The Magician's Assistant (32 page)

“Got it.”

Sabine and Howard Plate made their way to the end of the deck. When it was over the table relaxed. Bertie and Kitty both sat down. Dot stretched out her short legs in front of her. Guy slapped his brother lightly on the arm for no reason at all. “I think I did okay,” Howard Plate said.

“I have a feeling you did very well,” Sabine said. She picked up the stack to the right and began going through the cards like an answer sheet. “Red, red, red, red, red, red, red, red.” She flipped them down slowly at first, so that there could be the moment when people were startled not by her, but by the notion that Howard Plate was, in fact, in possession of perfect ESP. In the second it dawned on them that it was all a trick, she started going faster. She picked up the second stack and fanned it out, all black.

“Jesus,” Howard Plate said. He reached his hands out to touch the cards on the table. He was careful, as if suspicious of heat. “Would you look at that?”

It was not uncommon. The last person to catch on was the one who stood to benefit, the one who was quickly calculating a life of previously unexplored talents.

How laughed and broke the spell.

Sabine had picked the wrong member of the audience. She knew it the second the last card was turned, but once it was done there was no way to undo a trick. She had meant it to include him, to bring him over to the table, and yet she had mocked him. Magic was always mocking in a way. It was the process of fooling people, making them think they saw something they couldn’t have seen. Every now and then fooling people made them fools.

“You fixed it?” Howard said.

“It’s a trick,” Bertie said. “A card trick. Remember? Kitty asked Sabine to do a card trick.”

“Did you think I couldn’t do it, is that why you fixed it?”

“Couldn’t do what?” Sabine asked.

“That I couldn’t do ESP, that I didn’t have any?”

“Nobody could do it.” Sabine tried to make her voice kind. “There is no such thing.” She was not entirely convinced of this fact, but she felt it was important to say so.

“Well, you wouldn’t know. You’re a cheat.” He tilted back his head so that she could see his eyes beneath the bill of his cap, so that she could see the damage done to his face by the train track. “You wouldn’t even give a person the chance to try.”

“Leave it alone,” Kitty said.

“Don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” And with that Howard Plate’s hand swept down through the air like a bat.

Every single person at the table flinched backwards in their seat, as if the hand were coming down especially for them, but it didn’t hit coming down. His hand struck as it came back up, catching the underneath edge of the table. It was the table that was struck rather than the people, and the table, which was pine stained to look like oak and lighter than it appeared, flipped up on its side, towards Guy and How and Bertie, away from Dot and Kitty and Sabine. The cards, which had brought about all the bad feelings, were the first to shoot up in a particularly spectacular twist on shuffling, followed by the coffee cups and varying amounts of coffee, both milky and black, followed by the table itself. Probably no one would have been hurt if they had just sat there and taken what was coming on. The coffee was no longer hot and the cups tumbled to the floor and slivered into pieces. How caught the table on his knees, but it wasn’t very heavy and the blow was more surprising than painful. Bertie, however, saw it all coming. She watched Howard more carefully then the rest of them did, and when she saw his fist she tried to stand. In the second the table came towards her, she fell backwards in her chair, hitting her head with a dull crack against the wall. In all the confusion, the flowered pieces of coffee cups still spinning on the floor, the coffee still dripping from the edges of their chairs, they each distinctly heard the sound of Bertie hitting the wall.

How righted the table from his knees, looking first to see that he wasn’t in turn pinning someone else, and then slipped down on the floor beside his aunt. The edges of her white sweater were turning brown from where the coffee was soaking through. He picked up her hand, the one with the ring, and held it.

“Bertie?” Dot crouched down beside her daughter and touched her forehead. Guy helped Kitty and Sabine pull the table into the center of the room, though any one of them could have managed it alone. “That was a hell of a spill.”

Bertie was still in her chair, but on her back, like a drawing that needed to be rehung in another direction. She squeezed her eyes shut and then blinked them open. “Tell Howard to go,” she said quietly.

“How’s your head feel?” Dot said.

“Tell Howard to go.”

“I didn’t do a damn thing to her,” Howard Plate said, his voice raising. “She fell out of her chair and now you’re going to say I pushed her out.” He rapped his finger on the table. “I was all the way over here.”

“Howard, go on,” Kitty said.

“I did not push her.”

Dot tried to slip her hand under the back of Bertie’s head and Bertie’s eyes squeezed shut again. Dot’s fingers came back a bright and oily red. Suddenly Sabine remembered having cleaned the light fixtures that morning, although it seemed like weeks ago. That was the reason everything was so bright now.

“Ah, Christ,” Howard said. “Well, you’ve all got it fixed now. There’s your proof. There’s your proof that I’m the bad man.”

How was the biggest person in the room, the tallest, the heaviest, the strongest, though none of them would have thought of him that way. He would not have thought of himself that way. “Bertie, do you want to try and sit up?” he asked his aunt.

“Sure,” she said, “but if your dad could go.”

“Fine,” Howard Plate said. “You don’t have to ask me twice.” He was across the room in four large steps. He opened the door with one hand and took his coat off the hook with the other. He was gone at the very moment How was lifting up Bertie’s chair. Howard Plate did not close the door, did not remember or did not bother to. The cold air cut into the room and made Bertie smile. Dot kept her hand under her daughter’s neck to help steady it. Kitty ran to close the door.

It was the barrette, the flat gold oval from Wal-Mart that held back Bertie’s hair, that had bitten into the back of her scalp and scraped up as it met the chair rail on the wall going down.

“I can’t quite tell.” Kitty removed the barrette and tried to see what was beneath the fast-soaking curls. “You’ve got so damn much hair. But I’m pretty sure you need stitches.”

“Maybe she has a concussion.” Dot tried to peer into Bertie’s pupils to see if they were evenly dilated.

“I don’t have a concussion,” Bertie said, her voice tired. “You should call Haas. He can drive me over.”

“He can meet you there,” Dot said. “We’ll drive you over.”

How was standing with Guy now. The sight of the blood had driven them back, away from the table. Their faces were pale, very young, suddenly identical. They looked as much alike as Kitty and Parsifal. “She going to be okay?” Guy asked.

“I’m going to be fine,” Bertie said. “Nobody ever died from falling out of a kitchen chair.” She looked at her pair of nephews. “You call Haas. Tell him I’m okay, that I just need a few stitches, but he should come over to the hospital.”

“Sure,” Guy said. “He should come now?”

Bertie nodded slightly. “That would be best.”

The boys turned and went together down the hall, opting for the phone that was farthest away from the kitchen.

“I’ve got to get a towel,” Dot said, and headed down the hall as if she were following after the boys.

“Get a dark one,” Bertie called to her.

Sabine leaned over and began picking up pieces of coffee cups, but they seemed to be everywhere. The floor had taken on the jagged topography of a bar fight.

“Bertie, I’m awfully sorry,” Kitty said. She touched the back of her hand to her sister’s pale cheek and held it there as if checking for fever.

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t do anything is right.” Kitty tried to wipe away the line of blood that was running down the back of Bertie’s neck, but she only succeeded in smearing it. “Your sweater’s going to be ruined,” she said sadly.

Dot came back with a towel and an armful of coats. “Okay, chop-chop, we’re getting out of here.”

“One of you needs to stay here with the boys,” Bertie said, taking the folded towel and pressing it gently against the back of her head. She winced. “Shit.”

“They’ll be fine,” Dot said. The heater was set to seventy-two degrees, the cupboards and refrigerator-freezer were full of food. There was television.

“They won’t be fine. They feel bad. We don’t all need to go.”

“I can stay,” Sabine said. She wanted to be of help. She was the one who started everything, picking Howard from the audience. That was why Parsifal was the magician. He knew who to pick, how to control the crowd.

“No,” Bertie said. “Not you.” She twisted her fingers through Sabine’s to hold her there. Sabine squeezed. At least she understood how to comfort.

“My boys, I’ll stay,” Kitty said. “But for God’s sake, get going or we’ll all have to come in and give you a transfusion.”

Sabine held the towel while Dot and Kitty helped Bertie on with her coat. The boys came back in time to tell them Haas was on his way. After that Bertie was in a hurry to go.

“Call me from the hospital,” Kitty said. She followed them onto the porch and stood in the circle cast down from the light over the back door. The snow was so brilliant it seemed fake. “I want to know how many stitches.” She waved, as if they were going on an adventure and she understood that she had to be left behind. Sabine was sorry to leave her. Kitty would feel guilty about this somehow. There was snow in her dark hair and she shivered, standing in the cold night without so much as a sweater.

“Goddamn Howard,” Dot said, her eyes on Kitty as they backed down the driveway. “You can’t go swinging your temper around without somebody getting hurt.”

“At least it wasn’t one of the boys,” Bertie said.

“Well, it shouldn’t have been them, but it shouldn’t have been you, either. I just feel sick about this,” Dot said. “You were the only one of my children who never had stitches. I always thought of that as a real personal success.”

“I had stitches when they took my wisdom teeth out,” Bertie said.

“Those kind of stitches don’t count. I’m talking about emergency stitches, this kind of thing, everybody piled up in the car going to the emergency room, praying you don’t have a wreck on the way over. Bertie was always so much more careful than Kitty and Guy,” Dot said over her shoulder to Sabine, in the backseat. “I always said it was God’s reward to me. He knew I didn’t have the energy for another daredevil. She was always a lady. Never jumped off of tables, never wanted to play pirates using real knives. I always thought that would be such a high-class thing, having a kid that wasn’t sewn up fifteen different ways.”

“Well, I’m almost thirty,” Bertie said, yawning. “This can’t be held against my good childhood record.”

“Your children are always your children,” Dot said with authority.

It was early in the evening and completely dark as they headed towards town. Inside the houses that were so much like Dot’s, the warm yellow lights clicked on, and Sabine could see the shapes of people passing in front of their windows, and she wondered if there were other strangers in town, a whole contingency of hidden people who had not meant to come there at all, people who meant to leave but couldn’t find exactly the moment to go. She wondered if they were from all over the world, from every place she had ever been to with Pársifal, sleeping in their borrowed beds, drying their hands on guest towels. She wondered how it was they’d come to be here. Had their cars broken down? Had they spoken to a stranger in a restaurant and stayed to find out more? Had they come here to visit someone, some relative so distant that the blood ties were all but untraceable, and then somehow just fell into a habit? They had grown used to being there even as they longed to leave. They missed the beautiful places they were from. They missed the indigenous flowers, the good local supermarkets, their families, and still they did not know how to go. It was impossible that what was happening to Sabine could be happening to her alone.

Haas was standing outside the front entrance of Box Butte General Hospital. Even from a distance they were sure it was him.

“He’s going to freeze to death,” Bertie said, leaning forward as they pulled up the front drive.

“I’m sure he’d rather freeze to death than wait inside,” Dot said.

Haas had recognized the car and was there with his hand out, opening the door before they had come to any semblance of a stop. “Are you all right?” He reached down and unfastened Bertie’s seat belt. His face was flushed with cold and worry.

“I’m fine,” Bertie said.

“I told them inside you were coming.” Haas wasn’t wearing any gloves. He was trying to help her out of the car or trying to embrace her, it was difficult to tell. In his worry his hands went everywhere, as if he were checking for other injuries.

“You two go inside,” Dot said. “Sabine and I’ll park.” But even as she was saying it, they were walking away, pressing themselves together into one person against the terrible cold. Dot watched them until they were safe inside the bright waiting room. She shook her head. “I like Haas plenty,” she told Sabine. “He’s a good man. But there’s something about those two, the way they’re so stuck on each other. It makes me nervous. I always want to leave the room when they’re together.”

“It’s like watching something that’s too private,” Sabine said, thinking of the letters that Phan had written to Parsifal, how she had to put them back in the envelopes.
Most Beloved.

“Maybe it’s just that nobody ever loved me that way. Al sure didn’t, not even in the beginning, and I didn’t grow up around that sort of thing. I’m from another generation. Maybe I don’t understand it or maybe I’m jealous, though God knows I’m too old to want somebody hanging all over me now.” She smiled at Sabine, picked up a handful of her straight black hair, and then let it fall back into place. “What about you? Were you and Guy ever that way?”