"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 killed 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.