No one knew more about practice than Parsifal. Work a routine until it was inside you, until you could feel all fifty-two cards in the deck as separate pieces in your hand. Work it until it no longer looked like work. "You can't always trust what you think, what you know," he would tell Sabine. "But you can always trust your nature. You have to make the tricks your nature."
"Ted Petrie," Sabine said. "That was the third name. There was no alias."
Kitty nodded. "That one was on the list. Ted for Ted Williams and Petrie for Rob Petrie on the Dick Van Dyke show. Rob Williams was on the list, too."
"He must have really wanted out of here," Sabine said.
"Like you wouldn't believe."
Sabine's feet were getting cold and she pulled them up on the chair. In Los Angeles it had been hard not to take things personally: What reason did he have to lie to her? But in Nebraska, in this kitchen, it didn't seem so much like lying. He had remade his life, and when he was finished it was the only life he knew. In Nebraska this seemed reasonable, smart, a wool coat with toggles. "What about you?" Sabine said. "Did you have a book of names?"
Kitty shrugged. The gesture made her seem oddly girlish. "There were a few. I never had Guy's imagination. He had real vision when it came to these things. Sometimes he made up names for me. Assistant names. Ophelia, Candy-we had a big range."
"Magician's assistant?"
"I was going to have your job, but that was only on the days he was going to be a magician. He was still thinking of a lot of things back then. If he'd decided to go with being a professional baseball player, there wouldn't have been much of a spot for me. Batgirl, maybe."
When Guy was twelve years old, there was no Sabine. Sabine was a child in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, drinking orange juice her mother squeezed in their juicer, checking out books from the library on the great castles of the world. No one in Alliance could have imagined Sabine. There was no need for her because her part would be played by Kitty, patient in instruction, diligent in practice. What was needed was a girl who could hold a hat and appear amazed every time a rabbit was extracted. A girl who knew how to smile and wave. Kitty was that girl. Spine straight, shoulders back. Kitty had thought, in the way that children think of such things, that this would be what she would do forever. In truth it was not such a great job, but all these years later Sabine felt she had somehow stolen it from this woman on the other side of the kitchen table. The life that Parsifal had left had come down hard on Kitty-marriage, two children, all that work and endless winters. Every day of it showed on her. But had she left with him at sixteen or seventeen, Sabine could see how she would have been the beautiful girl. Put her in lilac silk, wrap netting and beads around her bare shoulders. She would have done fine. She would have done well.
It was past being late. Even the snow had given up. In every direction there was sleep and stillness and dark. There was no time like this in Los Angeles. It was never this late.
"I'll admit it," Kitty said. "That night we first saw you on Carson, I thought, That was supposed to be me."
"But it could have been," Sabine said, and the thought troubled her. "Just as easily you as me."
"My brother and I were very close when we were growing up," Kitty said. Her voice was tired, as if she'd had enough of going over this. "The plan, our plan, was that we were going to wait out childhood as best we could and then go away together, maybe go to New York, change our names. I know there are kids all over the world who go to bed at night saying that they're going to move to New York and change their names, but you get older and you forget about it, except Guy. He did that, exactly. He did everything he said he was going to do except"-she stopped and smiled to show that she had made peace with everything-"take me with him, and I understand that, you know, I really do. It's like a prison break. There's just a lot better chance of being successful if you go it alone." She put out her cigarette with one clean twist and then lit another one. Her hands were perfectly steady. "That was all a long time ago. I don't think about it now. I have two wonderful boys. I'm very close to my family." She shook her head. "I'm talking too much," she said. "I don't think I'm making sense."
"No," Sabine said, "I understand." Children wanted to change their names and move to New York? She, who had been read to every night, whose hand was held at the crossing of every street, did not understand. Sabine in Los Angeles, where everything in the world was available to her, peaches in January, a symphony orchestra, the Pacific Ocean. It was not the city children dreamed of leaving. It was the one they dreamed of coming to.
"There's a real high price for getting out of a place like this." Kitty smiled. "Alliance, Nebraska, doesn't like to let go once it's got its hooks in you. There aren't any new people coming in to take your place. But Guy did it."
"How?"
"He suffered," Kitty said, making "suffered" sound like a bright word, a fine plan.
"You mean reform school?"
"I mean reform school, I mean killing my father. That's creating a circumstance where you just can't come back."
Sabine sat up in her chair. Her fingers fluttered in front of her face as if something cold and wet had touched her there, and the cigarette, smoked almost down to the filter but still glowing orange, dropped to the floor and rolled beneath the table. "What?"
Kitty looked so startled one would think she had received the news, not given it. "My father," she said.
The words were somewhere in the catalog of words Sabine's mind had memorized. "Your father."
"They told you this," Kitty said, her voice neither a question nor an answer. Her voice was wishful.
"Who?"
"Guy told you, Mother told you, Bertie told you. Fuck." Kitty reached under the table and retrieved the cigarette, which had burned a small black reminder into the green floor. "That mark on the floor," people would say, "that was the moment that Sabine knew."
"No one told me anything."
Kitty stubbed out what was left of nothing and went to the sink to wash her hands. When she was through she dried them and washed them again. "Why would no one tell you that?"
"Do you think I know?"
Kitty wrapped her hands in the dish towel hanging from the refrigerator door. Her face was pleading, guilty, and for an instant Sabine thought if there had been a killing, Kitty was the one who'd done it. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to tell you. I never thought you didn't know-I mean, that's the story. That's everything. If you know about this family at all, then that's what you know."
"You're saying Guy killed his father." Because it was Guy.
"He did," Kitty said, her voice quiet.
"And this is true. This is a known fact. Did someone see it?" She would not misunderstand this. She would not let him be accused of something impossible.
Kitty raised her head, repeated the list of all in attendance. "I saw it. My mother saw it. Guy saw it. My father saw it." She braced herself against the counter, as if Sabine might come at her.
Was it still snowing? Did the wind still circle around the house? Shouldn't the others be up by now? Shouldn't they wake them?
Sabine asked when.
"New Year's Eve, nineteen sixty-six. Guy was fifteen. Almost sixteen."
She asked how.
"Hit him."
"With his fists?"
Kitty shook her head. She had been the one to tell. It wasn't a secret. Every paper for five hundred miles had printed the story, printed it again when Guy got out of Lowell. "A bat," she said. "His baseball bat. One hit. He didn't mean to kill him, he meant to stop him. He pulled him and slapped him but it was like he was just a fly, like Oad didn't even feel it. And the bat was right there, right by the door, where he always left it. There wasn't one second to think. He was just going to stop him but there was something about the way…" She stopped and waited and then tried again. "My father was moving very quickly. There was no time. Guy couldn't get a good fix on where, and the bat came down on his neck. He broke his neck. In two minutes, in a minute, he was dead."