Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Daniel slept a lot. He picked at his food and didn’t seem to want anything but the blue banana popsicles she got at Sergeant Pepper’s, the corner grocer. She called every other doctor in the yellow pages, but none of them would come to the house and Daniel refused to go to an office; he said he was better. “One more day in bed,” he promised.

  He got up the next day, went to work, came home. He did seem fine, and she stopped worrying. But one day when she dropped over at the shop, she saw him leaning over a fish tank, smoking a cigarette, letting the ashes float on top of the water. “Hey—” she said, laying her head against his shoulder, inhaling his scent. “You’ll give those things fish cancer.” He didn’t smile back at her; he made his brows jump and then he stubbed the cigarette out into a paper cup. “I hate cigarettes anyway,” he said.

  When they walked home, she waited for the routing, the sudden spirals he liked to make, but he followed a stubbornly linear course, he walked one end of the sidewalk until it turned into street, then he crossed and began on another strip. He was methodical, unadventurous, and she tried to hold onto his arm, to break up the silence. She asked if anything was wrong.

  “I’m terrific,” he said, crossing the street, not even looking to see if she was following him.

  Isadora had lunch with Allison. They talked about Daniel. She kept trying to peel answers out of Allison, she kept thinking that that woman knew something she didn’t. “Come on,” said Allison. “He seemed fine to me. He gave me back all my Peres except for one, so he’s not in pain. Maybe he’s just getting jittery about getting married again.”

  “What?” said Isadora, startled, one hand floating up to her hair.

  “You know, cold feet. He threw his back out two days before we got married. For no reason at all. He hadn’t been lifting anything, doing anything. He just got out of bed funny. He had to lie flat on his back for a whole day. He was fine for the ceremony. Stop worrying. I know how he is.”

  “He hit his head,” Isadora said. “We haven’t even set a date yet.”

  “You haven’t?” said Allison. She paused, stirring her coffee. “Did you ever call that Jillian person, maybe she knows something. Daniel likes to talk to strangers, you know. He’ll tell them his whole life story.”

  “I guess,” said Isadora.

  She did try to find Jillian. She waited until Daniel was asleep and then she groped in his pockets for the number. She pulled out the notes he had made to himself: BUY COOKIES, GET CLEANING, but there was no number, no name. She riffled through his address book, but there was nothing there. It made her feel queasy inside to see Allison’s name there but not her own. She shook the feeling off.

  She took walks through the suburbs, she tried to find the house with the clothesline, but she had no sense of direction, and she ended up getting lost, having to go to one of those bland houses and ring the bell to ask how to get back to the main street. She was grubby in black jeans, a fraying black tee shirt, and her hair was crinkled in curls and dirty. The directions she got were sketchy, the face of the woman giving them hostile. Isadora walked until her feet cramped up and then she had to sit right down on the sidewalk and run the circulation back into them. She sprinted the rest of the way, stepping down on those spiny tinglings as her feet gained back their blood.

  She confronted Daniel that evening. She said she felt he was being different with her.

  “Different—what are you talking about?” he said. “What’s the matter with you, being this suspicious? Allison said you were asking all kinds of questions about me. Why couldn’t you just ask me?”

  “I am,” said Isadora. “I am asking you.”

  “I told you, I’m fine. I don’t like you to be like this.”

  He pushed himself up from the table, using his hands to brace himself. He didn’t bend to kiss her and she watched how he rubbed his temples as he left. All the time Isadora thought, What way do you like me to be? But she was silent.

  She went to the medical library the next day and searched through the books. She was a little intimidated by all the white coats, the serious expressions, and she felt smothered by the books. There were eight shelves on the head, and she ended up just grabbing a handful of books, stooping under their weight, and settling them on a table. It made her feel worse reading about head blows. There were sudden blood clots that could dim your sight, there were things that could make you just drop dead. One book said that your whole personality could change, but then the text stopped. It didn’t say anything about how you could change it back to the way it was. Isadora hunched over those books for three hours, and then, more confused than ever, she slapped them shut, she left them bunched on the table. Daniel, she thought, Daniel.

  She did some prowling of her own. She asked Allison over and kept watching her; every five minutes Isadora wanted to know if Allison saw the changes in Daniel. “You’re crazy,” Allison said. “I keep telling you he’s just jittery, that’s all. He was that way before we got married, it’s the whole thing of belonging to someone, it makes him nervous.”

  “Did he tell you that?” Isadora said, and when Allison shrugged, Isadora turned away. She wouldn’t believe that, not with the way Daniel had pushed her to confide in him, to live with him and not keep her own place, not to be so separate. She went to the pet shop when Daniel was at lunch and asked his assistant, a lanky young man, if Daniel had gone home sick. She was trying to be cagey, to avoid coming right out and saying that she thought something was very wrong, but the assistant just said that he was busy, that it was all he could do to keep track of the animals, let alone Daniel.

  Daniel didn’t make love to her the way he used to anymore, he didn’t seem as though he wanted to consume her. He always managed to get into bed long after she did, no matter how she dallied. She’d brush every single one of her teeth, she’d cream her face and hands, she’d plop into a living room chair and try to read. When she finally slunk into bed, exhausted, and when he finally lay beside her, she would try to talk, to coax; she would sometimes be whispering to him how she felt for minutes until she would notice the evenness of his breath, she would sense him asleep.

  A week later, she came home with boxes of Chinese take-out, a surprise. She thought they could set the wedding date, make it final. When she got to the house, she saw that the front door was tilted open. She could see slices of the living room, could see a drift of animals moving in and out of the room. “Hey, Daniel—” she called. She went inside, still holding the cartons, leaving the door open. She kept glancing back at the outside; it reassured her.

  She wandered the rooms, maneuvering in and out of the animals as they begged for the food. His clothes were still rumpling on the floor, his drawers were still half open, crowded with unmatched socks. She thought he’d be back. He probably just went on one of his mystery walks, that was all. She went into the kitchen and started chopping a salad, and then, because she couldn’t stand the closeness of the house, she decided to run. She could always reheat the food. It would be more fun to eat with Daniel anyway.

  She didn’t bother to shuck off her clothes and change. She took the dogs and ran as she was, in a long skirt and top, for almost forty-five minutes. The hem of her skirt ripped, and there were big half moons of sweat under her arms. She had a pulse of dampness along her spine, and her mascara sweated into twin stains. She panted her way back into the house. “Daniel—” she called.

  She ate alone, picking at her salad, feeding spoonfuls of the Chinese food to the animals. When she finally fell asleep, in the living room, the lights were on in every room of that house.

  She tried at first to pretend nothing was wrong. She waited in the house for two days, not answering the phone, tensing when it rang, sure it was Daniel. The silence, the way his ringing wouldn’t catch, would force him to come home and talk to her, would make him tell her what was wrong. She went to the pet store late at night—Daniel kept an extra key—and she sat in the shop until three, waiting, and then she walked home.

/>   She was suddenly very aware of herself. She would look at her reflection in the mirror for hours, touching her face, wondering what was the matter with her, what was so wrong about her face, her hair, her eyes, that he didn’t want them. What was wrong with her mind, with who she was, and oh God, she worried, she wondered, what was she going to do with all those things just by herself?

  She was embarrassed walking on the streets when people she knew stopped her. It unnerved her that the first words out of their mouths were always about Daniel—how was he, what was he up to. She was mute, she didn’t tell anyone that Daniel was missing, that she didn’t know where he was.

  It was terrible without him. The animals must have sensed something because the dogs chewed the rug, one of the cats ripped apart her lace blouse and she wept into the severed sleeve. At night, she couldn’t sleep. She dragged Scale into the living room and tried to make him curl up into her lap, and when he struggled to leave her, to extricate himself, she wept again. Every cell of her beat time along with the clock. Please, she thought, oh please.

  She called Allison on the morning of the third day. When Allison heard what was going on, she said to wait, that she would be right over.

  Allison was panting when she arrived. “I ran,” she said, clutching her side. “What the hell is wrong with you, not telling me something like this? I have a right to know.”

  Isadora looked at her hands, fumbling the fingers together. She kept shaking her head, trying to dislodge the images of Daniel folded up on the road, bleeding into his brain, all that brilliant red lathing his memory, erasing even her own face from his mind.

  “It was the bump,” Isadora said.

  Allison gave her a sharp look, but she said nothing, and it was Allison who picked up the phone to call the police. Isadora saw what that did to Allison, how it reshaped her face. It amazed her how much information Allison knew. That woman could recite Daniel’s car registration, the year of his car, she knew his social security number. She had been married to him, Isadora thought. When Allison hung up, she was fuming. “Damned cops,” she said. “They laughed at me, they thought it was a big joke. ‘Two days,’ they kept saying. ‘Lady, two days is nothing, wait a week.’ They said it was as common as milk for men to come back home drunk and loony with love again. I told them about the head bump, you heard that, didn’t you? They couldn’t have cared less.”

  Isadora sat helpless while Allison called the store and asked for Daniel. “You could have done all this, you know,” Allison said. She was getting irritable. “Call his parents,” she told Isadora. “Come on. They don’t like me.”

  Isadora didn’t want to call. It would be terrible if he were there, terrible if he weren’t. How could she explain anything to anybody. She made Allison sit right beside her as she dialed. Daniel’s mother answered and as soon as she knew it was Isadora, she was squeezing in her questions. When were they coming to visit, when was the wedding, could they have a picture of Isadora because Daniel had told them how lovely she was.

  Isadora knew as soon she heard those questions that Daniel wasn’t there. She started out the story, she tried to get the words right, but even as she was speaking, she found herself separating out, becoming a bystander listening to her own voice. She was baffled, disbelieving, she felt the sense of story there, the unreality. When she was finished, she was silent, and then Daniel’s mother spoke.

  “You poor baby,” she said, startling Isadora. But then she started asking more and more questions, her voice drying up the sympathy, becoming suddenly metallic. She wanted to know just where Isadora had been when this head injury occurred, when Daniel went out, why he had felt the need to be alone. Had she called a doctor? Had she called the police? Isadora could hear Daniel’s father in the background, but she was drained, she didn’t want to retell the story to him, to anyone. When Daniel’s mother told Isadora to call her if she heard anything more, it sounded to Isadora like an order.

  “I can’t stand it,” said Isadora, hanging up.

  It was Allison’s idea to call Duse.

  “I don’t want comforting. I want Daniel.”

  “Isadora,” said Allison. “She’s a psychic, isn’t she? Maybe you don’t believe that stuff—I don’t know if I do either—but she did find that little kid, didn’t she?”

  Isadora swabbed her face dry with her sleeve. “She never said she did. Other people said that. All she said was that that kid was alive.”

  Allison touched Isadora. “That’s enough,” she said.

  “I want Daniel,” said Isadora.

  “Listen to me—” said Allison. “You don’t have him.”

  Isadora slumped into a chair. I don’t have him, she thought, and when she started weeping, Allison put her hands on Isadora’s back. “It’s okay,” she said. “You have Duse. She can help.”

  Isadora made the call, but all the time her fingers were hooking into the numbers, she knew she wouldn’t be able to tell Duse anything. As soon as she heard Duse’s voice, she started to weep, she had to hand that receiver over to Allison and beg her to do the talking.

  Allison’s voice was clear. She explained about Daniel, how no one knew where he was and no one seemed able to help. “That girl,” said Duse. “Why didn’t she call me immediately? Never mind. I know why.” She told Allison that both of them should drive out to see her. She didn’t want Isadora going alone, she didn’t think her girl was in any state to do that. “You bring lots of his clothing, you hear me?” Duse said. “Things he lived in, that haven’t been washed clean of his scent. And bring pictures of him, something that shows his palms if you have it. I read that hand. It’s funny. I never noticed anything, but lines change.”

  Isadora, her head to the phone, her face parallel to Allison’s, pulled away. “She never noticed anything in my father’s palm before he died,” she said flatly.

  Before Allison got off the line, she told Isadora that Duse had to speak to her. “You don’t have to talk,” Allison said. “She said she knows you’re upset, that she just wants you to listen.”

  Isadora put the phone to her ear. For a moment, there was no sound. Like holding a seashell, she thought, cupped up to your ear, waiting to hear the sea, that wonder, to hear the ocean swell inside the clean hardness of a shell.

  “Isadora,” said Duse. “I can fix everything.”

  17

  They drove up in The Swimmer’s car, a battered green Dodge. The upholstery smelled of chlorine, he had two tiny water wings suspended from the rearview mirror, and the trunk was crowded with scuba equipment. The car ran all right; Isadora speeded and zipped in and out of lanes. She tried to ignore the rearview mirror as much as she could; when she peered into it she could see slices of Daniel’s life—his shirts, a belt, some pants—spread across the back seat. She had these movie flashes—the invisible man, she thought. She could almost feel Daniel’s arms under those rumpled shirt sleeves back there, she could almost see his face reflected in the shine of a belt on the car floor. It made her heated with want. Duse had told Isadora, though, that if this trip was too much, then Isadora could always mail the things, but Isadora knew she couldn’t stand worrying about lost mail or ripped packages. Not knowing where Daniel’s clothing was might be a more tender pain than not knowing where he himself was.

  They arrived around noon, and Duse was in the front yard, weeding, her hair tied back with a yellow scarf. She stood up when she heard the car, coughing into a garden-gloved hand.

  “You look terrible,” Duse said, pulling Isadora out of the car, pressing her hands to Isadora’s face.

  “You don’t look so good either,” Isadora said, squinting in the sun. “You look tired.”

  “Clients,” said Duse. “More and more. And every one of them keeps thinking I can make them miracles.”

  She made them come inside. Allison stopped in the hall to look at the photo gallery. Isadora flinched when she saw the pictures of her father. It hurt her eyes and she had to shield them with the flat of her hand, she
had to look away. Her own picture, blown up, was larger than her own face.

  “So you’re Allison,” Duse said, but Isadora, looking at her mother, could tell she wasn’t really listening, that her eyes were still focused on Isadora. Duse sat them in the living room and then told Isadora that Daniel was nowhere in her death files, and that that was a good sign.

  Allison shifted. “What kind of files?” she said.

  “I pulled them all out,” Duse told Isadora. “I started working on them in bits and pieces because I knew you didn’t like seeing me at them. I don’t have as much faith in them as I used to—because of Martin—but still, sometimes they work, and I want to try everything, anything. I didn’t find even a trace of Daniel. To make sure, I even went to the library. I sat down with all these out-of-town obituaries and tried to make a trio.” She shook her head. “Not a thing. Of course, it’s different for me. I don’t carry him inside of me the way you do. It’s you who should be looking for signs, you know. All that need ought to pull something out in you, don’t you think?”

  “Will you stop?” said Isadora. “Will you just stop?”

  “All right,” said Duse. “Maybe he wasn’t your destiny after all, maybe that’s why he can’t be found.”

  “He was my destiny,” said Isadora sharply. “But not the way you think. It had nothing to do with all that hocus-pocus stuff. We were right for each other. We need to be together, that’s all. He hit his head—” she said desperately. “He could be wandering around. You found the Rearson kid—”

  “That’ll never end, will it?” said Duse. “I didn’t find any Rearson kid. How many times do I have to say that to get it through to anyone?”

  “That doesn’t matter. The kid was found,” said Isadora. “That’s all that counts.”

  “It isn’t all that counts,” said Duse. She sighed and then she looked at Isadora, she trailed one hand through her girl’s hair. “Baby, you find him,” she said. “You have to try, don’t you?”