Dot came back with a towel and an armful of coats. “Okay, chop-chop, we’re getting out of here.”
“One of you needs to stay here with the boys,” Bertie said, taking the folded towel and pressing it gently against the back of her head. She winced. “Shit.”
“They’ll be fine,” Dot said. The heater was set to seventy-two degrees, the cupboards and refrigerator-freezer were full of food. There was television.
“They won’t be fine. They feel bad. We don’t all need to go.”
“I can stay,” Sabine said. She wanted to be of help. She was the one who started everything, picking Howard from the audience. That was why Parsifal was the magician. He knew who to pick, how to control the crowd.
“No,” Bertie said. “Not you.” She twisted her fingers through Sabine’s to hold her there. Sabine squeezed. At least she understood how to comfort.
“My boys, I’ll stay,” Kitty said. “But for God’s sake, get going or we’ll all have to come in and give you a transfusion.”
Sabine held the towel while Dot and Kitty helped Bertie on with her coat. The boys came back in time to tell them Haas was on his way. After that Bertie was in a hurry to go.
“Call me from the hospital,” Kitty said. She followed them onto the porch and stood in the circle cast down from the light over the back door. The snow was so brilliant it seemed fake. “I want to know how many stitches.” She waved, as if they were going on an adventure and she understood that she had to be left behind. Sabine was sorry to leave her. Kitty would feel guilty about this somehow. There was snow in her dark hair and she shivered, standing in the cold night without so much as a sweater.
“Goddamn Howard,” Dot said, her eyes on Kitty as they backed down the driveway. “You can’t go swinging your temper around without somebody getting hurt.”
“At least it wasn’t one of the boys,” Bertie said.
“Well, it shouldn’t have been them, but it shouldn’t have been you, either. I just feel sick about this,” Dot said. “You were the only one of my children who never had stitches. I always thought of that as a real personal success.”
“I had stitches when they took my wisdom teeth out,” Bertie said.
“Those kind of stitches don’t count. I’m talking about emergency stitches, this kind of thing, everybody piled up in the car going to the emergency room, praying you don’t have a wreck on the way over. Bertie was always so much more careful than Kitty and Guy,” Dot said over her shoulder to Sabine, in the backseat. “I always said it was God’s reward to me. He knew I didn’t have the energy for another daredevil. She was always a lady. Never jumped off of tables, never wanted to play pirates using real knives. I always thought that would be such a high-class thing, having a kid that wasn’t sewn up fifteen different ways.”
“Well, I’m almost thirty,” Bertie said, yawning. “This can’t be held against my good childhood record.”
“Your children are always your children,” Dot said with authority.
It was early in the evening and completely dark as they headed towards town. Inside the houses that were so much like Dot’s, the warm yellow lights clicked on, and Sabine could see the shapes of people passing in front of their windows, and she wondered if there were other strangers in town, a whole contingency of hidden people who had not meant to come there at all, people who meant to leave but couldn’t find exactly the moment to go. She wondered if they were from all over the world, from every place she had ever been to with Pársifal, sleeping in their borrowed beds, drying their hands on guest towels. She wondered how it was they’d come to be here. Had their cars broken down? Had they spoken to a stranger in a restaurant and stayed to find out more? Had they come here to visit someone, some relative so distant that the blood ties were all but untraceable, and then somehow just fell into a habit? They had grown used to being there even as they longed to leave. They missed the beautiful places they were from. They missed the indigenous flowers, the good local supermarkets, their families, and still they did not know how to go. It was impossible that what was happening to Sabine could be happening to her alone.
Haas was standing outside the front entrance of Box Butte General Hospital. Even from a distance they were sure it was him.
“He’s going to freeze to death,” Bertie said, leaning forward as they pulled up the front drive.
“I’m sure he’d rather freeze to death than wait inside,” Dot said.
Haas had recognized the car and was there with his hand out, opening the door before they had come to any semblance of a stop. “Are you all right?” He reached down and unfastened Bertie’s seat belt. His face was flushed with cold and worry.
“I’m fine,” Bertie said.
“I told them inside you were coming.” Haas wasn’t wearing any gloves. He was trying to help her out of the car or trying to embrace her, it was difficult to tell. In his worry his hands went everywhere, as if he were checking for other injuries.
“You two go inside,” Dot said. “Sabine and I’ll park.” But even as she was saying it, they were walking away, pressing themselves together into one person against the terrible cold. Dot watched them until they were safe inside the bright waiting room. She shook her head. “I like Haas plenty,” she told Sabine. “He’s a good man. But there’s something about those two, the way they’re so stuck on each other. It makes me nervous. I always want to leave the room when they’re together.”
“It’s like watching something that’s too private,” Sabine said, thinking of the letters that Phan had written to Parsifal, how she had to put them back in the envelopes. Most Beloved.
“Maybe it’s just that nobody ever loved me that way. Al sure didn’t, not even in the beginning, and I didn’t grow up around that sort of thing. I’m from another generation. Maybe I don’t understand it or maybe I’m jealous, though God knows I’m too old to want somebody hanging all over me now.” She smiled at Sabine, picked up a handful of her straight black hair, and then let it fall back into place. “What about you? Were you and Guy ever that way?”
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 go
ing 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.”