Bellweather Rhapsody (16 page)

When he hangs up, the sleep he missed last night drags his eyelids shut and slows his breathing. He has always been a catnapper, but lately Hastings finds himself powerless to resist his own tiredness, slipping under an instant after he realizes he might fall asleep. He slumps into a fretful darkness wondering whether a horrible thing he saw fifteen years ago—the most horrible thing he’s ever seen—was only the beginning of something worse.

10

M
INNIE SHOULD PROBABLY
get off the elevator. She’s been riding it up and down, lobby to upper floors and back again, since she got on at four, her own floor, about thirty minutes ago. In that time, she’s shared the elevator car with three violinists, one cellist, and one tuba player. The hotel is full of teenagers carrying musical instruments. When she imagined her triumphant, ass-kicking return to the halls of the great hulking horror of her dreams, Minnie Graves saw wedding dresses. Orange extension cords. Perhaps a melee, a fight to the death, a fire ax chopping down a bathroom door.

She did not see band geeks.

A reedy boy in jeans at least three sizes too big, his waist cinched with a belt like a drawstring purse, smiles as he steps into the elevator on the eighth floor. “Five,” he croaks. Minnie nods at him and presses the button. “Please.” He smiles sheepishly.

“Big night, huh?” she says.

The boy’s cheeks ignite.

Minnie tries not to notice when the elevator passes by the seventh floor. Thankfully, it does not stop. She focuses on the teenager instead, who may, in fact, be wearing a girl’s top. The hem is loose, floaty; the collar is ruched like a peasant shirt. Just because she’s never had a big night herself, a night big enough to end with someone else’s shirt on her back, doesn’t mean Minnie isn’t familiar with the signs. She wants to ask what happened. Maybe some kind of strip string quartet.

The boy gets off at five and a woman gets on. No—a coiled, terrifying creature in women’s clothing. She is tall, though she’s getting the bulk of her height from horrifying-looking red pumps that make Minnie’s arches ache in sympathy. Her hair is white and pulled back in a murderously tight ponytail. As soon as she’s inside, she stabs the L and then the Close Door button and casts a glance at Minnie that might as well be a shiv jerked between her ribs.

“Gotta move faster than that, honey,” this insane woman says.

It takes Minnie a moment to understand the woman thought Minnie meant to get off at five with the boy. Logical; not many people go joyriding in the elevator. Still, Minnie resents it. She knows she looks like an unremarkable cupcake. Fluffy, pale, round as a moon pie. But what Minnie resents most is this horrible woman’s assumption (some would say reasonable) that if you are fat—and Minnie is fat, not overweight, not chubby, she is solid with
fat
—you are someone who Cannot Help Herself. Someone Who Will Defer. Someone Who Is Weak.

When the fat, in fact, is one of the few parts of Minnie that make her strong.

“Lady,” she says, and pushes the emergency stop button. The elevator jiggles to a halt. “Do you have a problem with me?”

“Who wouldn’t?” the woman says, eyes glimmering. “Now be a good girl and release the elevator, so I can get back to my life and you can get back to your collection of limited-edition Beanie Babies.”

Minnie stares at the woman but doesn’t speak. She steps close and pushes her belly into her like a sumo wrestler. Minnie moves with surprising speed and the woman, caught off guard, wobbles on those ridiculous heels. She tries to steady herself by placing a hand on Minnie’s arm.

Minnie removes the woman’s hand from her arm and twists her wrist backward with a sound like a fistful of uncooked spaghetti snapping in half. The woman makes a cartoon noise—
Auck!
—and slams against the mirrored wall to her right. She slides down to the floor, holding her wounded wrist to her stomach, and Minnie smiles.

None of this happens in real life, of course. But Minnie imagines it so vividly she finds it hard to believe actually doing it would be any more satisfying.

Minnie Graves, since the night of November 13, 1982, when she watched from the sidelines as two just-married strangers obliterated themselves, has lived almost entirely in her mind. She always had an active imagination—it was curiosity that drew her closer in the first place—but since that night, her mind has gone Technicolor. Surround sound. She has lived in stories and in movies.

Horror movies.

Minnie had witnessed real violence and now lived for the Hollywood version. Before that November, every time Mike would tell his little sister about the latest awful thing he’d watched with his friends, he’d done so only to torture her. Then what Minnie saw at the Bellweather changed everything about what she considered scary. How she felt about fear and what it meant to be afraid.

For weeks afterward, through Thanksgiving and into December, her family spoke quietly and walked on tiptoe. Minnie didn’t smile. Minnie was afraid of everything—every closed door, every dark closet, every unexpected noise. Minnie didn’t sleep through the night. She couldn’t be woken without screaming, kicking, fighting for her life. Her doctor suggested introducing her to animals. “Take her to a shelter or a pet shop or the zoo,” Dr. Ramble told her parents. Minnie could still see their faces, their exhaustion and worry for her carving every line and crease deeper. “Let her hold a bunny.”

“Dr. Ramble is a kook,” her father said in the car on the way home. “I think he got his degree at Wossamotta U.”

“I’d like that,” she said quietly. “I’ve never held a bunny before.”

Their neighbors kept rabbits in a hutch in their garage, and must have been instructed not to upset poor little Minnie, because they brought her over to hold their pets with palpable solemnity. They all knew why she was there, including Minnie. If it was for her sake they were pretending she wasn’t broken, they needn’t have bothered; after all, she knew better than anyone just how broken she was. Beth, the oldest neighbor girl, pulled a squirming mass of dark gray fluff from the corner of the hutch and said, “This is Rocket.”

Minnie’s heart sped as the bunny approached. She didn’t know what to do, how to hold it. Did you hold a bunny like a baby, not that she’d had much more experience holding babies. She was going to hurt it. She didn’t know why she’d said she wanted to hold a bunny; its big back legs would kick and tear at her. But then Minnie was simply—holding the bunny.

Flat against her chest, nothing to it. The rabbit was warm and soft, softer than any of her stuffed animals, softer than her grandmother’s mink stole, softer than anything she had ever held in her own arms. Beneath the cloud of its softness she could feel its heart beating like a mad butterfly, matching and then doubling her own heart rate. It was almost too ridiculous to believe, but there it was. The bunny was afraid of her. The bunny feared her, feared Minnie Graves.
Minnie Graves,
who was lately afraid of the whole entire world, possessed the power to instill terror.

She pressed her palm flat against the rabbit’s back and stroked its fur until its heart began to slow. She didn’t know which was more of a revelation, to have been granted this incredible power by a living creature, or to discover she had the ability to soothe the fear away. She pressed her face into the bunny’s side and breathed in its woodchippy scent. It wasn’t a miracle or a cure, but it helped.

By the following spring, the Graves family was breathing easier. Minnie, if she wasn’t completely her old self, was at least sleeping through the night and not jumping three vertical feet at every odd noise. Mike and his friend Henry (she would develop a terrible crush on Henry in two short years, a relationship built around buckets of fake blood and that would never develop beyond
Hey, bye,
and
George Romero is a genius
) were monopolizing the Graves’s new VHS player with a stack of tapes they’d rented from the Rite-Aid. Minnie was working on her social studies homework in the kitchen, half listening to her brother and Henry’s murmured conversation.

She was memorizing the names and capitals of all the countries of Europe for a quiz on Monday. It was a Saturday evening. They’d had sloppy joes for dinner, Henry too, and she’d accidentally spilled her glass of milk and it had dripped into the table, through the cracks on either side of the leaf they’d had to put in because Henry was joining them. She remembered everything about that day: the map of Europe in her social studies textbook, countries the same pastel colors as Necco Wafers. Her mother had braided her hair that morning just for fun. The braid was draped over her shoulder and Minnie couldn’t resist chewing on the end. She could still taste it, comforting, fibrous, weirdly metallic.

She had to pee. Walking to the bathroom, Minnie passed the doorway to the family room. Mike and Henry had shut off all the lights, and when Minnie turned, attention caught by the bright square of the television screen, her feet stopped themselves.

Minnie was in the Bellweather.

She was looking through the television
into
the Bellweather, looking down that long hotel hallway. At the end of the hall were two little girls in matching pale blue dresses and high white knee socks. Then they were on the ground, torn to pieces, legs and arms at ugly angles, blood on the walls. Then they were standing again, as pale blue as before.

She walked into the family room. Mike and Henry were sitting on either end of the couch with their backs to her. She stood behind the couch and watched and didn’t breathe and didn’t blink.

Henry noticed her first. Later Minnie would think that the seed of her crush had been planted when Henry noticed her before her own brother did. “Hey,” he said, “hey, Minnie, you don’t have to—”

Mike jumped off the couch. “Jesus, Minnie, Mom and Dad’ll gut me. You have to get out of here.”

“I want to see it,” she said. “I’ll tell Mom and Dad it’s not your fault. I want to, Mike—I want to. I want to see it.” Her eyeballs were dry. She wondered when she’d last blinked. On the television, a little boy—
Danny,
this must be Danny—was pressing his hands over his eyes. They covered his whole face. Then the picture and the noise stopped, replaced by a silent blue screen that hurt Minnie’s eyes. Henry had turned off the tape.

“None of it is real. It’s just a movie,” Henry said. “If you don’t want to see anything, you can always close your eyes.”

Minnie sat on the couch between them. She pulled her legs up.

“Are you sure, Bug?” Mike said. “Are you really, really sure?”

“I want to see it,” she said.

The Shining,
seen at last, was horrifying. Wrong. Minnie didn’t understand everything but she
felt
everything, every shrieking, grinding sound, every frame of every scene. When the tide of blood poured out of the elevator shaft and into the hallway, gushing over the chairs and tables and washing them away, Minnie’s own blood roared in her veins. There were things in that movie she didn’t know could be
thought
of, much less seen, much less made to happen.

She went straight to bed. She hadn’t told her family, but she had been dreaming of the Bellweather every single night for months. The reason she’d ceased to wake herself up, shaking and crying, was that she’d become too tired to fight; the fear had won. She had accepted that, in her dreams, she would always be afraid. Then
The Shining—
and no other movie would have done for this first, critical dosing—inoculated her. She had been exposed to the fear that was eating her, slowly but surely, in the light of day; she had confronted it in her waking hours and was rewarded with a night of black, dreamless peace. When she woke up the next morning, a kind of rested she’d forgotten she could feel, Minnie at last knew how to train herself to survive in the world. She would spend the rest of her life pouring the fear out of her dreams and into scary movies.

Minnie grew up. She didn’t have many friends, and certainly no best friends. She never had any boyfriends; Henry wasn’t interested, and he was the only one she ever cared about. She slept through the night. Even though she remembered fewer of them, she was still dreaming horrible dreams; if woken mid-dream by an unexpected loud noise or by her mother, worried she would miss the bus, Minnie screamed and swung and scratched as hard as she had that first night at the hotel. Her family had learned to let her oversleep.

The list of new things that frightened her grew and grew. Being asked to dances. Regents exams. High heels. Unlocked doors. Driving tests. Failing driving tests. Garage door openers left in unlocked cars. Airplanes. Lyme disease. College applications. College. Dorms. The list of horror films she watched, again and again and again, kept pace. She poured her fear into
Night of the Living Dead.
Into
Halloween
and
The Exorcist,
The Evil Dead
and
Alien.
She had nightmares on Elm Street and spent summers on Camp Crystal Lake. She watched Hitchcock and the Universal and Hammer horror films, but they didn’t have nearly the visceral potency of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Mike and Henry, home from their first years at college, took her to see David Cronenberg’s remake of
The Fly
for her sixteenth birthday. The movie—and Henry, whenever he gushed about the girl he’d met at school—broke her heart in a hundred places.

She got fat. She wasn’t able to say when it started, somewhere in eighth grade, she suspected, around the time gym class began to feel like a circus sideshow, with her as the main attraction, but the sizes of her jeans, her tops, her bras increased with each season. At first it was another thing for her to be fearful of, but as her new size stabilized, she came to enjoy it. Her body had barely been hers since that November—it jumped, it flinched, it twitched at everything—but the fat was her own. It was armor. It made her feel solid, planted, like she could defeat anyone who crossed her simply by falling on them.

She got a two-year degree from the local community college, because her parents wanted her to, in biology. When Jennifer and Theo (he
was
still her brother-in-law, despite a few years when it was touch and go) came over for family dinners, they asked what she intended to do with her degree. Make a paper airplane, Minnie would say. Use it as a lobster bib. In truth, she had no desire to do anything. No desire for more school. For a job. No interest in making friends, or, God forbid, going on a date, being someone’s girlfriend (someone who wasn’t Henry), getting married. When Jennifer and Theo forced her, by their very presence, to consider that such lives were not only possible but in fact fairly commonplace, Minnie’s stomach flopped like a dying goldfish. How could she be expected to participate in the world? The world was a terrible place. People hated each other. They killed each other. They shot each other on their wedding day, they hanged themselves and tried to—would have—