She had brought Phan's car to the airport because it was the biggest. It was also a BMW, which made it the nicest. "Mouse," Mrs. Fetters said, looking at the license plate. "Is that a nickname?"
Every question, no matter how unimportant, exhausted Sabine. It felt like a turn onto a potentially never-ending off-ramp. "No, it's a pet. It's the name of a friend's pet."
"A pet mouse?"
"Yes." Sabine slammed the trunk. She needed some basic parameters. She did not have the slightest idea who these people were. She did not know why she had offered to pick them up. When they got in the car she turned to Mrs. Fetters in the front seat. "Just when was the last time you saw Parsifal?" she said.
"Guy?"
Sabine nodded.
"Two days after his birthday, so February tenth." Mrs. Fetters looked straight ahead out of the cement parking garage. "Nineteen sixty-nine."
Sabine did the math in her head. "You haven't seen him since he was seventeen?" For some reason she had thought that maybe Parsifal had sneaked away at some point and gone for a visit, at least one visit.
"Eighteen," Bertie said from the backseat. "It was his eighteenth birthday."
"And I saw him on television," Mrs. Fetters added in a sad voice. They sat quietly with that information, the car idling in reverse. "I'd like to go right to the cemetery. If that's okay with you."
Sabine pulled out. She would take them to the cemetery. She would take them to the hotel. And then she would get these people the hell out of her car.
Los Angeles International Airport was a pilgrimage, a country that was farther away than anyplace you could fly to. They exited and made their way down Sepulveda, past the dried-out patches of grass along the sidewalk and fast-food restaurants that lined the way to the 105 east. With three in the car they could forgo the light and ease out into the diamond lane, where they sped along past a sea of traffic waiting anxiously to get out of the city. Angelenos were loners in their cars. That was the point of living in the city, to have a car and drive alone. They got onto the Harbor Freeway north. They passed the Coliseum ("Look at that," Mrs. Fetters said) and the University of Southern California; went through downtown, where they had to crane their necks backwards to see the housing of the criminal justice system. Sabine stayed left through the bifurcation, moving smoothly towards Pasadena and the series of tunnels where murals marked Latino pride and African-American pride and the pride of a washed-up Anglo movie star turned boxer, his fists wrapped in tape and poised beneath his chin. Sooner or later it all gave way to graffiti: some twisting, ancient alphabet legible only to the tribe. The senseless letters arched and turned, their colors changing with mile markers. They took the Harbor to the Pasadena to the Golden State Freeway, north towards Sacramento, though no one ever went that far. The median swelled with deadly poisonous oleander bushes. Sabine went to the Glendale Freeway and then took the first off-ramp on San Fernando Road, which she took to Glendale Avenue, which left them, when all was said and done, at the towering wrought-iron gates of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, UNDERTAKING, CEMETERY, CREMATORY, MAUSOLEUM, FLOWER SHOP. ONE CALL MAKES ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS, the sign Said.
"Oh," Bertie whispered.
In the fountain, bronze frogs spit water onto the legs of bronze cranes, which spit water straight into the sky. Real ducks and one adult swan paddled serenely, doing their job. Forest Lawn was Mecca for the famous dead, the wealthy dead, the powerful dead. They were buried beneath the tight grass or in their beautiful sarcophagi. George Burns was now filed away beside his beloved wife in a locked mausoleum drawer. All of the headstones were laid down flat, which the cemetery claimed gave a pleasing vista but in fact just made the hills easy to mow. Tourists ate picnics on the lawn. Lovers kissed. The devout went down on their knees at the Wee Kirk o' the Heather. There was politics in where you were buried, under trees or near water. The cheap seats were beaten by the sun or sat too close to the edge of the drive. Phan and Parsifal had decided on the best, a center courtyard behind an eight-foot brick wall with locked bronze doors that made casual viewing impossible. When they told Sabine, they were practically giddy-twin plots! Who would have thought there would still be two left? They reeled through the living room, arms around each other's waists, laughing.
"Forest Lawn?" she had said.
"It's so beautiful," Phan said. He had spent twenty years in this country and still cynicism eluded him.
"It's so crass," Sabine said.
"This is Glendale Forest Lawn," Parsifal said. "That's the original of the five. It's so-o-o much nicer than Hollywood Hills. The shade is stunning."
"Glendale isn't even close." They were moving too far away. "You don't want to go there."
"It's Los Angeles," Parsifal said. "This is our city. If you truly love Los Angeles, you want to be buried in Forest Lawn." He leaned back into the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. "We can afford it, we're doing it."
Sabine decided to drop it. Who was she, after all, to say where another person should be buried?
After dinner Phan found her alone by the swimming pool. He sat down beside her. The night sky was a dark plum color and in the distance it glowed from the streetlights. "I bought three," he said.
"Three what?"
"Three plots." His voice was gentle, always asking a question. It grew softer every day he was sick. Phan's hair, so black and beautifully thick, had turned gray in a month and he wore it cut close to his scalp now. "We should all be together. That is the truth, the three of us are family. I don't want you to be alone."
Sabine kept her eyes down. Through the generosity of the offer she saw that she was alone. Even in death she would be the third party, along for the ride.
It got darker every minute they waited. The birds were almost quiet. Phan patted her hand. "It is a very difficult thing to discuss. I imagine that when we are gone your life will only be beginning. You could marry, have a child still. You have so far to go before you'll know how things will end. So this plot is only insurance. It says that Parsifal and I love you always, that we want you with us; and if you don't come, it will always mean the same thing. It will stay for you."
Sabine nodded, her eyes filling with tears. Thoughts of their deaths, her life alone, an amendment to twin plots, overwhelmed her. Though she and Phan had very few moments when they could be close out of a true fondness for one another, instead of their mutual fondness for Parsifal, she dipped her head down to his shoulder.
"I can't imagine this," Mrs. Fetters said, looking out over the rolling hills of the cemetery, dotted with the occasional winged angel, marble obelisk, Doric columns. "I'm looking at it hard as I can and I can't imagine it. California and Nebraska shouldn't even be in the same country. Do you think there's someplace I could buy flowers?" Her voice had an almost pleading sound to it. "I don't want to go without bringing something."
"Of course," Sabine said.
"I appreciate your being so patient with me." She touched her hand to the window. They passed a statue of the Virgin, her bare feet balanced delicately on top of a globe. "Bertie, do you see how beautiful it is?"
"It's like a park," Bertie said. "What would it be like to die here?"
Sabine pulled up in front of the flower shop, information center, and sales office which were all housed together in a rambling imitation English Tudor manor. She should have thought about the flowers. When she came out with Parsifal to visit Phan, they always stopped off in Pasadena and bought their flowers from Jacob Maarse. Cemetery flowers tended to rely heavily on gladiolus and carnations. They were also criminally overpriced. But Sabine was out of practice. She hadn't been out here in two weeks, not since the funeral, and she wasn't buying anything on that trip. She reached into her purse and put on her sunglasses. Her palms were beginning to sweat against the wheel.