The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Really?" Mrs. Fetters said, looking around the room with new respect. "What a tragedy that was. What a sweet boy."

  They sat quietly, both of them trying not to look at anyone in particular. "Do you remember that scar Guy had—it was right here?" Mrs. Fetters put her finger beside Sabine's left eye and traced a line down the side of her face, back along her hairline, in front of her ear, and down to the very top of her jaw, following the exact course of a scar Sabine had looked at for twenty-two years. The touch was so light that it chilled her.

  Sabine nodded.

  "Where did he get that scar?"

  "Playing hockey at Dartmouth. Someone got him with the stick."

  "I got him," his mother said, crossing her arms around her chest. "Seven years old. I was working in the yard and Kitty and Guy were playing. I was trying to cut back a bush but my shears were too small and I told Guy to go to the garage and get the big shears. But Guy was all busy with Kitty, they were making something and I had to holler at him again, told him he better run 'cause I wasn't going to ask him a third time. Well, then he drops everything. He went off in a flash and not two seconds later he's coming back and he's got the clippers and they're open, like this"—she put her palms together and turned back her hands. "Well, I saw those things coming, they caught the sun. It's like he's running with a couple of butcher knives, and I say to him, 'Don't run,' though not a minute before I'd told him to run, and he gets confused, looks at me, and down he goes over the hose line, just like that." She snapped her fingers. The nurse looked up, puzzled, and then looked away. "Damned if he didn't slice his beautiful face halfway off, right in front of me. I'll tell you, if you have kids you spend your whole life thinking how you'll never forgive yourself. You always think you should have been watching them better, but half the things happen when you're looking right at them."

  Sabine saw him, his back narrow in a blue T-shirt, his hair cropped short. The blood on the blades of the shears, on the grass. "What happened?"

  "Everything happened," Dot said, holding herself tightly, "at exactly the same minute. I'm crying, he's crying, Kitty is absolutely beside herself. I turn him over and I have to push the skin back over the bone with my fingers." She held up her hand to show Sabine the fingers she had used. "I was covered in dirt, of course. You've never seen the likes of it. I tell Kitty to get my car keys and just like that we're off to the hospital, not that you'd even call it a hospital after being in a place like this. Everybody comes out to see what's going on. I've got Guy in my arms, Kitty's holding on to his feet, she's got blood on her, I'm all bloody. The three of us look like we just walked away from some sort of wild burning car crash. I tell them what's happened, so the doctor says he's going to take him in the back and sew up his head and that I am to wait in the other room until it's over. At this piece of news Guy grabs onto my shirt, right at the neck, for everything he's got and he starts to really scream. So I say, 'cause I'm feeling so bad about telling him to run, 'No, I'm going in there.' 'No, no, Dot,' they say. 'You won't like this. You trust us, you stay out here.'" Dot Fetters took a breath and looked at the double doors going back to wherever it was they sewed up children's heads.

  "I see how scared he is, and I know I'm going back with him. I've already made my point and there's no getting out of it. Besides, nothing bleeds like a cut on the head, so we're all pretty much standing in a pool now. Well, a nurse comes and she tells Kitty that they're going to go get cleaned up, get a little present maybe. 'Course, Kitty is not one to be left out, and the next thing I know this woman is hauling my girl bodily away, and Kitty is howling like a dog. She's got Guy's shoe in her hand where they tugged her loose. Now it's me and Guy and the doctor. We go back in a little stitch-up room and another nurse and I put him out on the table and tell him to hold real still, that they're going to sew him right back together. 'Just like mending a shirt,' I say, 'absolutely good as new.' But when he sees that needle coming he starts to thrash. They damn near put that needle in his eye. I'm holding him down on one side and the nurse has got him on the other and for a kid who must have about a half cup of blood left in him he's fighting like a grown man. He's screaming, and I can still hear Kitty screaming down the hall. Well, nobody's got the time for this, and nothing I say is making any sort of impression on him, so they bring out a sack—it was like a little laundry bag—and they stuff him inside and they cinch it up at the neck. There's my baby in a bag, just his little head sticking out, and I really thought I was going to fall over. Then they strapped the bag to the table, strapped it down tight, so he's held just so, and the nurse takes his head and the doctor gives the shot and starts to stitch. I never saw anything like it. Once Guy knew he was whipped he settled down, but his eyes were wide open and he stared at me while I stood there and cried like an idiot. That doctor took pretty little stitches, better work than I ever did."

  Sabine thought about the straitjackets, water boxes, chain acts, MRIs. Do not be tied down, locked up, no matter what. "He had claustrophobia," she said. "I know that. He hated to be confined. He told me it was because he got locked in a refrigerator once."

  "Oh," Mrs. Fetters said, looking tired. "That, too."

  Sabine was about to ask, but they called her name. "Sabine Parsifal," the nurse said. Mrs. Fetters stood up with her.

  "I'll be right back," Sabine said.

  "Oh, I've come this far, I might as well go along."

  "You can't come back there with me," Sabine said.

  "May I come back?" Mrs. Fetters asked the nurse. "I'm her mother-in-law. It's just stitches."

  "Sure," the woman said. It was the emergency room. Everyone there could come back for all she cared.

  When they were seated in the little white cubicle, Sabine looked at her, Dot Fetters with her tight gray curls and plastic-frame glasses. Everyone's mother. Sabine didn't even know her. "There's no reason for you to do this," she said. "I'm going to be fine."

  A young Chinese woman came in wearing a white lab coat, her straight black hair caught in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back. "So, Mrs. Parsifal, you cut yourself," she said, taking off the layers of wrapping. She did not look judgmental, she just ran water in a basin. "When did you do this?"

  Sabine told her it had been an hour ago, maybe two.

  The doctor touched the cut gently and a sharp wire of pain came up Sabine's arm. She liked the way it felt, the simple clarity of pain. Cut your hand and get it stitched up, wait and the hand will mend, the stitches come out. The idea that she would have the opportunity to get over something thrilled her. The doctor rested Sabine's hand in the warm water of the basin and cleaned the wound. Sabine watched the doctor's two hands working over the pale fish of her one. The water turned pink. Her hand was removed, patted dry.

  "I'm going to give you a shot," the doctor said, filling up a needle for proof, "and when everything is good and numb we'll sew it up, all right?" Everyone was so wide-awake, even Sabine. They did not feel the time.

  Mrs. Fetters stood up then and took hold of Sabine's other hand, the good hand. "This is the part that hurts," she said. "Squeeze hard."

  It was all a business, part of a larger service industry. The doctor was good, though she had only been a doctor for six months. She somehow managed to give the illusion of time, but from her arrival to the positioning of the last bandage, only ten minutes passed. Papers were exchanged, signed, duplicates received. Sabine and Mrs. Fetters touched their feet to the black rubber mat of the exit door at the same moment, and it swung open and set them free.

  "I appreciate your coming along," Sabine said in the car. It was after one in the morning and yet there were people everywhere. Slender palm trees cut outlines against the night sky.

  "You always want to feel like you've come along at the right time, and besides, I wanted to see you again."

  Sabine nodded but didn't say anything. Phan's car was an automatic. Her left hand sat in her lap, face up, useless.

  "I just hated getting stitches. I don't know how many ti
mes I went in or took in one of the kids. Something always had to be sewn up." Dot thought about it for a minute, maybe ran over the entire catalog of life's pains in her mind. The burst appendix, the broken wrist, the endless litany of tears in the skin. "That story I told you, about Guy falling on the shears?" She asked as if she thought Sabine might have forgotten it in the last hour.

  Sabine took her eyes off the road for a minute and looked at her, nodded. The traffic was light.

  "It was awful, start to finish, and I was eaten up by guilt, thinking I had done it to him, that he'd have such a scar on his face, but not for one second during the whole thing did I think he was going to die. It never even occurred to me."

  It was the thing that happened when you ventured outside, people started talking. Everywhere she looked the citizens of Los Angeles were awake, talking. Their heads bent towards one another in the front seats of the cars that flashed by. On the sidewalks they stood close and whispered, or they stood apart and screamed. Those who had no answers had sense enough to stay home in bed. "I don't know why he's dead, Mrs. Fetters, if you're asking me."

  Sabine pulled into the circular loop in front of the Sheraton reserved for registering guests, which they weren't. They sat there together in silence.

  "So," Sabine said, because it was late and the not-asking had, at that exact moment, become as difficult as the asking, "why did you and your son not see each other for twenty-seven years?"

  "What did he tell you?"

  "He told me you were dead."

  Mrs. Fetters sat quietly, as if, of all the possibilities she had been privately mulling over, this was not one of them. "Oh," she said finally, sadly. "When did he tell you the truth?"

  "He didn't. The lawyer told me when he went over the papers. He didn't know, either."

  "Dear God," Mrs. Fetters said, her hands pressed hard against her thighs, bracing herself. "You mean all this time—" She stopped for a minute, trying to piece together so much information. "Come inside and have a drink. I need a drink."

  "It's too late," Sabine said.

  "Park the car," she said. "Or leave it here, either one. What about his sisters? Did he say his sisters were dead? He wouldn't say Kitty was dead."

  "Helen," Sabine said. "There was one sister named Helen. Everyone died together in a car accident in Connecticut."

  "Connecticut," Mrs. Fetters repeated to herself; a state she had never seen, had barely imagined. "Well, you must be wondering what I did!" She looked like she was ready to walk to Forest Lawn and dig Parsifal up with her hands. "What can a mother do to make her son say that she's dead, the whole family dead?" It was as if he had killed them.

  "He wanted to separate from his past," Sabine said. "That's what I know. Nobody's saying that it's because of anything you did." But of course, Sabine thought, that is exactly what I'm saying.

  The bar stayed open until two A.M. Who would have thought it? It was quieter now, no piano player, one waitress. The bartender waved them back into the fold like lost friends, brought them the same drinks without being asked. It seemed like a miracle, a bartender who remembered.

  "We'll drink to your husband and my son," Mrs. Fetters said, and they touched their glasses.

  "Guy," Mrs. Fetters said.

  "Parsifal."

  They drank. It was that wonderful, fleeting moment when the scotch was still warm on top of the ice cubes, so very nearly sweet that Sabine had to force herself to pull the glass away from her mouth. There was so much to say it was impossible to know where to start. But the place Mrs. Fetters picked to begin was a surprise.

  "Tell me about that fellow in the cemetery."

  "Phan?"

  Mrs. Fetters nodded, her hair holding fast. "Him."

  "He was a friend, a friend of Parsifal's, a friend of mine."

  "But more a friend of Guy's."

  Sabine ran the thin red straw around the rim of her glass. "Parsifal met him first."

  "And what did he do?"

  "He worked in computers, designed software programs. He was very successful. He developed Knick-Knack."

  "Knick-Knack?"

  "It's a game," Sabine said.

  It meant nothing to her. Ask anyone else in the bar and they would have gone on and on about how they'd thrown half of their life away playing Knick-Knack. Sabine watched while Mrs. Fetters sorted things out in her head. At the table beside them a man was telling a woman a story in a low whisper while the woman bowed her head and wept.

  "Listen," Sabine heard him say to her. "Listen to me."

  "I know nothing about Parsifal," Mrs. Fetters said. "I've been out of the picture for a long time. But I know one true thing about my son, Guy, one thing that is making all of this difficult to figure." She looked as if she were trying to remember how to say something, as if the words she needed to complete the story were Swedish and her Swedish was no longer very good. "Guy was a homosexual."

  Sabine took a sip of her drink. It was something like relief. What she did not have in life she would not have in death. It was only fair. "Yes," she said, "so was Parsifal."

  Mrs. Fetters nodded like a satisfied detective. "So now where does this leave you, exactly? You're too pretty to just be faking it for somebody."

  "We were very close," Sabine said. Her voice was quiet. The bar seemed to press forward; the bartender pushed his upper body across the polished wood, pretending to reach for a bowl of salted nuts. There was no answer, not unless you were willing to sit down and look at all the footage, sift through the ephemera. "We worked together, we were friends. After Phan died, I think we both had a sense that it was just going to be the two of us, and so we got married."

  "But why didn't you marry somebody else?"

  There was a votive candle in a pale orange cup burning between them on the table. A whole host of somebody-elses stretched out in front of her, all the men who were in love with her, who begged her to be reasonable. Architects, magicians, rug dealers, the boy who bagged her groceries at the supermarket—none of them were right, none of them came close. "I was in love with him," Sabine said. Everyone knew that.

  "Everyone was in love with that boy," Mrs. Fetters said, making Sabine's confession common as ice. "But weren't the two of you ever"—she tilted her head to one side, as if straining to hear the word—"together?"

  "No."

  "And that was okay with you."

  "Oh, Christ, I don't know," Sabine said. "No, not at first." It embarrassed her even now, and Parsifal was dead. "When I was young I guess I thought he'd come around, that it was all about having patience. I'd get angry at him and then he'd get angry at me. Finally we broke up the act. I was maybe twenty-five then. We were only apart for a week, but—" She stopped and looked at Parsifal's mother. Maybe she could see him there, just a little bit around the mouth. "When we were apart something changed for me. I missed him so much I just decided it was better to take what I had. To accept things. I really believe he loved me, but there are a lot of different ways to love someone."

  "It seems to me that you got a bad deal," Mrs. Fetters said.

  "I had a very good deal," Sabine said, and picked up her drink.

  Mrs. Fetters nodded respectfully. "Maybe you did. There are a lot of things in this world I'm never going to understand."

  "Do you understand why Parsifal told me you were dead?"

  Mrs. Fetters polished off her drink in a clean swallow and caught the bartender's eye, which was easily caught. "I do."

  "Good," Sabine said. "Tell me about that. I'm tired of confessing."

  Mrs. Fetters nodded, looking as if the late hour of the night was finally catching up with her. "I was born in Alliance. I lived there all my life. When I was growing up, if you had told me there was such a thing as a man who loved another man—" She stopped, trying to think of something equally impossible, cats loving dogs, but it all fell short. "Well, there was no such thing. There were two men I remember worked for the railroad who lived together just outside of town. There were lots of fellows
worked for the railroad that lived together, but there was something about these two made everybody nervous and after a while they were run off, and even then I don't think folks could put their finger on what it was, exactly. We were a backwards lot, and I was way out there in front, the most determined to keep myself backwards. I was a grown married woman before someone told me what it was to be gay and it was a while after that before I believed it. And yet all the time I knew something was different with Guy, and he was only three or four before I knew that was what it was. I never exactly said it to myself, and I sure never said it to anyone else, but I knew."

  The bartender arrived with two fresh drinks. "Coming up on last call," he said helpfully, picking up the used glasses and damp napkins.

  "We'll think about it," Mrs. Fetters said. She drank while Sabine waited. "I'm taking too long to get to my point. That's because I'm not so interested in getting there. By the time Guy was fourteen there was a little trouble, him messing with friends, playing games that I didn't think were games. I sent him to Bible camp, I got him saved, but all over him I saw his nature. I thought it was something that could be changed, a sickness, and so I sent him away when I was pregnant with Bertie. I sent him to the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility up in Lowell to get cured. I sent him into the worst kind of hell so that what was wrong could get beaten out of him. The day he turned eighteen he came home, packed up his things, and left. That was that. He didn't want anything to do with us after that, and once some time had gone by I couldn't say I blamed him. I never knew what happened to him, not until fifteen years later, when I saw the two of you on the Johnny Carson show. You can't imagine what that's like, thinking your child is probably having some miserable life somewhere because of what you've done to him and then seeing him on television, a big famous magician. I liked to fell out. I wrote to the people at the show and asked them to forward a letter on to Guy—Parsifal the Magician. Oh, I was sorry and I told him how sorry I was and how we all wanted him to come home. I just about held my breath every day going out to the mailbox. Then, sure enough, I get a letter with no return address and a postmark from Los Angeles. It was very polite. He said all was forgiven and forgotten and the past was in the past, but the past needed to stay right where it was. He said he just didn't want to think about it, not ever again, and would I please respect that. He sent us some money. Every now and then more money would come. In the last few years it was a whole lot more money, but he didn't write to me again and he didn't write to Kitty, which I think was wrong of him no matter how mad he was." Mrs. Fetters looked right at Sabine and Sabine did not look away. "So that's what I did."