“Stay where?” Kitty pulled the elastic out of her hair and nervously reshaped her ponytail.
Sabine redirected Kitty’s attention by turning her head to that side of the room. “You didn’t move.”
“Houses in small towns where boys kill their fathers are tough to sell. Kids weren’t allowed to walk down our street for months, and when they were allowed, they didn’t anyway. And there wasn’t any money and there wasn’t anyplace to go and when there was, if there was, years and years after that, hell, we didn’t even care anymore.” Kitty put out her cigarette, though she’d barely smoked this one at all. “Forgive me, but I think I need to stop this now. We can start it again later, but right now I think I’m at my limit.”
“It’s so late,” Sabine said, not having any idea what time it was but knowing instinctively it was no time to be up. “You must need to get home.”
Kitty stood up. She was tall but not as tall as Sabine. “I’m home for tonight.”
“You’re sleeping here?”
“For tonight,” Kitty said. That was another story, a story that neither of them had the energy for. She picked up the saucer and dumped the ashes in a trashcan under the sink. Then she washed the saucer with hot water and soap and put it in the rack to dry. “You go on to bed.”
“I’m sleeping in your room.”
“No, you’re not. I’m on the couch. It’s only a few hours. I have to be at work in the morning. It’s a good couch.”
Sabine had slept on so many couches. In dressing rooms and Parsifal’s old apartment and the hospital waiting rooms. She was too tired to even consider hunting up blankets, a spare pillow. Too tired to think of someone else having to do it. “Come on and sleep in your room. There’s another bed.”
“I’m fine,” Kitty said, and raised up her hand.
“I won’t talk anymore,” Sabine said. “Sleep in your room. I’m going to sleep. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Kitty meant to decline, but, like her mother and her sister, she was unable to refuse what she wanted. “Maybe then we won’t have all those dreams,” she said.
They walked down the hall together, dragging their long tails of information. They did not turn on the light and Sabine got into the bed that was unmade and as cold now as the snow on the windowsill. She pulled up her knees, shivered. Kitty took off her jeans and got into the other bed wearing a sweatshirt and anything else she had on. She was lying on her back, and Sabine could see her profile clearly in the light that came in under the door. She recognized it.
“I’m sorry about this,” Kitty said.
“I would have found out sooner or later.” Sabine turned on her side to face her.
“Who knows, maybe not. You made it this far.”
There were so many other things to say, but sleep was pushing Sabine down under the water with both hands. Questions struggled to shape themselves into half sentences, but she didn’t have enough energy left to form her mouth around them. Already Kitty’s breathing had become regular and deep. Sabine thought that there would be someone waiting for her on the other side. She thought there would be information, but when she went to the snowy field, she waited and waited and she was alone.
Before her eyes opened, Sabine’s hand skimmed the crumpled bedspread, looking for the warm bundle of rabbit fur that usually slept near her stomach. When her fingers found nothing there, she remembered and opened her eyes. This was a boy’s room, brightly lit because the rolled shades had not been pulled down the night before. There was sun covering the beds and the desk. Sun coming off the hot tin of the baseball trophies and washing over the red plaid rug. She was alone in the room and there was no indication that she hadn’t slept there alone all night, never waking, barely turning over. The other twin bed was neatly made, so exactly as it had been when she arrived yesterday that for a minute it seemed that nothing had happened. It wasn’t snowing now. Outside the window was divided into two planes, blinding blue and blinding white. The snow was snapped down over the field like an ironed bedsheet. It was a clean, orderly world.
Sabine would have had to stoop to get all the way under the shower but instead she stood there, eyes closed, and let the water beat against her face, her nose almost touching the flat silver disc of the showerhead. Everything in the story had been reversed. Los Angeles was the place to kill someone, Nebraska was where you went later to forget. The openness would hide you. No one would look in Nebraska. Probably every third house on the street sheltered a member of the Witness Protection Program. Yet somehow Parsifal’s plan had worked. He moved through the city of patricides without detection. Sabine was waiting to feel devastated by what she knew, but the longer she waited, the more she was sure it wasn’t coming. She had taken all her blows with proper heartbreak: Phan’s death and then Parsifal’s, the surprise of his family, and then all the other surprises. Yet somehow the news that Parsifal had killed his father, killed him, albeit accidentally, with a baseball bat, called up very little this morning. The steam in the bathroom released decades of soap and shampoo smells from the wallpaper. Sabine turned her naked body in a coastal fog of herbal-floral steam and let the water, which was slightly hotter than she could stand, pound on her neck. She wouldn’t have told, either. That was where the comfort was, the thing that made sense. Now she understood why he had lied to her, and how it was less a he than the complete burial of an unmentionable truth. Where we are born is the worst kind of crapshoot. Sabine was not entitled to her birth in Israel, to the loving nest of Fairfax. This could have been her house. She could have picked up the bat, felt the coolness of the wood in her hands. And if she had, she would have cut off the past as well, clipped it like an article from the newspaper so that people might see that something was missing but no one would know what it was. And even as she wished he had told her, so that she might have comforted him, forgiven him, she knew that had it been her life she would not have told him, either; because there never would have been a morning, sitting in the kitchen over coffee, that she could have pushed the plates aside and taken his hands and said, “Listen, listen to me, there’s something I have to tell you.” Parsifal, her friend, her husband, had made himself a happy life like someone else would make a seaworthy boat, following step by careful step. The past was no longer his past and it slid away from him like an anchor, unattached, to the mossy darkness of the ocean floor. She had watched him sleep for years, seen his face the first moment he opened his eyes, and she knew he was not troubled by dreams. This was Sabine’s comfort, her joy: Parsifal had gotten away. He was in the boat that saved his life, the boat that was Los Angeles. He had let the blue water run over his open hand. It was Sabine who had come back. Sabine who was now at the bottom of that ocean, holding the anchor to her chest.
The water went quickly from hot to lukewarm to cold and forced her out of the shower. In the mirror she saw nothing but thick steam. When she was dried and dressed, she went to the kitchen, where Dot Fetters sat with her coffee, staring into the unbearable brightness of snow.
“I slept so late,” Sabine said.
“You were up late,” Dot said dully. She did not look up.
Sabine got her coffee in a SEE MOUNT RUSHMORE mug, the rocky faces of three important presidents and one minor one floating in a pale blue oval. “Bertie’s gone to school?”
Dot nodded.
“And Kitty?”
“Gone first thing to work. I saw her, though.”
“So she told you we met. I liked her. Bertie was right. She looks so much like Parsifal.”
“She told me.” Dot nodded, agreeing with herself that it was right to acknowledge this. “Told me she told you everything. She was none too pleased about it, either, thought surely I wouldn’t have brought you all the way out here without coming clean first. I guess we need to get our stories straight, have a big family conference. Forgive me, but we don’t get a lot of new people around here. We’ve got Haas, but I know for sure Bertie has told him every single thing starting with Moses. He always look
s so nervous when he’s here.” Dot looked up at Sabine for the first time. “Did Kitty tell you anything about Kitty?”
“No.”
“Well, I was just checking. Got to see who knows what. Kitty thinks you’re going to want to leave today, that I ought to plan on driving you to Scottsbluff.”
Sabine thought about the plane, the screaming stewardess, her raccoon eyes melting down her cheeks. “I don’t have any plans to go.”
Dot chose to drive her point home, just to make sure there was absolutely no misunderstanding it. “Guy killed Albert, right there in that corner.” She picked up her cup. The coffee had cooled to a point where she could drink it quickly. “My son, your husband. Baseball bat. Al was dead right away. Ambulance came, and then the police.”
“That’s what she told me,” Sabine said, thinking it pointless to add, more or less. She felt a great well of sympathy for Dot. She was seeing the part where Dot was kicked, not the part where Parsifal stopped it. It wasn’t this Dot, but the one in the picture. Small, pretty, hopeful. Sabine got up and went to the refrigerator to find some milk for her coffee. She saw the eggs waiting in their blue depressions on the door and felt that they must be a good omen. She slipped one into the pocket of her sweater. Then she pulled her chair around so that she faced Dot, so that their knees touched. She considered saying that it would be fine if Dot wanted to stop there, but she was afraid Dot would think she wasn’t willing to listen, that she was repulsed by what was, in fact, a repulsive story.
“I don’t know how much of this you can understand,” Dot said. “I know you’re plenty smart, but you weren’t here and it’s hard to get the whole picture sometimes. It’s hard for me to understand it all, and I was there.”
“I can’t imagine how you must have felt.” Sabine wanted her coffee but did not pick it up.
“I can tell you,” Dot said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I felt bad. I felt bad that my husband was dead, even though I had prayed that he would leave or die for nearly as long as I’d been married to him, and then I felt bad for all those years of prayers. I felt bad my son had been sent off for doing it, for trying to take care of me, because that’s when I realized that Guy had always been my favorite, and then I felt bad for having favorites. I felt so bad that when Bertie was born two months after all of this I named her for Albert, which was maybe the worst thing I ever did because it sent a real clear message to Guy about which one of them I was missing most. I handled it poorly, start to finish, but I’ve got to say life doesn’t prepare you for this one. There are no examples to follow, no other families you can look to. It’s all running blind. Kitty was so angry at me for not being able to keep Guy at home she said it was all on my account that he was in Lowell, which was true. But what she never understood was how lucky I was to get him in at Lowell. He was close enough to sixteen that there was talk of trying him as an adult, and that’s prison, something else altogether. No one seemed to give two cents that he was a good boy trying to stop a grown man. No one cared about what Al had put Guy through all those years. Things then weren’t like things now. Your husband beats you, your father beats you, you take it like it’s your duty. And if you lift a finger back, well, the law is going to be so deep down your throat you’ll feel it in your stomach. So Guy’s gone, and I’ve got Kitty and then this little baby, no money.” She shook her head. “Forget it. I’m feeling sorry for myself. I don’t like to think like this.”
Dot was right about one thing: There were no examples to follow. No card that read, I’m so sorry your son killed your husband. “It seems fair,” Sabine said helplessly. “I’m feeling sorry for myself all the time these days.”
The snow in the sun had a certain ground-down, glittery brilliance. In the white bed there were flecks of color, bright pinpricks of green and yellow and red, the colors you saw when you pressed in on your eyes as a child. Parsifal may have taken the hardest hit, but he had gotten away, safe, in his boat. Dot and Kitty had stayed, circling that same spot on the kitchen floor. Dot was crying now, and Sabine knew from too much experience that crying in the morning practically guaranteed a headache for the rest of the day. She leaned over and stroked Dot’s hair, felt the stiffness of the curls beneath her fingers. Then she did something that she had seen a million times but had only done herself years before on the rarest of occasions. She extracted a hen’s egg from Dot’s ear.
White and cold, it came out smoothly. She had applied just the right amount of pressure so as to give the feeling of the egg being birthed through the tympanic membrane—not too much pressure, of course. More than once she had seen an amateur crush an egg against the side of some unsuspecting head, a mixture of yolk and white slipping beneath the shirt collar. Sabine, who had been nervous about pulling this off, felt so enormously pleased with herself she considered palming it again and trying the other ear. Dot Fetters touched her ear nervously and then took the egg from Sabine’s hand as if it were something more miraculous than her breakfast.
“Oh,” she said. “Sabine.” She traced her finger across the chalky white shell. “This is so sweet of you.”
“Plenty more where that came from.” Parsifal’s line.
“I should have told you.”
“You should have.”
“In California, it was all so overwhelming. You and that house and the palm trees.”
“So what was the story in the Sheraton? What was all that about his being gay?”
Dot tilted her head towards her right shoulder, her ear coming close to the wool of her sweater. “Well, it’s true that I knew he was gay and it used to worry me when there was free time to worry. Guy’s being gay and his going to Lowell got tied up together in my mind somehow. I think that really sealed things for him. Maybe if he’d been brought up in a better home, stayed in Nebraska, it would have gone different.”
“Not a chance,” Sabine said.
“You think?”
“He liked men. No, one knows that better than me. That’s just who he was.” Who he was in the bone marrow. He loved the comfort, the sameness of himself. He loved the narrow hips and the rough brush of the cheek.
“So you aren’t mad at me? You aren’t leaving?”
“I’ll leave eventually.” Her mind was still on the egg. “But I just got here.”
There were too many other things to know. It doesn’t just happen that one day the father knocks down the mother and the son knocks down the father and then everybody goes their own way. And besides, even in this short time Sabine had gotten the thing she’d most hoped for: She felt closer to Parsifal here. It should have been in Los Angeles, in the house where they lived, in the clubs where they played, on Mulholland late at night; but all the places she knew him to be only showed up the fact that he was gone. In Nebraska, where she had never imagined him, she could see him everywhere.
“Guy could do the silver dollar really good towards the end.” Dot made the movement of taking something out of her own ear. “Smooth as silk. All the kids in the neighborhood waited around for him. They were crazy for it, even if he wouldn’t let them keep the dollar. But he never could do the egg. He tried it on me, but I always saw it coming. Not that I ever told him, of course. But he knew.” She patted Sabine’s knee, happy and proud, like a parent. “You, on the other hand, wow. I felt that thing coming right out of the center of my head. I don’t mean to compare, but you’re a lot better at this magic stuff than he ever was.”
“Oh, God, no,” Sabine said, strangely shaken that such a thing could even be said. “He taught this to me. I don’t know a thing about magic that I didn’t learn from him. Taking an egg out of somebody’s ear, that’s nothing. It’s a kid’s trick. The things he could do ... Well,” she said, struck by the loss of all those things, “you wouldn’t have believed them.”
Dot nodded appreciatively. “I’m not saying he wasn’t good. He was wonderful. Good at everything he tried his hand at, baseball and math and cooking, even. All I’m saying is that with this m
agic business you’ve got something...” She pursed her lips together. A mother looking to be completely fair to all parties involved. “Extra. You’ve got a good move. I think it’s because you don’t ever draw attention to yourself. Beautiful as you are and elegant, you don’t do anything to make people look at you. You don’t show off. When you pulled that egg out of my ear, you looked just as surprised about it as me.”
“That’s because I didn’t think I could do it.” The praise irritated Sabine. Dot didn’t understand. She had missed those crucial twenty-five years in the middle of the story.
“Well, I’ll drop it, I just don’t want you to sell yourself short, is all.” Dot stood up energetically, relieved to have the weight of that conversation thrown off her. She kissed the shiny crown of Sabine’s head and held the egg out to her. “I’ll make you breakfast. Any way you want it. How about that?”
At ten-thirty Dot left the house to go work in the cafeteria of the high school, where Kitty’s boys were in the ninth and eleventh grades. She stood on the side of the hot-food line opposite the students and dished mashed potatoes and creamed corn into indented plates. Sabine believed Dot would be fast and give out fair and equal portions. “It’s good work,” she told Sabine. “I like seeing the kids. Not just Kitty’s boys, but all of them. Kitty says I shouldn’t work now that we’ve got this money, but I’d miss it. What’s there to do at home all day? There’ll be plenty of time for that.” Up until four years ago, Dot did forty hours a week at the Woolrich plant and overtime when she could get it. But then the money that Parsifal sent once in a while became regular and generous, and though she could never ask him if she could count on it, after a while, she did. That was when she quit the plant and went to the high school.