting to subside. Natalie spreads her arms and legs wide and imagines the calm of flying underwater. Then she kicks her legs together and propels herself along the bottom of the pool, the moon, high above, never leaving her sight.

Viola may have hollowed her out once upon a time, but Natalie didn’t stay that way. Over the years, she’s filled herself with everything she could think of. In college, at a sprawling state university in Indiana, she filled herself with music theory and student teaching, with beer and pizza. Out of school, she filled herself with hard liquor and more pizza. She tried filling herself with work, conducting jazz and blues ensembles in addition to the required concert bands and orchestras, taking on private student lessons as Viola once had, spending almost every waking hour tapping out tempos with the flat of her hand against her knee. She met Emmett at her first real job (he was called in to sub after the regular chemistry teacher set his beard on fire during a classroom demonstration), and she filled herself with marriage. She suggested they go out with other couples; she pressed to host dinner parties. They used their joint savings to go to Paris over summer vacation. They made careful decisions about rugs and sectionals, what movie to see on Saturday night, whose families would host them for which holidays.

It wasn’t enough. She wasn’t full. Natalie was never, ever full.

They moved, first to Chicago, then to Ann Arbor, then to Minneapolis, to one half of the twin cities, because Natalie was restless again and Emmett refused to move to any place with a cost of living higher than anywhere they’d been before. He had family in St. Cloud and suggested Minneapolis, she knew, because he wanted children and wanted to be close to his parents and brothers and sisters when that happened. “When that happened” was how Emmett talked about procreation, as though it were as eventual as their next birthdays, their thinning hair and wrinkling hands, their deaths. Natalie didn’t have the heart to tell him that the act of having a child—of conceiving, carrying, delivering, rearing—was something she could no longer imagine.

This was chiefly the result of being a teacher. All the time they were moving, she and Emmett were teaching: in public and private schools, the children of the wealthy, the super-wealthy, the poor and the destitute, the comfortable and the aspiring. But in every school and every ensemble she conducted, Natalie always had the same students. The same jerkoff percussionists who found it hilarious to ditch lessons and waste time in rehearsals. The same meek little third flutes, barely passing enough breath through their instruments to make them whistle. And the same phenoms, bright and bright-eyed, born full of talent, whom she tutored and praised and who always left her for something better. To them she was a yearbook signature, a souvenir, and she had come to resent all the hours of her life she’d given without hope of return. So for her it was too late for kids, even though technically, biologically it wasn’t: she was only (ha!) thirty-five. It was just that she had already raised hundreds of children and didn’t have the strength to raise another, one of her own—one who would leave as surely as all the others had, who would take what was left of her heart and everything else.

Now she loved her job and loved her husband in the same hazy, unexamined way. They were what she knew. They were the outward markers of a normal life, the kind of life, as a child, she’d never expected herself to live but had slid into sideways, by default, because it seemed safer. But filling herself with a normal life only ever got her a guilty conscience and this—this pain. This restlessness. This hunger.

She tucks her legs beneath her and pushes up from the bottom of the pool. When she breaks the surface, she laughs. Natalie isn’t a good person. She isn’t sure she’s a bad person, either; most days it’s enough to accept that she’s a person at all. But today is not most days. Today she’s swimming in a half-dead hotel, a ghost with a pulse, washing away everything about herself that isn’t actually her. Today she’s listening to the first good advice Viola Fabian has given her in years.

Get over yourself, Natalie.

She dives deep and opens her mouth and her eyes and fills herself up with cold blue water.

Natalie’s mostly dry by the time she finds him in the auditorium. She’s already explored the dark concrete corridors of the basement, the laundry, and the kitchen, a cat burglar creeping from one nook to the next, taking mental note of all the exits and escape hatches. She sees a few people—kids from the festival, they have to be—laughing like jackasses as they run between each other’s rooms. She wonders what Rabbit and Alice are doing tonight; she meant to check in with them at dinner, but they disappeared before she had finished serving herself.
Oh, right, Wink. Your tender young responsibilities. The reason you’re here. Maybe you should have said hi before you went for that dip on the roof.

They could be thoughts in someone else’s head.

Instead of taking the elevator, she walks down the sweeping double staircase from the second floor to the lobby, holding her arms out for balance as she descends on quick, squishy tiptoe. A youngish man behind the front desk is reading a ragged paperback. He doesn’t look up at her.

Down a short hallway, on the left, is a library with a green marble fireplace and overstuffed chairs that look like leather marshmallows, and another ballroom on the right, set up for the concert band. The neat rows of empty chairs and music stands have already seen one rehearsal. They stand slightly askew, littered with the particular detritus of young musicians: abandoned tubes of cork grease and vials of valve oil next to empty Mountain Dew and Fruitopia bottles, potato chip and candy bar wrappers.

She sees herself grabbing a music stand by the base and wielding it in a wide circle like a scythe, hacking and felling the neat rows. She’ll hook a toe under the seats of the chairs and kick them on their backs, and when she’s done with the chairs and the stands, she’ll upend the conductor’s podium; she’ll heave the small wooden box over her head and launch it into the pile of rubble. What a beautiful racket she could make.

She’s about to wrap both hands around the long thin neck of a music stand when she hears it.

A piano.

She follows the sound back through the lobby and into the auditorium and closes the double doors behind her. A thin man is sitting at a shiny baby grand in the orchestra pit, noodling on the keys with his left hand.

He doesn’t know she’s there. His back is half turned to the seats; he’s hunched over the keys, rigid with purpose, scribbling on a piece of paper on the bench beside him. He’s using the same hand to both play and write. As she approaches, quiet on her cat-burglar feet, she notices just how thin he is, how his body seems to be made of pickup sticks.

“Quit skulking about and have a seat,” he says without turning around. He has an accent—English? “It’s rude.”

No: Scottish. Her shoulders fall and she smiles.

“I’m not skulking,” she says.

He stops playing and turns around. He is pointed, bird-like, and undernourished, with dark eyes set deep on either side of a large nose, hair turning to salt and pepper around his temples. There’s an extraordinariness about him, a strange, humming current. She moves closer.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“The Westing School of Music,” he says. “And you
are
skulking.”

“I mean originally. Geographically.”

“The planet Earth,” he says. “You?”

She’s close enough now to see his right hand, curled around the edge of the piano bench—or what’s left of his right hand, at least. It’s incomplete: only a thumb and first finger with three rounded stumps. Something triggers in her brain—the last line of a song, an old song.
Gimme your hands! You’re wonderful!

“Do I know you?” she asks. “You seem.” She shakes her head. “Familiar.” She leans against a seat in the front row without pushing it down. “I’ve seen you before.”

“You’re brand-new to me,” the thin man says.

“Ever live in California?”

He shakes his head no.

“Indiana?”

No.

“Michigan?”

No.

“Minneapolis?”

“I’m quite certain we’ve never met.” He smiles and leans forward. “I would remember.”