Sabine tried some of her drink, but now it tasted spoiled in the glass. "Well," she said.
"I'm not looking for your forgiveness," Mrs. Fetters said. "I haven't even come close to forgiving myself. I'm just telling you what I know. He should have told you. You're a nice girl. You deserve to know what's going on."
"I appreciate that," Sabine said. Parsifal in prison. Parsifal in hell.
Then, for the last time that night, Mrs. Fetters surprised Sabine. She reached across the table and picked up Sabine's good hand and held it tight inside her own. "I'll tell you straight, Sabine, I'll tell you what I want from you. Give me and Bertie one more day. Take us around to the places he went to. Show us what he liked. I want to see how it was for him, give myself something good to think about for a change. Even if it's not good, it will be good, because it will be the truth. I'll be thinking about him, how he really was, not just some idea I had. I want that to take back to Nebraska with me." She smiled at Sabine like a mother. "It's a long winter out there, you know, lots of time to think."
Sabine looked down at the table where her hand was swallowed up. Suddenly she was tired enough to cry, tired enough to sleep. She knew it would come sooner or later. "I need-," she said, but could not finish.
"You need to think about it," Mrs. Fetters said. She squeezed the hand and let it go. "Of course you do. You know where you can find me."
Sabine nodded. "I can tell you in the morning. It would be wrong for me not to give this some thought."
"Sure, honey," Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine pushed back from the table and stood up. "Good night," she said. She waited but it looked like Mrs. Fetters planned to stay for a while, contemplating last call.
"I'm glad you came over," Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine nodded and got to the door before she stopped. There was no one left in the bar. Just the bartender. The music was off. It was like speaking across a dining room. She did not raise her voice. "Thank you for going with me," she said, and held up her hand.
"That?" Mrs. Fetters said. "That's nothing."
In the car Sabine turned the music up loud. Parsifal kept the glove compartment stuffed with cassettes, mostly operas, scratchy recordings from the twenties. He liked Caruso. He liked Wagner, the story of Parsifal he had named himself for years before he had listened to the opera all the way through. The name sounded so much more like a magician than the more traditional Percival. The brave underdog knight. The one who finds the grail. The only one, in the end, who is left standing. She did not think of Lowell, Nebraska, then, sailing over the empty freeways home. She did not think of it driving on Sunset Boulevard, which was always awake, the billboard advertisements for new films bright as movie screens, the twenty-foot feces of famous people staring vacantly in her direction. She did not think of it as she drove into the hills of bird-named streets, or locked her car inside her own garage, or walked down the dark hallways of her own house. She did not think of it at all until she was in bed and it was quiet. Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility. Facility. Boys who habitually stole from grocery stores. Boys who loved fire and burned up dry grass fields in summers, hay barns in the winter. Boys who would not stop fighting, broke the noses and jaws of smaller boys. Mean, stupid boys who could not be taught the difference between right and wrong, never having seen it themselves. Boys who took girl cousins down to the creekbed at family reunion picnics and raped them. Boys who held those same girl cousins under the water later on to keep them from talking. Boys who knew what to do with a lead pipe, knew how to make a knife from a comb. The authorities locked them together in Lowell, Nebraska, let them discipline each other. And then they disciplined them. Parsifal, in his white tuxedo shirt of Egyptian sea-combed cotton. Parsifal, who walked out of the theater when the space alien split through the lining of the astronaut's stomach. He gave money to Greenpeace. Where, exactly, was Greenpeace when the seven boys in the shower went to put their shoes on before kicking you in the stomach, in the back? But he never let on, not for a minute. He picked up checks, wasted time, slept late. In Los Angeles he was never afraid. So maybe that was why he didn't tell her. Maybe it was better to keep it that far away, to never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget.
But Sabine would never know for sure. This was one more legacy. Something else to keep watch over.
The field is so flat that she cannot judge its size. It goes on forever and in every direction it is flat. There is no point on which to fix her eyes, just green, a green so tender and delicate it makes her want to bite into it. Sabine is standing in warm water, the new green shoots surrounding her ankles, her feet sinking into a soft mud she cannot see. There has never been so much flatness, so much green.
"Sabine!" Phan says, and waves. In his hands he is carrying a bouquet of Mona Lisa lilies. Their slender leaves reflect the brilliant sun. He walks towards her like a man who knows how to walk through rice. He moves without losing his balance or damaging the plants. His pants are neatly rolled to his knees. They are dry and clean.
Sabine loves him. She cannot remember ever being so happy to see anyone in her life. "I am not alone," she says. She doesn't mean to say it aloud, but it makes Phan smile hugely. The air is humid and sweet. Like the water, it seems to be alive.
"I behaved so badly," he says. He leans over and floats the heavy bouquet beside them in the water and then takes her hands, but she pulls her hands away so that she can hold him in her arms, put her arms around his neck. She can almost smell the sun on his skin as she presses her lips to his ear.
"I'm so sorry," she says. "To think that I could have blamed you for anything. I know you were doing what you thought was best."
"I should have explained-"
"Sh," she says. "Don't think of it." It is such a strong feeling, the joy of being with Phan, who understands, the joy of not being alone, that for a minute she thinks she is in love with him. In love with the dead gay lover of the dead gay man she was in love with. She laughs.
"What?" Phan asks.
"Just happy." Sabine steps back to see him. He looks even better now. He is perfect in this field, breaking the line between the green shoots and blue skies. "Where are we?"
"Vietnam," Phan says proudly. "I was going to come back but I thought, Sabine should really see this."
"Vietnam," Sabine says. Who would have thought it could be such a beautiful place? All the times that Sabine had heard about Vietnam, thought about it, no one had mentioned it as beautiful. "I can't believe it."
"My father came here from France in 1946. Did I ever tell you that?" Phan takes her arm and walks her down the long wet path through the limitless fields. "He was a contractor. He was supposed to come here for two years and build roads but he stayed and stayed. He married my mother, they had a family. In his soul, my father is Vietnamese. He loves it here."
"Your father still lives here?" Sabine says, her toes tracing through the soft muck.
Phan laughs. "Good Lord, Father has been dead forever."
Sabine nods. Clearly condolences are not in order. "When did you leave?"
"My parents sent me to study in Paris in 1965. It was a difficult year. 65. I never came back until now." He stops and looks out at the landscape. "I had a little white dog," he says. "The dog had a red leather collar." When he turns to her there are tears in his eyes and he touches her hair with the very tips of his fingers. "Isn't it funny, the things we miss the most, the things that really can break our hearts?"