The Magician's Assistant (18 page)

“Not much farther,” he yelled over the wind, and put his hand beneath her arm in a professional manner. As they walked across the tarmac, sheets of snow pooled and vanished beneath her feet. It was like walking on something boiling. In every direction the snow was banked into high hills. Plows worked on either side, nervously rearranging what could not be made right. The flat, smooth place they were walking across now had been carved out like a swimming pool. The man worked hard to open the heavy metal door, and the wind made a sucking and then howling sound when it, with Sabine, was let into the warm building.

Dot and Bertie Fetters were waiting.

They looked different in Nebraska. Even at the first sight of them in the hallway, Sabine could tell they looked better here. Instead of seeming merely bulky, the heavy coats with toggles made them look confident, prepared. Sabine wondered if she too could buy high boots with rubber covering the feet. When they saw her, they called her name with a kind of joyful wonder that she had never heard in the word Sabine before. They threw themselves together onto her neck. What was lost is now found.

“I half thought you wouldn’t be on the plane,” Dot said. “I tried and tried to tell myself that you were really coming but I couldn’t make myself believe it.” She hugged her again, hugged her hard enough to empty out Sabine’s lungs. “Have you gotten thinner? It couldn’t be possible that you’ve gotten thinner?”

“Sabine,” Bertie said, stepping back to see her fully, “it’s so wonderful that you’re here. Was the flight okay?”

“Good,” Sabine said.

Bertie leaned towards her, her mouth up close to Sabine’s ear. “You’ve got to meet Haas.” She held out her hand to a man standing away from everyone, his back pressed against the wall. When she motioned he came to her, the nylon of his blue down coat making a soft shushing noise as his arms moved against his sides.

“Haas,” she said quietly, “this is my sister-in-law, Sabine Parsifal.” Bertie’s face was so hopeful, so eager to please, that Sabine had to look away from her. She shook Haas’s hand. “This is my fiancé,” Bertie said, “Eugene Haas.”

“Nice to—,” he said, but was unable to finish the sentence, assuming, perhaps, that what was nice was implied. Haas was older than Bertie. He looked a little overwhelmed, frightened even. Like Sabine, he seemed unsure as to why he was in this airport. He pushed his hand back into his pocket and stepped away.

“Haas drove us over,” Bertie said. Sabine looked at the delicate bones of his face, the way his stocking cap was pulled to the top of his glasses, and thought, He worries about you in this weather. He’s afraid you’ll get stuck in an embankment and freeze to death on the road. He’s afraid of someone skidding on a patch of ice and coming into your lane.

“Come on and let’s get you home and settled in.” Dot took Sabine’s arm and steered her with authority to where the bags were being set out by the man in the blue coveralls.

The airport had two gates and Sabine had arrived at the second. In the lobby, orange plastic bucket chairs stood empty and waiting, bolted into two straight lines. There was a vending machine full of brands of candy she had never heard of before. Chuckles. Haas went on ahead to drive the car to the front door from where it was parked, fifty feet away. The woman who had sat beside Sabine on the plane smiled at her shyly now and without speaking, picked up her suitcase and left.

Sabine looked at the woman at the ticket counter, the man and woman who waited patiently at security, the two girls talking at the car rental booth. She looked at the handful of people who milled around through the airport, and she looked at the Fetters. There was something she couldn’t put her finger on exactly, a way they resembled each other and yet resembled no group Sabine had seen before. And they had not seen her before, either, because she felt them looking, the way people had looked at her in the marketplace in Tripoli the first time she went and did not know to cover her head. There was a Lucite display box in the baggage claim area that held three five-gallon cans of house paint,
VISIT SHERWOOD HARDWARE,
the sign said.

“Kitty was going to come, but Haas had to drive,” Dot said, “so there wasn’t enough room in the car.”

“He wanted to come and meet Sabine,” Bertie said.

“I’ve never seen a man so interested in taking care of a woman as Haas is. ‘Let me get you coffee.’ ‘Are you sure you don’t want to take a scarf?’ I swear, if he wasn’t so nice he’d drive me crazy.”

“You’d get used to it,” Bertie said.

“How long have you been going out?” Sabine asked.

“Six years.” Bertie seemed more self-assured in Nebraska. She was older here. You could see it in the way she held her head. “It was seven years ago he came to teach at the school, and we started going out a year later.”

“As long as you’re not rushing into things.” Sabine had meant it as a joke, but Bertie just nodded her head as if to say that was how she thought of it, too.

“No one will ever accuse Bertie of not being cautious,” Dot said.

The man in the jumpsuit brought Sabine her luggage, never for a moment doubting it was hers. She was suddenly embarrassed by having two bags. She had packed carelessly. She had brought Phan’s gloves and was wearing his coat. She had brought the sable hat that Parsifal had bought for Phan in Russia. She had brought Parsifal’s sweaters. She had thrown anything that caught her eye into the suitcase. In LAX, where skycaps pushed flatbed carts burdened with hat boxes and shoe trunks, Sabine had never even thought about her luggage. Bertie took the heavier bag and led the way out to the car.

Maybe, if anything, it was like Death Valley. None of the beautiful parts, not Furnace Creek or the range of Funeral Mountains. No place where the rocks were red. Not in the spring, when the ground cactus bloomed with vicious color out of the sand. But maybe this was Death Valley in its endless stretches of flatness. Death Valley in July at noon in the places where people with flat tires managed to walk three miles or four before giving out, their sense of direction destroyed by the 360-degree sweep of nothingness. Add to that the snow, which pelted the car the way the sand could bury you when a windstorm came out of nowhere. Over and over again Sabine tried to fix her eyes on a single flake hurtling towards them, lost it, and found another. It made her head ache but she couldn’t make herself stop. Add to the snow the bone-crushing cold, which was a combination of the cold of the atmosphere and the cold of the wind. It was not so unlike the heat in that it permeated every square inch of your skin and deep beneath it. Cold, like heat, quickly became the only thing possible to think about: how to get out of it, how it was going to kill you. There were no towns in the thirty-five miles between Scottsbluff and Alliance. Sometimes there were billboards, but there was little to advertise, places to eat and sleep that were so far away there was no point in even thinking about them now. Most of what there was to look at was flat land and snow.

“I bet you never thought you’d see Nebraska,” Dot said. She was beaming. Nebraska made Dot Fetters whole. They were coming into the town now, driving down streets lined in rows of tiny, identical ranch houses.

“I never did,” Sabine said. Was it the snow that made every house exactly the same? Was there something else under that white blanket?

“It’s hard to tell it now, but in the summer this place is beautiful. In the summer you’d never want to be anyplace else.”

“This winter has been worse than most of them,” Bertie said from the front seat, where she sat next to Haas. “Don’t think it’s always going to be this bad.”

Always? Did they think she was staying? Did they think she’d be around to see the summer or the winter after this? Was that what Parsifal thought as a boy when he looked out into the fields:
Do you really expect me to stay through to the summer?

“It’s a shame you didn’t bring Rabbit,” Bertie said. “Haas, you should see Sabine’s rabbit.”

Haas pulled into one of the many driveways there were to choose from. The house was lit up, waiting. They tightened their coats and stepped into the soft, deep snow. They hurried up the front steps and through the unlocked door.

“This is it,” Dot said, stretching out her hands. “This is home. I should feel embarrassed. I’ve seen your house.”

Over the sofa there was a copy of a painting, an old covered bridge, a horse and wagon approaching. “When I’m king,” Parsifal had liked to say as they wandered through antique stores, “my first edict will be to outlaw all covered-bridge paintings and their reproductions.”

Sabine told her she was happy to be there, and it was true.

Dot smiled at the room, the nappy brown sofa with maple arms, the console television set, the two recliners. The bulb on the ceiling was covered with a piece of frosted glass that resembled a handkerchief pinned at each of its four corners. “I’ve been here a long time. We moved here when Guy was barely walking and I was still carrying Kitty around. Now I think about this being Guy’s house and I don’t think I’ll ever move. It’s one of the only links I’ve got to him. I started feeling that way a long time before he died.”

Sabine’s parents had told her that the house on Oriole was too much for her, that she should give it up and buy someplace that would be easier to manage, but she wasn’t moving, either.

Bertie and Haas, who had been lingering out in the car, came through the door, red faced from the cold or from the pleasure of finding a minute alone. Bertie stamped on the mat to dislodge the snow from the deep treads in her boots. “Kitty!” she called out, her voice loud enough to call Kitty from next door. “Isn’t Kitty here?” she asked her mother.

“Sure she’s here.” Dot went into the kitchen and then looked down the hallway. “Kitty?”

“She was supposed to make dinner,” Bertie said to Sabine. Haas unzipped his jacket but couldn’t quite bring himself to take it off. He stood on the mat by the door, waiting.

“I’ll call her,” Dot said.

“Then you might as well do it in the other room.” Bertie sat down heavily in a chair and started to unlace her boots, Haas watching her, longingly.

“Don’t be silly.” Dot picked up the phone. “Sit, sit,” she said to Sabine. “This will take one minute. I bet she just had to run someplace with the boys. She’s probably on her way.”

They were all watching her, waiting quietly while the phone rang for what must have been a long time. Far past the point at which Sabine would have hung up, Dot spoke. “Howard,” she said, her voice gone flat. “It’s me. Let me talk to Kitty.” They waited, all of them. Dot curled the plastic phone cord around her finger. Sabine could barely make out some framed pictures hanging in the hall and wanted to go to them. Now she understood how much Dot had wanted to see the pictures at her house. “Well, she has to be there because she’s not here. She was going to come over for supper. Guy’s wife is in town from California. You know that.” Dot looked at Sabine, to be sure. “Just put her on the phone.” After a minute she put the earpiece of the phone on her forehead and tapped the receiver there a few times, then she hung up. “So,” she said, her voice steady and reasonable. “Other plans for dinner.”

“I’m going to pick something up,” Haas said, and slid the zipper of his jacket back into place.

“I shouldn’t have asked her to make dinner,” Dot said. “I should have done it myself.”

“This isn’t your fault, no matter how you look at it,” Bertie told her mother. Then she put her hands on Sabine’s sleeves and she squeezed. Sabine knew that Bertie was telling her something, but she was too tired and confused to figure out what it was. Maybe she meant to say sorry, or, just bear with this and don’t ask. Sabine nodded in general compliance. “We’ve got really good pizza in town,” Bertie said. “Tomorrow night we’ll cook.” She pushed her feet back down in her boots.

“Be careful,” Dot said. “It’s getting worse out there every minute.”

Bertie slipped her hand in the pocket of Haas’s coat as if she were looking for something important, and then she left it there. They did not care about the weather.

Sabine moved her hands inside her own pockets. Snow.

“Look at you, standing there in your coat,” Dot said to Sabine when they were alone. “I don’t get enough practice being a hostess.”

Sabine took her coat off and held it in her arms. She would prefer to wear it. The weight of the coat made her feel pinned down. “So, do you want to tell me about this?”

Dot tilted her head to the lacy piece of crocheting that hung over the back of the chair. She closed her eyes. “Not really,” she said. “Not if you’re giving me a choice. Everything comes out awfully quick, anyway. Don’t you think?”

Sabine saw her parents standing just inside the kitchen door. Her father did not look judgmental, only sad. He held the rabbit tenderly in his arms. “You’re thirty-five miles from the airport,” her mother said. “There is a blizzard outside, and you do not know these people. You’ve come to Nebraska for what, Sabine? What were you thinking about?” They looked cold, standing there in winter clothes meant for Southern California. Her mother shivered and pushed close to her father, close to the rabbit.

“Let me see Parsifal’s room,” Sabine said.

Dot smiled, her eyes still closed. “Good,” she said. “Now’s the time, when we have the house to ourselves. I still never get this house to myself. Everyone always asks me, ‘What will you do with Bertie gone?’ Bertie was about ready to ask Haas to move in over here after they got married, she was so worried about me, and you’ve got to know he’d do it. But I told her, there have been people in my house every day of my life. I moved from my folks to Al’s, then I had the kids. It would be nice, you know, to wake up one morning and have a place all to yourself.”

“I just got that little bit of time when I lived with Phan and Parsifal, and then the year after Phan died.”

“I’m not saying I hated it. I’m just saying after a while enough’s enough.” Dot stood up and stretched. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

There was a hallway with four doors off the living room. Two bedrooms on one side and a bedroom and bathroom on the other. “This is me, this is Bertie,” Dot said, and when they got to the last door she opened it and said, “This is you.”