The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  On the way home Sabine stopped by the downtown Sheraton Grand and the Fetters packed their bags and came home with her. She thought they might protest, but they smiled and nodded, said yes and thank you. They wanted to stay in the house, to be close to Sabine. Dot and Bertie Fetters wanted her attention. They wanted her love. It was not in their nature to shy away from what they wanted. She fed them dinner from Canter's. She laid out their towels and folded extra blankets at the feet of their beds. She asked them what they needed, what they wanted. They all kissed one another good-night and while she was walking down the hall they called to her again, "Good night." She left her door open so that she could hear the feint sounds of their voices. She thought she could hear water running through the pipes. The house was not empty. Rabbit came down the hall at a better than usual clip and stood up on his hind legs until Sabine reached down and brought him up into bed. Outside, the thick green magnolia leaves lost hold of their branches and floated like flat-bottomed canoes around the edges of the pool. A helicopter made a soft chop overhead. Everything was in its place.

  A wedding, Bertie's wedding, might be reason enough to go to Nebraska. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the state. She told herself there were cows, it was cold, they grew corn. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make the words into landscapes. It was a country she couldn't imagine. What could be more foreign than Nebraska? It was farther away than Israel. It was farther than Vietnam. Finally she stopped trying in favor of sleep, and the sleep was long and deep and dreamless.

  In the morning they sorted through pictures while eating bagels and eggs. There were a few albums, well organized and clearly marked with dates that Phan had put together; but pictures from the time before Phan and the ones taken after his death were dumped unceremoniously into a Bloomingdale's box large enough to hold the fox-fur jacket Sabine had bought for her mother's birthday in a year of largesse. Her mother had let her keep the box.

  In the early years together, Sabine had asked to see pictures of Parsifal's family, but he said there were none. She held her position that that wasn't possible; if your family is killed in a car crash you don't deal with it by throwing all their pictures away.

  "I didn't keep anything from that time," he had said. "I told you that."

  "Nothing? Not even a sock? You stripped yourself naked and started over again?"

  He looked at her, that special look reserved for conversations about his past that said, Drop it. No more. "There are no pictures," he repeated.

  Maybe Sabine could have believed this, but Parsifal was a fool for documentation. Look at the evidence on the kitchen table, the pictures sliding onto the floor in every direction. Eight rolls of film, thirty-six exposures each, from one trip to India. Sabine in the marketplace wearing a wide straw hat. Parsifal coming down a ghat to the Ganges, shirtless, laughing. There were pictures of the rug stores. Pictures of nameless magicians. Picture after picture of white rabbits doing cute things, sleeping on their backs, looking out the window, eating Cheerios from a bowl.

  "Is this Rabbit?" Bertie asked.

  Sabine looked at the picture, held it towards the light. "That was the rabbit before this one. Not such a good rabbit. Kind of stupid, God rest."

  Parsifal had kept the bad pictures, half a face out of focus, the blur of a tree taken from a speeding car, unflattering photos of friends with flame red eyes, their mouths open. "I have to throw these away," Sabine said.

  "Maybe later," Mrs. Fetters said, taking the stack out of her hands. "There's no sense in doing it now. Where was this?"

  Parsifal in his camel overcoat, unshaven, looking serious. To his left there was a mass of dark wire that Sabine knew to be the Eiffel Tower. "Paris."

  "Really," Mrs. Fetters said. "You two went everywhere."

  Sabine didn't remember it that way, there were plenty of days spent at home, vacuuming, doing taxes, but confronted with so much proof she could only think that in the last twenty-two years she had seen a great deal of the world. She never thought about the trips, the dinners or days spent in museums. She only remembered his company now. Why had he always taken her? There were plenty of men, men at home and men whom he met while he and Sabine were gone; their pictures were on the table now, on the floor and in her lap, nameless, with such beautiful faces. But none of them had stayed on the way Sabine did, the way Phan would have.

  "I like the ones of the two of you onstage the best," Bertie said, and handed Sabine a picture taken at the Sands in Las Vegas.

  "We're both wearing too much makeup," she said, and flipped it aside.

  Mrs. Fetters grabbed the picture back. She studied their faces. "You're beautiful," she said, her voice nearly angry. "Both of you."

  Sabine thought the bright lights made them look sickly and she didn't like to see herself in costume. But no one ever looked better than Parsifal on a stage. Tuxedos always made her think of the night they met.

  "I'd like to have this one," Mrs. Fetters said. "If you don't like it."

  "Of course," Sabine said, "take whatever you want. Clearly I have too many of them. And the negatives are all in here, too." She shook the box for effect, though she could hardly imagine finding the negative for one particular photograph. The picture of Parsifal in front of the rug store slid by and then was reabsorbed. She had enough to remember Parsifal by, more than enough. The Fetters could take what they wanted. "If there's anything else," she said, looking up suddenly. "I don't know what you'd like, clothes or books, furniture. Just tell me." They deserved things. She would pack up boxes of memorabilia. She would ship things to them later. Anything.

  Mrs. Fetters was going to say something, but a picture, just that moment revealed in the shift of paper, caught Bertie's eye. "Well, hey. Look at this." She reached into the box and plucked it up. The winning ticket. After looking at it herself for a minute, she gave it to her mother.

  Of all the photos, this one seemed to please Dot Fetters the most. Sabine leaned in. It was a black-and-white picture of a dark-haired girl about eight or nine years old. She was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt. She was standing in front of a car, smiling, doing nothing but waiting to have her picture taken. The face was familiar, but maybe just because Sabine had sorted through those pictures so many times before. It was largely a box of strangers. It seemed perfectly reasonable that there would be a child in there that she didn't know.

  "That's not me," Sabine said.

  "Of course it's not," Mrs. Fetters said, so happy to have the picture.

  Bertie was the one who told her it was Kitty.

  Sabine looked again. She had not seen a picture of Parsifal as a child and yet this was Parsifal as a child. Parsifal with long hair and a girl's dp of the head. Parsifal's other sister.

  Mrs. Fetters fanned the picture slowly back and forth, holding it by the corner as if it were damp. "I knew it. I knew he wouldn't have written us off altogether. Or at least he wouldn't write off Kitty. He loved her too much. Those two were a pair, right and left. When he left he took a picture of Kitty. That's proof. He leaves everything behind, but he takes a picture of his sister."

  The little girl had the sun in her face, but the sun, either early-morning or late-afternoon or hidden halfway behind a cloud, didn't seem too strong for her, and she looked straight into it. Sabine wasn't sure what it proved, one picture in a fur-coat box with a couple of thousand others. It wasn't as if he'd kept it on his desk, or put her in a frame in the bedside table with the people considered family. But who could say? Maybe having it meant something, maybe it meant everything. She was certainly comfortable letting Dot Fetters think that it did.

  "Do you want that?" Sabine asked.

  Mrs. Fetters looked surprised. "No, no. This one's yours. I have plenty of pictures of Kitty. This is the only one you've got." She handed it to Sabine, who took it carefully and put it in the breast pocket of her blouse, not because she wanted it, but because she understood the gesture to be important.

  Dot and Bertie Fetters made mo
dest piles of pictures they wanted to keep for themselves. Mrs. Fetters liked the pictures in foreign places best, while Bertie preferred the ones from magic shows. Bertie took one of the ocean with no one in it at all. They both took as many pictures of Sabine as they took of Parsifal. Mrs. Fetters took one of Phan.

  "I'm going to take one of you now," Bertie said, pulling an Instamatic from her purse. "One of the two of you together." She bit her lip thoughtfully. "We'll go out back, by the pool."

  Mrs. Fetters touched her hair. The curls sprang around her fingers. "Just take one of Sabine," she said.

  "Both of you," Bertie said. She looked around on the floor, then reached down and scooped up the rabbit with her other hand. She handed him to Sabine. "Him, too."

  They went out through the French doors in the dining room. Rabbit blinked and twitched in the sun. "Over by the purple flowers," Bertie said, the camera making her suddenly confident. "Come forward just a little, I want to see the pool, too. That's good."

  Mrs. Fetters put her arm around Sabine's waist and pulled her close; with her other hand she petted the rabbit's head. Sabine felt Mrs. Fetters' soft midsection against her hip. Dot Fetters smelled like vanilla.

  "Smile," Bertie said.

  Places were exchanged. There was a picture of Bertie and Sabine and then one that Sabine took of Bertie and her mother, Bertie holding the rabbit. There they were, in Parsifal's yard, in Phan's yard. Maybe Parsifal had done the best that he could, going on with his life without them, maybe the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility was something that no one could be forgiven for, but Sabine couldn't help but think he would have liked these people. It was a shame that he had spent his life without this love that was available to him. "You'll send me copies," Sabine said.

  "You bet," Mrs. Fetters said.

  Rabbit was tired of being held and he squirmed and kicked in hopes of being set down in the sweet dichondra. Sabine was always afraid he would find his way under the fence or fall into the pool and drown. It was only on the rarest of occasions, only when she was right there all the time, watching, that he was allowed in the yard.

  After the dishes were put away and bags were packed, it really was time to go to the airport, although no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave. Mrs. Fetters saw that there was a bit more coffee left in the pot and decided to go ahead and drink it.

  "It hardly makes any sense to come all the way here and not see anything," Sabine said, her voice sounding wistful in a way that she could not entirely account for. "If you wanted to stay a couple of extra days, you could stay here. I'd pay to have your tickets changed."

  Bertie smiled, her blue eyes bright and clear like her brother's. The more Sabine looked at her, the more beautiful she became. "You're sweet," she said. "It would be heaven to stay, but I've got to get back to work, and besides, I've got to see Haas."

  Sabine thought for a minute, scanned back over conversations. "God, Bertie, I don't even know what you do."

  "I teach first grade. They got a sub for Friday, but Monday I have to be back."

  Swarms of children, pots of thick white paste and snub-nosed scissors, construction-paper leaves in red and yellow taped to the windows. "First grade," Sabine said.

  "Oh, Bertie's the best," Mrs. Fetters said. "She got the teaching award for the whole school last year."

  Bertie shrugged. "It's a good job."

  "Anyway," Mrs. Fetters said, "Kitty counts on me to help her with the boys, and we've got this wedding to plan for. But it won't be that long till we see you. You'll come to the wedding?"

  The last wedding Sabine had been to was her own, and she couldn't tell the Fetters her best memories from that day. Parsifal danced with the rabbi, who was a remarkably good dancer, while the band played "Girl From Ipanema." Architects lined up to kiss the bride and one by one brushed their lips to her ear, begging her to meet them later in the evening. There was talk in the crowd of putting Parsifal and Sabine into chairs and lifting the chairs above their heads and dancing out onto the street, but people were drunk by then, their train of thought was easily lost. "Maybe I'll come to the wedding," Sabine said.

  What they accomplished by their dallying was the elimination of time for long good-byes. All the way to the airport they looked at their watches, wondering if they would make the plane. They were silent in the car. There was too much left to say and not enough time. There was no one place to start. Sabine wanted to ask what subjects Parsifal had liked in school as a boy. Had he done well, was he interested in magic? And what about his father? Did Parsifal ever say what had happened at the boys' reformatory? Had they ever gone to visit him there? Sabine wanted to say that even if Mrs. Fetters wasn't in the market for forgiveness, Sabine forgave her anyway, because as they took the San Diego Freeway towards the airport, she knew with sudden, utter clarity that his mother had not understood what she was doing, and, if she had, she never, never would have done it. But Sabine said none of this. She parked the car, checked their bag, and led them through the snaking concourse without a word. The Fetters no longer seemed interested in LAX.

  At the gateway, in clear view of so many strangers, Mrs. Fetters began to cry.

  "Don't," Sabine said. "You have to go."

  "You were so sweet to us."

  "You'll come back," Sabine said. "You'll come back and stay for as long as you want."

  "You shouldn't be by yourself." Mrs. Fetters slid her fingers beneath her glasses. "I've got my girls and the kids. I don't want you to have to be alone."

  "I'll be fine," Sabine said.

  The crowds moved around them, pressing them closer together. From overhead came an endless stream of information: If stand-by passengers would please ... Rows twenty-nine through seventeen ... announcing the arrival ... final boarding ... Ladies and gentlemen, there's been a delay...

  "That's us," Bertie said, but Sabine didn't know which part she was referring to.

  Mrs. Fetters stepped back, stepped directly onto a five-year-old girl with lank yellow hair, who shot out from under her foot and ran away for all she was worth. Mrs. Fetters did not notice. "You'll come with us," she said, her voice filled with wonder at her own good idea. The plan that would solve everything. Sabine would come with them.

  "Now?"

  "Get on the plane. You have the money. We can get some clothes, whatever you need. Come home with us."

  Bertie looked at them, interested.

  "I can't come with you. I have to go home." She held Dot Fetters in her arms for a moment and then let her go. "Who would feed Rabbit?"

  "Mama, we're boarding," Bertie said.

  "It's not a bad idea," Mrs. Fetters said. "Even if it's not right now."

  A tall black flight attendant in a tight blue suit stared at them from her podium and then gestured with her head towards the door. All the other tickets had been collected. Everyone was onboard, ready to go.

  "Good-bye, Sabine," Bertie said, and kissed her quickly. "I hope you come. I really do." She took her mother's arm and guided her towards the door, making Dot Fetters appear older than she was. When they handed in their tickets Dot blew a kiss and waved. Sabine felt sure they would come back, one more idea, something else to tell, but they turned around and then they were gone, down into the tunnel that would take them to the plane that would take them to Nebraska.

  Sabine stayed to watch the plane take off, and even after it left she stayed. All around her people were crying in the wake of arrivals and departures. They clung to one another as if a plane had nearly crashed or was about to crash. They held their children, kissed their lovers. She heard their voices all around her—It's so good to see you ... What will I do when you're gone ... I thought you would never get here ... Good-bye. The good-byes wore her out. She'd had enough of them.

  In the days after the Fetters left, Sabine slipped back into bed, back into the deep nest of dark sheets and king-sized pillows. A late Santa Ana wind howled around the house and loosened the ivy from the gate. Low waves crested and broke in the swimming po
ol. The half-constructed mall sat in her studio, no walkways, no roof, the windowpanes sealed in polyurethane bags. Salvio called from the rug store and even before he asked his question, Sabine told him he would have to decide himself. She told him to decide everything. Most of the calls she didn't return, including a nervous message from Sam Spender, the magician. On television the local news focused on murder, suspicion, prosecution. What would that be like, to have someone to blame death on, to stand across the courtroom from that person and point them out, say, You, you took everything I had. Little did they know that everything they had would be taken anyway. The thought of accusation exhausted Sabine. There wasn't any order. There wasn't any sense in trying to find it. On the day she was due to go back to the hospital to have the stitches taken out of her hand, she sat on the bath mat and cut them with cuticle scissors and then pulled the stiff thread out with tweezers. They lay scattered on the white floor like the spiky legs of a disembodied insect. The scar was pretty, dark red and thin. It didn't hurt.

  Eight days after they left there was a letter from Dot Fetters. Four pictures fell out when Sabine unfolded the paper. Three had been taken in her own backyard, but it was the fourth one that interested her. It was of a boy, thin chested and bright faced, maybe eight or nine years old, but Sabine was a bad judge of children. He wore a band around his forehead with a lone feather jutting up from the back, his eyes damp with pleasure. A sweet-faced, dark-haired boy who was her own boy. She would know him anywhere, in an instant. His jeans were faded and loose, his T-shirt striped. Sabine could barely make out the freckles that had left him long before they met. She studied his neck, his delicate shoulders. She memorized the gate behind him and the scalloped white border of the photograph. On the back, written in ink, were the most basic facts: "Guy, 1959." 1959. Sabine wished she had known him then, when she was a girl in Los Angeles. What had been wasted when she was only a well-loved daughter, her mother walking her to school in Fairfax every morning, lunch in a brown-paper sack, her father taking her to CBS, telling her she was sitting in Walter Cronkite's chair, even though Cronkite delivered the news from New York. What had happened to this little boy while she was sitting in Canter's after Hebrew school on Sunday, drinking cream soda and reading the funny papers while her parents divided up the Los Angeles Times? What had she lost that she could never account for? She reached over and pulled open the drawer on the bedside table where the picture of Kitty sat, faceup. Sabine lay on her back and held the two side by side. It was the same sun, the same scalloped edges; on the back there was the same handwriting, which said, "Kitty, 1959." Maybe the pictures were taken on the same day, or at least during the same summer. It was true, what Mrs. Fetters said: They were nearly twins; except, of course, for the wonderful feather. That was Parsifal's alone.