The Magician’s Assistant

  “Day after tomorrow. Bertie has to get back to work. I work in the cafeteria where Kitty’s boys go to school, but they’re real flexible. Kitty thinks I ought to retire now that we’ve got this money, but I like seeing the boys. They’re good kids, and they’re already so big, I mean, practically grown-up. I want to be around them while I can. Her older son is Howard Junior, for his dad, but her younger boy’s named Guy. Kitty named him for her brother. Now, there’s something I bet you didn’t know.” Something caught her eye in the dim light. She was looking in Sabine’s lap. “What did you do to your hand?”

  Sabine looked down at it herself. She had been trying not to think about it, but it was throbbing as if she were holding a small heart in her fist. Perhaps she’d wrapped it too tight. “I cut myself,” she said.

  Mrs. Fetters reached down into Sabine’s lap and brought her hand up to the bar. “Either you don’t know anything about bandaging something up or this isn’t just a cut.” Then she took the hand as if it were something not connected to Sabine, a wallet or a comb, and held it closer to the light over the bar. “Jesus,” she said. “This thing is soaking through.” She reached into her purse and tossed some money on the bar. “Come on in the bathroom and let me have a look at it.”

  “It’s fine,” Sabine said.

  But Mrs. Fetters wasn’t listening, she was off the bar stool, pulling Sabine along like a woman with vast experience in flesh wounds. In the bright light of the bathroom, things didn’t look very good. She had the Ace bandage halfway off before they were down to a solid red wetness whose color matched the flowers in the wallpaper. Sabine felt suddenly dizzy, and she didn’t know if it was from the loss of blood or the sight of it.

  “Do you want me to take all of this off and tell you you have to go to the hospital or do you want to save the time and just go now?”

  “I’d really rather not,” Sabine said, but in her own voice she heard doubt. She was moved by the sight of so much blood. Part of the cut, she knew, was in her wrist, that delicate network of things not meant to be severed. “I hate that hospital.”

  “Well, it’s a big town, there has to be more than one.” Mrs. Fetters looped the bandage back around carelessly. “Come on,” she said, leading again. “I guess it’s a good thing I called you. You probably would have bled to death in your own bed.”

  Sabine stopped her at the door. “If I have to go, that doesn’t mean you have to go. I’ll be fine.”

  Mrs. Fetters looked at her, puzzled. “You don’t think I’d have you going to the hospital in the middle of the night by yourself, do you? What do you think your mother would say if she ever found out?”

  My mother, Sabine thought, would be too busy asking you questions about how you raised your own children.

  Good Samaritan was less than a mile from the hotel. There was no need to drive all the way to Cedars Sinai. Could a person really bleed to death from sticking themselves with an X-acto knife? Probably not, but she liked the thought of it, committing suicide while she slept with no intention of doing so.

  The lights of the emergency room blazed. The electric doors flung themselves open at the slightest touch. They wanted you here. They pulled you in.

  Children lay flushed and dozing in their parents’ laps, a woman with her arm slung in a piece of floral sheeting stared straight ahead, a man with no shirt and a large piece of cotton padding on his chest lay on a gurney in the hall, a woman with blood-matted hair and bruises only on one side of her face sat away from the rest with a police officer. People cried, sweated, and slept. Some people sat next to suitcases and watched through the window as if they were waiting for a bus. Two old men who looked like they should be at Canter’s talked and laughed aloud at each other’s stories. Sabine went to the front. She filled out her forms, had her insurance card copied, and was not reassured that her turn would be soon. She went and sat beside Mrs. Fetters in the waiting area.

  “Do you think there’s something particularly bad going on tonight?” Mrs. Fetters asked in low voice.

  Sabine shook her head. “I’d guess this was pretty calm.”

  “I don’t think I’d ever get used to living in a city.”

  “This isn’t a very glamorous way to spend your first night in Los Angeles.”

  Mrs. Fetters laughed. “Well, what was I going to do? I’ll tell you one thing, spending the night in a bar never did anybody any good. I’m better off here.” She looked at Sabine’s hand and lightly touched the tips of her fingers. “Those nails of yours are getting kind of blue. I think we should loosen this thing up a little bit. They won’t let you bleed to death right here.” She took her hand and carefully wound back the Ace bandage, then put it on again, letting the weight of the soggy cloth hold it in place.

  “Thank you,” Sabine said. Dot Fetters got a tissue out of her purse to wipe the blood off her fingers. Several drops of blood fell on the white floor. No carpet around here. “This is where they brought Bobby Kennedy, the night he was shot.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Fetters said, looking around the room with new respect. “What a tragedy that was. What a sweet boy.”

  They sat quietly, both of them trying not to look at anyone in particular. “Do you remember that scar Guy had—it was right here?” Mrs. Fetters put her finger beside Sabine’s left eye and traced a line down the side of her face, back along her hairline, in front of her ear, and down to the very top of her jaw, following the exact course of a scar Sabine had looked at for twenty-two years. The touch was so light that it chilled her.

  Sabine nodded.

  “Where did he get that scar?”

  “Playing hockey at Dartmouth. Someone got him with the stick.”

  “I got him,” his mother said, crossing her arms around her chest. “Seven years old. I was working in the yard and Kitty and Guy were playing. I was trying to cut back a bush but my shears were too small and I told Guy to go to the garage and get the big shears. But Guy was all busy with Kitty, they were making something and I had to holler at him again, told him he better run ’cause I wasn’t going to ask him a third time. Well, then he drops everything. He went off in a flash and not two seconds later he’s coming back and he’s got the clippers and they’re open, like this”—she put her palms together and turned back her hands. “Well, I saw those things coming, they caught the sun. It’s like he’s running with a couple of butcher knives, and I say to him, ‘Don’t run,’ though not a minute before I’d told him to run, and he gets confused, looks at me, and down he goes over the hose line, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. The nurse looked up, puzzled, and then looked away. “Damned if he didn’t slice his beautiful face halfway off, right in front of me. I’ll tell you, if you have kids you spend your whole life thinking how you’ll never forgive yourself. You always think you should have been watching them better, but half the things happen when you’re looking right at them.”

  Sabine saw him, his back narrow in a blue T-shirt, his hair cropped short. The blood on the blades of the shears, on the grass. “What happened?”

  “Everything happened,” Dot said, holding herself tightly, “at exactly the same minute. I’m crying, he’s crying, Kitty is absolutely beside herself. I turn him over and I have to push the skin back over the bone with my fingers.” She held up her hand to show Sabine the fingers she had used. “I was covered in dirt, of course. You’ve never seen the likes of it. I tell Kitty to get my car keys and just like that we’re off to the hospital, not that you’d even call it a hospital after being in a place like this. Everybody comes out to see what’s going on. I’ve got Guy in my arms, Kitty’s holding on to his feet, she’s got blood on her, I’m all bloody. The three of us look like we just walked away from some sort of wild burning car crash. I tell them what’s happened, so the doctor says he’s going to take him in the back and sew up his head and that I am to wait in the other room until it’s over. At this piece of news Guy grabs onto my shirt, right at the neck, for everything he’s got and he starts to really scream
. So I say, ’cause I’m feeling so bad about telling him to run, ‘No, I’m going in there.’ ‘No, no, Dot,’ they say. ‘You won’t like this. You trust us, you stay out here.’” Dot Fetters took a breath and looked at the double doors going back to wherever it was they sewed up children’s heads.

  “I see how scared he is, and I know I’m going back with him. I’ve already made my point and there’s no getting out of it. Besides, nothing bleeds like a cut on the head, so we’re all pretty much standing in a pool now. Well, a nurse comes and she tells Kitty that they’re going to go get cleaned up, get a little present maybe. ’Course, Kitty is not one to be left out, and the next thing I know this woman is hauling my girl bodily away, and Kitty is howling like a dog. She’s got Guy’s shoe in her hand where they tugged her loose. Now it’s me and Guy and the doctor. We go back in a little stitch-up room and another nurse and I put him out on the table and tell him to hold real still, that they’re going to sew him right back together. ‘Just like mending a shirt,’ I say, ‘absolutely good as new.’ But when he sees that needle coming he starts to thrash. They damn near put that needle in his eye. I’m holding him down on one side and the nurse has got him on the other and for a kid who must have about a half cup of blood left in him he’s fighting like a grown man. He’s screaming, and I can still hear Kitty screaming down the hall. Well, nobody’s got the time for this, and nothing I say is making any sort of impression on him, so they bring out a sack—it was like a little laundry bag—and they stuff him inside and they cinch it up at the neck. There’s my baby in a bag, just his little head sticking out, and I really thought I was going to fall over. Then they strapped the bag to the table, strapped it down tight, so he’s held just so, and the nurse takes his head and the doctor gives the shot and starts to stitch. I never saw anything like it. Once Guy knew he was whipped he settled down, but his eyes were wide open and he stared at me while I stood there and cried like an idiot. That doctor took pretty little stitches, better work than I ever did.”

  Sabine thought about the straitjackets, water boxes, chain acts, MRIs. Do not be tied down, locked up, no matter what. “He had claustrophobia,” she said. “I know that. He hated to be confined. He told me it was because he got locked in a refrigerator once.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Fetters said, looking tired. “That, too.”

  Sabine was about to ask, but they called her name. “Sabine Parsifal,” the nurse said. Mrs. Fetters stood up with her.

  “I’ll be right back,” Sabine said.

  “Oh, I’ve come this far, I might as well go along.”

  “You can’t come back there with me,” Sabine said.

  “May I come back?” Mrs. Fetters asked the nurse. “I’m her mother-in-law. It’s just stitches.”

  “Sure,” the woman said. It was the emergency room. Everyone there could come back for all she cared.

  When they were seated in the little white cubicle, Sabine looked at her, Dot Fetters with her tight gray curls and plastic-frame glasses. Everyone’s mother. Sabine didn’t even know her. “There’s no reason for you to do this,” she said. “I’m going to be fine.”

  A young Chinese woman came in wearing a white lab coat, her straight black hair caught in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back. “So, Mrs. Parsifal, you cut yourself,” she said, taking off the layers of wrapping. She did not look judgmental, she just ran water in a basin. “When did you do this?”

  Sabine told her it had been an hour ago, maybe two.

  The doctor touched the cut gently and a sharp wire of pain came up Sabine’s arm. She liked the way it felt, the simple clarity of pain. Cut your hand and get it stitched up, wait and the hand will mend, the stitches come out. The idea that she would have the opportunity to get over something thrilled her. The doctor rested Sabine’s hand in the warm water of the basin and cleaned the wound. Sabine watched the doctor’s two hands working over the pale fish of her one. The water turned pink. Her hand was removed, patted dry.

  “I’m going to give you a shot,” the doctor said, filling up a needle for proof, “and when everything is good and numb we’ll sew it up, all right?” Everyone was so wide-awake, even Sabine. They did not feel the time.

  Mrs. Fetters stood up then and took hold of Sabine’s other hand, the good hand. “This is the part that hurts,” she said. “Squeeze hard.”

  It was all a business, part of a larger service industry. The doctor was good, though she had only been a doctor for six months. She somehow managed to give the illusion of time, but from her arrival to the positioning of the last bandage, only ten minutes passed. Papers were exchanged, signed, duplicates received. Sabine and Mrs. Fetters touched their feet to the black rubber mat of the exit door at the same moment, and it swung open and set them free.

  “I appreciate your coming along,” Sabine said in the car. It was after one in the morning and yet there were people everywhere. Slender palm trees cut outlines against the night sky.

  “You always want to feel like you’ve come along at the right time, and besides, I wanted to see you again.”

  Sabine nodded but didn’t say anything. Phan’s car was an automatic. Her left hand sat in her lap, face up, useless.

  “I just hated getting stitches. I don’t know how many times I went in or took in one of the kids. Something always had to be sewn up.” Dot thought about it for a minute, maybe ran over the entire catalog of life’s pains in her mind. The burst appendix, the broken wrist, the endless litany of tears in the skin. “That story I told you, about Guy falling on the shears?” She asked as if she thought Sabine might have forgotten it in the last hour.

  Sabine took her eyes off the road for a minute and looked at her, nodded. The traffic was light.

  “It was awful, start to finish, and I was eaten up by guilt, thinking I had done it to him, that he’d have such a scar on his face, but not for one second during the whole thing did I think he was going to die. It never even occurred to me.”

  It was the thing that happened when you ventured outside, people started talking. Everywhere she looked the citizens of Los Angeles were awake, talking. Their heads bent towards one another in the front seats of the cars that flashed by. On the sidewalks they stood close and whispered, or they stood apart and screamed. Those who had no answers had sense enough to stay home in bed. “I don’t know why he’s dead, Mrs. Fetters, if you’re asking me.”

  Sabine pulled into the circular loop in front of the Sheraton reserved for registering guests, which they weren’t. They sat there together in silence.

  “So,” Sabine said, because it was late and the not-asking had, at that exact moment, become as difficult as the asking, “why did you and your son not see each other for twenty-seven years?”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He told me you were dead.”

  Mrs. Fetters sat quietly, as if, of all the possibilities she had been privately mulling over, this was not one of them. “Oh,” she said finally, sadly. “When did he tell you the truth?”

  “He didn’t. The lawyer told me when he went over the papers. He didn’t know, either.”

  “Dear God,” Mrs. Fetters said, her hands pressed hard against her thighs, bracing herself. “You mean all this time—” She stopped for a minute, trying to piece together so much information. “Come inside and have a drink. I need a drink.”

  “It’s too late,” Sabine said.

  “Park the car,” she said. “Or leave it here, either one. What about his sisters? Did he say his sisters were dead? He wouldn’t say Kitty was dead.”

  “Helen,” Sabine said. “There was one sister named Helen. Everyone died together in a car accident in Connecticut.”

  “Connecticut,” Mrs. Fetters repeated to herself; a state she had never seen, had barely imagined. “Well, you must be wondering what I did!” She looked like she was ready to walk to Forest Lawn and dig Parsifal up with her hands. “What can a mother do to make her son say that she’s dead, the whole family dead?” It was as if he had kil
led them.

  “He wanted to separate from his past,” Sabine said. “That’s what I know. Nobody’s saying that it’s because of anything you did.” But of course, Sabine thought, that is exactly what I’m saying.

  The bar stayed open until two A.M. Who would have thought it? It was quieter now, no piano player, one waitress. The bartender waved them back into the fold like lost friends, brought them the same drinks without being asked. It seemed like a miracle, a bartender who remembered.

  “We’ll drink to your husband and my son,” Mrs. Fetters said, and they touched their glasses.

  “Guy,” Mrs. Fetters said.

  “Parsifal.”

  They drank. It was that wonderful, fleeting moment when the scotch was still warm on top of the ice cubes, so very nearly sweet that Sabine had to force herself to pull the glass away from her mouth. There was so much to say it was impossible to know where to start. But the place Mrs. Fetters picked to begin was a surprise.

  “Tell me about that fellow in the cemetery.”

  “Phan?”

  Mrs. Fetters nodded, her hair holding fast. “Him.”

  “He was a friend, a friend of Parsifal’s, a friend of mine.”

  “But more a friend of Guy’s.”

  Sabine ran the thin red straw around the rim of her glass. “Parsifal met him first.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He worked in computers, designed software programs. He was very successful. He developed Knick-Knack.”

  “Knick-Knack?”

  “It’s a game,” Sabine said.

  It meant nothing to her. Ask anyone else in the bar and they would have gone on and on about how they’d thrown half of their life away playing Knick-Knack. Sabine watched while Mrs. Fetters sorted things out in her head. At the table beside them a man was telling a woman a story in a low whisper while the woman bowed her head and wept.

  “Listen,” Sabine heard him say to her. “Listen to me.”