Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

of her.
    “Kirk’s in a coma,” he tells Jess. “Heart attack. He’s been replaced with a sub this year.”
    “That’s awful. Oh, Hastings, I’m sorry. I know you really liked him. I hope he pulls through.”
    “Me too.” He can hear a voice in the background. Voices. Who else is there? Who is with his wife? “What’s that sound?” he asks.
    “I’ve got company, but first—you said there were two things on your mind. What’s the second?”
    “This girl.” Her face has already vanished from his mind. Her face is gone. How can her face be gone when the gut-deep feeling he knows her, he knows her, how does he know her, is stronger than ever. “You ever get déjà vu?”
    Jess laughs. “Only when I’m talking to you,” she says.

6
Bad Rabbit
    R ABBIT’S PARENTS, lapsed Protestants, had managed to pass along the big-ticket ideas of Christianity, but practically speaking, Rabbit had learned Judeo-Christian history from the school of Indiana Jones. Bambi’s mother taught him about loss, and he was too in love with dinosaurs to entertain the idea of a literal seven-day Creation schedule. Charlie Brown (or rather, Linus) told him the Christmas story;
Jesus Christ Superstar
covered the crucifixion. He did not regret his secular education. He may have been baptized Presbyterian, but music was his true religion.
    In his earliest memories he was sitting on the floor in the family room, in front of the giant stereo his parents had bought themselves as a wedding present, his face pressed into the padded fabric of one speaker. The fabric was prickly against his forehead but his nose fit perfectly into a little groove, and he could feel music spilling like molten gold through his entire body. He’d sit back on his heels when the song was over and his father, an accountant and amateur drummer whose (still-unrealized) dream was to open a jazz club and coffee house, would say “Order up!” and put another record on the turntable. Rabbit’s favorite albums were by Earth, Wind & Fire (syncopation made his brain feel like it was laughing) and
Also sprach Zarathustra,
its opening rumbling like an earthquake. And he loved
The White Album,
and when his mother played ABBA on the piano and they’d sing together (though Alice couldn’t do it without being a total showoff), and the
Star Wars
soundtrack, and of
course
Zeppelin. For six months in 1984, he had asked his parents to play “Stairway to Heaven” instead of a bedtime story.
    Rabbit and Disney’s
Fantasia
turned ten and fifty, respectively, in the same year. Rabbit had only seen pieces of it on TV—the Disney Channel liked to play “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and the dopey Beethoven scene as filler between shows—but it was his father’s favorite movie of all time. His father had first seen it in a theater in college (high as a kite, he said, with a hushed
don’t tell your mother
) and had been waiting twenty-one years for it to return to the big screen. It had changed him, he said. It had opened him to music in new ways. So when it was rereleased for its half-century anniversary, his father skipped work, pulled Rabbit and Alice out of school, and bought them all tickets on opening day.
    Rabbit had never seen him in such a state of excitement. His father’s eyes blinked furiously behind his glasses, and his smile was so broad and wide Rabbit wondered if his lips ached. Except for a few hassled-looking parents with very young children, they were the only people in the theater—it was a Friday matinee on a school day, after all—and Alice, typically, wouldn’t shut up about how amazing this was going to be, how magical, because she knew what their father wanted to hear more than anything was how very much like
him
his children were. Alice was always good at knowing what people wanted to hear and giving it to them in symphonic stereo.
    Rabbit was less enthused. It was exciting to be out of school, but he was suddenly worried about his dad. What if the