"He didn't forget you." But that was just something to say. Actually Sabine had no idea. Maybe he had forgotten. She never saw a trace of past in him. Maybe he had put every scrap of it to bed, including the woman sitting in front of her now. "When I think of my mother, I think of her playing the piano," Parsifal would say to Sabine in their early days when she still bothered to ask. There was no piano in this house.
"Don't try and make me feel better."
"I'd love to make you feel better," Sabine said, taking her drink down to bare ice. "I'd like to make us both feel better."
The refrigerator made a low rumble and then resumed its deep electric grind. Dot blinked, as if suddenly awake. "You know, I gave myself a lot of comfort these last ten years or so, thinking he'd come back. Once I saw him on television and then when he started sending me money, I just knew, one of these days I was going to open up the door and there he'd be. The girls and I would talk about it all the time. Sometimes I'd be driving home from the grocery store and my palms would start to sweat on the steering wheel and I was sure, I was just absolutely sure."
"I know," Sabine said. If he had lived another twenty years, another forty, he would not have come back to this place. He had forgotten it. Even as he put the money into the envelope every month, it did not exist.
"And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That's the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That's the thing I've lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that's when you came."
"When I came?"
"You take up that place. That's what Kitty said, that all the years we've been saving a place for him and with you here, that place is full again. It is better."
Dot smiled at her, not unlike the way Sabine's mother used to smile when Sabine did well in ballet as a child. "I hate to bring this up," Sabine said, and moved the ice in her glass in circles with her finger, "but you know I'm not going to stay here. Sooner or later I have to go back to L.A."
"We'd talked about putting you in the basement, but with all the tricks you know you'd probably figure out how to escape."
"It's true."
Dot patted her hand. "Go to bed, Sabine. It's late. Nobody's going to ask you to live in Nebraska. You have to be born in Nebraska to want to stay here, I know that. Half the time that doesn't even do the trick. You're my daughter-in-law, my family. You can live anywhere you want and that's still going to be true."
Sabine gave Dot a kiss and headed down the hallway to her room. The cold weather made her sleepy, even when she stayed inside. She would go home. She thought about walking down the long hall to her bedroom on Oriole Street. She thought about the smell of the lemon trees mixing with the smell of the chlorine from the pool as she ran her hand along the paneling of the house that Parsifal had lived in as a boy. In a couple of days, in a little while, she would go home.
In Los Angeles, every day came with a series of tasks: Pick up the Bactrim, deliver the condominium complex, lunch at Canter's, take the rabbit to the vet. There were things she had to maintain, like the magic. Parsifal had told her in the very beginning, for magic to work it had to be a habit. Magic was food, it was sleep. Neglect made her awkward. She spun three balls in one hand while she brushed her teeth with the other. Add to that her job, the panes of glass that needed to be cut, sheets of grass to be painted. On the walls of her studio were the tacked-up drawings of buildings she would not get to for months, two dimensions she was to pull into three. Sabine made lists, things to buy, things to make, things to practice. All day long the list propelled her forward. When she went to bed at night her mind would reel through all she had forgotten, all the things there hadn't been time for. It had been like this even when she was a child, going from Hebrew school to painting class to ballet, working her math problems in the evenings, and then setting the table for dinner.
It wasn't like that in Nebraska.
She slept. She memorized the black lines of the branches that brushed against the storm windows of Parsifal's bedroom. She waited for Dot and Bertie to come home. She waited for Kitty and the boys. They were regular, punctual. She shaped herself around their coming and going. The house was clean, but when she was alone she cleaned it again. She read half of The Joy of Cooking and then made a cake from scratch, a daffodil cake. She chose the recipe because it was tedious and complicated and because she could find all the ingredients. She used every egg. In the garage, leaning alone in a corner, she found a snow shovel with a red handle and a flat tin bed. She put on her boots and hat and gloves and went outside to shovel the front walk. Then she shoveled the driveway. Sabine had never shoveled snow before. Every load surprised her with its weight, all those tiny flakes. She remembered reading somewhere that men were much more likely to have heart attacks and that it was better for women to shovel snow. What a way to die, pitching over into the soft bank, freezing there until your family came outside to find you. Her back hurt, a pain in a previously unknown muscle. She could feel the blisters rubbing beneath her soft lambskin gloves. Sabine shoveled the sidewalks well into the neighbors' property on either side. When she was finished, she went in and worked herself out of her clothes, which were stiff with ice. She sat in a hot bath and shook from the cold. Her toes were wrinkled, white and numb. Outside, it was starting to snow again.
In Dot Fetters' tiny ranch house, which in this blanket of heavy snow, and probably without it as well, appeared to be exactly like every other tiny ranch house in every direction, Sabine was finding a part of the husband she had lost. Guy the alter ego, the younger self. She imagined him flying down the street in the bracing cold, stomach to sled. She saw him at the kitchen table spooning through a bowl of cereal before school, his eyes fixed to the back of the box. Guy, who would someday be Parsifal, lying on the floor in the living room, reading library books on magic, frustrating books that never gave the information you really needed to have. She imagined him popular, tight with the neighborhood boys, good to his sister. At night she saw him asleep in the bed next to her bed, not the man he would be later on, the one that was gone, but this slighter, very present version of himself. She saw him in Kitty and Bertie, sometimes in Dot and How and Guy. She saw him at six years old and nine and twelve, because she needed to, every minute. Missing him was the dark and endless space she had stumbled into.
"I don't want to put you to work," Bertie said. "I think you should be relaxing, on vacation, but Mama thinks if we don't give you things to do you're going to kill yourself." She set a stationery box on the kitchen table. "Maybe you could address some wedding invitations-only if you feel like it. I know your handwriting is better than mine."
Sabine touched her fingers to the edge of the lid. She felt hungry.
"Go to bed," Parsifal had said to her. "You're going to go blind."
"Few more," Sabine said, not looking up. Why hadn't she looked up? She needed two hundred ash trees, two and a half inches high. She kept a trunk pinched between tweezers.
He walked behind her, pushed his hands deep into her neck. Sabine's neck was always aching. She spent her time hunched over. "Did you hear the one about the girl with too much work ethic?"
"No such thing." She threaded on a branch.