Bellweather Rhapsody (13 page)

“Let me tell you your fortune.” Alice presents the cards, still nestled in the purple scarf, for Jill’s inspection. Jill lifts her head slightly from the mattress to see.

“You know how to read them?”

Alice nods.

“You promise not to tell me if it’s really bad news?” Jill smiles when she says this, so Alice thinks she must be kidding. Still, she crosses her index and middle fingers and traces an X over her heart.

“My deck has good juju. Happy mojo.”

Jill sits up slowly. Her black hair falls over her face and she shoves it back with both hands. She is not just tired, Alice thinks. She is weary, a kind of weary there is no name or cure for.

“Check the towels. Between them.” Jill points toward the bathroom and grins lazily. “I’ve got a treat for us.”

The treat is a bottle of red wine on the linen rack above the toilet, secreted neatly in the pile of standard-issue hotel towels. Alice hands it to Jill triumphantly.

“And it’s even a twist cap. It’s almost like you’ve done this before.” She sits opposite Jill on her bed and crosses her legs. “Too bad all we have are those plastic cups over by the ice bucket.”

Jill shrugs, tosses the twist cap to the floor, tips the bottle straight up against her mouth, and pulls the wine into her body, desperately, like a marathoner emptying a water bottle. She is already flushed and glassy when she hands the bottle to Alice.

“Ahhhhh,” she sighs. “I needed that. I really, really needed that.”

Alice has been drunk exactly twice in her life. Once, accidentally, as a child: at a Christmas party thrown by her father’s boss, she had consumed eight punch glasses of hot wassail by filling and refilling the one half glass her mother poured for her. No one knew she was drunk until they arrived at home, when she took two steps inside the door and vomited red wine and cinnamon all over the foyer—no one, that is, except Alice herself. She’d figured out she was tanked and had kept the knowledge warm and slow and fantastically secret. Rabbit, if he had been any older than ten, might have had a clue his sister was blitzed by the way she latched on to him, more octopus-like than usual. If he had liked the half glass their mother poured for him too, he might have been drunk himself.

The second time Alice had been drunk was much more recently: a little less than two months ago, on one of the last weekends in September, at a party at Eric Cole’s parents’ house—or rather, a party at the adjacent field. This was upstate New York; why party in a house when there’s a perfectly good field nearby? Eric had graduated a few years earlier from Ruby Falls High. Alice hardly knew him, and, frankly, found the concept of Eric Cole—easily twenty-two, partying while his parents were out of town with kids still in high school—desperately lame. But everyone was going. “Everyone going” meant next to nothing to Alice, but it meant something to Jimmy Kopek.

Being drunk at Eric Cole’s house was a completely different experience than downing eight cups of wassail in the fourth grade. People she knew from school, a mix of those she was sort of friends with and not at all friends with, stood around a dented silver keg, passing foamy beer to each other in red plastic cups. And that was kind of . . . it. Alice remembered how happy she’d been the first time she was drunk, how all she wanted to do was laugh and pull the world close. She felt none of those things here. She felt cold and awkward and sad that Jimmy was standing on the other side of the circle of beer drinkers, laughing with his friends on the soccer team. They’d been together for nearly five months, since last spring and all summer long, but it was strange now that they were back in school. Summer had been a blur of rented videos and movie dates and late-night pancakes at Perkins and marathon make-out sessions while her parents were at work, just the two of them, Jim and Alice, Alice and Jim. Once upon a time, all he had to do was look at her a certain way—bashful almost, without blinking—and Alice felt she was the only girl in the world. But now he was different. It was soccer season, and Jimmy had somewhere to be, something to do and talk about other than Alice. She left messages with his little sister, with his mother, but Jimmy didn’t call her back. She finished her third cup of foamy beer and wondered why her stupid boyfriend suddenly found her so easy to ignore.

Jimmy hardly spoke to her; no one spoke to her, really. She wished she’d said something to Rabbit. Invited him. He probably didn’t even know this party was happening (she’d told her parents she and Jimmy were going to the movies), but if Rabbit were here, at least she’d have someone to talk to. But no: she’d been right not to say anything. Nelson Hamm, doubled over laughing at something Jimmy said, had given Rabbit a wedgie-a-week all freshman year. Alice rationalized that if she’d invited her brother, he’d feel obligated to come, curious to see if this time, this
one
time—it was senior year, after all, this was the stuff movies were made of—he would finally fit in. And in the end it could only be this way: he would be hurt by the assorted jerks and blank slates whom Jimmy insisted he was friends with, either by their outright cruelty or complete indifference.

Why was she here if Jimmy—or hell,
anyone
—wasn’t paying attention to her?
She was Alice Hatmaker.
She had a world waiting for her, outside this town and these people, and her brother was her best friend and he was going to go away, he was going to go to a different college and leave her on her own.

Alone in a crowd of boring people.

Alice was drunk enough at this point to think that was
exactly
what the future held for her. It was also the first time she’d admitted to herself how soul-deep terrified she was of the possibility that her brother would choose to go to a different college. Alice had applied to only one school, early admission, and though technically she was still waiting for her acceptance letter, she knew she was going to the Westing School of Music in Rochester. Westing was the biggest deal outside of Juilliard; it had the professors and the connections she wanted. Rabbit was planning to apply to Westing, but then he’d also gone and looked at Syracuse. Binghamton. A little place near Buffalo called Freedom-something-or-other. He would cast a wider net. His catch would come in, and the tide would take him to newer lands, lands where his sister had never set foot.

And oh God—what if it wasn’t just Jimmy, what if she
was
easy to ignore? What if Alice Hatmaker was a star only in her own head? What if Westing didn’t want her? What would she do then?

She had to talk to Rabbit. Rabbit loved her. Rabbit wouldn’t lie to her. Rabbit wouldn’t leave her, ever, not if she asked him not to. Not if she asked him tonight, right now.

Alice ran down the hill in the dark to the Cole house. The beer drinkers had managed to start a bonfire and were now circling the flames. Their shadows threw themselves in front of her, blocking her path, but Alice plowed through them like a thresher. The house was in front of her. The house had a phone, and a phone could call Rabbit—a phone would bring Rabbit here in their parents’ Taurus to pick her up, to take her back home where she belonged.

The wraparound porch creaked beneath her feet and the screen door squawked as she threw it open. She could hear voices in other rooms, but here in the kitchen she was alone. Tears of relief swelled in her eyes. She made a beeline for a cordless phone mounted on the wall over a small breakfast bar. She had the phone in her hand.

“
What’s your favorite scary movie?
” a voice growled in her ear.

She jumped three feet forward, away from the growler—who was just stupid Eric Cole, lame, too-old Eric Cole, carrying a case of more shitty beer in his arms. In her fright, Alice had thrown the phone and it skidded across the floor, spinning on its back like an upended turtle.

“Shit,” she said, and suddenly she was crying. Sobbing, real tears rushing down her face, dangling in droplets on the underside of her jaw.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” She heard a clanking that must have been Eric setting the case of beer on the floor, and then she felt his hands on her arms, steering her to a stool by the breakfast bar. “Hey, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m not a psycho killer.”

She cried harder. She howled. Eric wrapped his arms around her and turned her head to tuck it against his shoulder. Alice had always had problems hyperventilating—her body was naturally melodramatic, could escalate tears into a maelstrom of unstoppable grief in less than ten seconds—and she began to shudder and gasp for breath against the warmth of his T-shirt. Every inhalation calmed her down. He smelled like boy. Clean, end-of-summer boy, of sweat and grass clippings, cotton and hay. Jimmy Kopek, these days, smelled like shin guards and soccer balls, mold and McDonald’s.

Alice inhaled one solid, strong breath. She sat back from Eric Cole and blinked bleary eyes gummy with mascara. She’d been wrong; he was not a boy. He had a day’s worth of dark stubble on his face and a dimple on his right cheek like he’d been marked with a pin. He was looking at her intently, without blinking, as if she were the only girl in the world.

She kissed him.

He kissed her back, but in truth Alice had kissed him first. And she couldn’t say why, really, except that at that precise moment it had seemed the only thing to do.

Jimmy Kopek didn’t care about what she’d felt like. Jimmy didn’t even care that all that had happened between Alice and Eric Cole was a single kiss nearly six weeks ago—a fairly substantial kiss that Alice felt bloom all over her body, but one kiss nonetheless. She never found out who told Jimmy. She never knew how he knew.

He just knew.

So it is with mixed emotions that Alice takes the bottle of red wine from Jill and seriously entertains the possibility of getting drunk tonight. Righteously, horribly, shitfacedly drunk.

The bottle is warm from Jill’s grasp. Alice thinks of her brother out in the world without her, as he will be from now on, surely. She thinks of the boy Jimmy Kopek had seemed to be at first, how much he had loved her at the start, and how it broke her heart to discover how easily she could be cast aside. She thinks of Jill sitting in front of a cup of steaming tea she doesn’t want to drink while her mother berates her, crushes her, breaks her, and she tips the bottle back and glugs until she needs air.

“So tell me about the future.” Jill crosses her legs and faces Alice.

Alice has Jill shuffle and cut the tarot deck, tells her to choose six cards and concentrate. Jill
ommmm
s like she’s meditating, and Alice laughs. Alice loves the feel of the cards in her hands, bigger than playing cards, still stiff after years of use and satisfying to lay flat with a little snap. She bought them at the occult bookstore in Syracuse, by the university, on Westcott Street, with money from her fourteenth birthday. The possibility that you could know your future, could divine it through something as simple as a deck of special cards, was too alluring for Alice to pass up. She wanted to know. She wanted to see how glorious it was going to be. She was a girl who liked to be prepared.

“We’ll start with a simple six-card spread. Major arcana only. Those are the face cards, the cool-looking ones.” She clears her throat. “Think of a question. A big question. Life-altering. Let it kind of soak into your brain.”

Jill shakes her hair back and blinks rapidly, gazing at the ceiling.

“Got one. What—”

“Don’t tell me what it is.” Alice smiles. “Just hold it. Keep thinking it. I’m going to play your first card.”

Jill covers her eyes. “I can’t look,” she says.

Alice spreads the purple scarf over the bed between them and lays one card smack in the middle, facing Jill. It’s the Chariot. “Interesting.” The Chariot, which shows a man riding a chariot with a raised sword, indicates conflict.

“Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?” Jill whispers theatrically. She takes another long pull from the bottle. “Because I’m thinking that means I should steal a car and get the hell away from this place.”

“It means struggle. Battle. War. This card is your current state, the current place from which you asked your question.”

Jill raises her fist in the air. “
Vive la Jill!
”

Alice plays another card, crossways on top of the first. Her pulse lifts.

“Don’t get freaked by this,” she says. The card is Death. “I know it’s a skeleton and . . . pretty scary-looking, but Death—look, I pulled this card last night myself.”

Jill rests the bottle upright on the mattress. “I thought you said your cards had good mojo.”

“They do, they do—gimme the wine.” Alice drinks. “Death doesn’t mean death, like, literal death. It means change. Something new and different coming your way, which would be—it would be
good,
right? Change for the better?”

“Death would be a better change,” Jill says. Her eyes flick. Whether she regrets the sentiment itself or having expressed it aloud is hard to say.

Come on, deck,
Alice thinks.
Give me something to work with. Give me something good
. Above both cards she places the Magician.

“This is good, Jill. This is great, actually. This card represents your immediate goal, the thing you’re going to overcome obstacles to accomplish. The Magician is sort of a . . . not a trickster, but a smart guy. Like, a clever guy with a plan, with the will and creativity to carry it out.” Alice has always liked the Magician. His face is young but his power—between the infinity symbol hovering above his head and the snake eating its own tail he wears for a belt—is ancient. Eternal. “When the Magician shows up, he’s telling you not to hold back. To rise up to your full potential. To make your own future.”

Jill’s face hardens. She takes the wine back from Alice.

The fourth and fifth cards Alice plays, which represent the past, are the Devil and the Tower. This is officially the scariest tarot reading she’s ever given.

“Well. Shit,” says Jill, looking from one card to the other. “That can’t be good.”

Both the Devil and the Tower, unlike Death, are unambiguously not-good cards, and Alice, on the edge of buzzed, feels her poker face slide, slippery as the silk scarf on which she’s laid them. The Devil is, well, the Devil, representing violence, bondage, an inescapable fate. The Tower, with its drawing of a stone tower struck by lightning and tumbling to pieces under a darkening sky, means catastrophe. Destruction. Calamity and unforeseen misery. Alice has never seen the Tower come up in a reading she’s done for someone else, or for—