Bellweather Rhapsody (38 page)

“She felt betrayed,” Alice says quietly. Fisher hears the first tremor in her voice. “Her brand-new husband was going to leave her. For someone else.”

“Well, I knew
that,
” Hastings snaps. “We all knew
that
. Not before, of course, but after. After, it came out right away. Lily knew. Lily told me.”

Alice swallows. She looks eerily pale in the blue-green light.

“That’s a
reason
. It’s not an
answer,
” Hastings says. He looks down at his hands, one shaking, one holding a gun, and stands up swiftly, knocking over his chair. “It doesn’t tell me
why,
” he shouts. “Hurt him. Humiliate him. Hurt him worse than he hurt you—go ahead, Caroline, go ahead, I can understand that. I can almost understand why you killed him. I can understand
wanting
to kill someone.”

Pinpricks of cold sweat pop all over Fisher’s body. He looks down and sees he’s gripping Natalie’s hand, squeezing it white.

“But why did you leave me?” Hastings cries. “We were the only two left. We only had each other. Why did you take yourself away?”

Hastings jerks his head upright and now he’s looking directly at Natalie. Fisher feels her accept the weight of his gaze. Her body finally tenses.

Hastings shuffles closer. He never takes his eyes off Natalie as he skirts Rabbit, motionless in his chair. He is no more than five feet away now. His face is wet, with sweat or tears or both. He shines in the dimness as though he’s made of melting wax.

“You,” he says. His voice is a rasp.
“You’re
Wink.”

“Yes.” She nods once.

“You did it.” His gaze flickers from Natalie to Fisher and then rolls back to take in the Hatmakers. “You all did it. I don’t know how. Or why.” He shakes the gun at them, forgetting again that it isn’t just his hand. “But you did it.”

“Did what?” Fisher asks.

“Murder,” says Hastings.

“Yes,” says Natalie, quickly, gently. Fisher feels her body draining, melting beside him, while his own hide bristles with panic. “Yes, I did.”

Hastings hasn’t heard her, thank God. “
How
is what I don’t understand,” he continues dramatically. “Indulge me.
Alice
. Walk me through your master plan. Did you hang her? Was your brother cutting her down while you ran for help?”

Alice is shaking her head in terror. “Mr. Hastings. Please, please listen.”

“Did the kids kill the girl, and the grownups kill her mother?” He cocks his head. “It was the timing that gave you away. You had to do it in pairs. I got there so quickly both times, there was no other way.” His head tilts so far to the side that he’s practically resting his ear on his shoulder. “I was. I was there. I was there in the same room where Caroline . . . and just now, I was there again.”

He looks at Fisher.

“What did I do?” Hastings asks.

Fisher has no response.

“Oh my God.” Hastings looks down at his hands, at the gun. “Oh my God. What did I do?”

Slowly, more steadily than Fisher would have thought possible, Hastings raises his right arm, the hand holding the gun turning inward at the wrist.

“No.” Natalie’s voice is a whimper. “No.” Stronger now. “Mr. Hastings, no.”

“What are you
—
” says Fisher.

“I’m the murderer,” Natalie says.

“
Natalie,
” Fisher says.

“Why?” Hastings asks. The gun hovers, his arm begins to lower. “What gave you the right?”

Natalie is trembling. Fisher squeezes her hand hard, harder, even as she loosens her grip.

“Please,” Fisher says. He has no idea what he’s praying for. “Please—”

“Nothing,” Natalie says. “Nothing gave me the right. I took it.”

“That is not,” says Hastings. He closes his eyes and shouts, “An ANSWER.”

“I know.” She blinks.

What are you doing? What in holy hell are you
doing?

“Please give me an answer,” Hastings says. “An answer. I just need an answer.”

“There isn’t any answer,” she murmurs. “There’s only me and what I did.”

The flatness of her voice is what triggers him. Fisher becomes elemental desire—desire to cover, to shield, to fold himself around this person whom he loves, to make with his body an impenetrable shell. It doesn’t matter that Fisher’s body will never protect her from anything; it doesn’t matter that he could die if Hastings fires. None of that even occurs to him. None of that is relevant. What Fisher does next is a reflex of the heart.

Still holding her hand, he takes one pivoting step between them, facing Natalie, with his back to Hastings.

It happens like this:

Natalie looks at Fisher. She looks over his shoulder.

A cannon rips through him.

Fisher lands in the pool.

Cold.

Pulled. Under.

He’s been shot.

No—

He hasn’t, he hasn’t been shot, he’s been pushed.

Natalie pushed him out of the way.

24

B
OWIE FLOATS.
He hovers above her. A high cloud of red hair, a blue and orange thunderbolt splitting his face.

A breeze ripples across his surface and Natalie knows she’s lying on her bed at her parents’ house, her single bed with the afghan her aunt knitted when she was born, and Bowie is floating above her because he’s tacked to her ceiling with red pushpins. Everything as she left it. Her bookshelf, there to the left, with its complete set of
The Chronicles of Narnia.
Her dresser drawers half closed around purple and red and green lumps of cotton and corduroy.

Natalie calls out—for her parents, her sisters, Uncle Kevin—and her voice sounds distant to her own ears. Sound is all funny. She can hear a faint pulse, a beat like an irregular heart, but nothing else. No doors opening and closing, no faucets turning on or sofa springs creaking when her father throws himself down on them. She peers out the window at the end of the upstairs hall. Her street is there, but it isn’t the street she saw the last time she drove through, years ago; the house on the far end that some crazy idiot bought and painted canary yellow is still the dark green she grew up with. All of the cars in the driveways are American, except for one lone VW bus parked at the curb.

She knows that car. That car belongs to the Paoluccis’ son. He put a bullet in his head in the eighties.

A bullet.

Natalie turns from the window and walks downstairs, pausing on the landing, fighting the urge to lie down and hang her head over the top step. The house of her childhood opens to greet her. The brown and orange braided rug on the living room floor, the orange and tan plaid curtains. She can smell a faint whiff of smoke, but no one answers when she calls out again. Memories break over her. Every object, remembered or forgotten until this very moment, warms her face like an open flame. She is overwhelmed by the solidity of every detail. Someone (
I did it, it was me
) has drawn a smiley face in the dust on the television screen. The wallpaper in the front room, a pattern of tan and brown and yellow, is hideous to look at, but when Natalie presses her palm flat to the wall she’s afraid she’ll burst—with—it isn’t sadness. It isn’t regret.

Longing. She longs to feel as she felt in this house. She longs to feel possible.

Something is missing. Something isn’t here and she has to find it. Her mother’s car keys—on a lanyard, I made this lanyard at summer camp last year, purple and green—sit in a lumpen clay dish her mom threw at a class at the Y. Natalie takes them.

The street is as deserted as the house. No cars drive by. No mailmen, no kids, no adults, no dogs or squirrels or sounds other than that strange music, that pulse, faint but louder. It isn’t coming from the house after all.

The car—! She laughs out loud. The family Nova waits for her in the driveway, shining copper-gold in the light. She learned to drive in this car. She hit a mailbox in this car. Ran right over the curb and dented the front fender on a street-corner drop box, and then sped away because it was an official post office box, it was government property, what she’d done was probably a federal offense. Natalie had been alone, freshly licensed. She told her parents she’d been hit in a parking lot.

So began her criminal history.

Her side burns.

Every street is empty, empty and silent. No birds, even. The music gets steadily louder—she’s following it, homing like a carrier pigeon—and the day is bright and beautiful and wrong. She can’t explain herself in this place or how she came to be here, any more than she can explain the sensations crawling through her body. Now she feels loss; she feels as if she’s leaking. She has to gather herself. She has to fill the hole.

The Nova takes her to her high school. The music is loud now, but she still doesn’t recognize it. There are no words, no verses, no themes. There are only tones. Chords. Deep sliding sounds and that beat, that thudding beat that presses itself tightly around her head. The parking lot is empty. When she puts her bare foot down on the gravel, she feels music vibrating up her leg. Natalie didn’t dislike high school. Sometimes she played piano for the chorus, as accompanist; she played in the pit for a few school plays. This high school isn’t quite her own, though. She wasn’t a student here.

She was a teacher here.

The music is in the auditorium lobby. It rolls out like warm breath, lifting Natalie’s hair from her shoulders. The auditorium is dark except for the stage. Her feet are cold and clammy, and almost slide on the worn rust-colored carpet as she starts down the aisle. The air rumbles. Her breastbone thrums sympathetically.

The stage is so bright she has trouble looking at it. There’s a mussed bed on stage left, pillows and blankets on the floor, and a dresser on stage right, and at center stage is a piano—
her
piano, her mother’s mother’s piano, which is exactly what she came here to find. It shines in a tight white spotlight.

The music stops. Her ears throb in the sudden silence. Natalie, barefoot, slip-slides down the silent aisle to get to her piano.

Her side aches. She holds her hand to her side, presses and holds.

It hurts but she braces both palms on the edge of the stage, pushes up, and swings first one leg, then the other, and she’s shaking, shaking she’s so excited. It’s here. It’s all still here, waiting for her to play it. She can feel the keys beneath her fingers already. Natalie twists her hair and throws it over one shoulder and sits on the piano bench. Her mother’s mother’s piano is a warm red-brown, always cool to the touch, its shiny surface scratched by the everyday traffic of children and house pets. She lifts and pushes back the lid, smiling at its brassy
ALDWIN
decal (the
B
is long gone; her sister Laurie picked at it). She closes her eyes. Her fingers know where to go. They sit on the white keys, waiting, home. She presses down and for a moment it’s hers again, the first sound she fell in love with, the first chord of “Life on Mars?” But that’s all there is. No second sound follows the first. The keys stick. They feel gluey.

Natalie opens her eyes to see blood rising between the keys, rich red blood pooling around her fingertips, and she is too afraid to scream, too afraid, even, to move.

“Play,” says Ed Hollis. He’s crumpled by the dresser on stage right, where he landed after she shot him. His head is curled tight toward his belly, like a shrimp. “Play it anyway,” he says again.

“I’m sorry,” she says to Hollis. “I’m so sorry, Ed. You didn’t deserve—”

“Play it.”

“I can’t, it’s full of blood.”

“It always was. That’s why you fell in love with it.”

The keys are a shiny red lake. She can’t bear to disturb the surface.

“Play it.”

Natalie closes her eyes.

She presses her fingers into the blood and finds the keys underneath. They move. Full of blood, the keys move fluidly. The music, the pulse, returns, and Natalie plays along with it.
Listen,
says Hollis. He must be sitting beside her now; she can feel his weight on the bench, but she can’t open her eyes. Not yet.
Listen harder.
She remembers how it feels to play. To play with your whole body, your fingers, your wrists, your forearms and elbows and shoulders, your neck and your head, your legs, your feet. You are an orchestra entire. Your fingers are each a single instrument, your hands a section; point and counterpoint, melody and countermelody, concord and dissonance are born, sustained, resolved in your body. In your head and your heart. In the space behind your bellybutton: a flicker, a flutter. Each chord she plays rises. Her hair lifts from her shoulders. Her hips, her thighs, her legs straighten slightly as she floats away from the bench. The only parts of her still tethered are her hands, her fingers on the keys, and when Natalie finally does open her eyes, she and the piano are suspended in midair, upside down. The world falls away and in the perfect black she is weightless.

A drop of water splashes on her face.

She hears voices.

She’s back in her bedroom, miles from the stage, from that high school, it’s the night she killed a boy and Natalie has only just dropped the gun. Hollis flew. He was so close when she shot him that he flew back as he fell, and now he’s slumped against her dresser. That night, the night it happened, she sank to the floor where she stood. She crouched, trembling, and watched Hollis die from the other side of the room.

Another drop of water. She’s being rained on, but she blinks the rain away.

Her bare knees sink in the carpet pile as she crawls over to Hollis, the boy she shot, the boy who would have hurt her, she has no doubt, if she hadn’t. It was self-defense. It will always feel like murder. Because how can she blame him? How can she look at him and not see herself?

“Hollis,” she says.

His lips part on a bubble of spit. His head droops.

She gathers him in her arms. He curls tighter, smaller, pressing his head into her chest, and when he shudders she holds him as close as she can. This boy with his shaggy blond hair and fine-lashed eyes. His chipped-tooth grin. Whose future she took. She will hold this boy for the rest of her life.