"It's you," she whispered.
"Sabine," Sam Spender said, and held out his hand to her.
She shook her head.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Sabine Parsifal, one of the truly great magicians' assistants."
One of the truly great hood ornaments. One of the world's best bottle caps. There was applause.
"Now, when you take someone you don't know from the audience, everyone suspects they're a plant, that person must be in on the trick," Sam Spender's voice chimed and sang. "But when you pull a professional out of the audience, then everybody knows something must be up. Sabine, come on down here."
She held the armrests of her chair. She would bury herself in that seat. They would never find her.
"Sabine," Bertie said, and shook her as if asleep. "Go on up, he wants you."
People never seem to. take into account that they can say no. In Sabine's life she had seen people who truly, desperately did not want to be called onto stage, who begged to be passed over, but when they were pressed, they always went, resigned, as if to their deaths. When the magician asked, no one ever thought to tell him to go to hell.
She was lifted up, Bertie and Dot Fetters lifted her from her seat. She was not walking. She was being passed hand over hand through the air, above the audience, until she was delivered to the stage. Once their hands were free of her they clapped wildly. Sabine smoothed down the sleeves of her blouse. Sam Spender kissed her cheek, said something about having her back and how it was good. The lights were in her eyes.
No one had ever been alone this way before.
"So, are you going to be able to help me out with a couple of things, Sabine?"
She looked at him, begged him in the secret language of assistants and magicians. There was still time to get out of this, even if it didn't seem that way. She knew the location of every trap in the floor. There were lines in the light scaffolding overhead; if she could only reach them, she could pull herself up. It is a fact about human nature: People look down, not up.
"What I'm going to ask you to do is just hold on to this hoop, just a plain silver circle."
He put the hoop in her hand. It was cold, thin, light. It trembled with her hand.
"You got that there? Now I want you to pull on it. Go on and really give it a good pull, feel it all over and tell me if it's solid."
It was solid. It would be solid to anyone but Sabine, who knew the trick, knew the hoop like her name. She moved it around and around through her fingers. Parsifal hadn't done a hoop trick in fifteen years. It was a good warm-up, it looked good from the audience, but it had become too easy for him and so he stopped. When things were too easy, they didn't interest him anymore. Some of the things he did that were the hardest didn't even look so complicated, but those were the ones he stayed with and loved. He was that sort of magician. She was that sort of assistant.
"How does that look to you?"
The hoop fed itself endlessly through her fingers. She could not see Sam Spender, but she could remember him. A decent magician, a dull man. She and Parsifal were years past hoop tricks, lifetimes past. There was no need to check the hoop. It was rigged, there was a hair catch. Nothing you could see, you just had to know it was there. You knew because someone had told you. But there was nothing to do but check it over and over again. No place to go. Sabine stood there, hearing Sam Spender's questions without being able to answer. She couldn't answer. She couldn't walk off the stage. All she could do was check the hoop, and so, over and over again, she did.
"Come on, Sabine." She felt something, a tug and then emptiness. The hoop was out of her hands. "Here you go," Mrs. Fetters said, and gave the magician his hoop. "Come on, let's go home." Mrs. Fetters put her arm around Sabine's waist and led her off the stage, down the three short steps. Sabine was crying in a way that kept her from seeing. She would never stop crying. Bertie ran her hand in circles across the small of Sabine's back. They left the magic parlor, the three of them together.
When people approached them, Mrs. Fetters waved them away. "She's fine," she told Sally. A he so obvious that it said, none of your business, leave us alone. The valet brought the car up without questions and Bertie got into the driver's seat. Mrs. Fetters got into the back with Sabine. She held her there, stroked her hair.
"Which is worse," Mrs. Fetters said, "that man asking you to come up on stage or me telling you to go?"
Bertie drove out of the parking lot and safely to another street before parking in the slim shade of a palm tree. "I'm so sorry," she said. "We never should have asked you to take us there."
"We've been thinking about ourselves," Mrs. Fetters said. "We should be thinking about you. Poor baby, all you've been through."
Sabine was embarrassed in so many different ways she couldn't begin to list them. What had she done up there? What was she doing now? She tried to tell the Fetters it was all right, that she would be fine in just one minute, but she couldn't make the words. Parsifal would never be in the house when she came home. She would never open the door and find him there again. Not even once.
"I've got some Kleenex," Bertie said, and began rifling through her purse.
Sabine thanked her, took a deep breath, and tried to sit up straight. "I'm fine, really. I'm sorry." She wiped a straight line beneath each of her eyes. There were dark, wet stains on the front of her blouse.
"Nothing for you to be sorry about," Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine looked at her hands and laughed.
"So why don't we take you home?" Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine shook her head. "We'll go out to the cemetery." It seemed fine, better even, to go to someplace Parsifal was rather than someplace he was not. Sabine opened up the car door and got out. "Come on," she said to Bertie. "I can drive."
"You don't want to go to the cemetery," Bertie said.
"Sure I do." Sabine could breathe again. She stretched up on her toes. "Nobody minds a crying woman in a cemetery."
Bertie scooted awkwardly over the gearshift and let Sabine have the driver's seat.
"When my husband died, I used to cry like that," Mrs. Fetters said, leaning forward, her safety belt undone. "I cried like that, and I hated the man. I cried just because everything was different. So I can't imagine what it would be like, crying over a husband that you loved as much as you loved Guy."
Sabine was touched by Mrs. Fetters calling Parsifal her husband. "When did Mr. Fetters die?"
Bertie looked down at her hands. She adjusted her engagement ring so that the tiny diamond stood straight up.
"Albert died when I was pregnant with Bertie. That's why I named her Albertine." Mrs. Fetters reached up and patted her daughter on the shoulder. "The only thing this girl got from her father was his name. That's why she's so sweet."
"How did he die?" Sabine wouldn't normally have asked, but obviously no one was going to be breaking down over this particular loss.
"He was in an accident," Mrs. Fetters said. "It was a real shock. One minute he's there, the next minute-" She swiped her open hand through the air and then made a fist. "Gone."
The lilies had opened up. Their white waxy petals made twin bridal bouquets on the grass of the twin graves. Sabine sat with her back against the brick wall that protected them from seeing Lincoln Heights. She watched the flowers and listened to the light music that was pumped in for the wealthy dead while Mrs. Fetters chatted with the marker, retelling the day's events, the rug store, the Magic Castle, what she took to be her fault in all of it. Sabine considered getting up and correcting her, explaining to Parsifal that it, in fact, was not his mother's fault at all. She smiled to know that she wasn't so far gone that she couldn't see what a stupid idea that was.