The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "No," Sabine said, "I understand." Children wanted to change their names and move to New York? She, who had been read to every night, whose hand was held at the crossing of every street, did not understand. Sabine in Los Angeles, where everything in the world was available to her, peaches in January, a symphony orchestra, the Pacific Ocean. It was not the city children dreamed of leaving. It was the one they dreamed of coming to.

  "There's a real high price for getting out of a place like this." Kitty smiled. "Alliance, Nebraska, doesn't like to let go once it's got its hooks in you. There aren't any new people coming in to take your place. But Guy did it."

  "How?"

  "He suffered," Kitty said, making "suffered" sound like a bright word, a fine plan.

  "You mean reform school?"

  "I mean reform school, I mean killing my father. That's creating a circumstance where you just can't come back."

  Sabine sat up in her chair. Her fingers fluttered in front of her face as if something cold and wet had touched her there, and the cigarette, smoked almost down to the filter but still glowing orange, dropped to the floor and rolled beneath the table. "What?"

  Kitty looked so startled one would think she had received the news, not given it. "My father," she said.

  The words were somewhere in the catalog of words Sabine's mind had memorized. "Your father."

  "They told you this," Kitty said, her voice neither a question nor an answer. Her voice was wishful.

  "Who?"

  "Guy told you, Mother told you, Bertie told you. Fuck." Kitty reached under the table and retrieved the cigarette, which had burned a small black reminder into the green floor. "That mark on the floor," people would say, "that was the moment that Sabine knew."

  "No one told me anything."

  Kitty stubbed out what was left of nothing and went to the sink to wash her hands. When she was through she dried them and washed them again. "Why would no one tell you that?"

  "Do you think I know?"

  Kitty wrapped her hands in the dish towel hanging from the refrigerator door. Her face was pleading, guilty, and for an instant Sabine thought if there had been a killing, Kitty was the one who'd done it. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to tell you. I never thought you didn't know—I mean, that's the story. That's everything. If you know about this family at all, then that's what you know."

  "You're saying Guy killed his father." Because it was Guy.

  "He did," Kitty said, her voice quiet.

  "And this is true. This is a known fact. Did someone see it?" She would not misunderstand this. She would not let him be accused of something impossible.

  Kitty raised her head, repeated the list of all in attendance. "I saw it. My mother saw it. Guy saw it. My father saw it." She braced herself against the counter, as if Sabine might come at her.

  Was it still snowing? Did the wind still circle around the house? Shouldn't the others be up by now? Shouldn't they wake them?

  Sabine asked when.

  "New Year's Eve, nineteen sixty-six. Guy was fifteen. Almost sixteen."

  She asked how.

  "Hit him."

  "With his fists?"

  Kitty shook her head. She had been the one to tell. It wasn't a secret. Every paper for five hundred miles had printed the story, printed it again when Guy got out of Lowell. "A bat," she said. "His baseball bat. One hit. He didn't mean to kill him, he meant to stop him. He pulled him and slapped him but it was like he was just a fly, like Oad didn't even feel it. And the bat was right there, right by the door, where he always left it. There wasn't one second to think. He was just going to stop him but there was something about the way..." She stopped and waited and then tried again. "My father was moving very quickly. There was no time. Guy couldn't get a good fix on where, and the bat came down on his neck. He broke his neck. In two minutes, in a minute, he was dead."

  "Stop him from what?"

  "Kicking Mother on the floor," she said, and then she repeated it because it was the part of the story that so many people would leave out later on. "She was pregnant with Bertie then."

  On the night that Phan died, they knew it was over before it happened. Phan couldn't speak anymore but there were sounds that he made, crying, infant sounds. Sounds from the back of his throat in a pitch unlike anything they had heard before. You could hear them no matter where you were in the house, even though they were soft, and they froze you to that spot and broke you there. Phan was blind by then; he could not sit up. All he knew for sure was pain and fear. And he knew that Parsifal was there. Parsifal was not beside the bed, but in the bed. He took off his shirt so that he could hold Phan against his skin. He held him all day that last day, through the stink and the sounds and the terrible fear of what he knew was coming for him, too. He held the man that he loved, rocked him and kissed his hair as he had rocked him and kissed his hair on the first night they were together. Parsifal was afraid of death but he was never afraid of Phan. He loved him. Every minute he loved him.

  "Why didn't your mother tell me?"

  Kitty bit down on her lip harder than was thoughtful. She was trying to understand and trying to explain simultaneously. "I'm only guessing, but I imagine at first she didn't want to scare the hell out of you. She wanted you to like her, to like us. She wanted you to come here. My mother does what she has to. She's got experience in that. Then later, she let it slip her mind. Why think about it, you know? This isn't something we talk about. Even then we didn't really talk about it." Kitty closed her eyes, shook her head. "Would you have come if you'd known?"

  There, in that second, the exhaustion came, broke down like a wave the way it did on the nights Sabine worked so late. "Christ, I don't know. I would rather have known about it when I was home. I wish I could go and get into my own bed now. I would rather have known about all of this a long time ago, mostly so I wouldn't be hearing it now."

  "Guy was the best man I ever knew, even when he was a boy. It was an accident, how he killed him. He didn't mean to."

  "I'm sure he didn't mean to," Sabine said. Sure of what? Of nothing. She ran her hands up and down the sleeves of Phan's white cotton pajamas, pajamas she'd picked out herself for him to wear in a hospital in Los Angeles.

  "When it happened, when he fell, I thought, God, let him be dead, because if he's not dead he'll get off that floor and kill us all. Mama and Guy, they were half out of their minds, but I went over to him, knelt down on the floor and touched his neck and I felt his pulse kicking away. His eyes were open, not that he was looking at anything. My mother propped up on her hand and she said, 'Is he okay?' And I said, 'He's dead.' I believe those were the last words my father heard, me pronouncing him dead. I said it because I wanted that much for it to be true, so he wouldn't kill Guy for hitting him. Then it was true. Just like that."

  "Where," Sabine said, but she couldn't quite make it into a question.

  "Where what?"

  "Did this happen."

  Kitty looked around the room as if trying to remember exactly, and Sabine felt something like a small hand, a child's hand, creeping up the back of her throat. It laid a tiny finger against her tonsils. Kitty pointed, the nondescript corner of green linoleum near the back door. A broom stood in that corner, a pair of snow boots, one turned on its side. "There."

  It must have made an excruciating sound, a hollow crack of contact that would have precluded anyone crying out. There would have been the sound that any man would make falling to the floor.... There was Dot, on the floor herself. And where was Guy then, the boy who Parsifal was? Standing above them? Was the bat still locked in both hands, raised above his head while he waited to see what would try to lift itself up, or did the bat swing limply at his side? Did he lean on it, drop it? Did he back away? Cry out? "Why did you stay?"

  "Stay where?" Kitty pulled the elastic out of her hair and nervously reshaped her ponytail.

  Sabine redirected Kitty's attention by turning her head to that side of the room. "You didn't move."

  "Ho
uses in small towns where boys kill their fathers are tough to sell. Kids weren't allowed to walk down our street for months, and when they were allowed, they didn't anyway. And there wasn't any money and there wasn't anyplace to go and when there was, if there was, years and years after that, hell, we didn't even care anymore." Kitty put out her cigarette, though she'd barely smoked this one at all. "Forgive me, but I think I need to stop this now. We can start it again later, but right now I think I'm at my limit."

  "It's so late," Sabine said, not having any idea what time it was but knowing instinctively it was no time to be up. "You must need to get home."

  Kitty stood up. She was tall but not as tall as Sabine. "I'm home for tonight."

  "You're sleeping here?"

  "For tonight," Kitty said. That was another story, a story that neither of them had the energy for. She picked up the saucer and dumped the ashes in a trashcan under the sink. Then she washed the saucer with hot water and soap and put it in the rack to dry. "You go on to bed."

  "I'm sleeping in your room."

  "No, you're not. I'm on the couch. It's only a few hours. I have to be at work in the morning. It's a good couch."

  Sabine had slept on so many couches. In dressing rooms and Parsifal's old apartment and the hospital waiting rooms. She was too bred to even consider hunting up blankets, a spare pillow. Too tired to think of someone else having to do it. "Come on and sleep in your room. There's another bed."

  "I'm fine," Kitty said, and raised up her hand.

  "I won't talk anymore," Sabine said. "Sleep in your room. I'm going to sleep. It doesn't matter to me."

  Kitty meant to decline, but, like her mother and her sister, she was unable to refuse what she wanted. "Maybe then we won't have all those dreams," she said.

  They walked down the hall together, dragging their long tails of information. They did not turn on the light and Sabine got into the bed that was unmade and as cold now as the snow on the windowsill. She pulled up her knees, shivered. Kitty took off her jeans and got into the other bed wearing a sweatshirt and anything else she had on. She was lying on her back, and Sabine could see her profile clearly in the light that came in under the door. She recognized it.

  "I'm sorry about this," Kitty said.

  "I would have found out sooner or later." Sabine turned on her side to face her.

  "Who knows, maybe not. You made it this far."

  There were so many other things to say, but sleep was pushing Sabine down under the water with both hands. Questions struggled to shape themselves into half sentences, but she didn't have enough energy left to form her mouth around them. Already Kitty's breathing had become regular and deep. Sabine thought that there would be someone waiting for her on the other side. She thought there would be information, but when she went to the snowy field, she waited and waited and she was alone.

  Before her eyes opened, Sabine's hand skimmed the crumpled bedspread, looking for the warm bundle of rabbit fur that usually slept near her stomach. When her fingers found nothing there, she remembered and opened her eyes. This was a boy's room, brightly lit because the rolled shades had not been pulled down the night before. There was sun covering the beds and the desk. Sun coming off the hot tin of the baseball trophies and washing over the red plaid rug. She was alone in the room and there was no indication that she hadn't slept there alone all night, never waking, barely turning over. The other twin bed was neatly made, so exactly as it had been when she arrived yesterday that for a minute it seemed that nothing had happened. It wasn't snowing now. Outside the window was divided into two planes, blinding blue and blinding white. The snow was snapped down over the field like an ironed bedsheet. It was a clean, orderly world.

  Sabine would have had to stoop to get all the way under the shower but instead she stood there, eyes closed, and let the water beat against her face, her nose almost touching the flat silver disc of the showerhead. Everything in the story had been reversed. Los Angeles was the place to kill someone, Nebraska was where you went later to forget. The openness would hide you. No one would look in Nebraska. Probably every third house on the street sheltered a member of the Witness Protection Program. Yet somehow Parsifal's plan had worked. He moved through the city of patricides without detection. Sabine was waiting to feel devastated by what she knew, but the longer she waited, the more she was sure it wasn't coming. She had taken all her blows with proper heartbreak: Phan's death and then Parsifal's, the surprise of his family, and then all the other surprises. Yet somehow the news that Parsifal had killed his father, killed him, albeit accidentally, with a baseball bat, called up very little this morning. The steam in the bathroom released decades of soap and shampoo smells from the wallpaper. Sabine turned her naked body in a coastal fog of herbal-floral steam and let the water, which was slightly hotter than she could stand, pound on her neck. She wouldn't have told, either. That was where the comfort was, the thing that made sense. Now she understood why he had lied to her, and how it was less a he than the complete burial of an unmentionable truth. Where we are born is the worst kind of crapshoot. Sabine was not entitled to her birth in Israel, to the loving nest of Fairfax. This could have been her house. She could have picked up the bat, felt the coolness of the wood in her hands. And if she had, she would have cut off the past as well, clipped it like an article from the newspaper so that people might see that something was missing but no one would know what it was. And even as she wished he had told her, so that she might have comforted him, forgiven him, she knew that had it been her life she would not have told him, either; because there never would have been a morning, sitting in the kitchen over coffee, that she could have pushed the plates aside and taken his hands and said, "Listen, listen to me, there's something I have to tell you." Parsifal, her friend, her husband, had made himself a happy life like someone else would make a seaworthy boat, following step by careful step. The past was no longer his past and it slid away from him like an anchor, unattached, to the mossy darkness of the ocean floor. She had watched him sleep for years, seen his face the first moment he opened his eyes, and she knew he was not troubled by dreams. This was Sabine's comfort, her joy: Parsifal had gotten away. He was in the boat that saved his life, the boat that was Los Angeles. He had let the blue water run over his open hand. It was Sabine who had come back. Sabine who was now at the bottom of that ocean, holding the anchor to her chest.

  The water went quickly from hot to lukewarm to cold and forced her out of the shower. In the mirror she saw nothing but thick steam. When she was dried and dressed, she went to the kitchen, where Dot Fetters sat with her coffee, staring into the unbearable brightness of snow.

  "I slept so late," Sabine said.

  "You were up late," Dot said dully. She did not look up.

  Sabine got her coffee in a SEE MOUNT RUSHMORE mug, the rocky faces of three important presidents and one minor one floating in a pale blue oval. "Bertie's gone to school?"

  Dot nodded.

  "And Kitty?"

  "Gone first thing to work. I saw her, though."

  "So she told you we met. I liked her. Bertie was right. She looks so much like Parsifal."

  "She told me." Dot nodded, agreeing with herself that it was right to acknowledge this. "Told me she told you everything. She was none too pleased about it, either, thought surely I wouldn't have brought you all the way out here without coming clean first. I guess we need to get our stories straight, have a big family conference. Forgive me, but we don't get a lot of new people around here. We've got Haas, but I know for sure Bertie has told him every single thing starting with Moses. He always looks so nervous when he's here." Dot looked up at Sabine for the first time. "Did Kitty tell you anything about Kitty?"

  "No."

  "Well, I was just checking. Got to see who knows what. Kitty thinks you're going to want to leave today, that I ought to plan on driving you to Scottsbluff."

  Sabine thought about the plane, the screaming stewardess, her raccoon eyes melting down her cheeks. "I don't have a
ny plans to go."

  Dot chose to drive her point home, just to make sure there was absolutely no misunderstanding it. "Guy killed Albert, right there in that corner." She picked up her cup. The coffee had cooled to a point where she could drink it quickly. "My son, your husband. Baseball bat. Al was dead right away. Ambulance came, and then the police."

  "That's what she told me," Sabine said, thinking it pointless to add, more or less. She felt a great well of sympathy for Dot. She was seeing the part where Dot was kicked, not the part where Parsifal stopped it. It wasn't this Dot, but the one in the picture. Small, pretty, hopeful. Sabine got up and went to the refrigerator to find some milk for her coffee. She saw the eggs waiting in their blue depressions on the door and felt that they must be a good omen. She slipped one into the pocket of her sweater. Then she pulled her chair around so that she faced Dot, so that their knees touched. She considered saying that it would be fine if Dot wanted to stop there, but she was afraid Dot would think she wasn't willing to listen, that she was repulsed by what was, in fact, a repulsive story.

  "I don't know how much of this you can understand," Dot said. "I know you're plenty smart, but you weren't here and it's hard to get the whole picture sometimes. It's hard for me to understand it all, and I was there."