Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Everyone. It was that old game. If everyone has one, then no one does. No one, no one at all.

  Isadora didn’t thank the priest when she left. It wasn’t until she was outside again, seeing how hard and sharp everything stood out in the shimmering heat, that she wondered about his face. She hadn’t even seen him. How did she know what he was hiding, what was really on his face, in his mind? She looked around at the others straggling out of the church. She didn’t feel relieved. If anything, she doubted more, she felt worse.

  Duse was cooking dinner when Isadora stepped through the door. Isadora tugged the kitchen stool over and perched on it.

  “Hungry?” Duse said.

  Isadora looked carefully at Duse, watching her face. She placed her hands, carefully, flat, along her thighs. “If different people tell you different things,” she said, “how do you know what to believe?”

  “You know it inside,” Duse said. “Why are you asking me that?”

  Isadora told Duse about the priest. “Oh, he doesn’t know,” said Duse. “What made you go there anyway?”

  “I needed to talk.”

  “To a priest of all people,” said Duse, half to herself.

  Isadora said nothing. Someone knew something she didn’t, she thought. That priest said everyone had a gift, Duse said that only starred people did. The thing was—what did Isadora say. She shivered.

  “You cold?” said Duse. “Go get a sweater.”

  “Hot,” said Isadora. Two voices, she thought, her mother’s and the priest’s, and both of them seemed to be bellying toward her, both of them seemed to be somehow dangerous for her to listen to.

  8

  Isadora began to doubt Duse’s gift. She had never questioned the idea of a gift before. It had always seemed a given—clear and hard and irrefutable, as simple as breath. But Duse was defensive every time she brought the priest up in conversation, and it made her curious. It seemed funny to her how although neither the priest nor Duse denied the existence of gifts, both would refute the other’s interpretation. Duse insisted again and again that the priest was sinning against her identity, that he was making less of her than what she was by saying that every fool on the street had a gift, that she was not so special. “I’d like to see the grocer read my palm and tell me my future,” she said bitterly. “I’d like to see the lady down the street find a lost book the way I can. That priest never said what wonderful talents everyone is supposed to have, now did he? He just leveled everyone. He made them all ordinary.”

  “Maybe he made them all special,” said Isadora hesitantly.

  “Special, huh,” said Duse. “You think it’s special to be able to make soup from a pound of chuck roast? You want to be linked up with that?” She sighed. “He probably didn’t even think I could tell the future, did he?”

  It startled Isadora a little. “I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t say whether he did or he didn’t. We talked about me more.”

  “You,” said Duse. “You’re part of this gift thing, too, you know.”

  Isadora knew. She would lie on her bed and think. Everyone has a gift. No one has a gift. Then she abruptly narrowed it down, she saw it becoming more dangerous, but she couldn’t stop herself. I have a gift. I don’t have a gift. The last step, of course, was the first, was Duse. Duse has a gift, Duse doesn’t have a gift. The shock of it, the surprise, made her uneasy. You can fool yourself any way you want. The priest had said that.

  Her doubt made her days wobble; she was aware of layers of life, and she didn’t seem to be operating on a layer inhabited by anyone else. People were worrying about their sweaters pilling up, about their skin breaking out before a date, or even about passing a history exam; people thought about their kids getting into day camps and schools, about their husbands or wives loving them. There was that layer, and then there was the more terrible layer, the surface that took up with death, with disease, with all the things that are amusing in a soap opera and unspeakable in life. But hers was a narrow layer, she thought. Who else was worrying about crisscrossings in their flesh or feelings that wove themselves right into the fabric of their shirts, blueprinting them, marking them.

  She thought about that a lot, and she began, slowly at first, to test Duse. She would borrow books from friends and then casually ask Duse to do a reading. She told Duse that it would really be helping someone out, that she wouldn’t even ask unless it was important. It startled Isadora how little Duse could sometimes manage to reveal, how faded most of the details were, and sometimes how completely wrong Duse was. She told Isadora that a book from an epileptic girl belonged to someone who would always be blessed with health, she saw a car accident for someone who had told Isadora that he would never even sit inside a car if he could help it because both his parents had been killed in accidents. You couldn’t say anything like that to Duse, though; she just narrowed her face and said that she wasn’t so much wrong as just premature, that the things she had managed to pull out from those objects simply hadn’t surfaced yet. “You wait,” she told Isadora. “I’m right. You’ll see.”

  Duse saw that something was wrong, and when she offered to read Isadora’s palm, to read the very clothing Isadora had on, Isadora shook her head. “Why not?” Duse said. “You always badger me for readings.” She squinted at Isadora. “Do you have something to hide?”

  “I’m all right,” said Isadora.

  “No,” said Duse quietly. “I don’t think so.” But she left her alone.

  On Monday Duse announced at dinner that she was thinking of offering herself as a kind of psychic consultant. She said she could put a small ad in the paper, something that said she would be willing to read palms, to try and locate people or find missing items, maybe to even scan someone’s body with her own two hands and see what she could pick up. Duse looked at Martin and then Isadora. “I wouldn’t charge unless I had helped someone,” she said. “I just feel as though it’s something I should do.”

  Martin carefully set his fork against the rim of his plate. “You really want to do this, don’t you? I wish you didn’t.”

  Isadora looked up, curious.

  “All right,” he said. “All right, but you might get some real loonytunes, you know. Or you might get no one at all.”

  “I’m good at spotting who’s serious and who isn’t,” said Duse. “I’ll just put a box number in the paper. People will have to sit down and write me if they want to see me, and I can touch the ink, the words, I can get a picture of them from that.”

  “I don’t know,” said Martin. He started eating, teasing at his fish, flaking it into slivers.

  “You won’t be here when people are,” Duse said, her voice stilling. “You can pretend it doesn’t exist at all.”

  Martin looked down into the mush he was making of his food and then looked back at Duse.

  “You’ll make me crazy splitting me into two pieces like this,” Duse said. She stopped eating, she put her hands on the table and waited until he rustled his napkin out, until he wiped his hands.

  “All right,” he said.

  “What about me,” said Isadora. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

  “You don’t want me to do it either?” Duse said.

  Isadora fiddled with the ends of her hair. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well then,” said Duse, smiling, taking the two of them in with her eyes and holding them there.

  Isadora was in the school cafeteria when she saw Duse’s ad. It was just two lines, the words “psychic consultant,” carefully blocked, respectable, and a box number. It made Isadora feel exposed, and she quickly folded it up, pushing it in toward her stomach. She was eating with two other girls who were sprawled over different sections of newspaper—one of them was reading “Dear Abby” out loud, tapping her fingers against the bottom of the paper, rustling it. They weren’t friends of Isadora’s. They were completely indifferent as they both chewed on the ends of their milky plastic straws.

  Isadora was fifteen that ye
ar. No one talked much about their parents. People ran away to California or New York City, carrying half their record albums and a few tee shirts and jeans in a pack on their back, slinging a guitar on one shoulder. It was rumored that one boy was living in a dorm room right at the university in town, even though his parents had Xeroxed his photo and posted it all over town with a reward offering. They didn’t trust the police. But even had Isadora shared the queer embarrassment of her peers at being taken care of, her situation was different. The issues were more charged. She didn’t think she could spread the paper out and roll her eyes at the girls slumped beside her, she couldn’t stab that ad with her finger and ask them if they believed that was Isadora’s mother, for God’s sake.

  She had stopped telling anyone about her mother. She saw how it was—how they didn’t believe her, how they thought she was bragging, trying to lie some life into herself. And now it was hard enough, plagued with her own doubts as she was, without taking on other people’s sneers and insinuations, without seeing anyone’s hopeless belief. Isadora felt her lunch fisting up inside of her, and then, suddenly, she felt Duse’s hands prodding, pushing her toward something inescapable. Isadora began tugging the ad free when one of the girls glanced at her. “What’d you rip out?” she said. “Let me see.”

  “You’re not going to answer this, are you?” she said.

  Isadora looked down at the paper. “What do you mean?” she said. “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe you,” said the girl, shaking her head. “People like that eat your money alive, tell you any damn thing just to get more. Jesus. A psychic consultant. That’s ridiculous.”

  The other girl looked up, amused. “Hey, I know,” she said. “You should write a joke, something really hysterical. You could say you just ended a love affair with a spirit, but now you’re pregnant.”

  “That’s perfect,” said the other girl. “Where’s that ad?”

  Isadora crumpled the paper under the table, she dug at it with her nails until it was in pieces, until she could feel it fluttering down from her fingers to the dirty floor. “I don’t know,” Isadora said, standing, letting the last pieces drift down. “Maybe there’s another paper somewhere around,” she said. She left the table. She was glad it was Friday; she wouldn’t have to see them again until Monday.

  Isadora lost her concentration. She worried the remaining hours of the day away. Everytime she spotted a newspaper in someone’s hand, she felt her shirt sticking to the sweaty patches on her back, she felt her scalp itchy with moisture. She imagined the whole school scribbling out letters, concocting stories for Duse, who, Isadora knew, would take every request seriously, who would pluck one out to respond to, to give away her identity, as if it were a gift. Even if Duse knew the letters were fake, she still might respond, just to chastise someone’s silliness, to make them see what they would now miss. Isadora saw how it would be, how easy it would be for anyone to make the connection, to add the daughter to the mother, to link them right together.

  She walked home. She didn’t care how far it was, how stiffly her legs seemed to be moving. She was afraid of the bus conversation. She remembered one boy who used to stand at her bus stop. He was short and had one of those old-fashioned haircuts, the kind that makes your head look like the top of a hairbrush. He wouldn’t write “fuck” on the phone poles with the other boys, he didn’t have any smutty jokes to tell, and because of that, they ostracized him, they made his life a torment. She remembered how the other kids had grabbed his gym suit and shoved it into the mailbox, and when he said he’d get an F for not having it for gym, they all laughed, they waited until he threw a punch, and then, cleanly, in one neat move, someone broke that kid’s arm. Isadora remembered the sound it had made, remembered feeling the break inside her own skin. He hadn’t left the school, not yet; he had come back with his arm all plastered up in a sling, his face blank and dark. The whole time his arm was in a sling, he was driven to school, but the first day it was off, he stepped back on the bus, he let those hands draw him toward the end section, where he was hidden from the driver’s view by standing bodies, where no one in the front could see how they punched and prodded him, where the laughter hid the sounds he tried to make. Isadora always heard those sounds, even though she sat directly behind the driver.

  Isadora slapped into the house listlessly. She thought about how Duse had to touch every damned object in the house, how she had to run those fingers of hers over every surface, smearing her prints into the polish of the table. When Isadora took off her jacket, she stuffed it deep into her closet so Duse couldn’t race her hands over it, couldn’t use her fingers like dowsers.

  That evening when Isadora was slumped on the front stoop, watching the bats flap and die in the street, Duse poked her head out. “You okay?” she wanted to know.

  “Sure, why not?” said Isadora. She felt cloudy with pain suddenly, and it startled her the way all that sadness was sweet somehow, the way she felt herself bracing for a release. It reminded her of all those times when she had felt like crying but there hadn’t really been anything wrong, nothing snagging into her life, there hadn’t been any wick to her sorrow. She just sometimes had these seasons of sorrow, when sadness pressure-cooked until she could lie on her bed and force herself to cry. She’d think about death and loss and disease and then she would cry, afraid to move because her tears might dam up. She rested her face against her sleeve, letting the tears collect and clot into the weave of her fabric.

  “I know something’s wrong,” Duse said. “Don’t tell me there isn’t. Talk to me.”

  Isadora twisted around a little so she could see Duse. “If you know what’s wrong, then you don’t need me to talk,” she said, turning back and resting her head against her knees. She waited, she tensed for Duse’s voice, but all that happened was that the front door slapped against the screen as Duse went back inside.

  Isadora was crowded with words, drowning in them. She didn’t know who to talk to about how she felt about Duse’s ad. She had no really close friends and her father was really more Duse’s ally than her own. She knew he didn’t believe in palm reading and all that, and if she had been him, she would have made Duse stop. In the end, Isadora bought herself a notebook and hunched over the yellow paper, squinting, filling it up with her thoughts, expelling them. She smeared her fingers into the ink as she wrote, as her pen traveled and pushed her forward.

  Isadora didn’t think anyone would answer Duse’s ad, not really, and she was surprised by the handfuls of mail that arrived. Duse read them all, and she sometimes held a letter up against her forehead, as if she could get a fix on the person who had written her, a scent right through the pages. Duse wouldn’t let Isadora read the letters and she even destroyed the envelopes right along with the mail. She said a relationship between a client and herself was like one between a doctor and his patient, that there were just some things you didn’t reveal, things that might embarrass someone. “But you can sit in on the sessions,” she said. “That’s something different. When people write in response to that ad, they’re just writing to me—what do they know about you?—but in session—well, Baby, then they’ll know about you, I’ll make sure they see that star gleaming up from your flesh before they even open their mouths.”

  “Oh don’t—” said Isadora.

  “Baby,” said Duse. “Your gift will show. Give it some time.”

  It startled Isadora a little. She had been so busy wondering about Duse’s gift that she had forgotten her own. There had been such a release from that search, but now she felt it flowering up again, queasily unfolding. She gave her hands uneasy glances.

  “Don’t worry,” said Duse. “It’s still there.”

  Isadora had planned to be out when Duse had her sessions. She kept a careful check on the calendar hanging in the kitchen to see just when Duse might scribble in a time, and she was surprised when the doorbell rang one day when she herself had just gotten in from school. Isadora stayed in the background, too curious
to leave, half afraid that if she came out on her own, Duse would parade her in front of the client. She strained to hear the voice, afraid she might recognize it. When the sounds were strange to her, she waited a bit, and then she crept toward the kitchen, slinking along the cool paint of the wall.

  Isadora peered in as she passed the room. Duse was writing something. There was a middle-aged woman sitting on the couch beside Duse. She was a blonde, but her hair was cropped close to her skull. She used her hands like they were thorns, pricking the air, hurting it with the force of her moves. She told Duse that she had spirits following her around, that they were always whispering to her, making her do things she didn’t want any part of.

  Isadora, listening, leaned her cheek closer to the wall. The woman said that spirits had made her steal magazines from the checkout counter of the Thrift-T-Mart, had made her shove a few Milky Ways into the front of her shirt. She had pressed them deep into her bra, and she said she could still sometimes feel the places where the hard edges of the wrappers had scratched her pale skin.

  The woman went on and on, in a voice as tight as a wire. She said her spirits liked to play practical jokes on her, that they had short-sheeted her bed more times than she cared to remember. She said she didn’t know how many there were or what sex they were and she said they could change their shapes if they wanted and their voices, although she had never seen them. She handed Duse something. Isadora saw a whisper of fabric. “It’s a spirit scarf,” the woman said. “They hook right into the fabric. I feel them in the cloth against my neck.” She leaned forward a little and bent her head, showing Duse a rash she had along her neckline, given to her, she said, by those spirits out of pure meanness. Duse let the scarf drift through her fingers; she had lazy moves. Isadora, peeking out, saw the way Duse held her mouth, the way her eyes were tightening the way they did when she wanted to laugh.

  “I don’t get much from this,” Duse said. “Oh a car, maybe, the country a little. You like to drive recklessly, don’t you.”