She didn't tell him she was leaving, that he would get exactly what he wanted if he held on for a few more days. I know your wife, she wanted to say. "I'm going inside." Sabine turned around and walked down the driveway. The boots were an old pair of Dot's and they were too small for her. She was half walking on her toes.
"Maybe I'll take you up on that cup of coffee now," Howard Plate shouted at her as she turned around the corner of the house.
"I kissed your wife," she said quietly as she let herself in the back door.
Distracted now from the formerly seamless flow of work, Sabine took a shower, changed her clothes, and nervously straightened up the house. Howard Plate was not outside, she looked. There was only a perfectly harmless Chevy parked across the street. She was not afraid of him. He was a bully, a deep annoyance. She would not see him as a dangerous man. She made the twin beds in Parsifal's room and hung up the clothes, knowing it was probably not her business to do so, but it calmed her. The room, since she had so recently vacated it, had become mysteriously average. The baseball trophies and Hardy Boys books that had held her undivided attention for the past two and a half weeks were now simple decorations on shelves. She fluffed up the pillows and picked up three glasses (three?) from the night table. Then she went into the living room and folded up Kitty's bedding from the couch and put it back in the hall closet. For a minute she dipped her face into the sheets and smelled Kitty, the soap and cigarettes and wintergreen, which brought back the kiss, which led Sabine to close the closet door tightly.
By the time Dot came home with the boys after school, Sabine was back at work on the house. She had cut all the exterior doors and walls and made her windows out of two layers of freezer bags melted lightly together on a cookie sheet. She did not mention Howard Plate's visit. She had very nearly made herself forget about him and was only reminded by seeing the boys and their long and lean resemblance to their father. There were so many different angles from which to look at boys. They would look like their uncle, then their mother and then their father, depending on how you turned them in the light.
"That's the place," Dot said. She pointed the boys' attention towards the obvious. "That's exactly what it looks like."
"It's bigger," Sabine said. "And there's a roof."
"I wish you'd been here when my science project was due," Guy said, running a tender finger over a windowsill.
How sniffed around with moderate interest. "Are you going to show us how to do the cups and balls?"
Sabine nodded and held two pieces of recently glued board together. At home she had a vise. "Do you want to do that now?"
"I've been thinking about it," How said, careful in the ways teenage boys can be about not seeming to really want anything you might be able to give them.
So Sabine showed them cups and balls. It was no great betrayal to the secret society of magicians. The directions were, after all, written out in completely impenetrable English on the top of the box. There were diagrams of the trick in every cheap book of magic. But pictures never explained anything. Sabine set up the cups and the balls. "Leave the egg out for now, that's the tricky part. Basics first." She showed them how to hide the balls on the tops of the stacked cups, how to turn the cups over so that the balls didn't fall out, how there was no magic, just planning and acting. How and Guy, fresh from school's obedience, sat and watched, desperate as they never were in American history to give a perfect mimicking of the facts. "Once you learn how to do it, you never look at your hands. If you look at your hands, they'll look at your hands. You control the attention of the audience. You direct it. That's how you hide things."
Dot came over and stood behind Sabine. "Maybe you boys could learn how to do this, start up a brothers act, make your way in the world."
"We start a brothers act, I can tell you who's going to be the assistant," Guy said, never taking his eyes off Sabine's hands, which never stopped moving.
"There will be no slighting of magicians' assistants in my presence," Sabine said.
"Sorry."
"I'm ready to try," How said with great seriousness, his face fixed with the set determination of a batter waiting for the first pitch.
"Good," Sabine said. "Have at it." She slid the props across the table. She was pulling for How. She thought he was exactly the kind of boy who could make a decent magician, basically too introverted to do much with other kids his own age and therefore more likely to practice the tireless hours that were required. A boy who would fashion the persona of a magician like another boy might carve a turtle from a bar of soap. As much as Guy wanted thè skills, rabbits, hats, assistants, he didn't sufficiently need them. People would come to him for other reasons. He wouldn't have the patience for the tedium, the repetition and failure that might one day put him on late-night television.
How took the cups and carefully placed the balls on top, his large, chapped hands trying to appear nimble and birdlike. He set up the cups without any of the balls scooting across the table and onto the floor, then he looked to Sabine for approval and direction.
"And then you say…," she said.
"We're going to put this ball"-he held up the ball that he had hidden in his hand. A good palm job, although it was not a ball that needed to be palmed-"under this cup."
She liked his use of the first-person plural, his eye contact. "Good," she said. "Good."
How and Sabine skipped the cups around until Guy got bored and wandered off to watch MTV in the living room. How was tireless, a record set to Replay, so that at the end of every run-through he simply went back and started over again, each time repeating his patter with a musical freshness. Dot claimed a sudden urgent need to go to the grocery store to get away from the never-ending question, "Where do you think the ball is now?" But Sabine could take it. The wild tedium of watching someone else practice, of practicing herself, was a skill she had developed over the years. She spotted him like a gymnastics coach, sticking an arm beneath his back at the most perilous moment of the flip. He did not tire, get frustrated, grow sloppy. He worked.
"Do you think I'll be able to do the egg sometime?"
Sabine nodded. "You were born for it."
How put his broad hands down flat on the table. His nails were red, their beds crushed to a fleshy pulp by the constant efforts of his teeth. All his cuticles were stripped beyond the possibility of regrowth. "If you thought you could stay a little longer, it would really help me-I mean, to learn some of this. I should have asked you sooner, I know. I just…" He looked at her pleadingly, his sentence over.
"I really do need to go home, How. I'm sorry. You're going to be great, though. You've got what it takes to do this thing yourself. Your uncle did it. Nobody taught him magic." Sabine said this without having any notion of whether or not it was true. For all she knew, Parsifal's math teacher was a Blackstone himself. He may have passed on every secret in the book after the chalkboards had been wiped down.
Over the unbearable strains of electric guitars coming from the television in the other room, Sabine could hear How's labored breathing. This time of year, everyone in Alliance was breathing with difficulty. "Um," he said, staring at his damaged hands, his knuckles scraped and scabbed as a fighter's. "Do you think my mom might go and see you in California?"
"She might," Sabine said, never really having thought about Kitty in Los Angeles. "I hope she does."
He waited for a long time, mulling over her reply, preparing his next sentence as if he were culling the words out of an English phrasebook. "I'd like to come." He said this very quietly, as if he were overwhelmed by the burden of his own request.
"Of course you can come," Sabine said, and she meant it. She could take How to Disneyland, to the beach. He could lie by the pool. Her parents would like How, his sweet disposition and healthy appetite. She could hear his big feet slapping down the hall, coming in at night to practice magic in front of the mirrors in the master bedroom. The rabbit would be so happy-something to do. "You can come even if your mother doesn't."