The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  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?"

  Sabine smiled. The very thought of it. "Not us," she said, watching Bertie and Haas huddle together at the information counter, his arm around her waist. "It wasn't that kind of love." When Phan was in the hospital, when he was sick at home, Parsifal would hold him in a way she could not describe. It was the way Bertie was holding Haas now, holding on to him. They seemed to absorb one another through the skin.

  Parking the car only consisted of driving about twenty feet to the left and turning it off. The lot was well plowed and lightly scattered with cars. Every car stood far apart from the next. No one took the risk of sliding into someone else's fender. When Dot and Sabine pushed through the door of the hospital, the nurse looked up from her paperwork and gave a smile that established her as both helpful and concerned.

  "It's not us," Dot said. "My daughter, Bertie Fetters." Dot pointed to the double doors, knowing full well that was the direction they would have gone in. "Albertine Fetters."

  "Of course," the nurse said. She had the healthy, big-boned look of a woman who should have been on a ranch, collecting eggs and putting out hay for the horses. Sitting at her desk in such a white uniform, she had the carefully studied attitude of someone who was pretending to be something she was not. "She went back with her husband. Do you want to go with them?"

  "Naw," Dot said, walking away. "I've been. Let them be alone." She took up a spot on a battered two-seater sofa as far away from the nurse as possible and then patted the cushion next to her for Sabine to come and join her. "No big-city emergency room, hey?"

  Sabine sat down. In their hurry to leave she had not put on socks and now her feet were aching from the cold. "It is a hospital, isn't it?" Sabine hated hospitals, but this one brought up no unpleasant memories. It was just a large, well-lit room with a linoleum floor and mismatched furniture. If it weren't for the nurse, who was deeply involved in a magazine article, they would have been alone.

  "I should know. There isn't one part of this place I haven't been. I had all three of my kids here. Kitty crushed a glass with her hand. Al pulled Guy's arm out of the socket—Lord, that was a gruesome sight. They stitched up my lip and my eye, taped up my ribs. So many things you couldn't count. We were the regular customers. There was a time I couldn't imagine coming in this place and not knowing the name of the girl at the front desk. The nurses all said hello to me when I saw them in the grocery store. Cops brought Al here the night he died. Tried to resuscitate him all the way over in the ambulance and then again when they got here. What a thought that was, bringing him back from the dead." She shook her head. "Kitty got married on the second floor. Of course, it was just a tiny little place then. They added all this on ten years ago, our last stab at prosperity. If you want to be somewhere that Guy spent a lot of time, then this is the place."

  Sabine reached out to touch a rubber plant at the end of the love seat. For a minute she'd thought it might have been real. "Maybe I should drive out to Lowell," she said. "Take a look at the reformatory."

  Dot turned to her, her mouth open. "Jesus, what a horrible thought. You wouldn't do that."

  "Just to see it, see where he was."

  "You forget about that," Dot said. Sabine knew the look on her face. She had seen it on Parsifal's face the day she suggested they ride out to Connecticut to see his parents' graves. "He isn't there. You wouldn't see anything but a bunch of crazy, terrified boys. Or maybe it's gotten better by now. It couldn't have gotten worse."

  "You went to see him at Lowell?"

  "Sure I went," Dot said quietly. "Two weeks before I had Bertie. I took the bus clear to the other side of the state, almost to Iowa and up north of Omaha. Worst sort of hellhole, like nothing I'd seen before or since. But Guy came in the visiting room so nice, his hair all combed. All he wanted to know about was how Kitty was and how I was, and when I asked about how he was doing, he shook his head and said he was fine. I was so embarrassed, being that pregnant, but I knew the trip would be even harder once I had the baby with me. When our time was up, he gave me a hug, just like he was only going off to bed, and he told me not to come back." Dot nodded. "I knew what he meant. He didn't want me to have to come so far, but more than that, he didn't want' me to see him there. For me, that day was the worst of it. Worse than the day Al died and worse than the day Guy was sentenced. Guy would never want anyone going back to Lowell."

  Sabine took Dot's hand. She felt vaguely relieved. Touring the monuments of Parsifal's youth wasn't the only thing that mattered. "So I won't go. You know I hate to drive in the snow, anyway."

  "I appreciate that," Dot said.

  Sabine never looked up when someone came into the waiting room at Cedars Sinai. It was part of the code of manners, that you let people have their privacy, that you let them read bad magazines or have a cry or go to the bathroom twenty times in a half hour and grant them the courtesy of not noticing. But Box Butte General was too small, and when they heard the door Dot and Sabine and the nurse all looked up in unison at the tall, thin man who came through it.

  Howard Plate left a watery trail of snow on his way to the information desk. "I wanted to check on Bertie Fetters."

  "Hey," Dot called out. She waved her hand so that he would have no problem identifying her.

  Howard sighed and drummed the nurse's desk slowly with his fingers before turning and walking over. The nurse, always interested in the possibility of family drama on a slow night, watched until he was safely on the other side of the room, and then she went back to her magazine.

  "What are you doing over here?" Dot said.

  "I was getting ready to go on. I thought I'd just come by and check, make sure she's okay." He didn't look at Sabine. He kept his eyes on Dot. His hands stayed deep inside his pockets. "There's nothing wrong with her, did they say?"

  "No one's told me anything. I imagine she'll take some stitches in the back of her head."

  "Well, it's too bad."

  "You shouldn't be throwing tables around," Dot sa}d. Her tone was instructive: look both ways before you cross the street, never leave a knife point up in the dishwasher.

  "Don't get started on me," Howard said mildly. "If I want to hear it I'll go see my wife."

  "I'm not starting on you, Howard. I think it was decent of you to come by. I think you're a real son of a bitch for a million other things, but you're good to check on her."

  He nodded his head slightly, acceptin
g both the criticism and the smaller compliment. He looked tired. The map of scars on his cheek was red from the cold. "You don't need to say I was here."

  Across the room, Haas slipped through the double doors and was almost in their party before any of them noticed. They were all startled to see him; the terribly pained expression on his pale face rendered him tragic. For a second they each imagined some improbable version of bad news. "Why are you here?" he asked Howard.

  "How's Bertie?" Dot said.

  "Twelve stitches. She's fine. She only minded because they had to cut out some of her hair."

  "Twelve," Dot said.

  "Why are you here?"

  Howard Plate seemed completely unable to say. The bill of his cap tipped down, as if a strong wind had come up that might take it from him.

  "He came to see if Bertie was okay," Dot said.

  "You need to stay away from Bertie," Haas said. There was nothing threatening in his voice or the way he stood. His face lifted up and his glasses reflected the overhead lights and hid his eyes. He was a smaller man than Howard Plate by two inches, and he lacked Howard Plate's toughness in every way, the toughness honed in his hoodlum days, and yet there was no doubt that had they fought, Haas would have won easily. He would have been fighting for Bertie. "I know you're around," he said. "I know you're family, but when she comes into the house, you need to go."

  "I was on the other side of the room," Howard Plate said. "I got nowhere near her."

  "Doesn't matter. You say you got nowhere near her, and she got hurt. What that says to me is that you need to stay farther away."

  "Don't tell me what to do." He shifted his feet so that they were a few inches farther apart. Howard Plate was ready. If something was to happen, at least it would happen in a hospital. Dot wouldn't have to drive anyone over this time.

  "I am," Haas said, so quietly the nurse did not lift up her eyes. So quietly that Sabine almost didn't hear. "I am telling you." Then he went back across the waiting room and through the doors. Howard Plate watched him go. He stayed for a minute afterwards, watching, thinking about it. He seemed to have forgotten about his mother-in-law and Sabine. He had forgotten about the nurse. He stood by himself in the waiting room as if he were trying to decide whether or not he should go through the doors, pull Haas to the ground, and kill him. When he finally made up his mind and left, no one said good-night.