The Magician's Assistant (23 page)

She poked through the room, lonely and restless. She looked beneath the baseball trophies, behind the pictures on the wall. When half the afternoon was gone she found something that interested her high up in the closet, a Mysto magic kit, the corners of the box held together with strips of masking tape that were themselves so old that they were nothing but dried-out pieces of paper formed to the box. On the cover was a photograph of a somewhat sinister-looking man in a top hat and cape leaning over two children. The children were looking at a small white rabbit and a couple of rubber balls. Their oblivion to the magician seemed dangerous. The live rabbit seemed misleading. This had been the kit that Parsifal talked about, “impressing your friends.” Inside there was a set of interlocking rings that reminded her unpleasantly of Sam Spender and her breakdown at the Magic Castle. There was the set of rubber balls pictured on the box, a series of cups for hiding the balls, a black wand with a white tip. It had been so long since Sabine had seen anybody use a wand that it took her a minute to figure out what it was for. There was a deck of cards that didn’t belong with the set. From the diagram on the lid it was clear that a few items were missing: the magic twine, the five enchanted coins, and the bouquet of silk flowers. Silk flower bouquets turned ratty the third time you used them. Over thirty years they were bound to have disintegrated.

Sabine skimmed over the instructions, which were nearly impossible to follow. To do the cups and balls the way they described it would take eight arms, dim lighting, and an audience recently injected with Versed. What torture this must have been for a child who had never before seen magic performed. Sabine dropped the papers back in the box. She picked up the rings, hit them together and locked them, snapped them hard and set them free. It wasn’t a bad set of rings. Thirty years ago there was more integrity in a cheap box of tricks than there was now. She held all three rings together in one hand and then threw one up in the air, hit it, and locked it on. She threw up the second one, hit it, and then all three were connected. That was a little bit of a trick, to throw them up, to lock them where anyone could see without anyone being able to tell. That had taken them some practice. Sabine used to throw them to Parsifal and he would lock them on in the catch. It took forever to figure out exactly how hard to throw them and at what angle. It took forever again until they could do it in their sleep. Sabine liked the sound they made, the short clang and rattle of the metal running into itself. How long had it taken little Guy Fetters to figure this one out? Was he eight then? Ten? Twelve? She turned the lid of the box over and dropped the balls inside. She covered them with their cups and sent them spinning cup to cup. She hid two extra balls in the stacked cups. It was never just three balls. Sabine had fast hands. She knew how to make her hands go in one direction and the cups skid off in another. She could have made a fortune running three-card monte at Venice Beach. A good assistant had to be that smooth; faster than the magician, even. So fast as to be completely still.

There was no such thing as being a magician’s assistant without knowing the trick. People are misguided by the assistant’s surprise, the way her mouth opens in childlike delight as her glove is turned into a dove. But if you didn’t know how it would all turn out, you wouldn’t know where to stand, how to turn yourself to shield the magician’s hand or temporarily block the light. And if, in some impossible, unimaginable circumstance, the trick was not explained to the assistant, she would get it sooner or later out of sheer repetition: The egg comes out of your ear, the rabbit is between your breasts, your head is sawed off, it happens over and over and over again. Sooner or later you are bound to know it like your name.

But knowing a trick doesn’t mean being able to pull it off. That’s what Parsifal didn’t understand, or maybe it was just the sickness and sadness at the end of his life that made him forget. Sabine was an encyclopedia of magic, a walking catalog of props, stage directions, cues, but she wasn’t a magician. Most people can’t be magicians for the same reason they can’t be criminals. They have guilty souls. Deception doesn’t come naturally. They want to be caught.

There were sounds, rustling and then the stamping of boots coming from the kitchen. Sabine quickly put everything back in the box and slid it under the bed. It was a toy, a game. Forty-one years old, what was she doing on the floor, playing with balls, feeling guilty?

“Sabine?” Dot called from down the hall. “Are you here?”

“I’m here,” she said, scrambling up, her left leg sound asleep. She limped down the hall, hitting her thigh with her fist.

“I’ve got a real treat,” Dot said.

When Sabine rounded into the kitchen, there was Dot and, on either side of her, a boy. Each was tall. Each was beautiful, so red faced from the cold that he appeared to be just that instant awake. They were swaddled in clothing, plaid wool scarves wrapped half around necks, wool sweaters over plaid shirts, down vests over wool sweaters, and coats that looked to be borrowed from Admiral Byrd. Their hands were bare and chapped. The taller of the two wore a blue knit hat. They resembled their uncle at that time in his life when Sabine had first met him, when she first saw him take a rabbit from his shirt cuff. Beautiful.

“This is How,” Dot said, putting her arm recklessly around the taller, darker of the two. “And this is Guy.” Guy, slightly fairer, was smaller only from being two years younger. His body’s clear intention was to outreach his brother’s. When his grandmother embraced him he stiffened slightly. “Boys, this is your Aunt Sabine.”

“Aunt Sabine?” she said.

“Well, you’re their uncle’s wife. That’s how it works. Do you think ‘Mrs. Parsifal’ would be better? I should have asked you first.”

Sabine puzzled over it. Certainly not “Mrs. Parsifal.” But “Aunt Sabine”? “Aunt Sabine, or Sabine, either one,” she said, and stepped forward to shake their hands, both of them cold and impossibly large. Both of them with nails bitten nervously down to the quick.

“’Lo,” How said. (Howard? Sabine thought. Doesn’t anybody around here go by their name?) He shook her hand gently, awkwardly, as if the occasion to shake a woman’s hand had not come up in his life until now.

“Hello,” said Guy. His shake was more defined. He looked at her clearly for a minute before dropping his eyes back to the floor.

“They’ve been so excited about coming over to meet you,” Dot said, completely oblivious to their lack of excitement. Or maybe that was just the way boys were at that age. Sabine couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been around teenagers since she was one herself, and even then she hadn’t had much of an understanding of them as a group. She felt as if she were trying to speak to someone without knowing a word of their language. She fought an impulse to raise her voice.

“Parsifal, your uncle, he would have loved to have met you.” He would have. These handsome boys, Kitty’s boys, would have thrilled him.

“Parsifal,” Guy said. “Mom told us he changed his name.”

“He was a magician. That was the name he used for the act, and then it turned into the name he used all the time.” Was she pitching this too low? How much information did these boys have, anyway?
Uncle Guy killed. Grandpa years and years before you were born, not two feet from where you’re standing.

“I was named for him,” Guy said, making the connection just in case she’d missed it.

“Then you’re lucky,” Sabine said.

“I made cookies,” Dot said. “Could I interest you boys in some cookies and milk?”

To Sabine this seemed ridiculous, a parody of some television idea of what goes on between grandmothers and grandsons, but the boys brightened considerably at the mention of food. They made agreeable sounds that were not exactly words, took off their coats, and sat down at the table while Dot poured tall glasses of milk as white as their young teeth.

“So what did you do all afternoon?” Dot said, laying cookies out on a plate.

“Looked around at Parsifal’s things. I read a book.” Sabine hoped she wouldn’t be asked what book she’d read, although she wondered if the Hardy Boys would be a topic for conversation.

“Aunt Bertie says you’ve got a great place out in L.A.,” Guy said.

Sabine looked back at him, the salmon flush of his cheeks, the brilliance of such thick, straight hair. “It’s a nice house.”

“I’d like to go to L.A.,” he said. “Maybe get a band together. Could I visit sometime?”

“Sure,” Sabine said, although she couldn’t imagine what you did with a teenager if he wasn’t your teenager. The chance that a boy from Nebraska would meet with a significantly tragic outcome in Los Angeles seemed nearly certain. And then she remembered Parsifal.

“What about you, How?” Dot said. “Any interest in Los Angeles?”

“He’d never go,” his brother said for him.

“I’d go,” How said. His cheeks were so red he looked as if he’d been slapped. His mouth was red. His darker hair waved like his uncle’s. Uncle—she could not get used to the word. He never knew he was an uncle, but couldn’t he have guessed as much?

“I’ve got plenty of room,” Sabine said. “You could both come.”

“I’m not baby-sitting him,” Guy said.

“Guy.” Dot made his name long and low, getting the most out of the three letters.

“Nobody asked you to,” How said, quiet.

“He’s never going anywhere,” Guy said to Sabine. He was like a dog. He was on the scent now and could not let go. “He’s a mama’s boy.”

The absurdity of the insult caught Sabine so off-guard that she smiled hugely before realizing that a smile was not appropriate. This was the cut? The terrible accusation? What could be better, she thought, than a mama’s boy? How was out of his chair as quick as Sabine’s smile, his body moving over the table towards his brother like it was a thing over which he had absolutely no control. Guy, possibly tougher, was still smaller, and he leaned backwards, away from what was coming.

When Sabine spoke the room froze. She possessed an intrinsic understanding of men. It was from a lifetime of being beautiful, even to children. “Your mother? I met your mother last night. Did you know that?” The sound of her voice soothed them, made them nearly sleepy. The boys dropped back in their chairs. “The middle of the night, I woke up and she was in the kitchen. She reminded me so much of your uncle. They look so much alike. You look like him when he was young,” she said, giving that prize to How. “I had never met your mother before, but she was so much like her brother that I felt like I knew her.”

They did not hear her words as much as absorb them. Magic was less about surprise than it was about control. You lead them in one direction and then come up behind their backs. They watch you, at every turn they will be suspicious, but you give them decoys. People long to be amazed, even as they fight it. Once you amaze them, you own them. What was nearly a fistfight on top of the kitchen table was now completely forgotten. Like the flash floods in Twenty-Nine Palms, it surprised them both coming and going.

“How long will you be here?” How said, grateful now.

“I’m not sure. We’ll see how it goes.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Dot and the boys all lowered their heads, as if his or her own bad behavior might be the thing that would send Sabine packing.

“Why don’t you boys clear out for a while, and Sabine will help me get started on supper. Do you think you can watch a little television without killing each other?”

“Sure thing,” Guy said. He stood up, stretched, and took a cookie from his brother’s plate. His brother, feeling so recently vindicated, decided to let it pass. They walked out of the room together without ever picking up their feet.

Dot watched them go, shaking her head. “I love Guy, but that boy is turning into his father,” she whispered to Sabine. “I’d like to give him a good smack sometimes.”

“Do you want to give his father a good smack, too?”

Dot raised her hands in innocence. “Don’t even get me started on that one.”

“They seem like nice boys.”

“They are. Good boys. How is like Guy—your Guy. Doesn’t have his personality, but he’s got the sweetness to him. In a kid that age it seems like a miracle. I wouldn’t want to have kids now. There’s too much going on in the world. It would all be too hard for them.” As if harder things had been invented since her children were growing up.

Dot squatted down and shoved her head deep inside a cabinet beneath the sink. She said something, although there was no telling what.

“What?”

She leaned back slightly but kept her eyes straight ahead. “Did Guy ever talk about having children?” Dot said, her face still turned away. “I mean—I know, well, I know. But did he want kids?”

Not only did he not want them, he hated them. He had rolled his eyes in restaurants, on planes. He had taken Sabine’s arm tightly when he saw one on the street, whispered to her dramatically, “Well, at least we were spared that.” The mocking was so bitter and constant that in the years that Sabine thought she wanted a child she never once spoke of it. She bit down and waited until it passed. But so many years later, when it was Phan who wanted a child, there were no more jokes. “You feel differently when it’s your own,” Parsifal told Sabine, explaining his sudden change of heart. They talked about adopting, about surrogate mothers. They even talked about Sabine, and while she knew it would be disastrous for her, she would have leapt at the chance. It wasn’t too long after that that Phan had a blood test and none of them mentioned children again.

“No,” Sabine said. “He didn’t want children.”

Dot raised herself out of the cabinet, white rose potatoes filling both of her hands. “I think that’s my fault. He was afraid he was going to turn out like his parents. He would have been a good father. You could tell by the way he was with his sister. He had it in him. It’s too bad.” She looked at Sabine, suddenly aware. “That’s why you never got to have children. You were waiting around on him.”

“No.” Sabine took the potatoes from her. “I never wanted them, either.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“How much do the boys know about Parsifal?” Sabine asked in the Fetters family spirit of keeping the story straight.