Bellweather Rhapsody (34 page)

“How was rehearsal?” she asked.

“Terrific,” he said, grinning wildly. “By far the most—I really don’t have words. I don’t know what happened. The kids got religion. It was an absolute orgy. An orgy of gorgeousness.”

She led him over to the bed and gently pushed him backward.

“Oh, fine,” he said. “If you insist.”

“You’re not worn out from your—” She grinned. “Your student orgy? You know I could get you fired for just
saying
that.”

He propped himself on his elbows. “Natalie,” he said.

“Fisher.” She nudged his knees apart and stood between them, her own knees pressing against the edge of the mattress.
Go on, say it. Say what you came here to say.

“Run with me.”

“Run?”

“Yes.”

“With you?”

“No, with that other guy.”

He reached for her. If he’d held out his left hand, she might have been fine; she might have been able to take it without thought, without consequence. But Fisher reached for her with his right. He held out the most broken part of his body, and Natalie understood what that meant.

“Run with me, Natalie,” he said again, his voice thinner.

She took his torn hand in hers.

In the moment, it hadn’t felt like a promise or a lie, though of course it was both.

Now Natalie licks her wine-purpled and plumped lips and curls them at the corners. Everything, absolutely everything in her fucked-six-ways-to-Sunday life, feels fine with wine. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to
do
right now but sit on this old hotel chair and lean against Fisher and make mashed potato mountains and smile a secret smile, because in her handbag is her gun. Right where it belongs. Natalie is drunk and armed, ready for anything, ready to push her precarious life all the way over the edge as the circumstances demand.

She has to stop kidding herself about the gun. She has to stop pretending she doesn’t understand why she wants it around, why she needs it, why she tucked it into her purse tonight while Fisher was washing up. This is the truth: she is the gun. It’s the phantom instrument of her dark little heart, the anger she’s always been afraid of, the power she didn’t want to claim.

Get over yourself, Natalie.

A blast of sound. Behind her. Her hand jerks, knocking the last few drops of wine from her glass. It’s those collegiate
a cappella
jackasses, singing Queen. The evening’s entertainment has begun. If only the ghost of Freddie Mercury would return, back to the Bellweather for one night only, with a Russian assault rifle.
That
would be entertaining.

She pushes away and up from Fisher, who makes a halfhearted attempt to either go in her stead or prevent her from going at all, and makes a beeline for her magical bartender. Natalie is an incredible drunk. She’s been an incredible drunk all her life, meaning she can be drunker than a hobo riding the rails but never give the impression of being more than slightly tipsy. Alcohol focuses her attention, her brain, her motor skills, and her balance to a fine point; she walks a tightrope of complete control. In the days and weeks following the break-in, she drank excessively every night, but it wasn’t until Emmett opened the mostly empty liquor cabinet that he discovered the full extent of her self-medicating. She felt even more guilty, and poor (Natalie only drank the good stuff, unless she was at Statewide and it was free), and thereafter settled into a new, self-administered treatment plan for Coping with Having Murdered—

There’s that word.

She could live as a blank. Blankness was a sustainable kind of existence. She could walk a tightrope of total absence and control. She has been walking it for months now, until this weekend.

Natalie’s left heel wobbles in the carpet’s pile. The collegiate jackasses, in four-part fratty harmony, ask her to open her eyes. Look up to the skies and see.

This weekend will end
. They’re stuck here under an avalanche of snow now, yes, but this is upstate New York. An avalanche is nothing. The hotel will be plowed out, freed. They will go home. She will go home. She will see Emmett, the man she married, and she will have to say something to him about this weekend. What could she possibly say?

Unless. Unless she actually
does
run away with Fisher.

She needs more wine. More wine more wine more wine.

Goodbye, everybody, the boys sing. I’ve got to go.

“Hello, dear,” says her magic bartender, and Natalie can barely look at him as she grabs the proffered wine and bolts it down. He has another waiting by the time she hands him the empty glass. The singing boys are the same college boys she saw bellying up to the bar earlier. Alcohol would explain the swagger in their voices. Alcohol, and the girlish squealing that punctuates their every hip shake. She detests them. Their youth scrapes against her skin.

Fisher pats her leg when she returns to the table. The boys are scaramouche-ing and fandango-ing with gusto. Everyone—girls and boys and teachers—is laughing at their cheerful vulgarity, and by the time they attempt the guitar solo using only their lips and tongues and vocal cords, Natalie has decided. She isn’t going home. She can’t. She fills her mouth with wine. Emmett deserves—well, let’s not pretend the decision was made based on the needs of another person. But Emmett
does
deserve a wife who doesn’t treat him as Natalie has treated him.

So she’ll run. The question now is whether she’ll run with Fisher. He meant it when he asked; she doubts he’s ever asked anyone the same question with the same gravity. She can imagine what it would be like to run away with him. When she thinks of climbing on the back of his bike and never seeing the Bellweather, never seeing her students or her band room or her house or her husband ever again, relief drops down over her shoulders, heavy and rich as a fur cloak. What she finds she can’t quite imagine is where Fisher will take her. Where she could tell him to go. What will happen when they get there, and after that, and after that.

She loves him. He listened. He wanted to know what she’d done, who she really was.

Fisher rests his hand on her leg and looks at her sideways. His eyes glow. He is
in
love with her, and, good God, there’s a difference.

The rest of the program drifts by like fog. Viola speaks briefly. She seems subdued, as though she’s misplaced some of that old Viola Fabian zeal, and Natalie gives her own back a mental pat. Viola thanks the Boys from Buffalo for their spirited rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” She congratulates the students of Statewide’s class of ’97 for being so passionately committed to their music. A florid man in a tweed coat is introduced next, and he takes the podium to drone on about his personal musical journey. His eyebrows are enormous, so monstrous and distracting that Natalie is unable to pay attention to anything else, and when she hears polite applause, she is surprised he is finished speaking.

But not nearly as surprised as when every light in the ballroom winks out. There is a moment of confused silence, then cautious murmuring, and then there is nothing in the world but DUNNNNN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNN, otherwise known as the most famous bars Andrew Lloyd fucking Webber ever wrote. Natalie isn’t sure whether she’s ever been this drunk in her life, but even so, this can’t possibly be happening, can it? Fisher nudges her in the direction of the ballroom doors, which have opened to reveal the kitchen staff wheeling in carts of flaming dessert.

The flaming dessert—once extinguished, it appears to be an institutional form of Bananas Foster—is mediocre.

“Really,” says Fisher, “all it ever had going for it was its ability to make an entrance.”

“The grownups got alcohol.” She licks caramel off her spoon. “The kids got food on fire.”

“The grownups got food on fire
and
alcohol,” Fisher says. “We win.”

As last meals go, it is at least memorable.

Viola takes the podium again to remind everyone of Sunday’s schedule—the concerts will go on as planned, without an audience—and to thank them, once again, for their patience with the storm. The snow, for the moment, has stopped falling. With any luck, they’ll be able to return to their homes late tomorrow evening or early Monday morning. The crowd claps restlessly. They are tired of rehearsing; they’re ready to go home. Yet there’s a dull sort of electricity in the air—tired but alert, half cabin fever, half aching sexual tension. This could be their last evening in the Bellweather together. Tonight is the night for star- and school-district-crossed lovers to seal their respective deals. And there are still ghosts and lost girls to find, before everyone returns to the other lives that are waiting for them beyond the snow.

But the old life that’s waiting for Natalie will wait for her forever. Tonight she picks herself up and walks herself and her gun toward another life entirely. And if she has any unfinished business, she had better take care of it now.

“Be right back,” Natalie whispers to Fisher.

She bobs her way across the ballroom. She doesn’t recognize the man Viola is chatting with. She hovers, not caring whether she’s being rude.

Eventually Viola excuses herself and says, sharply, to Natalie, “May I help you?”

Natalie opens her mouth.

She is going to vomit. She closes it again.

“Natalie—oh, Natalie.
Look
at you.” Viola takes her arm and gently leads her toward the rear of the room, behind a large screen set up to corral students and diners more cozily in the center. “Are you drunk? How did that happen? Sit down, sit down.”

Natalie plunks heavily into a chair. Her purse slips from her hands and hits the floor with a dead
thunk.
There are stacks of extra chairs against the back wall, leaning towers of seats, beside a door with a shiny silver crash bar. There’s no breeze, but the door itself radiates a cold that cuts through the red fuzz in her brain. She fills herself with wonderful cool air.

“Oh, Natalie.” Viola’s voice is soft and sad. She brushes Natalie’s hair back off her face. Tucks it neatly behind her ears. She pulls Natalie closer, and before Natalie can help herself she wraps her arms around Viola’s middle and holds on tight, as though she were clinging to a tree trunk in a hurricane.

I’m—
Natalie’s head pounds.

Viola rocks her for a little while, letting her hold on.

“Miss Wink,” she says.

Natalie half laughs. The words are wedged at the base of her throat, pressing hard against her voice box, getting closer to being said.
I’m sorry I hit you. I’m sorry I hated you
.

No, I’m not.

“Shhh,” says Viola. “It’s okay. Let it go.”

I’m sorry I let you in—

“Get it all out.” Viola pats her on the back, a little harder than necessary.

Natalie squeezes her eyes shut.

I’m sorry I became you.

“Now stand up straight.” Viola peels Natalie from her middle. “Let me look at you. Dammit. You grew up. When did that happen?”

Natalie feels weak, almost too weak to stand, but Viola is pulling her up and—

Jesus, she’s drunk.

And hot. Blood ignites her face. Again she feels like she’s going to throw up.

“Can we open—” She shrugs at the door. “So hot.”

“Great idea.” Viola smiles luminously.

The white of her teeth stuns Natalie. For the next three seconds, everything stuns her. The blue darkness outside the door. The sensation of pressure from behind, of her center of gravity shifting forward. The biting cold as first her knees and then her hands break through the icy crust of a sloping snowdrift.

The innocent
snick
of the door closing behind her.

She shivers from shock and cold and sick. “Viola,” she mumbles, “let me back in,” even though she knows she knows oh shit
she knows
Viola will never do that. She pushes herself up out of the drift and wraps her raw red hands around the handle, but the door is locked, of course, because—

Viola is trying to kill her.

Natalie buttons her cardigan up to her throat, but a few extra buttons are hardly going to keep her from freezing to death, are they, and then she laughs, because wasn’t this what she really wanted, an end to the life she was living, a new beginning? She tumbles back into the drift and it catches her cozily, an easy chair of snow. She’s so tired. She’s so tired and so drunk and so amused by the sheer poetic ridiculousness of her life that she hardly hears the tiny voice asking whether she’s sure she really wants this. Natalie looks up at the dazzling deep black of the sky and the stars—there are hundreds of stars, hundreds of pinholes punched into the night—and gasps with delight, with awe.

Whatever will she do with the rest of her life?

Scream until she’s hoarse, bloody her hands pounding on the door in vain? Or turn her gaze up up up to the awesome face of the universe as a blanket of snow pulls itself tight around her?

She looks up. She sees not a new life but a whole new world.

21

W
HAT A NIGHT!
Viola presses the button for the sixth floor. Wink was so drunk, so out of it, just as pliant and spineless as ever. But it wasn’t just Wink, oh no—everything was working in harmony, all the players knew their parts. The teachers at Natalie’s table, disgusted at her drunkenness. The bartender, who had no qualms about overserving an obviously inebriated person. That administrator from Poughkeepsie who’d been so rudely interrupted by Natalie, waiting to speak with her old mentor, waiting and hovering and swaying. Natalie’s exhausted weepiness ensured she’d give up the second she figured out the door had locked behind her. That little priss might have humiliated her this morning, might have gotten her to bleed once upon a time. But all Viola had to do was wait. All Viola ever has to do is wait.

Circumstantial symphonies have arranged themselves around her all her life. Kevin Montrose, that arrogant, sloppy soloist, always coming in half a beat early, tripped and hit his head on a rock. The dreadfully happy, tragically unobservant Alex Faccelli sprinkled poison over his morning grapefruit of his own free will. They were accidents, perhaps lightly orchestrated. It isn’t fate or luck; Viola doesn’t believe in either. It’s a kind of harmonic concord. Viola is the center of gravity, the point around which all revolves, and when she sees her opportunity, her advantage, she takes it.