Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  She got home before her parents. They were probably celebrating, eating lunch someplace, and she went into her room to fiddle with her English report. She hadn’t had time to read a book, so she created one; she made it so alive that she almost forgot that it didn’t exist.

  It was around dinnertime when they both got back. Duse’s face was flushed. Martin was carrying a brown bag of groceries and something in a waxy carton. “Fish and chips,” he told her. “You hungry?”

  “How was I?” said Duse.

  “Fine,” said Isadora. She wanted Duse to stop but her mother kept asking her questions. Had the TV at school been okay, were any of Isadora’s teachers there with her? Isadora hated herself for lying, for not just telling the truth, and she hated Duse for not knowing it. She took it as proof that Duse had no gift at all.

  All through dinner the phone rang. At first Isadora would jump up and get it, but all any of those voices wanted was Duse. If they said anything at all to her, it was to ask if she, too, had any talents like her mother, if the same current ran through her blood. “Like mother, like daughter,” the callers said. “We have the same hair,” Isadora told them, setting the phone down and calling Duse.

  Isadora found out about what happened on the show through the phone calls. She heard Duse thanking all those voices for their sympathy, for their support. She heard Duse say that she knew she hadn’t come across that well, but how could she have when she couldn’t get one person from the audience to give her something so she could do a reading. She said that there had been a few palms, but that everyone, including herself, had been disappointed by the fortunes, that there just wasn’t any mystery riding in any of those palms. It would have been much better, she said, if she had been able to get just one glove, just one bobby pin that had been stuck into someone’s hair.

  Isadora frowned into her fish as she listened. “She’s so excited about all this,” Martin said, sipping his water, trying to jolly Isadora.

  It was a small show, Isadora told herself. There was no reason for anyone she knew to have seen her mother’s face waltzing across their TV screens, captured there until it assumed a place in their minds, in their lives.

  Duse got a smattering of mail from that show, gushing letters that she didn’t bother to answer. But she drifted them down into Isadora’s lap to make sure she saw them. “Strangers,” Duse always pointed out. “They’re not just being polite either. They believe I have a gift.”

  Isadora was silent.

  While Duse was riding along on her pride, Isadora was waiting to see which school would accept her. Martin kept plugging the University of Wisconsin until he saw how upset that made her, and then he put both his hands on her shoulders and told her that he was only kidding, that he had never really thought she would stay home. She didn’t say anything and his fingers moved on her shoulders, making contact and then relinquishing it again. Duse said that Isadora should go where she thought she belonged. “You’ll know,” she told Isadora.

  In the end, Isadora went to the University of Michigan because it was so large, because she thought she could get lost in all those people. She refused to live in a dorm and she wouldn’t listen when Martin said that he always thought that that was how you met people, how you formed bonds. Isadora was stubborn, though, and as soon as she got her acceptance, she made Teddy drive out to Ann Arbor with her to find an apartment. They stopped at every Dunkin Donuts they passed, sugar-shocking on sweets, eating as the car sped. Isadora turned the radio up until she could feel the beat pulsing right through the vinyl of the seats.

  Isadora was startled how much like Madison Ann Arbor was, but even so, Ann Arbor wasn’t home, and for that reason, she could love it. She spent less than two hours looking at places. She easily eliminated the communal living places. They all reminded her of Max’s house, with all those vegetables molding up in the freezer, the smell of cigarettes rising up out of the woodwork. She took a one-room efficiency—tiny, but with good wood floors and two huge windows. It was only three blocks from campus, on Kingsley Street. She would have to buy a table to eat on, a mattress that she could put on the floor, and curtains.

  Isadora became irritable during the trip back. She made Teddy turn down the music because she said her head hurt, and she didn’t want to stop for donuts or for anything. She watched the scenery. She thought she could tell the exact spot where everything became Madison and she pressed her feet down into the pile of the car rug, as if she could really brake the car, as if she could make it stop before they got home again.

  Martin and Duse didn’t stop asking Isadora questions, the same things over and over again, until gradually Isadora stopped answering. They asked the location of her place, was it safe, how much was the rent because Martin wasn’t exactly a millionaire, you know. What kind of bed was she planning to get, was she sure she wanted to put down money on a brand new mattress, did she want the bed from the house? Isadora was evasive. “I’ll manage,” she said, and then was silent. But they didn’t stop asking.

  11

  She was there, in that apartment, by the end of August. She hadn’t let her parents drive her up there, and she had resisted Duse’s offer to find her a ride. Instead, she took the train.

  She fixed her place up. She waxed down the floor and found a small table and matching chair at Goodwill. She loved her place. She found she could open the window in the kitchen and sit out on the ledge eating her breakfast, watching the students walking by. She felt safe. She liked walking around, liked the fact that no one knew her, liked going to classes and sitting there anonymously until it was time to leave. She had questions for the professors, she waited until class was over to ask them, or she went to their offices. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, not yet. She spent her afternoons studying or eating broccoli soup at the Del Rio. Sometimes, when it was warm, she lay on her back on the Diag, the flat grassy area in midcampus.

  She was surprised to find that her favorite classes were not her writing classes or her literature classes, but the classes she was required to take—the sciences, math. She fell in love with botany. She liked the outdoor lab where they all tramped around and tugged down leaves, where they all learned how to identify a tree just by the veining of a leaf. She learned how to make salads from wild plants, how to make a soup from dandelions, which she began cultivating in her own patch of land by her apartment. She thought she liked plants so much because they did nothing more ominous than grow.

  She called home every Sunday at three. When she phoned, she would lie flat on her wood floor, arching her back when it cramped, becoming a kind of human dust mop for the spidery webs of dirt that seemed to spawn on the floor. She wouldn’t let her parents come up to visit, though they always asked, and though she was always telling them how much in love with Ann Arbor she was, she wouldn’t let them love it too. She pleaded with them over the phone. “Not yet,” she said. She couldn’t tell them why. It would hurt them knowing she wanted to have one place that they hadn’t touched, that she needed a place that wasn’t owned or known by anyone else but herself. Something as minor as a visit would tint her feelings about Ann Arbor, and she was too fresh and happy to let that happen.

  She was a little surprised at how easy it was to talk to Duse on the phone, how much it catapulted her back into childhood when she had knotted herself about Duse like a shoelace. Duse on the phone was really less invading than Duse in person. There was none of that suffocating sense of her. Duse never brought up the gift business, although once she did mention that she felt something hibernating in Isadora, something new, but as soon as she had uttered the words and felt Isadora’s chilled silence, she let the subject drop.

  Martin was funny on the phone. He always wanted to know if Isadora was eating well, if she flossed her teeth. He kept reminding her about a six-month checkup, and he said he didn’t trust those teeth of hers to any other dentist, that she would have to come home and let him take a look. “Miss me, do you,” said Isadora.

  “M
iss nothing,” he said. “I wish I could work on my own teeth. I’d never go to another dentist if I could manage it.”

  A few times, when it was very late at night, Isadora would find herself missing them. Sometimes she heard sounds, swift creakings of the floorboards, and her old night fear would jerk up again and she would have to get up and turn on all the lights. She would study her fear away. She would want to call Duse, but instead, she wrote. She kept a journal, a thing she called her selfsearch. Sometimes she lay her palms out flat on the desk and looked at her marking. If she squinted it didn’t look like a star at all.

  She still depended on Duse. Once, she popped out one of her contact lenses, right in the kitchen. She thought she could hear it clicking on the linoleum. She knew it was there. She got down on all fours and started patting the floor, searching it out, as desperation swelled and pushed against her skin.

  When the phone rang, she lifted an arm for it instinctively. She heard Duse’s voice. “Wait—” she said. “I dropped a lens in the kitchen.” She tried to focus in on Duse, to forget that lens for a minute. It was Duse who told her to look under the grating of the refrigerator, who mentioned it so casually, so matter of factly, that Isadora didn’t think to fight her. She simply stooped back down and fumbled her fingers right onto the lens. “Hey—” she said on the phone, smiling, pleased, but when she hung up, she told herself that it was no miracle. Not really. Duse had simply known the topography of most small kitchens and had simply taken a good guess. Isadora probably could have found the lens herself if her nerves had not been so twisted up.

  Still, when her lens popped out again, when she misplaced a book or some class notes, she would call Duse. “You’re lazy,” Duse said, meaning, “Use your own gift, dig it out.” “I know,” Isadora said, meaning, “I don’t have the time to be clean and logical, I’m too nervous right now.”

  Through it all, Isadora began to think that if you had to be mother and daughter, it was easier at a distance.

  It was winter when Duse became famous. She had been watching the news when a woman came on the air, pleading, offering several thousand dollars for information leading to the recovery of her five-year-old baby girl. She held up a picture, her mascara running and splotching on her cheeks as she wept; but the thing that moved Duse the most was the way that woman had misbuttoned her blouse, leaving gaps that revealed white slices of bra as she bent forward. As soon as the woman was off, Duse wrote a letter to her, in care of the station. She said simply that she had this skill, that she knew how to touch pieces of clothing and know things about people, that she could read things right from the lines in the palm. She didn’t mention her death files—a thing like that would make that poor woman peel the skin off her own body. Duse offered to do a clothing reading for the woman for free.

  She mailed the letter; she forgot about it. But a few weeks later the woman called her, hesitant, and then she came over. Her name was Alice Rearson, her daughter’s name was Katy. She was weeping, making Duse smother in her grief. The air became heavy with the damp of it. Duse had to refuse to do a reading that day because her concentration was so soggy, but the woman thanked her anyway, clutched her hands, and left Duse with a baby dress, pink and faintly smocked, stained with chocolate on one cap sleeve. She gave Duse a piece of paper with her name and number scrawled across the width. It made Duse a little uncomfortable the way that woman kept touching her, the way she treated Duse as if Duse offered some sort of salvation.

  In the end, though, Duse couldn’t really get much from that dress. She made her head burn with trying, but all she felt was a subtle glimmering, a feeling that the baby would be found and returned—alive. Duse brooded about it. She felt failure closing up her air. Her sensations had been so weak and clumsy that she hated to give Alice any kind of hope at all. She tried her death files, but came up with nothing. It made her a little more hopeful—she hadn’t thought that the child was dead. When she called Alice, she told her what she had and she promised to mail the dress back, special delivery, so Alice wouldn’t have to make a trip out. Duse apologized for not being able to do more.

  Alice’s voice cleared. She didn’t ask Duse any questions about where her girl was, who had taken her; she was so strangely content by Duse simply saying her baby was alive. She said that was the really important thing, that she didn’t want to try again because she felt it would be tempting fate. That was just the kind of response Duse could understand, but still, she couldn’t quite agree with it. Fate was to be pummeled into the paths you chose for yourself. Still Duse couldn’t shake her sense of not having done one damned thing, and when Martin came home that evening, she wrapped herself about him, asking to be held.

  She knew he didn’t like hearing about her work, that that was a divider in their lives, but she wanted comforting and so she told him, she blurted it out. Then, “You’re mad,” she said, watching his face.

  He shook his head.

  “I couldn’t do anything for her.”

  “Well,” he said. “Hope’s something.”

  He stroked her red hair, pushed it free of her lean shoulders. “We’ll take a vacation,” he said. “We’ll get romantic about it. We can go to the beach and baste ourselves up in suntan oil and bake like potatoes.”

  “Or french fry,” said Duse, holding out her arms, lifting one sleeve and exposing the pale fragile skin.

  It was good to forget everything for a while. They went to Florida and Duse, amused, watched all the middle-aged men in their white shiny shoes and white shiny belts, the women in white sandals, their white hair tipped with blue. She immediately named the place the Land of the White Shoes, and she forbade Martin to ever buy a pair. She said he couldn’t own a white belt, either, and if she saw him with one of those white Panama hats, she would grab it and give it to the alligators. In retaliation, Duse went out and bought herself a one-piece black bathing suit which she wore every day, rinsing out the sea salt every night in the hotel bathroom sink. She sat under a black beach umbrella on a navy blue towel, and occasionally she would get up and swim with Martin. She was a dot of black in all that blue and when she walked out of that ocean, she saw how everyone watched her. Her hair, darkened by the ocean, was almost a true red.

  It was almost the fourth day when Martin bought a newspaper. He said he didn’t like knowing what was going on when he was on vacation, that as far as he was concerned, they were in a vacuum. The only reason he bothered with a paper at all was to see what movies were around. He didn’t feel like being stuck in the hotel room calling theatre after theatre. He was leafing through the back pages when he saw a tiny article. Psychic Finds Girl, it said, and underneath was a picture of a woman holding a baby, the two of them staring stony-eyed into the camera. Alice Rearson, the caption read. “Oh shit,” he said.

  Duse, sitting up, peered over his shoulder, shielding her eyes with the edge of her hand. “But that’s not true,” she said. “I never told her where to find that girl. I never told her much of anything. Why would she tell the papers a lie like that?”

  According to the article, the baby had been found sitting in the back seat of a white station wagon, her mouth sticky and stained red from licorice, a few strings of the candy still clutched in her hand. The motor was running; the doors opened easily and yet the girl made no attempt to leave. It was just a local cop who saw her sitting there, who had kids of his own and who knew how dangerous it was to leave them alone in cars because they liked to turn on the windshield wipers and break them, they liked to beep the batteries right out of the horn. He walked over, waiting for the parents, ready to lean on them with a lecture. He said the girl had looked up at him once; she had stuck out her tongue and made a funny face. He made one back. He waited ten minutes and then he saw this man coming toward him, young, fresh-faced. When the man saw the cop, he bolted, and the cop instinctively gave chase. The man was easy enough to catch, although he did throw the pint of ice cream he was carrying at the cop, spattering the gray sidewalk with pistachio g
reen. But once caught, he seemed to wilt right in the officer’s hands.

  He was only twenty-four, on unemployment from a lost factory job, and he had been hotshotting about town. When he saw Alice Rearson’s daughter toddling in the dirt patches at the side of a suburban road, he pulled over and called to her. She was a friendly, guileless child and she came right over. He wasn’t sure why he took her, he later confessed. He said simply that she was cute and small and he was lonely. He thought it might be nice to have something need him.

  She never fought him, the papers said. He told her he’d take her to the zoo, so she got in the car, and he kept his promise. They spent a whole muggy day at the animal cages. He fed her popcorn and candy and when she was sleepy he had her nap in the car while he drove home. He lived alone, a half hour from Alice, and when the girl cried for her mother, he gave her crushedup Valiums in her milk and put her to sleep.

  It was Alice who gave the statement, who said that she had stopped worrying after seeing this psychic who told her her baby would be coming home. She named Duse, she told what Duse did, and then she said that talking too much was just tempting Providence, and she didn’t want to say anything else about Duse. She made it sound as if Duse had masterminded the whole rescue attempt, as if Duse had guaranteed the girl’s safety. The spaces Alice Rearson left in her statement could be filled in by anyone. The papers, it said, were now trying to contact Duse for a statement. “Oh Jesus,” said Duse.