Bellweather Rhapsody (43 page)

“You would have stopped me.”

Fisher holds up his mangled hand, index finger pointing at the sky. “Ah-ha,” he says gently. “I knew it.”

Even in the gloom, he can see her face has gone the color of tomatoes.

“You would have, though,” she says. “You can say now that you wouldn’t, but only because it’s done. She did it to herself, anyway.”

“How do you mean then?”

Jill frowns. She looks about six.

“I found it under the sink two months ago. It looked like sugar, but I knew it couldn’t be, because it was under the sink in a plastic baggie, hidden behind the Drano. I asked her about it and she said that’s all it was, just sugar, but she took it away from me, so I knew she was lying. I’d already kept some before I even talked to her, and I brought it with me because—I don’t know. Once I got away I was going to have it tested. I thought I might be able to prove she killed Alex.” She blinks. “He would never, ever have killed himself. He was . . . he was a really good person.”

“Good people commit suicide all the time, love.”

“He adopted me.” She sniffs. “He was my friend.”

“Still doesn’t mean anything.”

She sticks out her chin. “He was going to take me camping near Muir Woods. We had tickets to see
Les Mis
when it came to the city. We had
plans
. And he would never have left me alone with
her.
Alex married my mother because he loved her and thought she loved him. I thought she was pretending like she usually did, but she was just so
good
at it with Alex. She sounded different. Better. Happy. It was the best I’d ever seen her pretend and I wanted it to be real, so I let her fool me too. Maybe it was real. Alex was pretty rich.

“But after a while, like always, she stopped pretending and it was too late for everyone. She hated him, because he was so—so nice.”

“Come again?”

“He was kind and rich and normal. He smiled at babies and gave money to charity. I think at first she thought he was interesting, you know, the way a scientist thinks a bug is interesting. And then one day they wake up and realize they’re married to a bug so they squash it. It didn’t help that he was so nice to
me
. He paid more attention to me than to her, and after a while I paid more attention to him. She didn’t like that at all.

“For a long time I’ve known she was—wrong, but I thought there wasn’t anything I could do about it. And then I
did
get away from her, everything was going so well this weekend, and I had an idea to . . . test her. If it was really sugar, like she said.” She sniffs again. “She would’ve passed.”

She hugs herself. “Anyway, it’s over,” she says. “I don’t have to worry anymore and neither does anyone else.”

She rakes a hand through her weird thicket of choppy hair, back to front, faster and faster, and Fisher can see how bright her eyes are. She’s trying not to cry. He never once saw her mother cry. Jill’s tears have to be real; Fisher can feel them. He’s so relieved, relieved for her, to see that she doesn’t have her mother’s pathological coldness, or at least she has this bit of empathy as an offset. Was lack of empathy a genetic trait, dominant or recessive? Perhaps she inherited the tears from her father.

Fisher’s chest tightens like a fist.

He isn’t going to the hospital.

Natalie doesn’t want to see him anyway.

His electric clippers are lying beside the bathroom sink, which holds a few stray hairs Jill missed cleaning up. The bin, however, looks like someone threw away a black wig. He rinses the clippers and pushes the door open wider. Light falls on Jill’s face.

She squints. Her eyes are set deep on either side of a rather large and thin nose.

“Come on, then,” he says.

She sits on the toilet lid and Fisher holds her head in his palms. He tilts her skull forward, measuring the relative length of the patches on her head. “It’s going to be short,” he says, “if you want it to be even.” She nods at him in the mirror. Then her eyes turn down at the corners and he watches two very real-looking tears pop from beneath her lids and race down her cheeks.

“It’ll grow back,” he says. “Don’t worry, squirrel.”

She rubs her nose on the back of her hand and sits up straight.

“I’m ready,” she says.

Fisher adjusts the clipper and passes it once, twice, three times around and over and through her hair. She has a nicely shaped head, full as an egg. Fuzz rains down on her shoulders and her lap. He only knows how to give the haircut he’s been giving himself for years, short on the sides and back, tapered at the neck. Her hair is soft but very thick.

He would be blind not to see it. He would be blind if he looked at her, with his own haircut, his own eyes, and his nose built finer and younger, and didn’t recognize them as variations on the theme that’s been watching him in mirrors his entire life. She hasn’t looked up from her lap, and Fisher is terrified of the moment when she will. He feels so damn shy all of a sudden, so old and stupid and ashamed that he never saw this coming. That he never knew. That he never knew she existed. Later, he thinks; later I’ll feel anger that Viola never told me. Later I’ll feel used, surely. But right now all he feels is naked and far too aware of time, how much has already passed, how much there might be left him, and her—and how all of that time she will live knowing what she’s done. Knowing where she came from and how she escaped. Knowing whose child she is.

Did Viola ever tell her?

Did she plan all of this because she knew?

He wants to give her the benefit of the doubt, wants to trust what he’s been given. He places his ragged right hand on her shoulder.

“Right, then. We can go to a professional when we get home,” he says. “If you’d like.”

Jill looks up, first at herself, then at Fisher. Her face betrays no surprise. There is something there, something bruised but alive that doesn’t want to let go. That may, in time, grow into a kind of love.

He has to trust it. He has to.

“Thanks, Dad,” she whispers, and places her hand over his.

27

S
IDE BY SIDE,
suitcases and bassoon in hand, the Hatmakers step into an empty elevator. Rabbit pushes L and the doors slide together.

Alice wishes she were a little happier. Well, she
is
happy—she’s thrilled to bits about her brother, both that he trusted her enough to confide what she’d begun to suspect when he tucked his conductor into bed, and that she
totally
called him out. So to speak. And yet she can’t help but feel an undertow, a nasty, nagging feeling that she’s running away. She’s a shitty detective, leaving the mystery unsolved. She’s abandoning Jill.

No one’s telling the truth. No one’s saying
anything.
After the orchestra finished playing, the conductor asked everyone to connect with their chaperones. The roads were plowed; they were going home. There’d been no guidance on what to do if your chaperone had been shot. No one said anything about a missing girl or a missing concierge or the crime scene tape all over the swimming pool or the policewoman in the lobby or Viola Fabian, dead.

Thunder rumbles from above.

“What’s wrong?” Rabbit asks.

Alice shrugs. “Oh, nothing.”

“Liar,” her brother says.

“I’m
starving.
Aren’t you starving?” It’s been hours since breakfast. They split a bag of Combos from the vending machine but that seems like hours ago too. “How long do you think we’re going to have to wait for Mom and Dad?” Rabbit had called their parents from the room phone but only got the answering machine. Alice heard their father’s voice blaring through the handset, saying he’s sorry he missed their call, leave a message and we’ll
callyarightback
. They had to be on their way to the Bellweather to rescue their kids. Right?

The car jostles as they pass the fourth floor.

“That’s not what’s really bugging you,” Rabbit says.

“Gee, I wonder what else it could be.” Alice slips her hands in her coat pockets and nudges him with her elbow. “It’s not like every single thing that’s happened since we got here has been batshi—”

There’s something in her pocket.

Her fingers close over a stack of stiff, rippled papers. Even as she’s pulling her hand out of her coat, even as she’s opening that hand, she doesn’t allow herself to believe it. It’s too good a trick to hope might be real.

She’s holding her missing tarot cards. The top card, warped and pink with wine, is the Magician.

“Oh my God,” Alice says. How did she do this?
How?
She turns to her brother. “Rabbit. Rabbit, look, holy shit,
look what it is.
”

“What is—”

“It’s the exact opposite,” she says, “of a suicide note.”

Something lands with a soft plop on the roof of the elevator car.

Again.

And again.

“Do you hear that?” says Rabbit.

The thunder is closer.

“What the—” Alice says, and a jet of cold chlorinated water caves in the elevator’s access panel and punches her in the back of the head.

Thank God the doors open at just that moment, because the water is coming and coming and Alice is drenched, soaked through to her underwear already, her jeans are pulling off her hips, her wool winter coat is pressing her shoulders down, and she can think of no other reaction so she’s laughing hysterically through chattering teeth. She hears a splash as Rabbit drops his suitcase. Water falls in a flat curtain across the open doors, a sheet of rushing, freezing cold hanging between them and the lobby. People are shrieking, fanning out as the carpet blackens under flooding pool water. Of course it’s the pool. She knows this. She doesn’t know how, but the pool has collapsed and is draining from the top of the hotel. The elevator doors frame a watery window on the lobby and Alice stares in shock. Potted ferns tip. Students scream and run, violin and French horn and saxophone cases held high over their heads, suitcases left behind to float on the tide. Some slip and fall and pull others down with them. A boy running with a tuba case trips and scatters a cluster of kids like they were bowling pins. The entire building shakes and an enormous gout of water pours into the lobby from Alice’s right, setting a small sofa adrift and knocking two girls off their feet. Alice hears them grunt. One of them bashes her head against a sconce and leaves a bloody smear on the wallpaper.

She’s cold. She can’t move. Water pours all around her. Her teeth are clacking together, actually clacking she’s so cold, and she laughs again because this is
really
happening.

The elevator doors are closing and she’ll be trapped in here and the water won’t stop, she’ll drown, it was all true, it was all leading to this, the cards tried to warn her, she should have listened. Temperance. The Star. Death. Images of water jugs, a pool, a scythe, meaning harmony, optimism, change,
fuck that
—fucking tarot meant
water,
meant pouring pool water and literal death. Oh God, of course—this was inevitable, this was written in the cards and the stars and all those swimming lessons as a kid, fed by her mother’s fears that weren’t fears but premonitions. She was warned. She was warned and she ignored it, and this is her curse come true.

Rabbit grabs her hand.

Her other hand closes over her tarot cards, over the message Jill left just for her. She realizes she doesn’t care how Jill did it; it’s enough to know she did. It’s enough to know that magic is possible, and what magician worth her salt tells you her secrets anyway? She squeezes her brother’s hand, her other, better self, and they both howl with laughter, with rage and defiance. Because they aren’t going down like this. This diseased old hotel doesn’t get to take the Hatmakers down with it.

Alice lets Rabbit lead. Clutching his bassoon case to his chest, he hurls himself sideways through the doors and pulls her out behind. He lands with a grunting squelch on the lobby carpet. Alice lands on top of him, rolls off, and hits the ground with a noise like a wounded squeaker toy.

The roar of the water fades to a rush, a trickle. A drip. It’s quiet for half a second. Someone shouts, swears. Alice hears crying. She’s wet through, freezing cold. Her shoulder is jammed and her neck is funny where she rolled onto her backpack. She felt something give inside—her Trapper Keeper, probably, giving up the ghost at last. She looks to her left and sees Rabbit, blinking water out of his eyes, his lip split and bloody from having smashed his bassoon into his face. But they’re whole. They’re safe.

Alice grins.

“Rabbit,” she gasps. Her voice is wobbly when she says, “Rabbit, we did it. The Hatmakers broke the curse.”

Postlude

H
E JERKS AWAKE.
He barely has control of his thoughts. He has no idea where he is, or even who he is, but one sensation cuts clean through, strong enough to pierce the drugs: relief. Relief like a sigh of the soul.

He wishes the girl were still sitting beside him. He doesn’t know when she left. It could be hours, it could be days.

He closes his eyes again and sleeps without dreaming.

She comes back the next Sunday with a small aloe plant—not flowers, not a balloon, nothing that tries too hard to be cheery, but something green and growing and alive—and a book. He doesn’t look at her. For some reason he’s afraid to, afraid to see in her eyes what she sees in him. She pats his hand and reads the book. She comes back the next Sunday and reads, but the week after that, without telling her, the nurses put him in a wheelchair, then a van, and take him to another hospital.

“You’ll tell the girl?” he says to the man helping him into his new bed. “You’ll tell her where to find me?”

The man isn’t very reassuring, but the girl gets the message, and she shows up the very next Sunday, albeit a little later than usual. His new room isn’t as nice as the old one. It’s grayer. Still, she pats his hand and reads her book and he thinks next week, maybe, he might feel up to looking at her.

There are red and green and yellow paper chains draped in the halls and taped to the nurses’ station on the Sunday when he finally speaks to the girl. He asks her what she’s reading.