Bellweather Rhapsody (20 page)

Wary—that’s how he felt in Viola’s presence. As if he might be called upon to defend himself, bodily, from her at any moment. An awful lot can happen to change a person in fifteen years, though he’s buggered if he can figure out who has changed more. Did Viola become evil? Did Fisher grow a conscience? He blanches—God, he hopes Viola doesn’t try to sleep with him—then he laughs, because it may be the first time in his adult life that he’s ever thought such a thing. But even if he weren’t otherwise sexually fixated, entranced by the enigmatic new Unavailable in his life, to sleep with Viola Fabian at this conference would be . . . the only word that seems to fit is “catastrophic.”

Fisher has been thinking of nothing but the red-headed pianist (save for his brief, recent encounter with Viola) for the past eight hours, waking and asleep. She crept through his dreams, skulking, silent. The mysterious red pianist and her hands: while she’d been lending her right, he’d been eyeing her left—ring finger banded, perfectly Unavailable. When she wrapped his arm around her and played the piano beneath his hand, Fisher had felt every atom in his body align, expand, vibrate with desire. By quick count, she was the thirteenth Unavailable; was she the one to which it had all been building? Could she be the last, the first he would fall in love with? How ridiculous it felt to think such a thing, and yet everything about her, about himself in relation to her, felt new. Different. Possible.

He snaps his head up.

“Right! Children! Welcome to another day.” The orchestra, now full, gazes up at him with a hundred or so eyes, eyes that today hold more than blank readiness. There is interest, a hint of trepidation. Resistance. The girl at the timpani is tense, readied. Half the trombones are glowering. He scans the winds, marking the absence of the first flute, which is no real surprise, and locks eyes with his Hatmaker, with Rabbit. Rabbit gives a little jump but pleases Fisher immensely with a slight frown and a returned stare of equal intensity. The basses lean against their fiddles, hunched thugs. The cellos hold their bows like sharpened spears, and the violas look positively mutinous, which is confusing until he remembers tossing off a disparaging comment about violas yesterday. The violins are stiff, perched on the edge of their seats, eyeing, he has no doubt, the pulse of the carotid artery in his neck.

“You all look lovely today. I trust you slept well. Tracy Hazlett, Miss Timpani. What did you do last night?”

“Relearned all my music.”

The orchestra ripples.

“Oi, liar,” Fisher says with a wide grin. “I was here in the auditorium nearly all night and no one else came in to practice. Unless you’ve got some big drums in your room, Hazlett, you’re lying.”

She blushes furiously. Half the orchestra titters and the other half glares double and triple bloody murder at him. When he smiles again, he makes sure they can see all his teeth. He leads them through several warm-up scales, and, satisfied with their intonation (they are, without question, excellent, if slightly hollow), he cracks his fingers loudly.

“After yesterday’s scene,” he says, “I’ve been thinking. The other music I picked out originally, it wasn’t all shite. Not
all
of it, at least. I hope none of you went and threw it out. I’d rather like us to go to war today.” He registers a few panicked faces. “Holst. ‘Mars, the Bringer of War.’”

A small hand snakes up from deep in the second violins.

“Oh, come
on,
” Fisher says. “You actually got rid of the music? You threw it out? Who does that? Hatmaker, would
you
throw out your music because some raving foreign madman told you to?”

Rabbit’s response is to stare back in silence. Fisher feels the temperature in the auditorium rise about twenty degrees. They are furious. They wanted him dead to rights before. Now that he’s gone after their rabbity mascot, they just want him dead.

“Let’s,” he says, and lifts his arms.

“Mars” begins in the distance and marches inexorably forward on fifty plucked strings, on low, dark tones that gather and build until they are all assembled in one defiant wall of sound. The players are, in fact, spiking in and out of tune, but by the time the violins are slashing their bows across their strings and the French horns are sending out a battle cry, they are playing not with their heads or their hearts, but their guts. Their vital humors. They collapse together on a single note, a note that explodes like a bomb, and when they rise, wounded, they are mad as hell. The brass section takes up the banner of those dark carillons, rising higher and louder in the air as the campaign reaches a fever pitch.

Fisher holds the glory of all that noise in his open arms. He presses his face against the sound. Takes it into his lungs. Beauty, weightless and useless and the only thing he knows he loves, truly loves. He thinks of his Auntie. He thinks of her small gold tooth, the only one he has left, now a cufflink that he’ll wear when he conducts Sunday’s concert. And he brings his orchestra crashing down, bomb after bomb after bomb, until they are all standing, spent and wobbly, together and bleeding in the center of a rubbled crater.

He gives them a moment of peace.

“Now that,” he shouts, “is
music!
”

There is a wave of relieved laughter. They sit easier in their chairs now, easier but no less alert.

“What you felt, the beast that swallowed you all and spat you back out, that is the great big bloody point of all this. If you learn nothing else from this bizarre and awkward experience—this gathering of strangers to blow into horns and pluck catgut—remember that you have the power to feel that. The power to create that. With your hands. Your breath. You are gods, children, and you can make war.”

Rabbit’s hair is a mess, his skin pale except for two spots of pink high in his cheeks. He looks as though he’s been run over.

“Look at Hatmaker here. The boy is wasted.” Fisher laughs. “Been to hell and back, have you?”

Rabbit nods. “We can make other things, too,” he murmurs. “Not just war.” He flicks his eyes up in the tiniest of challenges.

Fisher feels it like a barb hooked in his heart.

“Today all we’re practicing is war,” he says, the words sticky in his throat. “And later, sex, when we get back to our Debussy. From the top, basses. Bassoons. Describe the field of battle for us.”

It is a far, far better rehearsal than yesterday’s, all according to plan. Fisher has tried this tactic at other festivals—forcing these wunderkinder to recalibrate themselves, to open up to the reality of their own experience by being a complete and utter asshole to them—but the children at Statewide are the hardest nuts he’s ever had to crack. The most in need of reprogramming. Which makes sense, when he thinks about it. When he thinks of himself, even younger than these kids fanned in arcs of chairs and music stands before him.
He
was the original dancing bear and organ grinder’s monkey rolled into one. Music, the piano—everything had come easily, naturally. His gifts were a birthright he had never realized could be revoked until they were gone. Perhaps he would never have fallen in love with music so deeply if it had never been taken from him; would eighty-eight keys live in his dreams if they filled his waking hours? Nothing, after all, is more powerful than a love unrequited.

He thinks of the Unavailable redhead, of how she gave him music, if only for a moment, with her beautiful, whole hands. He cannot wait for rehearsal to end. He cannot wait to learn what other powers her hands might hold.

Rabbit is washing his hands when he sees, reflected in the bathroom mirror, a boy exiting one of the stalls carrying a French horn. Rabbit blinks. Yes, he is actually watching a boy exit a bathroom stall carrying a big gold horn. The boy steps up to the sink beside Rabbit, tucks the horn under one arm, and washes and dries his hands without a word.

If only that were the weirdest thing happening at Statewide.

Rabbit heads back to the auditorium, where the others are retaking their seats after a mid-morning break. Fisher Brodie is obviously mentally unbalanced, but there is something half magical about his lunacy. Again today, Brodie is playing with them as much as he is conducting—but he
is
conducting, and they, the orchestra, are
playing
. They played the
shit
out of that Holst piece. From the first read-through and spot rehearsals to a full performance right before break, every single time, Rabbit felt the hair on the back of his arms and neck shiver. His heart thumped. He had always identified himself as a pacifist (save for that one
fagott
-inspired fistfight), but this morning Rabbit wanted to tear someone’s arms off. He wanted to throw on a breastplate and a kilt, smear blue paint down half his face, grab a sword—no, an ax—and run full tilt across a battlefield and fucking chop someone’s head off.

Rabbit feels deeply weird, to say the least, about all of this.

About
all
of this. About his sister (his bulimic, manic sister?) and her missing (dead?) roommate, and the woman in the elevator, and Pete Moretti, the Tenor. He wishes his father were here. No—actually—no, he does not wish his father, or his mother, or anyone else who knows him is here, because here is the place where he might, just might, be brave and stupid and lit with hormones enough to kiss Pete. To kiss a boy. To feel it, finally.

All of this is running through his head—
kiss, Pete, kilt, ax, chop, Alice, death
—as he takes his seat, adjusting the leather strap hooked to Beatrice that he sits on. He sucks on his double reed. Kimmy sits down beside him with a toothy smile.

Brodie, looming above from the podium, cups his hands around his mouth and shouts to Rabbit, “Hatmaker! How would you like to be our new soloist?”

Rabbit’s heart stops.

“Our fickle friend, Miss First-Chair Flute, didn’t show up today. Her loss. Our gain.” Brodie picks up a sheaf of paper and waves it in the air. “I thought she might still be in a snit today. You know how flighty first-chair flutes are. So I took the liberty of transcribing the solos in
Afternoon of a
Faun
into bass and tenor clef for bassoon.”

Rabbit feels every eye in the orchestra on him, and more than a few friendly smiles. They want him to do this. They want him to take the bait, show Brodie up. Does Brodie want that too? Or is he setting him up to fail, teaching Rabbit a lesson for his defiance yesterday?

“Stravinsky believed in the power of your tenor clef, Hatmaker. I think it’s time we convinced Debussy. Pass this back, love, thanks.” Fisher sends the music back through the orchestra.

Rabbit is floating somewhere above the stage, looking down on himself. Floating-Rabbit half wants him to do it, just
do it
—play the hell out of the piece, punch someone in the face, and then go find Pete and make out with him. The Rabbit sitting on the stage, however, holding his bassoon upright in one trembling, sweating hand, is grasping what it means to be terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought. He takes the music when it’s handed back by the second-chair flute, who looks relieved.

Brodie’s hand is neat and crisp. The notes are evenly round, the stems delicate. The staffs, clefs, and time signatures are calligraphic.

He can do this.

He cannot
possibly
do this.

“It’s just for today, Hatmaker. Just for fun. I’m sure Miss First-Flute Temper Tantrum will come crawling back at some point. The question is, will we let her play?”

Rabbit’s mouth opens before he can think.

“She won’t be back,” he says. “She’s dead.”

The entire orchestra goes silent. Rabbit feels the beat and then, half a beat later, realizes what he has done.

Whether he believes Alice or not, he’s spreading her gospel.

“She’s what, Hatmaker? What did you say?” Brodie leans closer, turning one ear toward him.

“I said she’s dead,” Rabbit repeats, louder.

“That’s not funny,” Brodie says.

“Why is that the first thing everyone says?” Rabbit’s voice cracks. “Of course it’s not funny. It’s not a joke.” And as he says the words, he believes them. He knows his sister. He knows she isn’t lying. “She’s dead.”

“I heard—” A voice breaks behind him, somewhere in low brass.

“You heard what?” presses Brodie.

A blond girl peeks from behind her music stand. “I heard her roommate found her,” she says, “and now her roommate’s, like, catatonic with shock.”

Rabbit frowns.

“I heard that too.” A boy in a faded blue polo and pressed khakis—Rabbit can see the creases running from his knees to the tops of his loafers—raises his violin bow instead of his hand. “I heard the ASM is trying to cover it up. That this kind of thing has happened before. Like how at Disney World, they never report it when people die on the rides?”

“No,” says Rabbit. “That’s not what—”

A little cry goes up and is stifled, which of course has the opposite effect on the rest of the group. The orchestra begins to buzz and hiss, a balloon leaking whispers. Rabbit turns. It’s Jennifer—tiny Jennifer Czerny, who was drunk at that stupid dinner with Alice last night. She’s balancing her French horn on her lap with one hand and covering her mouth dramatically with the other. “You don’t think,” she says, her eyes wide, “it has anything to do with the ghost. The woman who hung herself. The Bellweather Bride? And Rabbit, Rabbit, wasn’t Jill your sister’s roommate? Oh my God, is your sister—did your sister
find her?
”

Rabbit starts to formulate words, a response of some kind, but Brodie holds his arms out wide and shouts at them, “OI.
OI!
”

The silence is only temporary.

“Everyone
keep
. Your fucking wits about you,” Brodie says. “Hatmaker. Answer me. Was the first flute your sister’s roommate?”

“Yes.”

“Did your sister find her last night?”

“Yes. Hanging from the ceiling. Then, uh—”

“‘Uh’ what, Hatmaker?”

“Her . . . body.” Rabbit swallows. “Sort of . . . disappeared.”

The orchestra ripples and Brodie shouts it back to silence.