Bellweather Rhapsody (7 page)

Viola asked Natalie’s parents to step out of the practice room while their daughter played for her. “Having you around makes us that much more nervous,” she told them, and winked at Natalie. The room, soundproof and close, felt like a secret clubhouse as soon as they were alone. Viola asked her to run through her scales, major, minor, and chromatic. She asked her to play a prepared solo, and Natalie played, of course, “Life on Mars?” Viola gave her a handwritten sheet of music to sight-read. Natalie knew she hadn’t performed perfectly—sight-reading wasn’t her strength, to say the least—but she knew she’d played well. She’d felt that sweet rush of weightlessness she always felt when she played, when the music lifted her high on its back. Through it all, Viola had said nothing beyond an instruction. She paced the small room (which felt smaller as time went on), winding the end of her white-streaked ponytail around her index finger, her brow furrowed, her lips pursed.

Natalie laid her hands in her lap and waited, hopeful.

Viola smiled at her with all her teeth and said, “You were sloppy on all your scales, but especially the full chromatic, which was pretty goddamn awful. That was the worst pedal work I’ve ever seen in my life, frankly, but it was still better than your sight-reading, which was a goddamn disaster. It’s laughable that you thought to audition with
that
piece of pop trash, but it’s not your fault; no one ever told you what to play. You taught yourself, and it shows. You aren’t ever going to be great, but if you want to try to be good, I can help you. Learn this,” she said, offering a sheaf of music. “All of it. By next Tuesday.”

Natalie didn’t know what else to do, so she smiled. Decades later, she would tell Dr. Danny that at that moment she knew, she
knew
—instinctively, deep in her gut—that Viola Fabian was dangerous.

But she didn’t listen to her gut. She hadn’t yet learned how.

Natalie is sick with the coincidence of it all. For them to have last seen each other on the other side of the country—seventeen years have passed since that sweltering day. Seventeen years: the midpoint of her life to date, almost exactly.

“Yes,” she says, “everywhere
is
far from this godforsaken armpit.” Natalie coughs. Her throat is itchy. “I’m from Ruby Falls. Way upstate. High school music program director.” Why is she still talking? Why can’t she stop? “Moved from Minneapolis this summer.”

“So you know.”

“Know?”

“Snow.”

Ah, the weather. Of course they would get around to talking about the weather. That’s what you do in an elevator, after all.

Natalie nods. “I know snow.”

She and Emmett had talked about what they were going to do next, after the body was buried and the lawyers introduced her to the phrase “justifiable taking of life” and it was clear nothing would happen beyond Natalie’s being written up in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
as a heroic homeowner. Well, Emmett had talked; Natalie had shouted.
“We are leaving!”
she had yelled at him when he calmly, all things considered, pointed out that running away would solve nothing. She had shouted,
“We are going somewhere else!”

Upstate New York, then, was somewhere else. More like nowhere, except for the hometown of Emmett’s friend from college who was willing to put in a good word with the schools in his district hiring chemistry and music teachers. And in this elevator with Viola Fabian is somewhere else entirely—another world in another time, from another era of her life. Anger comes over her like a wave of nausea, because Natalie cannot imagine that Viola Fabian’s path to this elevator has been anywhere near as disappointing as her own. And where is the justice in that?

“Have you heard the latest?” says Viola. “About this storm bearing down on us?”

“I thought it was only supposed to be four to six inches—”

“Four to six
feet
.” Viola stretches a smile tight over her teeth. “Enough to bury us alive.”

Without thinking, Natalie’s hand slips inside her blazer—to touch, reassuringly, the butt of her gun.

Viola had, among other things, taught her how to recognize a threat.

Viola Fabian taught Natalie that good wasn’t good enough. Neither was great. The only acceptable level of achievement was
brilliant,
which is exactly what Viola made Natalie become. Natalie was the one everyone talked about after recitals, playing solos much harder, with more fire, than her fourteen years would suggest she was capable of. She entered solo competitions and won. She auditioned for adult-level concerto competitions and placed. Every single thing Natalie attempted musically, she excelled at, and every single time someone praised her, she was sure to mention that it was nothing, that it was all thanks to her mentor, to Viola Fabian. Natalie was too young and awed by her developing abilities to question Viola’s motives or methods. Viola had made her successful; success had made her pliant.

Mostly Viola used words—
Stupid. Moron. You’re nothing special, you know. You’re lucky to have me
—but not always. The first time it happened was almost funny. Natalie and Viola were sitting side by side at the piano in Viola’s practice room at the conservatory while Natalie murdered a sonata. She was tired and hungry; she’d taken the bus straight from school without grabbing so much as an apple. Her hands were sore, tingly. She was desperate not to show Viola how exhausted she was, but Viola could always tell.

“What’s your problem today? You think Schumann likes it when stupid teenagers shit all over his music?”

“Of course not,” said Natalie. “Sorry.”

“Again. From letter F.” Viola stretched her arms behind her head and crossed one leg over the other. One pump, red and spike-heeled—she always wore pumps, even with jeans—dangled from her toe and she caught it in her hand. “One two three, two two three—”

Natalie limped along until she came to a particularly complicated passage of thirty-second notes, and her body, that betrayer, gave up. Her fingertips slipped and landed on the keys in a jumble.

“Oh, come
on!
” said Viola, and smacked Natalie in the side with her shoe.

Natalie flinched. Then she half smiled, puzzled. “Ow,” she said absently.

“Again,” said Viola.

Natalie rubbed her ribs. “That hurt.”

“It was supposed to. Again.”

Natalie took a deep breath and began at letter F. She walked this time instead of limped, her fingers tensed.

She got halfway through before her hand cramped.

Viola jabbed her with her heel.

“Ouch!” Natalie said. “What the hell?”

“It’s working, isn’t it? That was better. Again.”

Natalie was angry now. The still childishly chubby flesh below her ribs burned, stung by a size six and a half stiletto wasp. She attacked letter F. And when she ran into that field of thirty-seconds, she hit every single note as hard as she could. She punched them. She knocked them out.

“Told you,” said Viola, and smacked her one last time. Natalie took it without a word of protest. She had a bruise beneath her ribcage, never bigger than an egg, never smaller than a grape, for the rest of the time she was Viola’s student.

By the time Natalie realized what Viola was doing, it was too late. She was a senior in high school, and nothing whatsoever about music made her happy. Music was something to win, to be first and best at. She snapped at her parents and was too proud to apologize. She shrank from Uncle Kevin because it was easier than admitting the truth. She listened to all of
Hunky Dory,
to
Ziggy Stardust
and
Heroes,
and tried to feel lovely and strange and weightless, but she couldn’t; she played the piano, she listened to music, and nothing stirred, nothing sang inside. Natalie was earthbound and ordinary, marooned, alone.

Her parents threw a graduation party for her on a too-hot June night. Natalie, who didn’t particularly want a party in the first place, gamely put on a sundress and stole a beer from the refrigerator in the garage. She was two bottles in when Viola arrived, looking, in her gray suit and power pumps, like a court clerk dispatched to serve the party a summons. Natalie had been going to her weekly lessons as if everything were normal, had betrayed no hatred toward her mentor for tainting the first pure love of her life, so there was no reason for Viola to suspect she was unwelcome. But unwelcome she was; here, in the backyard strung with pink and purple paper lanterns, in the house that had once echoed with David Bowie, Natalie watched this wicked big sister from across the lawn and wanted her to die. She was mortified to have borne Viola’s cruelty and considered it kindness, humiliated by the understanding that all the awards and accolades were a celebration of something sick and wrong, something ugly between them.

She hid in the house, in her room. She watched the sun set on her last few friends and relatives in the backyard while she drank more beer. The party sounded like a success—she heard laughter, loud voices. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how she could tell her parents the truth about Viola. She could hear them already:
Listen to yourself, Natalie. You’re being melodramatic. Histrionic
. Viola was mean, Viola was a bitch, but Natalie had
allowed
her to be. And she, Natalie, was going to college in the fall. That was a natural cutoff, wasn’t it? Couldn’t this all just go away by itself?

There was a light thump on her door and Natalie turned and there was Viola, letting herself in. She looked like she didn’t want anything in the world but to eat Natalie’s heart out of her body.

“
There
you are. Everybody’s missing you down there.” She leaned against the dresser, her eyes skimming the beads and knickknacks and Bonne Bell lip-glosses of Natalie’s girlhood. “But
of course
you’re up here, hiding in your room like a spoiled brat.”

Natalie didn’t say anything.

“Your father tells me you’re going to Indiana.” Viola sniffed. “I was surprised you didn’t tell me yourself. What gives? You’ve been so
quiet
lately. We haven’t talked in months. Really, Natalie—is everything okay? Are you afraid about graduating, going off to college?” Viola sat on the bed next to her, pretending to be concerned. Next she was going to ask to brush her hair. “Maybe you’re feeling a little anxious that there’s an awful lot of competition out there. That maybe your best years are behind you?”

Natalie closed her eyes. The beer bottle in her hand was empty and her stomach too full. She sloshed.

Viola’s arm circled around her back, giving her a squeeze. “Your best years
are
behind you, kiddo,” she said in a voice slicked with cheer. “That’s the way it is. Sure, you’ll go on, you’ll go to school. You’ll learn how to write and how to teach music, and you’ll probably teach but you won’t write, and you certainly won’t compose anything worth remembering. Then you’ll marry someone and have children and you’ll say you played piano once but you won’t have sat down at yours in years. You’ll get rid of it. You’ll sell it, and you won’t be happy, but you won’t quite be able to put your finger on why. I’ll tell you why. Because that’s the way it is, Natalie. That’s life when you’re nothing special. And I’ll tell you something else. This is a
much
easier lesson to learn when you’re eighteen instead of forty.” Viola grinned.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

The bottle was a baton in Natalie’s fist. Viola raised her hands to protect herself and Natalie slammed the bottle into the meat of Viola’s forearm and she knew she hadn’t broken the skin but it was going to leave a bruise, a beautiful bruise, giant and swollen and black. She swore she heard the bone ring, low like a brass bell. Natalie, elated, feeling as if she had planted a flag on the moon, lifted the bottle again, and this time Viola was too stunned, too slow—this time, Natalie swung down and smashed her on her temple, right near the hairline.

Viola cried out. Closed her eyes, brought her hands up to cover her face, tilted and swayed on the edge of the bed. Natalie saw a tear of blood well, bright as a jewel, on Viola’s forehead.

Natalie dropped the bottle on her pink braided rug.

She didn’t think she would learn anything worse from Viola than that she was nothing more than an instrument, a toy to be tuned up and broken, but in her room on the night of her graduation party, Natalie learned that she was not the hero. Viola was not the villain. They were somewhere in between and nowhere at all, both of them alike.

Natalie brought the gun with her to Statewide on impulse, tucking it in her luggage between her sweaters and skirts and travel-size shampoo and conditioner. It had drifted into her mind while packing, as it often did, accompanied by a simple thought:
I might need that
. If she had asked herself why, for what possible reason could a chaperone at a weekend festival for teenage musicians need the protection of a .38—
other than the obvious ones, right?
—she wouldn’t have had a real answer. Not then and not now, other than as a kind of insurance against everything she couldn’t anticipate. It was easy to bring, easy to carry. It’s compact but pleasantly heavy in her jacket pocket, a gift passed to Emmett from his father. She’d made a point of not knowing much about it before the break-in, but now, now that she knows the pinch, the jerk, the flash of firing it, she can’t keep it out of her mind.

Emmett will miss it if he happens to check the safe in the den, but Emmett is spending the weekend with Kevin and Lou, playing poker, watching football, maybe road-tripping up to Canada for the casinos. She doubts he will so much as look.

She doesn’t have a permit to carry it. She carried it out of her home and out of her hotel room just the same.

But Natalie is not going to kill Viola Fabian. Natalie, old at thirty-five, “clinically depressed” and more than slightly bitter, is never going to kill anyone ever again, even if she feels like it and even if the person deserves it. However, and she thinks Dr. Danny would agree, it might be therapeutic to
frighten
Viola. To gently remove the gun from the inside pocket of her wrinkled-from-the-drive blazer and ask if Viola knows who she is.
Do I look familiar?
And do you remember what happened the last time we met?
She would press the red emergency button on the elevator panel and the car would jolt to a stop and she would face Viola, her Viola, and she would corner her in this tiny elevator car, which smells like old shoes and dust and a hint of ammonia from the housekeeping carts that are pushed on and off every day.