The Magician's Assistant (33 page)

Sabine smiled. The very thought of it. “Not us,” she said, watching Bertie and Haas huddle together at the information counter, his arm around her waist. “It wasn’t that kind of love.” When Phan was in the hospital, when he was sick at home, Parsifal would hold him in a way she could not describe. It was the way Bertie was holding Haas now, holding on to him. They seemed to absorb one another through the skin.

Parking the car only consisted of driving about twenty feet to the left and turning it off. The lot was well plowed and lightly scattered with cars. Every car stood far apart from the next. No one took the risk of sliding into someone else’s fender. When Dot and Sabine pushed through the door of the hospital, the nurse looked up from her paperwork and gave a smile that established her as both helpful and concerned.

“It’s not us,” Dot said. “My daughter, Bertie Fetters.” Dot pointed to the double doors, knowing full well that was the direction they would have gone in. “Albertine Fetters.”

“Of course,” the nurse said. She had the healthy, big-boned look of a woman who should have been on a ranch, collecting eggs and putting out hay for the horses. Sitting at her desk in such a white uniform, she had the carefully studied attitude of someone who was pretending to be something she was not. “She went back with her husband. Do you want to go with them?”

“Naw,” Dot said, walking away. “I’ve been. Let them be alone.” She took up a spot on a battered two-seater sofa as far away from the nurse as possible and then patted the cushion next to her for Sabine to come and join her. “No big-city emergency room, hey?”

Sabine sat down. In their hurry to leave she had not put on socks and now her feet were aching from the cold. “It is a hospital, isn’t it?” Sabine hated hospitals, but this one brought up no unpleasant memories. It was just a large, well-lit room with a linoleum floor and mismatched furniture. If it weren’t for the nurse, who was deeply involved in a magazine article, they would have been alone.

“I should know. There isn’t one part of this place I haven’t been. I had all three of my kids here. Kitty crushed a glass with her hand. Al pulled Guy’s arm out of the socket—Lord, that was a gruesome sight. They stitched up my lip and my eye, taped up my ribs. So many things you couldn’t count. We were the regular customers. There was a time I couldn’t imagine coming in this place and not knowing the name of the girl at the front desk. The nurses all said hello to me when I saw them in the grocery store. Cops brought Al here the night he died. Tried to resuscitate him all the way over in the ambulance and then again when they got here. What a thought that was, bringing him back from the dead.” She shook her head. “Kitty got married on the second floor. Of course, it was just a tiny little place then. They added all this on ten years ago, our last stab at prosperity. If you want to be somewhere that Guy spent a lot of time, then this is the place.”

Sabine reached out to touch a rubber plant at the end of the love seat. For a minute she’d thought it might have been real. “Maybe I should drive out to Lowell,” she said. “Take a look at the reformatory.”

Dot turned to her, her mouth open. “Jesus, what a horrible thought. You wouldn’t do that.”

“Just to see it, see where he was.”

“You forget about that,” Dot said. Sabine knew the look on her face. She had seen it on Parsifal’s face the day she suggested they ride out to Connecticut to see his parents’ graves. “He isn’t there. You wouldn’t see anything but a bunch of crazy, terrified boys. Or maybe it’s gotten better by now. It couldn’t have gotten worse.”

“You went to see him at Lowell?”

“Sure I went,” Dot said quietly. “Two weeks before I had Bertie. I took the bus clear to the other side of the state, almost to Iowa and up north of Omaha. Worst sort of hellhole, like nothing I’d seen before or since. But Guy came in the visiting room so nice, his hair all combed. All he wanted to know about was how Kitty was and how I was, and when I asked about how he was doing, he shook his head and said he was fine. I was so embarrassed, being that pregnant, but I knew the trip would be even harder once I had the baby with me. When our time was up, he gave me a hug, just like he was only going off to bed, and he told me not to come back.” Dot nodded. “I knew what he meant. He didn’t want me to have to come so far, but more than that, he didn’t want’ me to see him there. For me, that day was the worst of it. Worse than the day Al died and worse than the day Guy was sentenced. Guy would never want anyone going back to Lowell.”

Sabine took Dot’s hand. She felt vaguely relieved. Touring the monuments of Parsifal’s youth wasn’t the only thing that mattered. “So I won’t go. You know I hate to drive in the snow, anyway.”

“I appreciate that,” Dot said.

Sabine never looked up when someone came into the waiting room at Cedars Sinai. It was part of the code of manners, that you let people have their privacy, that you let them read bad magazines or have a cry or go to the bathroom twenty times in a half hour and grant them the courtesy of not noticing. But Box Butte General was too small, and when they heard the door Dot and Sabine and the nurse all looked up in unison at the tall, thin man who came through it.

Howard Plate left a watery trail of snow on his way to the information desk. “I wanted to check on Bertie Fetters.”

“Hey,” Dot called out. She waved her hand so that he would have no problem identifying her.

Howard sighed and drummed the nurse’s desk slowly with his fingers before turning and walking over. The nurse, always interested in the possibility of family drama on a slow night, watched until he was safely on the other side of the room, and then she went back to her magazine.

“What are you doing over here?” Dot said.

“I was getting ready to go on. I thought I’d just come by and check, make sure she’s okay.” He didn’t look at Sabine. He kept his eyes on Dot. His hands stayed deep inside his pockets. “There’s nothing wrong with her, did they say?”

“No one’s told me anything. I imagine she’ll take some stitches in the back of her head.”

“Well, it’s too bad.”

“You shouldn’t be throwing tables around,” Dot said. Her tone was instructive: look both ways before you cross the street, never leave a knife point up in the dishwasher.

“Don’t get started on me,” Howard said mildly. “If I want to hear it I’ll go see my wife.”

“I’m not starting on you, Howard. I think it was decent of you to come by. I think you’re a real son of a bitch for a million other things, but you’re good to check on her.”

He nodded his head slightly, accepting both the criticism and the smaller compliment. He looked tired. The map of scars on his cheek was red from the cold. “You don’t need to say I was here.”

Across the room, Haas slipped through the double doors and was almost in their party before any of them noticed. They were all startled to see him; the terribly pained expression on his pale face rendered him tragic. For a second they each imagined some improbable version of bad news. “Why are you here?” he asked Howard.

“How’s Bertie?” Dot said.

“Twelve stitches. She’s fine. She only minded because they had to cut out some of her hair.”

“Twelve,” Dot said.

“Why are you here?”

Howard Plate seemed completely unable to say. The bill of his cap tipped down, as if a strong wind had come up that might take it from him.

“He came to see if Bertie was okay,” Dot said.

“You need to stay away from Bertie,” Haas said. There was nothing threatening in his voice or the way he stood. His face lifted up and his glasses reflected the overhead lights and hid his eyes. He was a smaller man than Howard Plate by two inches, and he lacked Howard Plate’s toughness in every way, the toughness honed in his hoodlum days, and yet there was no doubt that had they fought, Haas would have won easily. He would have been fighting for Bertie. “I know you’re around,” he said. “I know you’re family, but when she comes into the house, you need to go.”

“I was on the other side of the room,” Howard Plate said. “I got nowhere near her.”

“Doesn’t matter. You say you got nowhere near her, and she got hurt. What that says to me is that you need to stay farther away.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” He shifted his feet so that they were a few inches farther apart. Howard Plate was ready. If something was to happen, at least it would happen in a hospital. Dot wouldn’t have to drive anyone over this time.

“I am,” Haas said, so quietly the nurse did not lift up her eyes. So quietly that Sabine almost didn’t hear. “I am telling you.” Then he went back across the waiting room and through the doors. Howard Plate watched him go. He stayed for a minute afterwards, watching, thinking about it. He seemed to have forgotten about his mother-in-law and Sabine. He had forgotten about the nurse. He stood by himself in the waiting room as if he were trying to decide whether or not he should go through the doors, pull Haas to the ground, and kill him. When he finally made up his mind and left, no one said good-night.

“My God,” Sabine said. “And I thought we got a lot of drama in L.A.”

“The things that go on in these little towns, you wouldn’t believe them.” Dot watched all the doors carefully to make sure that no one changed his mind.

When Bertie came out with Haas, her hair was knotted up on the top of her head. There was a large piece of white adhesive tape stuck to the base of her skull, with skin shaved freshly pink around the edges. She looked slightly dazed, as if her
stoic
good sense were finding its limits. Haas carried an ice pack in one hand, Bertie’s hand in the other.

“Oh, Bertie,” Sabine said.

“Twelve stitches,” Dot said. “I can’t brag on you now.”

Bertie stood and stared at them with such complete blankness that Sabine wondered if they had checked her for a concussion. “I’m going home with Haas,” she said finally, her voice a bare squeak. “I’m going to stay with him for a while.”

“I think that’s good,” Dot said. “I think that’s exactly right.”

“You have Sabine,” Bertie said. “You’ll be fine at home.”

“Absolutely fine. You two go on. Stay together. Absolutely right.”

“I don’t want you to worry.” Her spiky eyelashes were collecting the first stages of what appeared to be tears.

They all stood frozen in their spots, waiting to see whether or not Bertie was going to cry. Finally Sabine picked Dot’s purse up from the couch. “We’re leaving,” she said. “You two go home, get some rest.”

Dot was only too happy to follow, and together they went quickly into the night. For the first time the cold felt like a relief. The night sky that the storm had left behind was black and clean, full of the milky stars that one could never imagine seeing in Los Angeles, even when there wasn’t a trace of smog in the valley. The moon, which was nothing more than a white hole punched out of the Hollywood night, had its own landscape in Nebraska, as accessible as flour in a bowl. It lit their way to the car.

“I am giddy,” Dot said. “Not that I’d want her hurt, not for anything, but I’ve got to tell you I was starting to think Bertie was never going to go.”

“She’s never spent the night with Haas?”

“I told her to. I said we’re all adults here, but she’d just walk out of the room. She wants to protect me—from what, I have no idea.” Dot started the car and shifted into Drive. When they slipped a bit to the left on some hidden ice beneath the rear tires, she didn’t even notice. “Bertie was a big surprise. People don’t wait fifteen years between having their children on purpose. To start on diapers again, the alphabet. I didn’t think I could do it. Of course they had that
Sesame Street
by the time she came along, that was a big help. Guy was gone. Kitty had run off and married that nut. Bertie just stayed so close. She wanted to hold my hand everywhere, she wanted to sleep in my bed. I was tired, you know. I’d raised my two kids. I’d been through all that with Al.”

“She loves you.”

“And I love her, too. I couldn’t love her any more than I do. God help me, she was a great kid, but she never left. She’s going to be thirty years old in a couple of weeks. I’ve been telling her to marry Haas since the first week she started going out with him, and that was six years ago. Nothing comes in balance, Sabine. Your kids either vanish or they won’t go away. You pray that one daughter will get married and the other one will get divorced, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about either one of them.”

Sabine knew that if she stayed long enough, she would hate Howard Plate like the rest of them did. She knew there were stories and reasons, and even without them he made a particularly bad impression. Yet there was a strange way in which she felt almost sorry for him now. The way he couldn’t sit comfortably in any room. The way he was outside of his own family. “Do you think Kitty would ever leave him?”

Dot took her eyes off the road to look at Sabine. There was no traffic, only soft snow stacked into banks on either side. “She leaves him all the time. She leaves him, he leaves her. The boys move in, they move out. Kitty can go, she just can’t stay away.”

Sabine saw Kitty going to the car in the middle of the night, a few items carelessly thrown into a bag, the boys, bleary-eyed from having been woken up, trailing behind her. “I wonder why not.”

“You can’t really leave somebody in a town like this. There are only ten thousand people here. No matter where you go, you keep seeing them. You can’t ever start over again. I understand that. I wanted to leave Al, but where was I going to go? I’d never lived anyplace but Alliance. I didn’t have any money, I had kids. Howard and Kitty may well hate each other, but it’s their habit to be together, so they keep going back. You want to stop doing something, you have to get away from it. You have to put it behind you.”

“And you think that’s what Kitty wants?”

“Sure it’s what she wants, but she doesn’t have any confidence now. She’s used up all her confidence on leaving. Kitty doesn’t feel young anymore. She doesn’t think, Well, I could still start over and do something else. It makes me sad. We’ve been talking about it for more than twenty years now, how she’s going to leave Howard. It makes me tired to think about it still going on.”