Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Jesus, I can’t,” said Isadora. “What do you think, all I have to do is snap my fingers a certain way and then wham—instant Daniel? What do you think I am?”

  Duse looked curiously at her. “What do you think I am?” she said. “If you don’t believe in your own talents, what makes you suddenly start believing in mine again?”

  They were both silent, and then Duse sighed again. “All right,” she said. “All right. It just makes things harder, that’s all.” She started to walk to the other end of the room. “Anyway, he’s alive.”

  “Oh God,” said Allison, “How do you know?”

  “I just do,” said Duse. She wanted to see his things and she wouldn’t let either of them get up and fetch them. She took the car keys and went herself, coming in almost buried under clothing. She sat back down, rubbing his sleeve against her cheek, on her eyes, all the time thoughtfully cocking her head. Duse really did try. She took up every piece of clothing. She fingered the few photographs Isadora had brought, and when she got nothing, she said that it had been a long time, and that she was glad to see that sometimes that worked.

  “It has to,” said Isadora.

  Isadora stayed in her old room, while Allison had the guest room. Isadora couldn’t really sleep though, she just stared into the night and worried. Duse had read both Allison’s palm and her own, searching for tragedy. When she held Isadora’s hand, she said that it had been a long time, and that she was glad to see that the good lines had deepened, that the star was still there. “What about Daniel?” said Isadora.

  “What about you?” said Duse.

  Duse had dropped both their palms and then the three of them had sat in that room listening to the TV in the background, none of them concentrating until they went to bed.

  When Isadora heard something, she sat upright in the darkness, but it was only Duse, sifting her way through the suitcases and clothing to get to Isadora. She lay back down again. “I’m not getting anything,” Duse said. She had the clothes in her hand. “I know you’re upset. But listen to me, you can’t close up, not now. You just listen, Baby. Come on, sit up.”

  Isadora grabbed hold of the maple knobs of the headboard and pulled herself up, pressing her back into the hard coolness of the wood.

  “I felt cracked in two when Martin died. I just couldn’t see why I didn’t know beforehand so I could have stopped it, so I could have tried to change his fate or twist my own around just so he could live. And then after his death, when I couldn’t even sense him, when all I felt was this great cavernous mouth of nothing, when I couldn’t even touch him in the ties he used to wear—” she shook her head. “Sometimes, when you’re so close to someone, you miss the signs you should see. Maybe you don’t even want to see them. Who knows what I; would have done if I had had an inkling of Martin’s death? Maybe I would have blocked it out, not acted on it at all. I think my grief was probably a barrier, I think that’s why Martin could never come through me. I was lucky he got through someone else.” She touched Isadora’s sleep-tangled hair. “I’m getting blanks on your Daniel. It happens.” She took Isadora’s hand and unpeeled the fingers. “Look at that,” she said. “To have that and not use it is sinning right against yourself, denying who you are, and that’s the worst horror there is. There are plenty in the world who’d be delighted to do that to you without your doing it to yourself. Isadora. Please. This thing has you all wound up in it, do you understand? It won’t be solved unless you do the solving. You can’t rely on me to help you. Come on, Baby. You have to at least try to find Daniel. Not just for him, but for you.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” said Isadora. “I can’t read palms, I can’t trance. I couldn’t even hypnotize myself into a date. Martin had to do it.”

  “I can’t tell you what your gift is,” said Duse. “It has nothing to do with me. You figure out what you need to do.”

  “I want to do something. You think I don’t? I can t stand being inside my own skin right now. Sometimes I just pick up his shirts and I start ripping them, but it’s funny, all the time I hear that cloth tearing, I think it’s my own skin—I think how nice to be able to do that and just not feel.”

  “Okay, forget believing for now,” said Duse. “You don’t have to believe yet. Just sleep with his shirt. Come on.” She pulled out one red shirt from the pile she was holding and tucked it under Isadora’s pillow. “Here. Just try to keep yourself relaxed. Don’t you worry. Please don’t.”

  Isadora couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t even rest her head on the pillow, not with Daniel’s shirt lying under there. She tried to relax, to imagine that pillow lifting with life. She opened her hand up in the darkness, fanning out her fingers and then mentally tracing out the spot where Duse claimed she had that marking. She shut her eyes, she thought his name, scrunching up her face so tightly that she began to see colors, faint and smearing behind her lids. But that was it. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. She felt nothing but a sudden bloom of pain.

  She couldn’t believe. She touched the spot on her palm again. Daniel, she thought; she saw his name, she made it in scrawls across her mind. She thought of him wandering, stumbling into a phone booth and seeing a name—another Isadora—inked into a heart with some boy’s name. She saw him suddenly remembering, suddenly going out and finding her, linking up with her again, taking away the pain. She thought about Duse, she imagined her mother waking in the night, coming into her room to tell her she had had a vision about Daniel and that he was safe in a hospital resting, that they wouldn’t let him call her until he was stronger, but all the while he was calling her name. And then she felt herself alone in her bed, she worried that her dreams would be deserts, clean and silent of Daniel, empty of hope. What will I do, she thought, what am I supposed to do?

  She could hear Duse coughing from the other room, pulling one cough out of the other. She listened for a moment, and then she pulled Daniel’s shirt out from under the pillow and held it to her face, and when she slept, she had that shirt wrapped in her arms as if she were cradling her child.

  She was ashamed to face Duse in the morning. She told herself she was being ridiculous, and, in fact, when she sat down at the table, Duse was drinking coffee, ignoring her. It was Allison, groggy with sleep, who kept asking Duse what she had on Daniel, who seemed to get more and more irritable with the silence. “Give it time,” Duse said.

  “Nothing,” said Allison. “Damn.”

  Isadora saw how Duse looked at Allison. She didn’t like her, Isadora thought. Duse considered Allison a “gimmee,” most likely, one of those people who were just mouths, just asking, asking never stopping to take in a breath. Allison wanted Duse to tell her about the Rearson kid, she wanted to know just how Duse had managed to pick up on that, and when Duse said simply, her mouth one tight line, that all she had picked up was the life in that child, Allison frowned; she bit into her toast and severed it. Duse started to cough, cupping her hand over her mouth. “Excuse me,” said Duse.

  “Maybe that’s it,” said Duse thoughtfully. “This rotten cough. It was always difficult when I was sick; it blocks things up.”

  “You’re sick?” said Isadora. “Did you see someone?”

  Duse flapped one hand at Isadora. “Oh please. A cough is simple stuff.” She smiled at Isadora. “Brighten up. That cough is a sign of hope.”

  Neither Allison nor Isadora said much the first half of the ride home. They had left all of Daniel’s things at Duse’s except for the shirt Isadora had slept with. Duse told them it was better for them to be on their own ground, and better for her not to have such distractions. She kept Isadora in a hug for ten minutes before she would let her go, and even then she had to flicker her fingers across her daughter’s pale skin, she had to fluff out Isadora’s hair. She shook Allison’s hand and Allison gave her a weary nod of thanks.

  Allison and Isadora didn’t start arguing until a few hours into the ride. It began simply enough. Allison needed a quarter for a toll and Isadora was fishing into
both their purses. She accidentally flustered the contents of Allison’s down into the rug. “Christ,” said Allison. She bent down herself and grabbed a handful of change, threw it in, and then, staring straight ahead at the white line in the road, she began to talk.

  She spoke very low, and her eyes were shiny and hard. She said she had known Isadora’s mother would be a fake, she said she could tell that the moment she saw the woman, with her hair like a Las Vegas show girl, her eyes all painted with shadow. “What kind of a person is she,” said Allison, “parading herself on TV like some product in search of a sponsor, staking all sorts of crazy claims for herself. We drove all these fucking miles to hear that rot, to get nothing more than Duse saying that well maybe he’s alive. Well maybe. For that bit of wisdom, I’m supposed to get down on my knees and say how wonderful she is? That’s a talent that will supposedly leave me breathless?”

  “Coming here was your idea,” said Isadora. “I never said I believed that stuff, I never said anything like that.”

  Allison looked at her. “But you were willing enough to try in your panic, now weren’t you.” She snorted. “A belief of convenience.”

  “What’s the matter with you? What is it?” said Isadora.

  “It’s her and it’s you, too. I heard that talk at night, all that stuff about starry hands. Who do you think you are?”

  Isadora rolled up her window, the wind was swallowing Allison’s words, blurring them.

  “Daniel used to tell me how he’d never marry again,” Allison said. “What did you do, just push at him and push him until he left, until he couldn’t even tell me where he was going?”

  “You’re crazy,” said Isadora. “I won’t listen to this. I didn’t drive him away. I loved him. He hit his head.”

  “You overloved him,” said Allison. “He used to come and see me, did you know that? He never talked about you. I had to ask him, but he didn’t want to talk about it, he needed a breather from you.”

  Isadora started. “He never said anything like that. You’re lying,” she said, but she remembered Daniel’s walks alone, she remembered the look on his face when she showed up at the lunch he was having with a friend. Then—he hit his head, she thought. “You’re the one, not me. You were violent. He told me how jealous you were. You’re the one who was with him when I got home. How do I know that you weren’t the one to bang him on the head? He said you were jealous enough to hire a detective to follow him, that to escape that, he had to escape you.”

  “Stories, all stories.”

  “Half the things you told me were lies. Daniel told me how your life was, what kind of a marriage he had to get out from.”

  “Get out?” she said. “Then why do you suppose he liked me coming over every damned day? How come I still have the key and he hasn’t changed the lock? Ever wonder about that? And how come that woman that drove him back, how come he didn’t say she looked like you?”

  “Because she didn’t,” said Isadora, starting to cry, digging her nails into her arm, pricking herself. “She didn’t,” she repeated. Her voice turned raw in her throat. “We have to stop this,” she said. “If you don’t stop talking right now, I’m going to scream.”

  They were both silent the rest of the way. Isadora leaned her head back and tried to sleep, but she had a nightmare, fleshed with vague shapes, and she woke thrashing, forcing Allison to swerve to a shoulder in the road, to throw out both her arms to catch Isadora from banging her head against the windshield. “Oh God, look at us,” said Isadora.

  Allison washed her hands over her face. “Yes,” she said, “look.”

  They had a wobbling kind of truce. Isadora said she couldn’t stay alone in Daniel’s house, and she had given up her old place. She wanted Allison there with her, she said she needed her.

  The two of them were at Daniel’s for two weeks. Neither one of them slept in the extra bedroom. They both curled into Daniel’s bed, although at first, Isadora didn’t really want Allison there with her, not until she found she couldn’t sleep without another body keeping her from drowning in all the old feelings that still shivered in that bed. Allison kept her sane, made her remember how things were now. The bed was big enough so they didn’t have to touch at all. They didn’t talk very much. They moved back and forth in that house. Sometimes The Swimmer came over with a pizza, and he sat at the table and made them both eat. He chided and nagged and punched Isadora in the arm to get her to laugh at a face he was making for her. He cleaned up and then he left, kissing Allison, who seemed distant.

  Isadora started wearing things of Daniel’s. She would sniff at the fabrics, she would walk right into his closet and twirl things down from the hangers. She went to class but she couldn’t concentrate. She’d waste the hour rubbing her hand up and down Daniel’s sock, feeling the way the fabric stretched across her instep. Mornings, she used his toothbrush, his soap, she shaved her legs with his razor. She was careful to be private, to not let Aliison see, but it wasn’t so much for fear Allison might think she was ridiculous and would move out as that Allison might start doing the same thing, Allison might make her share what was left of Daniel. Isadora felt herself going mad.

  She spoke with Duse every few days, but the conversations were short, were always the same, and Allison was always in a foul mood for the rest of the evening. They both spoke with the police. No one had found Daniel’s car, no one had leads. Isadora felt stupid sitting primly at the station trying to unravel the tangle of relations, to explain an ex-wife, a would-be wife. One of the cops kept asking how they all could be friends, he said he found that impossible to believe. He kept asking questions—did they all sleep together, did they eat meals together, or what? Isadora let Allison answer, let her field and swerve around each question while she sat there mute. Before she left, she handed the police a small snapshot of Daniel that she had Xeroxed. She refused to part with a real picture, as if it might contain some of Daniel’s essence, anything that belonged to her. She told the police that her phone was out of order, and she gave them Darnel’s parents’ number. She didn’t want to answer any damnable phones. She had become afraid to even touch the cool plastic of the receiver, afraid to hear any news at all, any terror.

  Isadora began calling hospitals, asking about amnesia victims, pleading with the nurses, saying she wasn’t crazy. She placed ads when she saw how it was, how people acted when they thought you were some nut with nothing better to do than haunt hospital corridors bothering people, how she was slapped down with indifference.

  She kept calling Duse, but even that was a tug of war. She couldn’t mention Daniel without Duse bringing up Isadora’s star. She’d avoid the issue; she’d talk about how the police were no help, she’d say how she had spent the night just wishing Daniel’s name, just seeing each of the letters form in her mind. She’d finally ask Duse, over and over, trying to get her concern, if she had any sense of where Daniel was, if she felt anything new. Duse wouldn’t hear her. She would gloss right over Isadora’s questions, would hone in on Isadora’s palm, on what her girl’s fingers were curling in over, were hiding. It was as if both of them were trying to prod the other into an answer, a solution, as if each of them couldn’t get to the same end by believing something different.

  Although she never really spoke with Allison anymore, she still depended on her, still saw her as a link to something of Daniel. It bothered her when Allison said she was moving out, that she couldn’t bear to stay in that house anymore. “I’m going to Boston,” she said defiantly. “With The Swimmer. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “How can you just go?” said Isadora. “Don’t you have to know?”

  “I don’t know anything anymore,” said Allison. “Just that I can’t keep living like this. So I stay here and Daniel comes back, so what? I’m not his wife anymore, and sometimes now I think I should never have stayed his friend.”

  “You can’t go,” Isadora pleaded. “How can you?”

  Allison pulled at the elastic on her braid, tugged it off a
nd flipped her fingers through her hair. She looked like someone else to Isadora, with her hair down on her shoulders like that. “I can go the same way you can stay,” Allison said.

  Isadora never thought Allison would really leave, but one day she came back to find The Swimmer helping Allison pack, the two of them picking their way through drawers, collecting the odds and ends that were hers. Allison wouldn’t look at her, and Isadora sat miserably in one of the chairs, a cat in her lap, watching. When Allison left the house, she gave Isadora a quick hug, and she left the door wide open. Isadora could hear the motor in The Swimmer’s car.

  She paced the house, she kept finding traces of Allison, rubber bands that had popped free of the black hair, books with Allison’s name in them. She’s not coming back, Isadora thought, and then she thought Allison would have to call to check about Daniel, she wouldn’t just disappear. For a while she watched the phones, she tried to will Allison to call her. The two of them should be waiting for Daniel, should be supporting each other, she thought, it shouldn’t just be her alone in this big ramble of a house, going slowly crazy with the animals. She waited a week and when Allison didn’t call, she thought suddenly of Duse, of how Duse had never liked Allison.

  Isadora felt powerless. Duse hadn’t been able to help, Allison was gone, Daniel, too. I’ve been abandoned, she thought, abandoned.

  She tried to settle things, tried to convince herself she could. The pet store was leased, and she told the assistant manager what was happening. She made knots of her words but he told her not to worry, he said that he could really take care of everything. He said she could even work in the shop if she liked, that she really had that right, but Isadora just shook her head. She said she didn’t know anything about stores.

  “Oh, sure you do,” he said, and as soon as those words touched her Isadora pulled back. She was tired of hearing people tell her about all the things she was supposed to be able to do.