The Magician's Assistant (38 page)

There was nothing to watch on that first night, drawing up plans, cutting and layering walls to dry overnight, but they sat with her at the table and watched her like a television. Finally, when it was late enough, Kitty checked the boys’ homework and then herded them towards Parsifal’s room, though they were years beyond anyone being able to put them to bed. Then she brought blankets and a pillow from the hall closet and started to make up the couch.

“You don’t have to do that,” Sabine said. “You’re welcome to sleep in Bertie’s room.”

“Well, she can’t sleep with me,” Dot said, stretching her arms over her head. “I’m willing to take this welcome-you-back-to-the-nest thing just so far.”

“I’ve put many a night in on this couch. I’m going to be fine here.”

Sabine got up to wash the glue off the razor blade and off her hands. “Well, if you change your mind, you know where I’ll be.” There was not a great deal of sincerity in the offer. She was hurt by what Kitty had said and felt that if Kitty wanted to sleep on the couch she could sleep on the couch. Sabine dried her hands on a dish towel that was covered with fat blue ducks. “I’m going to bed.”

“Right behind you,” Dot said. She didn’t offer Sabine a drink. The drink was their all-clear sign that everyone else had finally gone.

Kitty, who looked like the victim of some natural disaster standing there alone with her arms full of blankets, told the two of them good-night.

Bertie’s room had been Kitty’s room. Dot and Al had been in the room beside hers, Parsifal across the hall. That was the map of the family before the great shift in sleeping arrangements came: Al down to the cemetery, Parsifal off to his bunk at Lowell, and Kitty crossing the hall to make a place for her soon-to-be-born baby sister. Or maybe she just wanted to be in her brother’s bed. Maybe she thought she would stay there when Parsifal came home and they would sleep in their matching twins, side by side.

Sabine had had that thought herself, sleeping in one of the two narrow beds: that somehow she and Parsifal were there in that room together, united now against any danger that had previously been for him alone. Comparatively, Bertie’s double bed felt like a giant expanse of mattress, and she tossed and rolled, trying to find a place for herself that was safe in so much open space. How had she slept in Phan and Parsifal’s king-sized bed? A single bed was all that anyone needed if they were alone. She took the extra pillow and pressed it against her back, trying to make herself feel hemmed in. She wondered what was going on across the hall, if the boys were talking, fighting, sleeping, pretending to sleep. She wondered if they realized where they were.

She pushed her hands into her pillow and closed her eyes. She thought about what it would be like to be home again, to have the rabbit snuggled hard against her back. She thought of her parents standing together in the airport, how they would arrive at least an hour early to make sure that they didn’t get caught in traffic.

“Sabine?” There was a crack of light coming in from the hall and the dark outline of someone at her door. For a split second she thought Bertie had come back. She imagined herself curled up in the hallway with her pillow and blanket. “Are you asleep?”

“No.”

Kitty came in dressed in a dark T-shirt and a pair of shorts, or maybe they were short pajamas, it was hard to tell in the dark. She sat down on the edge of the bed, facing away from Sabine, her hands holding tightly to her kneecaps.

“Did you decide not to sleep on the couch?” Sabine whispered, not wanting to wake up whoever else might be asleep. The walls in this house afforded all the privacy of Japanese scrims.

“It was a terrible thing that I said.” Kitty’s voice trembled. “I’m lying out there in the living room and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“You’ve had a hard day,” Sabine said, and with a sudden, benevolent clarity, she knew that she was right. Kitty was simply in fighting mode. She had been fighting with Howard all week. She had packed up her boys and slipped out this very morning. “You’re tired. Just forget about it.”

“It surprised me so much when you said you were leaving. I mean, I knew that sooner or later you’d go, but when you said it—I don’t know.”

“Forget it.”

“I know you’d never forget about Guy.”

“No.”

That was all there was to say about it, but Kitty stayed, hands to knees, looking at the wall in the dark in the room that had been her room three lifetimes ago. Sabine waited to see if there were something else. You never knew with these people, there was always some revelation lurking around the corner of every meaningful silence. “Are you okay?” Sabine asked.

“Okay,” Kitty said in a way that meant, Just okay.

“Are you thinking about Howard?”

“Nope.”

Sabine stifled a small yawn by pushing her mouth against her pillow. “Do you want to sleep here? You really don’t have to stay on the couch.”

“I should go back,” Kitty said, staying perfectly still.

“Well, all right.” Sabine would have been happy to have her stay. The bed felt so cavernous.

“I should go back,” Kitty said again, and then stood up and turned around to face the mattress. “Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

When she said it Kitty put a hand flat on the bed, leaned forward and kissed her. It was not a kiss on the cheek, or a kiss that was meant to be a kiss on the cheek but lost its way in the dark and landed gently on the lips as an accident. Kitty kissed her lightly, stopped for one second, and then kissed her again. Two soft mouths made softer by the close proximity of sleep, that dozing, nearly dreaming warmth that made people affectionate and unembarrassed. Sabine, who had not been kissed in this way for a long time, remembered the feeling and kissed back, some instinctual code patterned deeply in the cells. She kissed before thinking or understanding, and before she could think or understand, it was over. The beautiful face receded in the dark. Kitty smoothed down Sabine’s hair as if she were a feverish child needing comfort and then she left without repeating her good-nights, leaving Sabine to rattle in the four corners of her bed alone with something she had not started. The door clicked shut. There was no proof that anything had happened at all. Sabine’s body was terribly awake, every inch of it ready as it had not been two minutes before, all of it confused with wanting. Kitty had kissed her. Sabine rolled from her back to her stomach and then onto her left side. What should she have said? Kitty was out there now, alone on the sofa where the cold air came in from the windows despite Dot’s vigorous caulking. Maybe Sabine should go to her now, sit beside her, possibly take her hand, tell her something she had not yet thought of. Sabine touched her fingers to her lips. There was no evidence. She rolled back onto her stomach and waited, her eyes straining against the dark, for something else to happen.

No one slept well in their new beds.

In the morning only Dot seemed fresh, mixing up pancake batter from Bisquick. She was humming quietly to herself when Sabine came in, a snappy tune that Sabine did not recognize. Dot had wanted her house to herself but was so accustomed to disappointment that she took it all in graceful stride. Guy was in the shower, a steamy marathon meant to deny his brother even a tablespoon of hot water. How pounded on the bathroom door. “I said
now
!” he shouted.

Dot rubbed her hands in one quick, downward wipe on the dish towel tucked into the front of her pants and hustled down the hall towards the noise. “That thing will come right off the hinges,” she said to How. “This house isn’t built for high-impact fights. That, and your mother is still asleep, so keep it down.”

“Sorry, Gram,” How said, and twisted his bare toes into the carpet.

Dot tapped politely on the door. “Come on out now, Guy, or I’ll come in and get you. I have the key, you know. I’ve seen you naked before.”

The water shut off. A breath of steam rose from beneath the door.

Sabine sat down at the table wearing Phan’s pajamas and Parsifal’s bathrobe. She was a little bit taller than Phan and her ankles showed bare under the cuffs of the short pants. Dot came down the hall just as Kitty turned in from the living room.

“You’re not asleep,” Dot said.

“I wish I was.” Kitty poured herself a cup of coffee and turned to Sabine. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” Sabine said. She was looking for some recognition and hoping in a way that was weak and halfhearted that there would be none. In memory, the kiss had become less certain. It could have been friendly, familial, a good-night wish for pleasant dreams. Kitty was, after all, her sister-in-law, a married woman, however unhappily married. And Kitty was a woman. That made the kiss a trick coin, heads on both sides. Kitty and Sabine were both women, and despite their mutual lack of luck with men, they were not women naturally inclined towards women. Not that one kiss mattered. One kiss between two half-asleep women in their forties. It was best forgotten.

Kitty handed the cup to Sabine with no brush of the hand, no secret message to decode.

“I’m on today,” Kitty said to Sabine, to her mother, to anyone who might be listening. “I’ve got to get moving if my children will ever vacate the shower.”

“Don’t hold your breath.” Dot flipped a pancake, a true flip, where the cake lost contact with the spatula and did one solo rotation in the air.

The coffee was black and Sabine got up to get some milk out of the refrigerator. Even though she had not been looking for an egg, there they were. This was the bathrobe Parsifal wore on omelette Sundays. The pockets were deep and lined in fleecy flannel. The robe itself had so much fabric that one could easily hide a half dozen in the folds.

“Sleep okay?” Sabine asked, taking back her place at the table.

“Too much to think about,” Kitty said, her tone again implying exactly nothing. “The first night out of the house always makes me crazy.” As in, cannot be held accountable for actions?

“So tonight will be easier. Boys!” Dot called down the hall. “Are you planning on eating this morning or are you just going to bathe?”

“I’m going to have to drive them in.” Kitty looked at her watch with tired resignation. “The school bus isn’t coming here.”

Soon enough the smell of pancakes pulled the boys towards the kitchen, the sweet perfume of maple syrup calling them by name. Guy was exhausted from water that was too hot, and How was agitated from water that was too cold. Their wet hair curled darkly and dripped down their necks and into the collars of their ironed shirts. Even now their eyes were longing for sleep, and if their mother had said the deal was off, there was no need for school today after all, they would have wandered back down the hall in their somnambulist fog and curled into their beds like bears in winter. Dot put down plates of pancakes all around.

Kitty pushed away from the table. “I’m not going to have time.”

“Always time for breakfast,” Dot said briskly, a recording from a thousand mornings spent giving instruction on eating habits.

“Have something,” Sabine said.

“You’ve been spending too much time with my mother.”

“Something small, then.” Sabine leaned forward and let her fingers slip into Kitty’s soft hair, which had not yet been tied back for the day. The rest of them looked up. All eyes were on her, on her hand touching Kitty’s hair, and yet not one of them saw the egg until the moment it was pushed, whole and dully white, from her ear. Kitty shivered and touched the side of her head.

They stared at the egg in wonder, as if it were the one thing that might save them all. “That is so cool,” Guy said appreciatively.

Sabine handed Kitty the egg, and Kitty took both the egg and the hand together, squeezed them without enough force to do damage.

“Oh, I love it when you do that,” Dot said, and smiled.

“Just like you promised,” Kitty said to Sabine. “When I wasn’t expecting it.” She put the egg in the pocket of her sweater. “I’m going to take a shower with whatever water is available to me.”

“Wear your mittens,” How said to his mother as she headed down the hall. He waited until she was safely out of earshot before he leaned in towards Sabine. “Can you teach us that one, at least?”

“Palming an egg is no place to start. There can be a lot of mess.”

“So a neater trick. Something,” How pleaded. “If we’re all going to be staying here together, you have to teach us something. It doesn’t have to be how to turn someone upside-down on a chair.”

Sabine thought over the options. “All right,” she said, and put her napkin on the table.

“You don’t have to do it while you’re trying to eat your breakfast,” Dot said. She was now left with two untouched plates of pancakes.

“One minute, that’s all.” Sabine went down the hall to Parsifal’s room, her room, the boys’ room. She could scarcely recognize it for the clothes that covered the floor. She only caught the smallest glimpses of her plaid rug. She knelt on the floor and fished the Mr. Mysto set out from under the bed. The magician still gazed at the children with evil intent.

“That old thing?” Guy said, wracked with disappointment. “You think we haven’t been through that a hundred times?”

“I’m sure you have,” Sabine said, careful not to tear the masking tape off the lid. “But you’ve never been through it with me. All I need are these.” She took out the cups and balls and set them out on the table.

Dot sighed and took away the two extra plates. “If this wasn’t educational I’d never let it happen while we were eating,” she said.

Sabine hid the balls on the tops of the cups and they watched her do it and did not see her. It was something that Parsifal figured out when he was halfway through his career as a magician: People don’t pay attention. They don’t know how. They can smell guilt or fear from the other side of the Dodgers’ stadium, but if you simply go about your business with authority no one can tell. “Three cups,” Sabine said, unstacking the cups with the balls hidden inside them. “One ball.” She placed it under the middle cup. “All you have to do is keep your eyes on the cup.” She slid them easily—left to right, circle back, part the two, slip the third in the center. “All I have to do is make sure you’re wrong.” She took away her hands.