Sabine told him. She told him about the snow and the house and Bertie and the snow and Dot and Parsifal's room and meeting Kitty in the middle of the night and the snow and the snow and the snow. She did not tell him about Parsifal's father, although she knew she would when she got home. There could be no association for her parents now between where she was and a violent death, no matter how long ago it had happened. They depended on Sabine to be safe, as she depended on them to be.
"Your mother has gone to the store. I almost went and then I didn't. Maybe it is because I knew you would call."
"Possible," Sabine said.
"That would make your father a mind reader, a sort of magician. Maybe we could get a little act together."
"I'd like that."
"Well, then, come home and we'll get started. Have you seen enough of it now? I wouldn't think you'd need too much time to figure out Nebraska. Are you coming home?"
"I just got here last night."
Her father laughed as if she'd said something terribly funny. She wanted him to laugh. She wanted him to talk to her all day until Dot came home. She wanted to hear the sound of his voice, safe and happy. Her father, who had set his alarm for two A.M. so that he could get up and drive to the Magic Hat to pick her up because it was too late for taking buses home from work.
"I am only wishful thinking. Nebraska is too far away to go for the night, I know that. Should I have seen Nebraska, Sabine-Love? What do you think? Your mother and I talk about vacations. You couldn't list all the places we didn't go."
Sabine lifted her head, opened her eyes. Outside was snow and sky, a house across the street that was a mirror image of the one she was in. "There are better vacation spots."
"Do you think you will know Parsifal better now?" His tone was confidential. Either way it would be their secret.
Sabine's eyes were still open. Parsifal had shoveled the walk that led to that street. He had cut his face open with hedge shears in that yard. He had killed his father in one accidental second and changed the world. She told her father yes.
"Good, then. Good. You are in the right place."
Sabine tried to go back to sleep but could not. No matter how far she pulled the shades down the room wasn't dark. She wandered through the house, studying the pictures on the walls, looking in drawers and finding nothing that mattered. She lay across Parsifal's bed and read an entire Hardy Boys mystery. The plot involved a cave and the kidnaping of the boys' father. She shook the other books to see if anything had been left behind and found the wrapper from a stick of Doublemint gum, but that was probably from one of Kitty's sons.
She poked through the room, lonely and restless. She looked beneath the baseball trophies, behind the pictures on the wall. When half the afternoon was gone she found something that interested her high up in the closet, a Mysto magic kit, the corners of the box held together with strips of masking tape that were themselves so old that they were nothing but dried-out pieces of paper formed to the box. On the cover was a photograph of a somewhat sinister-looking man in a top hat and cape leaning over two children. The children were looking at a small white rabbit and a couple of rubber balls. Their oblivion to the magician seemed dangerous. The live rabbit seemed misleading. This had been the kit that Parsifal talked about, "impressing your friends." Inside there was a set of interlocking rings that reminded her unpleasantly of Sam Spender and her breakdown at the Magic Castle. There was the set of rubber balls pictured on the box, a series of cups for hiding the balls, a black wand with a white tip. It had been so long since Sabine had seen anybody use a wand that it took her a minute to figure out what it was for. There was a deck of cards that didn't belong with the set. From the diagram on the lid it was clear that a few items were missing: the magic twine, the five enchanted coins, and the bouquet of silk flowers. Silk flower bouquets turned ratty the third time you used them. Over thirty years they were bound to have disintegrated.
Sabine skimmed over the instructions, which were nearly impossible to follow. To do the cups and balls the way they described it would take eight arms, dim lighting, and an audience recently injected with Versed. What torture this must have been for a child who had never before seen magic performed. Sabine dropped the papers back in the box. She picked up the rings, hit them together and locked them, snapped them hard and set them free. It wasn't a bad set of rings. Thirty years ago there was more integrity in a cheap box of tricks than there was now. She held all three rings together in one hand and then threw one up in the air, hit it, and locked it on. She threw up the second one, hit it, and then all three were connected. That was a little bit of a trick, to throw them up, to lock them where anyone could see without anyone being able to tell. That had taken them some practice. Sabine used to throw them to Parsifal and he would lock them on in the catch. It took forever to figure out exactly how hard to throw them and at what angle. It took forever again until they could do it in their sleep. Sabine liked the sound they made, the short clang and rattle of the metal running into itself. How long had it taken little Guy Fetters to figure this one out? Was he eight then? Ten? Twelve? She turned the lid of the box over and dropped the balls inside. She covered them with their cups and sent them spinning cup to cup. She hid two extra balls in the stacked cups. It was never just three balls. Sabine had fast hands. She knew how to make her hands go in one direction and the cups skid off in another. She could have made a fortune running three-card monte at Venice Beach. A good assistant had to be that smooth; faster than the magician, even. So fast as to be completely still.
There was no such thing as being a magician's assistant without knowing the trick. People are misguided by the assistant's surprise, the way her mouth opens in childlike delight as her glove is turned into a dove. But if you didn't know how it would all turn out, you wouldn't know where to stand, how to turn yourself to shield the magician's hand or temporarily block the light. And if, in some impossible, unimaginable circumstance, the trick was not explained to the assistant, she would get it sooner or later out of sheer repetition: The egg comes out of your ear, the rabbit is between your breasts, your head is sawed off, it happens over and over and over again. Sooner or later you are bound to know it like your name.
But knowing a trick doesn't mean being able to pull it off. That's what Parsifal didn't understand, or maybe it was just the sickness and sadness at the end of his life that made him forget. Sabine was an encyclopedia of magic, a walking catalog of props, stage directions, cues, but she wasn't a magician. Most people can't be magicians for the same reason they can't be criminals. They have guilty souls. Deception doesn't come naturally. They want to be caught.
There were sounds, rustling and then the stamping of boots coming from the kitchen. Sabine quickly put everything back in the box and slid it under the bed. It was a toy, a game. Forty-one years old, what was she doing on the floor, playing with balls, feeling guilty?
"Sabine?" Dot called from down the hall. "Are you here?"
"I'm here," she said, scrambling up, her left leg sound asleep. She limped down the hall, hitting her thigh with her fist.
"I've got a real treat," Dot said.
When Sabine rounded into the kitchen, there was Dot and, on either side of her, a boy. Each was tall. Each was beautiful, so red faced from the cold that he appeared to be just that instant awake. They were swaddled in clothing, plaid wool scarves wrapped half around necks, wool sweaters over plaid shirts, down vests over wool sweaters, and coats that looked to be borrowed from Admiral Byrd. Their hands were bare and chapped. The taller of the two wore a blue knit hat. They resembled their uncle at that time in his life when Sabine had first met him, when she first saw him take a rabbit from his shirt cuff. Beautiful.