Disclaimer: I do not own Next to Normal.
Henry took the phone away from his ear and stared at it, as if the reason for the conversation's abrupt cut-off would suddenly become apparent, if only he scrutinized the device for long enough (but no such luck). It wasn't that Natalie had never hung up on him before; no, the puzzling thing was that there had been no warning—no anger or hysteria or commotion (sometimes he could distantly hear her parents screaming at each other) from the other end. It had come out of the blue. Thinking it might have been an accident, he tried re-dialing, only to get his girlfriend's answering machine: "You've reached Natalie Goodman. I'm busy right now; leave a message."
Okay. Well, it was almost eleven o'clock at night. Although unlikely—Henry knew she was no stranger to all-nighters and sleep deprivation—he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and pretend she'd accidentally fallen asleep, and that the phone had been shut off when it hit the floor. (There had been no clattering sound to support this theory, but he went with it anyway.) It was a touch annoying, but he would see her in school the next morning anyway. They always met in Room 103, one of the school's small music rooms, to play the piano there. (To be more specific, she played, and he watched her play, marvelling at how she could alter the instrument's tone in an instant—delicate, heavy; fast, slow; soft, loud.)
But Natalie wasn't in Room 103 the next day, or in English 12, or in Advanced Physics. As far as Henry could tell, she wasn't in school at all, and that made him worry. Natalie had never cut school, not even when her mother was going through electroshock treatment and she was out popping pills at clubs every night. She'd come in feeling and looking like shit the next day, but she came in nevertheless; "I can't afford to miss anything," she'd insist, not even if a day off seemed justified to the average person.
Henry's final plan of action was to stop by the Goodmans' house and demand an explanation. He rode his bicycle over after dinnertime, pedaling rapidly, trying to get rid of all the nervous tension that was knotting itself up inside his stomach. When he arrived, it didn't take much of a look to tell that nobody was home: no sound, no lights, and most importantly, nobody to acknowledge the pounding on the door or the bell being rung over and over again. Standing on her front porch in front of the empty house, he tried calling Natalie again.
Nothing. Her phone must have been off.
It was just over a week later when she finally got in touch. His heart skipped a beat when, absently shuffling through the day's mail delivery, he caught sight of the familiar, tidy handwriting on the front of an envelope, spelling out his name. There was no return address or stamp, suggesting that the epistle had been dropped off by hand—and although the opening flap was only temporarily sealed by being folded in, rather than glued shut, opening it seemed to take forever.
The letter was short and to-the-point: just a simple date and time, and—while accompanied by a brief description—without a real explanation. He read the message once, twice, and a third time, trying to wrap his head around the words, to come up with a reason as to why this would have happened.
It was an invitation to the funeral of Dan Goodman.