After the funeral Sabine moved downstairs into Phan and Parsifal's room. She slept in their bed. She pushed her head beneath their feather pillows. She slept like Parsifal used to sleep, endlessly. She stayed in bed when she wasn't asleep. She used their shampoo and dark green soap. The room smelled like men. Their towels were as big as tablecloths. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, shoe polish, every item took on the significance of memory. Suddenly Sabine could see just how full the house was, how much they had owned. She was now responsible for Parsifal's two rug stores, for every sweater in the closet, for Phan's toy mouse, the only thing he had left from his childhood in Vietnam, who watched her from the dresser with painted-on eyes. She had the IRAs, CDs, money markets, insurance premiums, quarterly tax reports, warranties. She had the love letters that were not written to her, the paperback mysteries, the address books. She was the last stop for all of the accumulations and memorabilia, all the achievements and sentimentality of two lives, and one of those lives should not have come to her in the first place. What would she do with Phan's postcard collection? With his boxes of patterns for bridal gowns? With the five filing cabinets that were stuffed full of notes about computer projects and software programs, all written in Vietnamese? Closing her eyes, she imagined her parents' deaths. She imagined her loneliness taking the shape of boxes and boxes of other people's possessions, a terminal moraine that would keep all she had lost in front of her. She was nailed to this spot, to the exact hour of Parsifal's death. And then what about when she died? Who was going to look at the picture of Phan's family and wonder about them then? Who would possibly wonder about Sabine?
The phone rang constantly. It was mostly Sabine's parents, checking on her. It was friends, people who had read the obituary. It was the polite managers from the rug stores who had a few questions. It was strangers asking to speak to Parsifal. For a while it was the hospital and the funeral home; the director at Forest Lawn, where Sabine had Parsifal's ashes buried next to Phan's. When the phone rang at ten o'clock on the fourth morning of his death and found Sabine still in bed but not asleep, it was the lawyer. He asked her to come in for lunch.
"I know there's a lot to do," Sabine said, pulling the comforter up over her shoulders, "but not today, Roger. Really, I promise I'll come in."
"Today," he said.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"There are some things I need to tell you, and I need to tell you in person, and I need to tell you now. If you can't come to lunch, I'll come to the house."
Sabine put her hand over the receiver and yawned. Roger had been a friend of Parsifal's, but Sabine thought he was pushy. "You can't come to the house. I'm not cleaning it."
"That means you'll come to lunch."
Sabine closed her eyes and agreed, only to get him off the phone. She did not have an especially curious nature. She did not care what the lawyer had to say. The worst thing he could tell her was that it was all a joke and Parsifal had left her nothing; and that, frankly, sounded like the best news possible.
If it had been Parsifal, she would have told him he needed to get out. After Phan died she'd had to beg him to even open the front door and pick up the newspaper. She would sit on the edge of his bed, this bed, holding his bathrobe in her lap. She would tell him how much better he would feel if he just got up and took a shower and got dressed, tell him that Phan would never have wanted things to be this way. The difference being, of course, that there was no one sitting on the edge of the bed now. Even Rabbit had gone off somewhere. Sabine got up and found the bathrobe but then dropped it on the floor, took up her old spot in the nest of the comforter, and went back to sleep.
Phan is in the swimming pool.
"You don't swim," Sabine says, but clearly, he does.
He is swimming with his eyes open, his mouth open. He shines like a seal in the light. He rolls into a backstroke and comes straight towards her. "I learned," he calls. "I love it."
Parsifal's gray suit jacket is draped neatly over the back of a white wrought-iron chair. Outside it is warm but pleasant. When Phan reaches the edge of the pool, Sabine holds out her hands to him and he lifts himself up and into her arms, the cool water from his body soaking her blouse as he holds her. The gold has come back to his skin and he smells of some faint flower, jasmine or lily, that makes her want never to let him go. Phan is clearly much happier since his death. Even in his best days with Parsifal, she has never seen him so relaxed. In life he was shy and too eager to please, in a way that reminded her of a dog that had been beaten. In the fullness of life Sabine had been jealous of Phan, jealous that Parsifal had found someone else to love so much. Jealous because she had wanted that for herself and so understood. What was Sabine, then, but an extra woman, one who was inevitably dressed in a satin body stocking embroidered with spangles? A woman holding a rabbit and a hat. But Phan was always gentle with her. There was nothing about exclusion that he didn't understand.
Sabine smiles and sits down with Phan beside the pool, letting her legs dangle in the water. The dolphins' necks are strung with flowers. The water is the blue of the little mountain bluebird she once saw outside of Tahoe. "What do you do now?"
He takes one of her hands between his. The eczema that plagued his palms for years is gone. "Most of the time I'm with you. I stay with you." He stops for a minute. Phan was never one to talk about himself. "Now and then I go back to Vietnam."
"Really?" Sabine is surprised. Phan would hardly speak of Vietnam.
"It's a very beautiful country," he says. "There are so many things I remember from when I was a boy, things I haven't thought of for thirty years-grasses in the fields and the rice, when it first comes up in the spring. It's difficult for me to explain. It's a comfort, like listening to so many people speak Vietnamese. Sometimes I stand in the market and cry. You'll know what I mean someday when you go home."
"I am home."
"Israel," Phan says.
"It isn't the same," she says. "I was so young when we left there, I don't even remember it."
Phan shakes his head. "This isn't our country," he says.
Los Angeles is Sabine's country, the only one she loves. "Where do you think Parsifal goes?" she asks.
Phan looks at her with enormous tenderness. The wind blows her hair, which is nearly as black and straight as Phan's. Somewhere beyond the pool a mockingbird is singing. "Most of the time he's with me," Phan says. "We stay with you together. We go to Vietnam."