Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia Read Free Book Online Page B

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
Natalie Takes the Elevator
    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