Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

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