Bellweather Rhapsody (6 page)

“You’re creeping me out,” Jill says. “Why aren’t you at rehearsal?”

“I’m not stalking you, if that’s what you mean.” Alice is horrified these words are coming out of her mouth. She laughs nervously.

“The thought hadn’t entered my mind until now.”

“I’m sorry. We got off on a strange—I’m—I was running late. My chaperone got us here late, and I wanted to unpack before going to rehearsal.”

“Us?” Jill brushes past Alice and picks up the flute.

“My brother and I. He plays—he’s in the orchestra. Are you in the orchestra?” Alice shakes her head. Of course Jill’s in the orchestra; they say there isn’t a pecking order, but there is, and the best woodwinds and brass are in the orchestra, where there are fewer of them.

Jill doesn’t answer. She hugs the flute case against her chest, propping her chin on one end. She looks younger than she is, as young as twelve, and Alice realizes that at the same age she was making faces in her mirror, learning how to smile with her nose, Jill was crossing in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to play to a packed house.

Alice droops a little. She feels tragically normal.

“Hatmaker?” Jill says, and Alice nods, excited to hear her name spoken by this magical creature. “That figures. Hey, listen—”

The door opens again, and Alice frowns, wondering how many keys the Bellweather cut for this particular room. Then she stops, because the woman with the white ponytail who enters is none other than Viola Fabian.

The temperature drops at least ten degrees.

“There you are,” says Fabian. “What did I tell you? You’ve been here all of fifteen minutes and already you’re pissing and moaning.” She sighs and puts her hands on her hips. “I swear to Christ, Jelly, there are faster, surer methods of matricide.”

“You weren’t there, Mom. You don’t know what he did.”

“It doesn’t matter what he did,” Fabian says. “It only matters what
you
do.”

Alice’s brain says
Don’t stare don’t stare
but she can’t help it, she stares, because mother and daughter are so similar and so different. They are severely beautiful, otherworldly, and intense. But while standing beside Jill was thrilling, standing beside her mother is—Alice catches herself, because even though she is prone to melodrama, she seldom feels this strongly—standing beside Viola Fabian is frightening. Where Jill presents possibility, Viola is all coiled threat. Alice thinks of her own mother, of curly-haired Harriet Hatmaker, handing her an oversize red mug of chicken-and-stars soup when Alice had chickenpox, telling her they would fight chicken with chicken. Viola has never made her daughter a bowl of soup in her life, Alice thinks; she has never tended her when she was ill or tucked her in or held her when there was no comfort but to be held. Alice wonders if anyone has ever tended Jill, in any way, and if her intelligent ferocity is what happens when a girl has had to teach herself how to be human.

“What do you want?” Jill asks. She has dropped the flute to her side casually, but Alice notices there is nothing casual about the way her fingers grip the case. “This isn’t what we agreed.”

“And you agreed not to have a tantrum. But you did, and that means it’s your own fault that you’re here now.” Viola opens the top dresser drawer, which is half full of Alice’s things. “If you’d behaved properly, you wouldn’t have to suffer the indignation of watching me search your room.”

“Actually, those are mine—” Alice bites her tongue, because neither Jill nor her mother seems to remember she’s there.

“I knew you would do this. I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave me alone for ten seconds. I haven’t even unpacked yet,
Mother
.”

“Then how do you explain this?” Viola holds up a red lace bra that Alice wears because it forces her chest up, making it easier to hit the high notes.

“That’s
mine,
” Alice says, ripping it out of Viola’s hand. She swallows, and feels perfectly high. “And I’d like to ask you to leave, please, Dr. Fabian. This is not your room, I am not your daughter, and my things are none of your business.”

Viola’s head and shoulders pivot. For the first time, she trains all her attention on Alice.

It’s like being caught in a tractor beam.

“I’m sorry, you are—?” Viola says. “And why aren’t you at rehearsal?”

“I’m Alice,” she says. “My chaperone got me here late.”

Viola approaches and stares at Alice. Her eyes are hard and flat, and Alice, whose talent for charming adults is almost greater than for belting a song to the rafters, feels utterly outmatched.

“What makes you think you’re special?” Viola asks.

“I don’t—”

“Oh, you do. You think you’re very special indeed. So special that you can take your time getting to rehearsal. So special that you tell me your first name only, and order me out of my own daughter’s room at the festival I am in charge of. I’ll tell you what else I can see, very plain: you’re not special at all. But I would like to know, out of simple curiosity, what
you
think makes you special. You teenagers.” She smiles, a broad, true smile. “You make me laugh.”

Alice’s knees buckle. She has no defense against a grown woman, an adult, dressing her down for no reason other than to hurt her. And she is hurt, terribly, because Viola Fabian has seen into her private and terrified heart. For what Alice fears most of all is that there is absolutely nothing special about her, that there are hundreds of thousands of other Alices, that everything she ever dreamed of becoming was only pretend.

“I’ll see you at dinner.” Viola leaves and doesn’t bother to shut the door.

After a long, still silence, Jill walks up to Alice and puts a cold hand on her arm. “I know you thought you were being brave,” Jill says. “But that was stupid.”

Alice looks up at Jill—at
the
Jill Faccelli, who is now looking at Alice as if
she
knows
her,
and can’t help but be a little happy.

“Is she always—?” Alice half asks, before feeling rude.

Jill shuts the door and crosses to the closet, from which she removes a scuffed black suitcase. Baggage routing tags sprout from the side handle, a bouquet of ciphers: LAX, LHR, CDG. That suitcase, Alice knows, has been all over the world, has followed Jill to London and Paris and Berlin and San Francisco and New York and God knows where else. She looks at her own bag, brand-new, naked, and untraveled.

“Oh, yes,” Jill says. “She is always like herself.” She flings her suitcase on the second bed and unzips it in one fluid motion. “She is never not Viola Fabian. She is never not correct, she is never not to be obeyed, she is never not the first, the middle, and the last word on everything. She is the reason I exist and the reason I need to do whatever she tells me. She is why I have a roof over my head, why I do not starve, why I live the life that I live. And it is because of Viola Fabian that I play the flute, that I am a musician at all, that I am a genius.” She pauses and gives Alice a small but honest smile. “I meant it when I said it was brave of you to stand up to her like that. To stand up to her at all.”

Alice shrugs and tries to pretend this compliment hasn’t made her entire year.

“And I meant it when I said it was stupid,” Jill says, and begins to unpack. “Now she knows who you are.”

4

A
LL THESE YEARS,
Viola has been waiting in the elevator. Natalie knows this is impossible—or at least highly improbable—and yet there she is. When the doors part, Viola Fabian, the woman herself, is standing inside as if she’s been shut up there for the past two decades, biding her time until Natalie pressed the call button. Every detail is just as she remembers. The ponytail, which was mostly white even in Viola’s mid-twenties, is now the color of paper. The exquisite gray wool suit could be the exact same one if the lapels were a bit wider. The frozen blue eyes and the sloping reddish brows—proof that Viola has, at some point, been something other than a white witch—and the mouth, painted the color of dried blood, are still poised for a glare, a doubting arch, a cutting remark that once had the power to stake Natalie through the heart.

Natalie’s body moves itself forward, crossing the threshold from the dim sixth-floor hallway of the Bellweather into the ancient elevator car. Viola even smells the same. Natalie has compartmentalized so many things about her—that’s Natalie’s former therapist talking, Dr. Call-Me-Danny; he dropped fruity jargon like “compartmentalize” and “avoidance behavior
”
every third word—that she’s begun to forget some of the details. But the memories are all there and floating up from the cold storage of her subconscious. Viola smells of lavender and something burnt. A hot wire. Singed toast. Natalie is suddenly afraid she’s going to cry.

She didn’t even cry after the break-in.

“Which floor?” Viola asks.

Her voice—Natalie blinks, and just as suddenly knows the tears aren’t going to come—her
voice
sounds different. Smaller, more human. How is that possible when everything else is precisely the same? Unless it’s Natalie’s ears that hear differently.

“Lobby,” she replies with a small croak. The elevator doors slide together, sealing them inside. “Thank you.”

Viola has already pressed L and settles back to the middle of the car. She sniffs. She looks at her watch. She does normal things for a stranger sharing an elevator to do. But they aren’t strangers; they are far, far from strangers.

Natalie clears her throat. “Here for the festival?”

Viola stares straight ahead. “Yes” is all she says.

“I have two students attending, chorus and orchestra. Both seniors.” Natalie swallows, feels she is talking too much. “Did you travel very far?”

“Everywhere is far from this godforsaken armpit.”

Natalie bites back a smile. Classic Viola. Then she frowns, bruised. This, she imagines Dr. Call-Me-Danny would say, is a “complex emotion.”

Why doesn’t Viola recognize her? How can she not remember Natalie Wink?

The first time Natalie Wink met Viola Fabian, one was ten and the other twenty-six; one was a student, one a teacher; one was awestruck and one was abusive. That, said Dr. Danny, was the simple truth. Natalie, who was there, knows it’s sort of half the truth, that it contains pieces of the truth—gnawed on, mangled, and spit back out—and, in any case, that it was never simple.

It began with a piano. Her parents had a piano, an upright they’d inherited from her mother’s mother, and Uncle Kevin, her mother’s youngest brother, would sometimes play it when he came up from San Francisco for Sunday dinners. But this piano—Natalie had never heard a piano sound so pretty or so sad. It danced. It dipped. The vinyl popped.

Laurie and Nancy, her older, painfully normal sisters, were out with friends. Natalie had been sent to bed early so that her parents could talk to her uncle about life in the city—Had he found a job yet? Those types in the Haight weren’t the most reliable employers. And he’d been kidding, right, about this being the first square meal he’d had all week?—but she’d crept back to the landing at the top of the stairs. Uncle Kevin always brought records with him, trying to
expand their consciousness,
which her parents never played while Natalie was (officially) awake.

She lay on her back and tipped her head over the top stair. The sad piano and a man with a warbly voice walked her through a sunken dream, until a single step appeared, a strong step made of sound followed by another, slightly higher, and another, higher yet. The piano got mad, and faster, she’d reached the top of the steps and with a rush of violins the entire world fell away. She leaped out into nothing and floated, held up by music. She had no idea what the man was singing about—sailors, cavemen, and lawmen were all involved—but it didn’t matter. It was beautiful. Her fingertips tingled. She wanted to run downstairs and flip open the lid of her grandmother’s piano and play it right then and there, but she didn’t. She listened to the next song instead. And the next. Her mother’s voice grew louder, she was getting upset; Natalie could picture Uncle Kevin running his hands through his bushy red hair until it stood three inches off his head. Natalie wished they’d shush. She pushed their voices aside and listened to the record and fell deeper and deeper in love.

When her uncle came upstairs to use the bathroom, Natalie was still curled on her back, head hanging over the top stair, giddy and giggly.

He crouched beside her. “Didn’t you go to bed an hour ago?” he asked. “Sit up, Natty, all your blood’s going to pool in your brains.”

“Who was that?”

“You mean on the record?”

She raised her head, dizzy, and nodded.

“You liked that?”

“It’s the best music I’ve ever heard.”

“Then I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow morning, look in the record cabinet. Filed under B for Bowie.”

She listened to all of
Hunky Dory,
but especially “Life on Mars?,” again and again. Uncle Kevin walked her through the basics, about sharps and flats, scales and counting beats. She listened more. She listened harder. The music echoed inside her mind and came out through her hands, one note, one chord, one measure at a time. She went straight to the piano when she got home from school. She spent every Saturday and Sunday dancing her fingertips down and over and across the keys.

She begged and pleaded with her parents for lessons, real private lessons. Uncle Kevin mentioned he’d seen a conservatory student play a piano concerto to a standing ovation, and Natalie knew, as soon as she heard her name—
Viola Fabian
—that this woman would be her teacher.
Had
to be. Her mother caved first. It was her mother’s mother’s piano, after all, and Natalie had only been two when her grandmother passed away. The drive from Millbrae to San Francisco to meet Viola Fabian was etched permanently in Natalie’s brain: how the rolling brown hills gave way to long blocks of pastel row houses, to city stoplights and street corners and crowds of people, and how Viola could be in any one of them.

Viola met with Natalie and her parents in one of the practice studios at the conservatory. They compared calendars, discussed fees. Natalie eyed the twin baby grands with greedy joy. She ached to show this strange and beautiful young woman—younger than her parents, maybe even younger than Uncle Kevin—how talented she was. How alike they were.