The Magician's Assistant (26 page)

While the Plates were replacing all their clothes in the proper order, Guy said he couldn’t find his scarf and a search was launched. That’s when How touched Sabine’s arm and motioned for her to follow him into the hall. She did, followed him all the way to the end, past all the bedroom doors. They left the lights off. How stood very close to Sabine and whispered in her ear. “I have to ask you.”

“What?” Sabine whispered back.

“Maybe—it wasn’t just a trick?” His voice was soft and uncertain, desperate that neither a father nor a brother could overhear.

“What do you mean?” She could smell him, warm and not entirely clean. Smelling sweet somehow and like a boy.

“I’ve watched that for so long and I’ve always kind of wondered if maybe. Well. Maybe there’s nothing to figure out. I mean, maybe he just did it.”

“Like magic?” Sabine said, feeling ridiculously soft for this boy suddenly, wanting to pull him close to her and whisper in his ear, “It’s all in the chairs.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. He was glad to be understood, glad he didn’t have to speak any more than this.

“No,” Sabine whispered. “It’s a trick. A really difficult, complicated trick that’s supposed to make you think that magic happened, but it didn’t.”

“Oh.” He stayed quiet for a while but didn’t move. “Okay. That’s what I thought. I just wanted to be sure.”

“Sure,” she said. In the dark she thought she could make out disappointment, a Santa Claus kind of loss, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie to the boy. They walked together back into the kitchen. Guy had decided that he hadn’t been wearing a scarf after all.

The Plates bundled into their separate cars and backed away from the house. From the kitchen window Sabine watched the red taillights down the driveway, first one set and then the next. She was sorry to see them go, to see Kitty go, because there was such comfort in her face, which had disappeared into darkness as soon as the car door was shut. Kitty wasn’t Parsifal, but she was the only thing Sabine had found that came close.

As soon as the crowd was safely gone Dot turned on her heel to ferret out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the back of the pantry. When she had assembled their drinks, snapping the ice cubes from their blue plastic trays with an authoritative twist, she held both glasses still in her hands. Once those ice cubes had settled down in the whiskey she said to Sabine, “Listen. Have you ever heard such a quiet?”

Sabine listened, for at just that moment the refrigerator had stopped its electric rumbling, and there was a great Midwestern silence filling up the kitchen. She was not accustomed to this kind of quiet, the kind that grew and flourished on the spread-out outskirts of an already too-small town in the deadest part of a dead state, buried in the insulation of snow.

“I love them.” Dot handed Sabine her glass and they both took a long drink with no formalities. “I don’t love Howard, but I love the rest of them. But when they’re all gone, my God. I think sometimes I might cry, I feel so relieved.” She slipped down into a kitchen chair and turned her face up towards the covered light fixture on the ceiling as if she were taking in vitamin D from the sun.

“Maybe I should go do a couple laps around the block, clear the place out for a while.” When she said this Sabine realized she had not set foot outside the house since she’d come in from the airport yesterday, and that it was only yesterday when she had been in her own house. “Have you seen enough of it now?” her father had asked her.

Dot swung out a chair. “Sit, sit. I’ll keep you here. You’re a treat, so much like Guy, my Guy. I look at you and I know exactly the kind of man he grew up to be. The two of you together, though, all those smarts and good looks in one room, it must have been something else.” She tilted back her glass and drained it. When she set it back on the table, she studied the bare ice cubes with relief. One more task accomplished.

“I’m nothing like him,” Sabine said regretfully. The list of ways they were different scrolled through her mind, overwhelming, endless. “He was a real crowd-pleaser. He could talk people up, charm them, make deals.” At the rug auctions, the way he bid so forcefully, so completely without hesitation that other people dropped out thinking that there was no point, this man would bid until the end. Then he’d take that same rug back to Pasadena and double the price, make some old lady from Glendale think he was all but giving it to her for Christmas, it was such a sweet deal. And in magic he invented misdirection, could have had the entire audience studying his kneecaps while his hands took oranges from his pockets.

Having left the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter by the empty blue tray, Dot was forced to stand up when she hadn’t intended to. “I have two daughters,” she said. “I know all about daughters. You remind me of my son.” She gestured the bottle towards Sabine before filling her own glass, but Sabine shook her head. “Half an inch,” Dot said, putting a splash in anyway. “Otherwise it makes me look bad. Kitty and Bertie, they can’t hold anything back. They can’t get what they want out of people, except maybe for me, because they’re too busy turning themselves inside out trying to be helpful. You think they could have stood up to a room full of people and not told them how to balance on top of a chair?”

Sabine shrugged. “If they wanted to.”

Dot tapped her finger hard in front of Sabine’s glass, nailing her point in place. “Not in a lifetime. They’d spill before the question had been all the way asked. But Guy, hell, you felt lucky if he told you what time it was. He was like you. He kept things in because we all wanted to know them. He was always entertaining us, juggling baseballs, doing impressions of people from his school or famous people or us. Guy never was a bully, but he stood up to people, he got his way. Howard could have barked at Guy all night and Guy would have never lost his head, just like you. That’s what made his father so crazy.” Dot closed her eyes and watched it all spread out before her in bright colors. “No matter how much Al screamed, how much he kicked Guy around, it always wound up looking like Guy was the one in charge. Plain and simple, Guy was smarter than Al, and god, did it make Al mad. There was no amount of punishment Al could dole out to stop him. Guy just wasn’t afraid. And I’ll tell you what, he should have been. I told him all the time. ‘Be smart,’ I’d say, ‘be afraid of your father.’ That’s all he really wanted from all of us, a little fear.”

“But he was afraid,” Sabine said. “He did lose his head. Everything that happened proves that.” Sabine looked down at the floor and saw the little black smudge where she had dropped her cigarette. Look to the other side and she would have seen the place where Dot and then her husband fell. It was like touring the beaches of Iwo Jima.

“No.” Dot had the authority of an eyewitness on a clear day. “What he did was the only thing there was to do. He hadn’t meant to kill his father, but he meant to stop him. That’s what mattered most to Guy, stopping him. He didn’t lose his head, he was thinking. He couldn’t get Al off of me and he saw there was no time to call anybody for help. Guy had to be the help himself. He saw that, understood that, and he did something. That’s not called losing your head.” Dot took a slower sip of her drink and it calmed her some. “I wish he had told you this himself, because he could have explained it so much better than me.”

“I wish he had, too.”

“I know that he didn’t have regrets about what he did. Maybe he felt sorry that Al died, and maybe he felt guilty about having done it, but he told me himself on the day he came home from Lowell that he’d done the right thing. What a grown-up boy he was, saying something like that. There he was, eighteen, and he’d already figured out all sorts of things I wouldn’t come to for years and years. I used to wish so bad I could talk to him, tell him once I’d finally put it all together, but nobody can be expected to wait around. By the time I understood what had happened he was already a famous magician. He had you. By the time I’d figured it out he had forgotten about me altogether.”

“He didn’t forget you.” But that was just something to say. Actually Sabine had no idea. Maybe he had forgotten. She never saw a trace of past in him. Maybe he had put every scrap of it to bed, including the woman sitting in front of her now. “When I think of my mother, I think of her playing the piano,” Parsifal would say to Sabine in their early days when she still bothered to ask. There was no piano in this house.

“Don’t try and make me feel better.”

“I’d love to make you feel better,” Sabine said, taking her drink down to bare ice. “I’d like to make us both feel better.”

The refrigerator made a low rumble and then resumed its deep electric grind. Dot blinked, as if suddenly awake. “You know, I gave myself a lot of comfort these last ten years or so, thinking he’d come back. Once I saw him on television and then when he started sending me money, I just knew, one of these days I was going to open up the door and there he’d be. The girls and I would talk about it all the time. Sometimes I’d be driving home from the grocery store and my palms would start to sweat on the steering wheel and I was sure, I was just absolutely sure.”

“I know,” Sabine said. If he had lived another twenty years, another forty, he would not have come back to this place. He had forgotten it. Even as he put the money into the envelope every month, it did not exist.

“And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That’s the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That’s the thing I’ve lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that’s when you came.”

“When I came?”

“You take up that place. That’s what Kitty said, that all the years we’ve been saving a place for him and with you here, that place is full again. It is better.”

Dot smiled at her, not unlike the way Sabine’s mother used to smile when Sabine did well in ballet as a child. “I hate to bring this up,” Sabine said, and moved the ice in her glass in circles with her finger, “but you know I’m not going to stay here. Sooner or later I have to go back to L.A.”

“We’d talked about putting you in the basement, but with all the tricks you know you’d probably figure out how to escape.”

“It’s true.”

Dot patted her hand. “Go to bed, Sabine. It’s late. Nobody’s going to ask you to live in Nebraska. You have to be born in Nebraska to want to stay here, I know that. Half the time that doesn’t even do the trick. You’re my daughter-in-law, my family. You can live anywhere you want and that’s still going to be true.”

Sabine gave Dot a kiss and headed down the hallway to her room. The cold weather made her sleepy, even when she stayed inside. She would go home. She thought about walking down the long hall to her bedroom on Oriole Street. She thought about the smell of the lemon trees mixing with the smell of the chlorine from the pool as she ran her hand along the paneling of the house that Parsifal had lived in as a boy. In a couple of days, in a little while, she would go home.

In Los Angeles, every day came with a series of tasks: Pick up the Bactrim, deliver the condominium complex, lunch at Canter’s, take the rabbit to the vet. There were things she had to maintain, like the magic. Parsifal had told her in the very beginning, for magic to work it had to be a habit. Magic was food, it was sleep. Neglect made her awkward. She spun three balls in one hand while she brushed her teeth with the other. Add to that her job, the panes of glass that needed to be cut, sheets of grass to be painted. On the walls of her studio were the tacked-up drawings of buildings she would not get to for months, two dimensions she was to pull into three. Sabine made lists, things to buy, things to make, things to practice. All day long the list propelled her forward. When she went to bed at night her mind would reel through all she had forgotten, all the things there hadn’t been time for. It had been like this even when she was a child, going from Hebrew school to painting class to ballet, working her math problems in the evenings, and then setting the table for dinner.

It wasn’t like that in Nebraska.

She slept. She memorized the black lines of the branches that brushed against the storm windows of Parsifal’s bedroom. She waited for Dot and Bertie to come home. She waited for Kitty and the boys. They were regular, punctual. She shaped herself around their coming and going. The house was clean, but when she was alone she cleaned it again. She read half of
The Joy of Cooking
and then made a cake from scratch, a daffodil cake. She chose the recipe because it was tedious and complicated and because she could find all the ingredients. She used every egg. In the garage, leaning alone in a corner, she found a snow shovel with a red handle and a flat tin bed. She put on her boots and hat and gloves and went outside to shovel the front walk. Then she shoveled the driveway. Sabine had never shoveled snow before. Every load surprised her with its weight, all those tiny flakes. She remembered reading somewhere that men were much more likely to have heart attacks and that it was better for women to shovel snow. What a way to die, pitching over into the soft bank, freezing there until your family came outside to find you. Her back hurt, a pain in a previously unknown muscle. She could feel the blisters rubbing beneath her soft lambskin gloves. Sabine shoveled the sidewalks well into the neighbors’ property on either side. When she was finished, she went in and worked herself out of her clothes, which were stiff with ice. She sat in a hot bath and shook from the cold. Her toes were wrinkled, white and numb. Outside, it was starting to snow again.

In Dot Fetters’ tiny ranch house, which in this blanket of heavy snow, and probably without it as well, appeared to be exactly like every other tiny ranch house in every direction, Sabine was finding a part of the husband she had lost. Guy the alter ego, the younger self. She imagined him flying down the street in the bracing cold, stomach to sled. She saw him at the kitchen table spooning through a bowl of cereal before school, his eyes fixed to the back of the box. Guy, who would someday be Parsifal, lying on the floor in the living room, reading library books on magic, frustrating books that never gave the information you really needed to have. She imagined him popular, tight with the neighborhood boys, good to his sister. At night she saw him asleep in the bed next to her bed, not the man he would be later on, the one that was gone, but this slighter, very present version of himself. She saw him in Kitty and Bertie, sometimes in Dot and How and Guy. She saw him at six years old and nine and twelve, because she needed to, every minute. Missing him was the dark and endless space she had stumbled into.