The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

There were things she had to maintain, like the magic. Parsifal had told her in the very beginning, for magic to work it had to be a habit. Magic was food, it was sleep. Neglect made her awkward.

She slept. She memorized the black lines of the branches that brushed against the storm windows of Parsifal’s bedroom. She waited for Dot and Bertie to come home. She waited for Kitty and the boys. They were regular, punctual.

Missing him was the dark and endless space she had stumbled into.

Now everybody’s older, it’s not so much of an issue anymore. She worries about me too much, though. I don’t like that. I have to worry about the boys and worry about myself, and then I have to worry about the fact that I make my mother worry.

Maybe, without being able to remember the exact incident, they sensed that she had been on television. Maybe they could smell all the other places she had been to in her life. They didn’t know why it was exactly, but they knew she was different.

It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you.

“Pick a card, any card. Memorize it and put it back in the deck. Don’t forget it, don’t change your mind, don’t lie about what it was later on when I need you to tell me the truth.” Card banter. She knew it like a song. She sang it.

And when Sabine remembered, it was all good. Except for when Phan was dying, except for the loss of Phan, there was something to recount in every single day, twenty-two years of good days.

It seems like there wasn’t ever time to talk about the past. Those were such good days, when we were all together, but everything happened in a rush. When I think back on it now, I want to find a way to slow things down.

It is overwhelming to feel such relief, the abrupt end of pain. This is everything she has wanted, this instant, the sound of his heart beneath his sweater.

Kitty was in the twin bed, both of them on their sides, Sabine facing the window, Kitty facing Sabine. Of course she could hear her now, the nearly undetectable sounds another person makes when she is at her quietest.

Sleeping together, she believed, was about love, which was what she knew the architect wanted.

Mainly she felt stupid trailing behind Kitty like a silent sheep when she wanted to touch her arm and tell her something, thank you or that they were friends now, absolutely. They had been alone all afternoon. They had gone out and told secrets. They had fallen asleep. Shouldn’t there be a moment when they whispered something to each other instead of simply walking single file into the kitchen’s throng?

It was a beautiful word, volunteer, the promise of partnership, inclusion. To volunteer was your chance to step into the light and see the people who were seated down where you used to be.

“My God,” Sabine said. “And I thought we got a lot of drama in L.A.”

She knew there were stories and reasons, and even without them he made a particularly bad impression. Yet there was a strange way in which she felt almost sorry for him now. The way he couldn’t sit comfortably in any room. The way he was outside of his own family.

You want to stop doing something, you have to get away from it. You have to put it behind you.”

Kitty could have been the magician’s assistant. She had all of her brother’s potential, his humor and beautiful bones. Looking out at the flatness until it folded down against the earth’s natural curve, Sabine thought it was the one thing Parsifal had done wrong. He should have taken his sister with him.

this new life in Nebraska, where time had not only stopped but occasionally seemed to creep backwards,

The closets were empty except for some summer dresses pushed down hard to the far end of the bar; a few pairs of sandals, stacked one on top of another, sat beneath them as if they knew to stay close to the dresses they belonged with.

She was quieter then, distracted, as if she were late for someplace and could not exactly remember where it was she needed to go. Sabine was worried about her, but Kitty begged off conversation. Sabine, for one, missed her terribly.

In her loneliness she felt herself drifting towards home.

But as nature abhors a vacuum, families are unable to leave empty bedrooms sitting idle.

Kitty and the boys here? Around the clock? Full, long days of company, days of Kitty.

Kitty looked neither convincing nor convinced when she spoke of staying away this time. There was only a note of wanting in her voice, a tired desire. Staying away was a wish, like wanting a new winter coat or an extra fifteen-minute break at work or a sewing room.

The things that went into keeping people together and tearing them apart remained largely unknown to the parties immediately involved.

She cried because she saw the man she loved at the height of his life and she missed him terribly. She cried from the pleasure of having a chance to see him again, even like this, reduced to two dimensions, his whole body the size of her hand.

Making things that were already made meant that you had to suffer the burden of comparison. Usually what people needed to see was the idea of a house, the possibility. Once the poured concrete and supporting beams existed, a tiny reproduction of it was nothing more than precious.

She kissed before thinking or understanding, and before she could think or understand, it was over.

Not that one kiss mattered. One kiss between two half-asleep women in their forties. It was best forgotten.

It was something that Parsifal figured out when he was halfway through his career as a magician: People don’t pay attention. They don’t know how.

Sabine nodded. She had spent the better part of her life in love with one basically unobtainable Fetters. The idea of somehow setting her sights on another one, one that she had no idea what to do with anyway, was ludicrous.

They sat there quietly for a while, both meaning to say other things. All the things that had made them brave the night before, the dark and the quiet, made them terribly shy now.

but even the quiet is volatile, living.

People freeze to death all the time, but never on the night you expect them to, never on the night you hope for it.

Sabine put her arms around Kitty and held her against her chest. This was the thing that everyone had told her about, the thing that she had given up for Parsifal before she really understood what it was.

She would be thirty in two weeks and was old enough to remember to put together the proper package for herself: old, new, borrowed, blue.