Bellweather Rhapsody (2 page)

Minnie stares at the woman, at her dark hair and pale skin. There is an orange electrical cord looped around her neck and Minnie feels the same sickness in her stomach as when she saw the bruise on Jennifer’s back. She knows this moment is dangerous, and she knows she should tell people—she should run down the hall and start banging on doors and screaming, but she can’t. For some reason, she can’t.

And she doesn’t.

“Little girl,” the woman says again. She is wearing long white gloves. She pulls one off and drops it to the floor. “Could you pick that up for me please?”

“
Don’t,
” says the dead man.

He gurgles red between his lips and grabs her arm and squeezes, hard, and Minnie finally screams, and pelts first one shoe and then the other at his bloody chest, and runs. And runs. She flings herself against the emergency exit at the end of the hall, pounds down the stairwell, hides her shaking self beneath the last set of stairs, beside an exit door that she is too frightened to walk through, and collapses.

The next thing she knows are warm hands on her face—
Bug, Bug, wake up!
—and Minnie rouses, hiccupping for breath, to the concerned dark eyes of her new brother-in-law. She screams blue murder. She kicks, she punches him. She drags her fingernails across his face. Photographs taken after the youngest bridesmaid was discovered playing hide-and-seek in an emergency stairwell all show Theo with four angry pink welts strafing his left cheek, a marked man.

Her parents pull her off their freshly minted son-in-law, apologetic and confused, not yet calmed from the rush of worry and adrenaline that their missing daughter inspired, not yet aware of the man and the woman outside and inside room 712. Her mother’s first thought is of the missing shoes—
I swear, Minnie, they were the same dye lot as the dress, there’s no way we can ever get a more perfect match
—shoes, at that very moment, that are confounding the hell out of the hotel manager and the local police. Not that anything about the mess in 712 makes any sense: not that a happy young bride, just married in the morning, should have any cause to commit an apparent murder-suicide during the first few hours of her honeymoon.

Minnie’s parents will discover this later, long after the reception, after a clerk at the front desk remembers that the colors of the Graves-Huppert wedding match the bloody Mary Janes. By then, Minnie will be asleep. When her parents wake her to talk to the police, again she will scream and kick and fight like an animal, afraid to be awake in a world of so many monsters.

Andante Misterioso

1

R
ABBIT EXHALES A
puff of November breath and worries. Every minute they spend outside in the cold, his bassoon is getting more and more out of tune. He blows on his hands. Why didn’t he remember to bring gloves? Or a hat? It’s November in Ruby Falls, they’re spending the weekend in the Catskills, he knows better. His butt is numb where it connects with the cold concrete. He hugs his bassoon case to his side, under his armpit, but it isn’t helping. His Discman is heavy in the pouch of his sweatshirt, but he’d have to unbutton his coat to get it. Anyway, his sister would be seriously offended if he slipped headphones on in her presence. No matter how freezing his ears might be, he knows Alice can’t stand not being listened to.

His sister dances back and forth, zigzagging from the bottom step to the top, rehearsing songs from
Mame,
which the drama club is putting on the first week of December. She’s covered “We Need a Little Christmas,” “My Best Girl,” and “The Man in the Moon,” which isn’t even her song to sing. Alice, of course, is Mame. She pirouettes on a high note and slides sidesaddle down the metal railing in the middle of the steps.

“Hey,” she says, nodding at the front lawn. “You see the billing?”

Rabbit squints at the official school sign, its movable letters currently admonishing the students and parents of the Ruby Falls Central School District to bring their donations of canned goods and other nonperishable items to the next football game. Beyond it is a plywood signboard, staked into the freshly frosted ground, white with large gold and black lettering and a stylish cartoon of a flapper holding a trumpet like an old-fashioned cigarette wand. It reads
RUBY FALLS HIGH DRAMA CLUB PRESENTS
MAME
STARRING ALICE HATMAKER
.

He smiles a frozen smile at her. Alice isn’t wearing a hat or gloves either. Her cheeks are blotchy pink but she doesn’t look as though she feels a thing.

“Next stop,” she says, “Statewide. Then Broadway, of course.” She claps. “Soooo excited! Are you? Excited about your very first time?” She yanks up the handle on her brand-new rolling suitcase—cherry red, the color of Luden’s cough drops—and leans against it. “Aren’t you excited?”

He nods. He
is
excited. This—pale, twitchy—
is
his excited face. Rabbit Hatmaker is excited, and also anxious and terribly worried that something happened to Mrs. Wilson, because she’s almost ten minutes late picking them up, and if
she’s
any later,
they
are going to be late getting to Statewide.

He hugs his bassoon case tighter. He imagines his instrument’s gleaming black plastic constricting, sparkling silver keys fogging under the warmth of his fingertips. Five years together, and he’s hardly ever left her out in the cold. Mr. McGurk, former head of the RFH music department, introduced Rabbit to his bassoon when he was in seventh grade. “Bert,” he’d said (he never called Rabbit by his nickname), “I need a bassoonist in junior high band. It’s a lot like that saxophone you’re playing right now, only there are two reeds wired together instead of one, so you can’t bite down on it. You have to curl your lips around your teeth and hold it between them, soft but firm, like this.” McGurk’s mouth disappeared beneath his mustache in a flat, lipless line. “Li’ dis!” he repeated. “That’s called your
embouchure
.”

The district owned two bassoons for student use, and McGurk presented Rabbit with one in a long flat case that seemed too small to contain it. But she was all there, in five separate pieces. A heavy boot. A bubbled bell. A graceful swooping bocal. Two joints, a wing and a tenor. Like a puzzle he solved every time he played, lining up the keys and pads, the corked ends fitting snugly into the right holes. Before he’d ever wrapped his lips around a double reed, Rabbit loved that bassoon. It was strange and singular and it made sense, and when he was first learning, it was two inches taller than the top of his head. He loved that about it too, that he was master of this mammoth instrument. He named her Beatrice.

Rabbit and Beatrice have been waiting to go to Statewide for years. Every March, starting in seventh grade, Rabbit prepared a solo for ASM. He could never remember exactly what the acronym stood for, Association for School Music, or Student Musicians, something like that—regardless, every spring ASM held competitions across the state of New York. The kids playing the hardest-level solos and receiving the highest scores each year were eligible for the ASM conference festival held the following fall, known as Statewide: a long weekend retreat at a resort in the Catskills, concert band, orchestra, and chorus made up of the best student musicians and vocalists from Queens to Boonville, with a packed schedule of intense all-day rehearsals culminating in a Sunday of concerts. Statewide was a huge deal, one step away from the big show. Everyone knew that the top music schools in the country, the Juilliards, the New England Conservatories, the Westings, saw the festival as a sort of farm team and went scouting for scholarship recruits. Only a handful of kids
ever
made it from podunk Ruby Falls, and never more than one kid a year. They were immortalized in McGurk’s office, in photographs and notecards and press clippings tacked alongside the yellowing programs and playbills that represented his twenty-five years of teaching at RFH. Rabbit, in McGurk’s office for his weekly lessons, memorized them. 1984: Claire Walker, RFH valedictorian, now playing with the horns of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 1988: Billy Fasman, youngest of the Fasman family, sang tenor at Tanglewood.

1996: Alice Hatmaker, drama queen extraordinaire, high school headliner. His other half.

He’d been jealous that his sister went to Statewide when she was a junior, but just a little. They’d never been particularly competitive about their achievements, probably because Rabbit was universally good at almost everything he tried (basketball notwithstanding) and Alice was great but only at a few select things. He sat beside his parents at Alice’s Statewide concert, anonymous as anyone else in the audience. Rabbit felt awkward. Not excluded, exactly, but a beat early. There was something there for him in that strange old hotel, he could feel
that
all right, but it wasn’t ready for him, not yet.

Last March had been everyone’s final chance. Rabbit was looking down the barrel of his senior year. McGurk was looking down the barrel of his retirement. McGurk coached Rabbit through a level-six solo, a lively syncopated sonata in four movements by Telemann, tapping out the time with his fingertip on the edge of Rabbit’s music stand. ASM held the competitions at a different school every spring, so Rabbit was lost from the moment he and his father entered the west wing of Fayetteville-Manlius High School. He’d been slotted at 6:30 on a Friday night—the last solo of the day—and Rabbit could tell that his judge, a thin woman with streaky blond hair who was rubbing her temples even as she greeted him, had checked out hours ago. He sat down and dampened his reed. It was a science classroom; there were rows of long lab tables with gas jets and sinks, and a poster of the solar system over the chalkboard. He thought of McGurk tapping tapping tapping, keeping gentle time. He thought of his father sitting outside in the hall, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, cupping an ear toward the closed door. The judge asked him to run through several scales and to begin whenever he was ready. And Rabbit, as always, found himself the moment he began to play.

She clapped. She actually
clapped,
his judge, and got up to shake his hand when he’d finished his piece. Maybe she’d heard too many flutes and violins and not enough bassoons that day; maybe she was just overjoyed the day was over. Or maybe he’d been really good, as good as he’d felt himself to be—his insides matching his outsides, everything attuned. She gave him a perfect score.

Rabbit was going to Statewide.

He didn’t know that for sure, of course. Not until late September, when he received a congratulatory letter, a folio of music, and various forms requiring his parents’ signatures, a full day before his sister. She said she was happy for him, she hugged him and assured him he was going to love every second of it, but there was a distinct difference between her happiness on Friday and on Saturday after she’d received her own conference acceptance.

“The Hatmaker twins broke the curse,” he told McGurk. He hadn’t been able to reach him the day before, when the good news was his alone; retirement, said McGurk, meant never having to answer your telephone. “Two Ruby Falls kids in one year.”

“I knew you could do it, Bert,” said McGurk. Rabbit could hear a dog barking in the background. “That’s great news. That’s great,
great
news.”

Rabbit wanted to say more. A lot more. About McGurk’s replacement, Mrs. Wilson, whom he wanted to like but couldn’t, and not just because she wasn’t McGurk; he had a sixth sense for liars and secret keepers, and she was at least one, if not both. About how much he
missed
McGurk, period. It was different at school without him. It was lonelier. And he wanted to ask McGurk a question that would have been impossible to ask while he was still Rabbit’s teacher: whether the rumors were true, that McGurk had been living with the same guy for the past twenty years, and that the guy was in fact his boyfriend. He wanted to ask if he, McGurk, was like Rabbit—gay—and whether being and not telling anyone was eating him alive too.

But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. The stories about McGurk, they were just rumors. He didn’t want to insult McGurk if he was, you
know,
and he didn’t want McGurk, if he wasn’t, to
be
insulted and consequently weirded out by Rabbit. It was too complicated, too frightening and risky. Rabbit needed to talk to someone he trusted, someone
like
him, and while he felt, deep down, that he and McGurk were very much alike—he couldn’t. He didn’t have the words.

“Thanks for everything” was all he ended up saying.

It was the closest he’d ever come to telling someone the truth, and over the next seven days he slipped into a bleak, blank misery. Not because he’d almost told someone he was gay, but because he
hadn’t
. Having skirted the opportunity, having come so close and swerved, Rabbit realized how mortally exhausted he was of not being himself—completely himself. In the fall of his senior year, he had reached the point of no return. He was more tired of lying than afraid of what might happen when he stopped.

Which was saying something. The only fistfight he’d ever gotten into was when Dave Hollister got hold of his sheet music and picked on him because the bassoon part was labeled
fagott.
“It means ‘bundle of sticks’ in German!” he’d shouted at Dave before kneeing him in the groin, after which Dave laid him out with a single punch. And Dave Hollister was his
friend—
or friendly, at least; they sat at the same long lunch table.

He had to believe if he chose his audience wisely, it wouldn’t be like that. It wouldn’t have to be.

Which is another reason, moments from Statewide, why he’s nervous as hell.

He blows into his freezing hands. Mrs. Wilson is now twenty minutes late. Alice plunks herself down on the step beside him and stretches out her legs, swiveling her ankles to the right, then the left, humming more highlights from
Mame.