Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia Page A

movie wasn’t as incredible as he remembered—and how could it be, after twenty years? Not in college, not on drugs? The parts Rabbit had already seen weren’t exactly mind-blowing; those silly flying horses were for little kids, and he found the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice acutely frustrating (if Mickey Mouse was stupid enough to mess with the magician’s hat, he deserved all the trouble he got). Rabbit’s stomach soured in anticipation of having to pretend, first to enjoy the movie, and then not to notice his father’s disappointment.
    The toddlers in the theater fussed and Alice knocked over her soda at the end of “The Nutcracker Suite,” because, she whispered theatrically, she was so caught up she forgot where her foot was. During the Beethoven segment, with its dippy fauns and centaurs and baby unicorns, Rabbit dared to glance at his father. The wide smile was still there, the blinking eyes—and then they were gone, and so was all the light streaming back at them from the screen. A child shrieked in the sudden dark and people began to rustle, but Rabbit’s father grabbed his hand quickly, gently, and whispered, “Don’t worry, it must be the light in the projector, the music’s still there”—and Rabbit really, truly heard Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for the first time. His eyes stung from the blackness, so he shut them and felt the music sweep him up faster and higher than he’d ever flown with his head mashed into the stereo speaker. He soared on the breeze of a brilliant spring day. The sun poured warm honey on his shoulder blades and he ran ahead up a small hill, bare feet tickled by springy new grass, and rolled down the other side, laughing. When the rain came, he shivered and ducked for cover, but it was gone soon enough, and what it left behind was a sense of the perfect rightness of this time and this place. Of himself—perfectly right, perfectly at peace with his family in the dark. He laid his head back contentedly and let out a long breath.
    His father squeezed his hand. Alice was muttering something but Rabbit couldn’t make it out, and didn’t care to. His father squeezed his hand again and Rabbit knew then that he needn’t have worried, that his father couldn’t possibly have been disappointed in the moment he’d dreamed of for decades. The wait, in fact, had been necessary, because what he’d been waiting so long to experience was the joy of sharing something so sublime with his children.
    Rabbit had never understood music before as an agent of connection, as a way for people not only to feel within themselves but to feel
among
themselves, a language that brought common souls into conversation. Beethoven could talk to him and could talk to his father, and he and his father could talk Beethoven to each other. Rabbit was a very shy child, more often spoken to than with. A recurring theme of parent-teacher conferences, beyond his academic excellence, was concern over his apparently self-imposed isolation. But on the day that Rabbit felt the Pastoral Symphony vaporize his body and plug his soul directly into his father’s, he realized he had found his native tongue.
    He had just started fourth grade at Ruby Falls Elementary, old for his year despite how young he looked; he was eligible to sign up for lessons on an instrument of his choosing. Uncharacteristically for Rabbit, he didn’t worry that no such instrument existed. He trusted that it was out there, and that he would find it when it was ready to be found, and that through it, Rabbit Hatmaker would be able to talk. To his family, to his teachers, to people he’d never met. To animals. To the universe. Maybe to God.
    That was the second of two revelations in his tenth year on earth. The first had already occurred that summer, at the swimming lessons his mother had been forcing on him and Alice since they could walk, when he got his first crush on a boy. On Mattie DeLuca, who was bused to the community swimming pool