The Magician's Assistant (42 page)

“Sabine,” the voice said. There was a hand shaking her shoulder. “Sabine, wake up!”

“Kitty?”

“Dad’s here.” How reached over and switched on the light next to her bed. Sabine raised up on one elbow. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt with Mr. Bubble on it. His hair was rumpled with sleep.

“Your dad is here?” She had been dreaming about Parsifal. Parsifal and she were in a magic show.

“In the kitchen with Mom. You have to go talk to them. You have to get up.”

Sabine pushed herself up from her bed and opened the closet to find her bathrobe, but How took her hand and pulled her forward. Parsifal was with Phan and they were happy. There were flowers everywhere. “Come
on,
” How said.

Sabine stumbled down the dark hallway in her pajamas. The house was cold without her robe. Dot turned the thermostat down at night to save money.

“I won’t put up with this.” Howard’s voice, too loud for being so late at night. Sabine didn’t know how she hadn’t heard it before or how Dot was sleeping through it now. The people who listened for Howard’s voice had been awakened by it. The ones who weren’t used to it slept through.

“Go home,” Kitty said, her voice tired.

Guy was standing just outside the kitchen door, wearing only a pair of white jockey shorts. The light from the kitchen fell over the front of him like the light from a movie screen. He was watching, shivering, all of his skin impossibly pale.

“Go in there,” Guy said when he saw Sabine. She put a hand on his bare shoulder and he leaned against her. He still had the warm smell of sleep on his skin. “He’ll kill her,” he whispered in her ear like a secret.

They were watching Kitty and Howard, who seemed to think that they were the only two people in the house who were awake. “Nobody’s going to kill anybody,” Sabine said, feeling clearheaded and brave. Parsifal had told her, Kitty is fabulous. He said it with such assurance that there was no way to believe it wasn’t true. Howard was easy, a middle-aged punk. If she had to go up against him, there was no way he could match her. She left the two brothers behind her, huddled together at the door frame.

Kitty was sitting in a chair at the table, her hands covering her face. Howard was standing beside her, rapping the blade of a ten-inch knife against the table. In her life, Sabine had seen as many trick knives as real ones. Blades that were rubber and bent away. Blades that slid up into the handle and gave the illusion of stabbing. That’s how they did it in the movies, in magic shows.

“Hey, Howard,” Sabine said, rubbing her eyes. “You’re waking everyone up.”

He turned to her, his face full of the rage she had seen only on the faces of the teenaged boys who roamed Los Angeles. He pointed the knife towards her. “Go back to bed.”

Kitty raised her face. She was crying or she had been crying. There was the smallest cut along the top of her cheek that was bleeding. She was bleeding. A delicate cut with blood so impossibly red that for a moment Sabine thought that, like the knife, it might not be real. She would take Kitty and the boys back to Los Angeles with her. That was the answer. Looking at the cut on Kitty’s face, Howard, this same kitchen, it became clear. All of this was over.

“Go back to bed,” Kitty said. “Take the boys with you.”

Sabine shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere.” She came over and took the chair next to Kitty. “Let me see your face.” She put a hand under Kitty’s chin.

“I’m fine,” Kitty said. “Really.”

“Goddamn it, don’t you hear?” Howard Plate said.

“Perfectly,” Sabine said, not taking her eyes off Kitty for a minute. She pressed a paper napkin left from dinner against the cut.

Howard took hold of Sabine’s shoulders, the shoulders of Phan’s white cotton pajamas, and pulled her to her feet. The neck of the pajamas caught her neck and made her head snap back and then up straight. The knife, which he held at a careless angle so that it could as easily go through her skin as not, cut her sleeve. In the hallway she heard a sound from the boys, a deep inhale. There were as many trick knives as real ones. Knives so useless you couldn’t use them to open an envelope. For all she knew she was still asleep, or she had been awake before and this was now the dream. Howard’s knuckles pushed against her collarbone and the soft skin of her throat.

“Howard,” Kitty said, standing up herself.

“Listen to me!” he screamed at Sabine. He flung her back against the refrigerator and then shook out his hand as if he regretted having touched her. Four refrigerator magnets shaped like fruit fell to the floor.

Sabine pulled down her pajama top to set it right again, trying to catch her breath. No one had ever pushed her, had ever pulled her anywhere. “You need to go home,” she said, coughing.

“I’m going home,” Howard said. “I’m taking my family home.” He was like the audience, just barely contained. He shook slightly, as if he were making an enormous physical effort to keep himself from killing her in his fury.

“They won’t go with you,” Sabine said.

“They’ll do what I tell them to do.” Howard Plate looked at Sabine as if he were only just now able to see her. He was trying to catch his breath. “Why are you here? Didn’t I tell you to stay away from us?”

Maybe he could kill them. Maybe Kitty’s leaving had made him mad enough and the dream she remembered really was a dream rather than a promise. Kitty is fabulous. Sabine had thought she could bluff her way through this, but when she opened her mouth there was nothing she could think of to say. She was afraid of him. It had never occurred to her that this might be the outcome. She was in Nebraska in a kitchen where one man had already died. What did she know?

“They want to come home tonight. My boys want to come home. Jesus. I don’t have to explain this to you.” Perhaps he meant to pound his fist against the table and forgot the knife was still in his hand, or maybe he meant to drive the knife into the wood, which he did. It went in with a deep thud and stood up straight, a gesture from an old western—cowboys, Indians. Kitty flinched against the sound and then, for a while, they were all quiet.

While each waited to see what the other would do next, Guy stepped forward into the light, all of his skin showing, his arms wrapped around his narrow chest. The elastic on his underwear had seen a hundred washings and sat down loosely on his slim hips. The white was not a pure white anymore, but a very, very pale gray. He had none of his standard bravado, no sway; but with all of his body showing, his youth and beauty were startling and they all turned to watch him. Almost naked, he glowed with celebrity the way his uncle Parsifal had that night on the Johnny Carson show. He came into the kitchen so quietly, with such timidity, that he appeared to be coming in not to stop the fight, but to offer himself up to it. How followed his younger brother, stepped just inside the door, onto the linoleum, and stopped. Guy moved ahead silently, as if clothing were responsible for all sound. They couldn’t even hear his feet against the floor.

“You boys go back to your room,” Kitty said. “This is all going to be fine.”

Guy looked at the knife. He reached out two fingers and lightly touched the handle to test how securely it was anchored in the wood.

“Go on,” Sabine said. She did not like to see him so close to the knife.

“Dad, it’s late,” Guy said, as if this whole story were about sleep and how they were being kept from it.

“Then get your naked self to bed,” Howard said.

Kitty walked towards Guy and put her arm around her son, ran her hand across the beautiful skin of his back. “I’ll take the boys to bed.” She held out an arm for How, who came to her. They were children, sleepy and undressed.

“They’re big enough to get themselves to bed.” Howard’s tone was halfhearted, his anger failing him. He looked at his wife, who was walking away. “You come back here when you’ve got them settled,” he said.

Kitty stopped, her beautiful face suddenly rested and self-assured. Whatever it was was over. Guy had defused it somehow, had made it all different. “I’m going to sleep,” she told her husband. “We’ll talk later.” And then she walked her boys down the hall.

Howard Plate looked at Sabine. She was the only person left in the kitchen. He shook his head in disgust. “She never minds me.”

“It’s late,” Sabine said.

Howard rubbed his hands through his hair, rubbed his face with his hands, as if trying to coax the blood from the pool around his brain. “I only wanted them to come home. That’s where they’re supposed to be. I was in bed and I wanted my wife and my boys to come home.” He looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out where the conversation about sleeping at home had gone so wrong. “You can’t make Kitty do anything. She won’t do anything you tell her to.”

Sabine nodded. It was no time to argue the point. The back door was so close he could be there in a second.

“All right,” he said. “All right. You tell her to call me first thing in the morning.”

“I will,” Sabine said.

Howard Plate, without a coat or hat, stepped into a howling snowstorm of solid whiteness that Sabine had not noticed until he opened the door. She closed it behind him, snow blowing over her bare feet, and turned the lock. It would be impossible to see the road on a night like this. He could drive off the shoulder, and if the car were stuck, back tires spinning great plumes of dirt and ice, and he decided to walk, how far could he go without a coat? How long could Howard Plate wander the streets of Alliance in the snow before lying down to rest for a minute and freezing solid? Everyone would remember this night, how he was half out of his mind when he went out into the weather. People freeze to death all the time, but never on the night you expect them to, never on the night you hope for it.

Sabine went and pried the knife out of the table with a solid tug and then put it back in the drawer so it would not be the first thing everyone saw when coming in for breakfast in the morning. She rubbed the cut in the wood with her finger. Another reminder.
Do you remember that night Howard came over and stabbed the kitchen table with a knife?

Sabine headed back to her room but went to the left instead of the right without meaning to; force of habit. The boys lifted up on their elbows from their twin beds and blinked in the darkness.

“Did he go?” How said.

“He went home,” Sabine said. “Everything’s fine.” It was amazingly simple, lying to them. They wanted to believe that everything would be all right, she wanted them to believe it.

“We thought we heard the door,” Guy said. “Was he okay?”

“I think he’d calmed down.” Thanks to you, she wanted to say, but maybe Guy wouldn’t want the credit for sending his father away.

“Gram didn’t wake up?”

Sabine shook her head. “Now you need to go to sleep.” She went to Guy’s bed and then How’s, kissing them both on the forehead even though they were too old. It was not an ordinary night.

“Good night,” How said.

“Good night, Sabine,” Guy said.

Sabine backed out of the room quietly and closed the door. She liked to believe they were already asleep, that they felt so safe with her reassurances that sleep came without question.

Across the hall, Kitty was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

“How’s that cut?” Sabine said.

“I shouldn’t have left you out there with him.”

“It was fine. He left without any problem.” Sabine leaned over and looked at Kitty’s face. She ran her thumb beneath the tear on Kitty’s cheek. It wasn’t so bad. No more stitches, at least.

“He’s always going to be around,” Kitty said, as if she had decided to take the rest of the night to puzzle out her life.

“He’s not,” Sabine said. She sat down beside her sister-in-law and took her hand. “He won’t be in California.”

“Lucky for you,” Kitty said, her voice thoughtful. “He doesn’t seem to like you.”

“I want you and the boys to come back to California with me.” All she didn’t understand was why she hadn’t thought of it before.

Kitty looked at her. “Leave Alliance?”

“In a heartbeat.”

Kitty sat up and pulled a pillow into her lap. She had meant to go with her brother. She had meant to be the magician’s assistant, see the ocean. “Leave Mother and Bertie?”

“Lots of visits.”

“Oh, Christ,” Kitty said. “I don’t know.” She looked up at Sabine. “I’m not so young anymore. I don’t know how it would be to uproot everybody, have everything be different.” She reached up and put her hand on the side of Sabine’s face. Kitty’s hand was as cool as a leaf. “You wait and you wait and you wait for something to happen, and then when it finally does you don’t know what to do about it.”

Sabine closed her eyes and kissed Kitty. A kiss that she liked to think would have been much better if she hadn’t been so tired.

“We don’t have to decide this right now,” Kitty whispered. “It doesn’t have to be tonight.”

Sabine shook her head. “This offer is good. Permanently good.” She stood up and Kitty stood up beside her and together they folded back the blankets. Now the bed was the right size, and Sabine put her arms around Kitty and held her against her chest. This was the thing that everyone had told her about, the thing that she had given up for Parsifal before she really understood what it was. Kitty pressed her face against the side of Sabine’s neck. “I’m going to fall asleep,” she said.

And that was when Sabine remembered what she wanted to tell her. “Just one more thing,” she whispered. “I had an incredible dream about Parsifal and Phan tonight. I never remember my dreams, but everything in this one is still so clear.”

“Tell me,” Kitty said from deep inside the well of Sabine’s arms. “I dream about them all the time.”

***

Very early on the morning of Bertie and Haas’s wedding, two perfect inches of powdery snow fell on Alliance, Nebraska, making all of the snow that was beneath it appear fresh and bright. The plows were back in their sheds by seven
A.M.
and by eight the sun was out and the sky was clear from Wyoming to Iowa. While the tides of her family rose and fell around her, Bertie stayed focused on what was to be the happiest day of her life. She would be thirty in two weeks and was old enough to remember to put together the proper package for herself: old, new, borrowed, blue. All of the teachers and staff from Emerson Grade School were there, as were the teachers from the high school, where Haas taught chemistry; the middle school; and Saint Agnes Academy. Cousins and second cousins came from Hemingford and Scottsbluff. Two came from Sheridan, Wyoming. Al Fetters’ brother, Ross, came with his wife all the way from Topeka, Kansas, though no one had heard from them in years. In fact, the only member of the family not in attendance was Howard Plate, and no one had expected him anyway.