"All right," he says, and rests his cheek against her hair, and if they do not stand there together forever, they stand for a very long time, and Sabine has no memory of it ending.
There was nothing like waking in an unfamiliar darkness. Sabine blinked, her fingers tried to understand the blankets. Is it home, is it my bed? No. The hospital, then, Phan's room? Parsifal's? No. Am I somehow back in my old apartment, my parents' house, did none of this happen? No. Far away she heard the faintest sound, a second of scraping, a chair against the floor, and she used the sound to navigate her way back to Parsifal's room in Nebraska. She thought she smelled a cigarette and then didn't, but it stayed in her mind. The electric clock said 1:30. Sabine closed her eyes and waited but nothing came. She turned and pushed her head under the pillows and then turned again. Sleep felt like it was over for good.
There was nothing to do but get up. Barefoot and dazed, Sabine went down the hall. Dot or Bertie, one of them, was smoking a cigarette in the kitchen. Sabine had gone to sleep too early. She should have known she would wake up. If she had been smart, she would just now be going to bed.
The woman in the kitchen had her back to the door. Her dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled into a ponytail so that her pale neck was exposed. With her head bent forward, Sabine could see the shadows cast from the top vertebra of her spine. She was smoking with too much concentration to know that anyone else was in the room. There were already two cigarettes crushed out in the saucer beside her. A light haze of smoke ringed the overhead light. Even from the back, even without knowing her, Sabine recognized the girl in the picture.
"Kitty?"
The woman looked up at her and smiled from her brother's face, the pale blue dog eyes tilting up ever so slightly, the shadow smudged beneath the lower lip. Sabine felt confused, suddenly remembering that she had been dreaming and thinking that this was part of the dream: She goes to Nebraska to find Parsifal but he is a woman. The woman was wearing a sweatshirt and slim jeans, socks but no shoes. She was Parsifal's mother, the one Sabine had made up, the one who worked crossword puzzles in the car in Connecticut, the woman Sabine made from his rib while he slept.
"Sabine," the woman said. She dropped her cigarette in the saucer and rose from her chair. She came right to Sabine and took her in her arms. Sabine had been held minutes ago and it was like this and not like this. The woman smelled like smoke and salt, and beneath that she smelled like soap and powder. Sabine brought up her arms, lightly touched the woman's back. Kitty held Sabine just a second longer than she should have and when she stepped back she was smiling and just beginning to cry.
"What a good first impression I make," she said. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and laughed. Parsifal always laughed when he cried. He laughed when he was embarrassed about anything.
"I cry all the time these days."
"I'm so sorry about dinner. I thought I'd get over here fine and I didn't get here until the middle of the night."
Did she know how much she looked like Parsifal? Could she see it in the photographs? "I wasn't even hungry."
"I probably woke you up. Did I wake you up?"
"I don't think so," Sabine said. Had she been awake? She had the distinct impression of having been outside and she wondered if she would ever walk in her sleep. The thought made her shiver and she peered out the window. In the light of a street lamp she saw two aluminum poles with no clothesline strung between them.
"It's still going like a son-of-a-bitch out there."
"I'm not entirely awake," Sabine said.
Kitty looked worried. Parsifal's face, so completely his face that Sabine could look at it all night. She had watched that face for twenty-two years. She had seen that face in stage makeup, she had seen it with fevers and asleep. She would know it anywhere. "Go back to bed," Kitty said. "You must be exhausted. I know I woke you."
Sabine yawned, shook her head, sat down at the table. "May I have one of these?" she said, picking up the pack.
"You smoke? I didn't think anybody in California smoked."
"I don't, but I'm not in California."
Sabine tried three times to work the lighter and then Kitty reached over and took it from her. When she pushed the button down, a flame shot out of the blue plastic. "Childproof," she said. The two women sat and smoked, each trying not to stare at the other.
"I appreciate your being so nice to my mother," Kitty said. "Looking after her when she was in Los Angeles and then coming out here to visit. It's really helped her."
"Your mother's great."
Kitty gave a small nod of halfhearted agreement. "She is, but still a lot of people wouldn't have done it. They wouldn't want to be bothered. We're all way back there in the past."
There was a time when Sabine believed in keeping what was private to herself, but now everything that mattered to her felt spilled. It had all gotten away from her somehow. "I haven't been doing so well with all of this," she said. "Your mother and Bertie were good to me, too."
Kitty seemed to understand; maybe she wasn't doing so well herself. "I'm sorry about not coming to Guy's funeral. If there had been any way, I would have been there."
"You didn't know," Sabine said. "I didn't know."
"I still feel bad about it." She covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. "I can't believe I'm sitting here talking to Guy's wife."
Why did there seem to be such a difference between being Guy's wife and being Parsifal's wife? Sabine didn't know Guy. She felt like she was lying, setting herself up for another evening of revelation like the one she'd had with Dot at the Sheraton. She was Parsifal's wife. "Listen," she said. "I just need to be clear about something."
"Guy was gay."
Sabine sighed. "Did your mother tell you?"
"He was always gay," Kitty said, blowing smoke towards the ceiling, her neck stretched back. "I think I may have been the one who told my mother. I can't remember."
"Okay."
"I don't care how you worked out being married. What I care about is that you knew him, you were there with him. You were with him all those years when I wasn't. You were with him when he died." Kitty stopped and considered this. "Were you?" she said. "Right there with him?"
Sabine nodded. She went back to that room again, saw him there in the blank white light of the Cedars Sinai basement, laid out on the tongue of the MRI machine. She pushed the thought away.
Kitty waited for something else. When nothing came she asked, "And it was…?" Kitty looked at her so hard. Sabine's hand holding the cigarette stayed perfectly still, halfway between the table and her lips.
"Very quick. He had a headache, the aneurism burst. That was it."
Kitty's eyes filled up again, and she turned them away. Sabine would have said Kitty looked older than her brother, were it not for the fact that he had aged so much at the end. For years he was younger, for a while they had been the same age, and then, at the end of his life, he was older again.
Kitty dabbed her nose on the cuff of her sweatshirt. "Did my mother tell you I have a son named Guy? My younger boy. My oldest is Howard, for his father, but my other boy is Guy. I wonder if I should change his name now. I think it's harder to get a good spot on the football team if your name is Parsifal."
"Might as well leave it alone, then."
Kitty smiled so slightly, so quickly, that when it was over Sabine wasn't sure she had seen it at all. "Parsifal is a good name for a magician. It's a lot better than anything he had picked out when we were kids. He had a whole school notebook full of names. There were three categories." She held up three fingers to make the point. "There was general alias, that was going to be his everyday name, then there would be a stage name, and then he would pick out a third name that would be his backup, so that if anyone ever found out he changed his name he would give his third name as his real name. The third name was the real genius of the plan. The third name was always deceptively dull. He practiced writing them all the time. He said he wanted his signatures to be convincing."