Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Daniel’s house, the animals, were another matter. It took her five phone calls to figure out what bank mortgaged the house, and even then, she was continually asked just who she was, what business it was of hers. She lied. She said she was Daniel’s sister, that she had come for a visit and he had talked about selling. She wanted the details he was simply too busy and too lazy to go and get for himself. The bank was unimpressed. They didn’t care how her voice stuttered, how she was almost pleading, they wouldn’t discuss it with her, and when she blurted out the truth to them, confessing, almost crying, the bank wouldn’t believe her. They said that people didn’t just disappear, not when they had responsibilities. Isadora continued pleading. She wanted someone, anyone, to take control. And when the line went dead, she swayed, holding on to the phone cord as if it were an umbilical cord that was slowly being severed from her before she was ready.

  She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t make payments if she didn’t know what they were, and she didn’t think she had the funds to keep the house anyway. She wished that she just knew someone to call, someone who could simply and methodically recite answers for her, tell her what to do. She listened to the house, to the animals, and she started to write again, furiously this time.

  At first, she couldn’t write anything that didn’t have to do with Daniel. She started to compose letters to him, to stick them into envelopes and take them to the post office. She would spend hours leafing through the zip code book, ferreting out different addresses where she thought he just might be. She always sent her letters to him in care of a post office box, and she put her return address in the corner. It made her feel hopeful, as if she had taken some concrete step, some action. But then those letters started boomeranging back to her, they were rectangular white stains on her carpet. She couldn’t look at them. She began to take all the mail outside and look at it by a trash can, so if her letters to him came back, she could toss them out, she wouldn’t have to have them in the house, layering up all her failures.

  Next, she stopped putting her return address on the letters. It was better not to know how quickly they came back. She sat up nights writing him, and it reminded her of all those times when she had confessed things to him in her notebook, it reminded her too of the time she went to Confession, of the way it had felt to bleed out all that pain and not see a reaction on another face. It was a small comfort. Writing to Daniel, whether he were present or not, still managed to make her feel linked up, and she could imagine him reading his mail, waiting for the right time to respond. She could think about him loving her.

  She continued to badger the police. She went there every single Thursday, in a dress and stockings, carrying a purse, but no one did much except show her the files and files of missing people. One officer told her that he thought that sometimes people were just swallowed up by holes right in the earth. “The earth is just like swiss cheese,” he told her. “They have black holes in space, don’t they? Why not cheese holes in the ground?” She stood there stupidly, until she saw the grin spanking his features outwards, until she realized that he was trying to get her to smile.

  She did everything rational that she could. She made posters with Xeroxes of his face, she offered rewards. But all that happened was that she got a lot of crank mail, a few theories about people saying they saw spaceships kidnapping Daniel for breeding, requests for money before the help was given, and one particularly vile letter saying they would cut out Daniel’s tongue and mail it to her if she didn’t come up with five million by noon the next day. Isadora went back and ripped down those posters, every one of them. Her hands were violent, shearing.

  She watched the news. Everytime a body was dredged up from somewhere, she went mad. She called Duse, she asked over and over again if Duse thought that body might be Daniel’s. “I don’t think so,” Duse said. “Do you?” When Isadora said that she didn’t know, that that was why she had called Duse in the first place, Duse told her to use her own gift. “I cant,” said Isadora. “I don’t have any gift. And anyway, everything feels dangerous to me. I have no control.”

  Duse was silent for a moment. “Isadora,” she said, “do you think you’d need any kind of talent if your life was a nice clean sheet of paper? If the only trouble you ever snagged against was which shoes you should wear with which skirt? Baby, a talent is to sort out life with, to explain it so you won’t ever feel like you’re out of control.”

  “I don’t understand anything,” Isadora said, hanging up.

  The police failed her, the hospitals, Allison, her own attempts. Even Duse was no real help; all she did was to insist Daniel was alive, and sometimes for Isadora that was enough, but other times, it was just more torture, more doubt. She would call Duse at odd hours, at 2 A.M., at 8, just to hear a voice of hope. Duse’s confidence, though, wasn’t infectious. As soon as Isadora put down the phone, she wanted to rip her skin right open.

  Isadora began filling out transfer applications. She couldn’t be in Ann Arbor anymore. She couldn’t walk down a street without peering into every face, checking to see if it was Daniel. The old places had no charm for her, and discovering anything new was always something Daniel had instigated, not she. She didn’t know what to do about the house. She went to the legal aid place on top of the old storefront and they told her it wasn’t her responsibility, that she could just take what was hers and move out, but she might want to notify the bank about what was going on. She couldn’t speak to those bank people on the phone again, so she wrote them a letter, licked it into a plain envelope, and began going through the house, getting the things that were hers.

  She didn’t have much, and in the end, she packed two things of Daniel’s for herself, his alarm clock with the yellow cartoon smile painted on it and a faded, pale-gray sweater. She left him her name and Duse’s number tacked to the freezer. “Love, Isadora,” she wrote, but it made her start weeping, so she carefully inked it out.

  She didn’t have any idea what to do with the animals. She couldn’t keep them with her, and she couldn’t just let them stay here rambling in this house, starving, chewing on the furniture and the rug tufts. At first, she fiddled with hiring someone to come in and feed them, at least for a year, but when she scavenged the papers to price a service like that, she was dumbfounded by the cost. It depressed her. Every time she walked into that house and the animals greeted her, making her one of their own, she felt traitorous. She would have to stoop down and burrow her head in the dog’s fur, she would praise the cats and talk to the parrot, cooing, her voice sliding with undertones, but she never felt sincere or believable.

  In the end, Daniel’s assistant rescued her. He said he had a big ramble of a house in Ypsilanti, and a yard, and he would be absolutely delighted to take the animals. “Until old Dan gets back,” he said, trying to make Isadora relax. Even so, it was terrible for her to gather all the pets together and keep them in the living room until they were picked up. She had valiantly tried to brush the dogs, to clean the lint from the parrot. She had even relined his cage with pages from a brand new Vogue, using only the colored fashion pages from Paris. She still couldn’t help thinking that she was betraying them and they knew it.

  With the animals gone, the house was a mausoleum, and she felt cushioned in the silence. It was funny. She could be fine in that house with the windows glassily sealing out the street noises, with the doors bolted. She let the TV gather dust in the closet, she let the radio layer up in spider webbing. It was going outside again that was difficult for her, having to feel all that life pulsing up around her. It took another month, but she was accepted as a transfer student at the University of New Mexico. She didn’t know anything about the school, but she didn’t care. She was going because Albuquerque was near Sante Fe, the place Daniel had always said he wanted to visit, and sometimes late at night, she had fantasies of running into him on one of those arid streets, of recapturing him with just one look.

  Before she left Ann Arbor, she had a final deep panic. She
thought about hiring a detective and she even pulled a few names from the yellow pages, copying each one out over and over as if that would calm her. She even started to make a call, but then she just let that receiver clack down as soon as she heard a voice on the other end. Daniel had severed himself from Allison because of a thing like that. And in any case, like Allison, she would never be able to afford something like that. And like Allison, she would lose out.

  She came home for the summer, home to Duse.

  Duse’s Epilogue

  Duse always blamed the doctors. She had never liked the way they kept your own body a secret from you, the way they used language to camouflage your own inner workings. She was always sure she could have cured herself if given the time. Before Isadora had come home, she had tried. Duse used to shut herself up for whole long afternoons, taking the phone off the hook, muffling the receiver with dishtowels. She ignored the doorbell and the sharp stinging raps on her front pane of glass. Sometimes she heard her name shimmying into that house, sometimes she saw a face peering at her, waving so she’d notice, but Duse always turned away. She had never seen anything wrong with putting herself first. The clients who understood always came back, the ones who didn’t relieved her by their departure.

  She sat in her rocker, pushing it to the hot, sunny window in the dining room. She shut her eyes, she visualized herself as healthy. Sometimes she could go ten minutes without coughing, without feeling that pressure against her rib cage. She kept a pocket watch on the table by her so she could time everything—her coughs and her silences. She was going to will that cough right out of her, she wasn’t going to let illness be part of her destiny.

  When she started having headaches, she thought about her father. It made the pain worse. She began fussing with her hair, preening in front of the mirror, all the time pretending her head wasn’t pushing right up from her body. She took aspirin, swallowing three with a quick gulp of orange juice, or she kneaded her pulse points with her thumb, a form of Chinese massage a client had taught her. Sometimes, too, it worked.

  She was nauseated a great deal. She took salt and it seemed to help, although sometimes she thought her stomach was feeding on itself. The tissue seemed to burn. Everything’s peeling away, she thought. She tried to see that burning as a cauterizing process, she tried to see a spigot of water flushing out the heat, she made it so real in her mind that she almost felt wet, and she told herself that she really did feel better.

  She wasn’t surprised by Isadora’s coming home, but it did bother her that Isadora seemed so lacking in strength; that a good part of what that girl did involved aimless brooding walks about the neighborhood. She saw too how the girl would hunch up over the obituary columns, ruining her eyes on the patterns those names made, on the way they seeded the pages like mines. Duse had never needed any death pages to tell her who was dead and who wasn’t, she had never let her eyes burn so much that she would have to dim her own vision with dark glasses. She had never had sight spasms. She had had her own way of knowing about death. For her, the death pages were simply a check, a proof for the unbeliever. When she said that to Isadora, Isadora looked up at her. “For people like me, you mean,” Isadora said.

  “You’re my daughter,” Duse told her.

  “Duse’s daughter would know what happened to Daniel. Duse’s daughter wouldn’t be sinking in questions,” said Isadora.

  Duse couldn’t stand for Isadora to feel that way. In the end, to give that girl some sense of control, some sense of power over something—anything—she let Isadora badger her into seeing a doctor. She wasn’t fond of the tests, and she didn’t like the careless way the nurse needled her blood from her veins. The doctor told her that she had dangerously high blood pressure and he gave her some pills. He asked about her diet, and he was annoyed about the salt. He told her that she had better stop that nonsense or she would be in trouble.

  “What trouble?” she said.

  “You never mind, you just believe me,” he said.

  Isadora offered to go to the medical library and look everything up for Duse. She said she was good at that research and that she had done it for Daniel. Duse let her go, just to have Isadora busy at something other than her endless yearning for Daniel. Duse took the pills the doctor gave her. She could try it for a while, she thought.

  The pills made Duse depressed. She felt her vision clouding, so much that once she bumped into the end table, bruising her shins, cursing. It embarrassed her; she felt suddenly old. She tried to walk a straight, even line, and when she couldn’t, she took those pills and flung the bottle along the floor.

  In the end, the thing that made her dump out all those pills was what they were doing to her lifelines. Her fate line had a twist in it now, and she saw how her lifeline frayed, right in her hand, how pieces of it whispered and grew thin and strayed off the surface of her palm. It terrified her. She studied her hand, she made charts and drawings of it, all the time frowning, and then she went to see Isadora, who was copying out her medical notes for Duse to read.

  “It’s there,” Duse said, making Isadora look up, making her push that tangle of hair from her face.

  Duse held up her palm. “I’m dying,” she said.

  Isadora tilted forward. “No, you aren’t,” she said. “The doctor never said anything like that. You’re just tired, your skin is just clenched up from all the fists you make.”

  ‘Isadora—” warned Duse.

  Isadora focused on her own hands, on the way they looked, white, silhouetted against the black of her jeans. She had a sudden sharp image of Duse falling, swaying and looping down until Duse was one of those spin-the-bottles, whirling around, stopping to position herself to Isadora, to blame.

  “You think I said that to get attention?” Duse said. She leaned on the wall. “What are you going to do without me?” Duse said.

  “Nothing,” said Isadora. “Nothing, because nothing’s going to happen. Please stop talking like this. Please. It makes me crazy inside.”

  Sometimes Isadora found that she could joke her way out of her worry. She told Duse that the one good thing about Duse’s illness was that it made her forget about Daniel for a while, it seemed to temporarily stop up her grief. “I never could stand to be second,” Duse said, smiling.

  There were things Isadora could do now. She got up in the night and started cleaning salt out of the house, throwing out the pretzels and the candy and the chips, snacking on the dips and the crackers before she tossed the containers out. On one occasion, she methodically ate her way through a whole box of Cheese-Ta-Bits. In the morning she was sick. She would never eat anything salty again, she vowed, but that night, she polished off the Doritos.

  She cooked the meals. She bought vitamins in clear yellow capsules. She dripped the oily A and E into the food. She took the other vitamin pills and ground them into the meals. Duse complained about the bland boredom of the food, but Isadora, determined, said that it was just Duse’s medication working on her palate.

  Isadora liked the sense of cause and effect, the way she was making Duse better, almost forcing her to get well. And Duse, too, encouraged it; she let Isadora section her days up for her into TV and reading and meals, and it was only when Isadora asked Duse if when she felt better she might try to see if she could sense something on Daniel that Duse got angry.

  Isadora knew Duse had headaches. The doctor said it was just tension and to let Duse rest them away. So when Isadora saw Duse sitting in her rocker, thoughtfully staring, almost in trance, Isadora assumed that Duse was just trying to cure herself, or maybe trying to get something on Daniel, and she left her to herself.

  Duse woke in a hospital bed. She drifted in and out of consciousness, and when she came to, she floated. She tried to speak, but her mouth had turned damp, her speech dribbled out of her like a baby’s. She was irritated with the doctor. She kept trying to prop herself up so she could hear him. He said she was very lucky, that she had had what he liked to call a warning stroke, right in her roc
ker. He told her that it had been Isadora who had rushed her to the hospital because Duse had kept nodding off, her motions cranky, unresponsive. I know about luck, Duse thought, I don’t need you to tell me anything. She didn’t want to talk to him, although he kept asking and asking. She was ashamed of the way her mouth worked, so she made writing pantomimes, she asked for paper. She got a yellow legal pad and she wrote, in her crabbed hand, that she would be fine, no thanks to anyone but her own self.

  “Mrs. Michaels,” he said, and she thought DUSE, as instant and automatic as her own heartbeat. She averted her face, she buried it into the clean starch of her pillow.

  Isadora came to see her. Duse felt heavier, as if her mass had increased while she had slept. She wrote something out for Isadora and handed it to her. Isadora’s face panicked. “I can’t do anything for you,” she said. “I don’t have a gift.”

  When the night nurse whisked in, reminding Isadora that Duse had to get her sleep if she ever wanted to be well, setting down a plastic pitcher of water for Duse, Isadora reached for her mother’s hands. The whole time her fingers were flexing over Duse’s, Duse was turning Isadora’s hand over in her lap, not letting go until she saw the marking, still alive, still riding in her daughter’s palm.

  Duse didn’t like the food and she picked at it. She asked for salt. She took the medication the nurses brought her, she tipped the white paper cup down against her hand, but when the pills started making her depressed and dizzy, she stopped. She flushed the things down into the toilet. It all seemed so useless, anyway. She was dying.

  Duse dreamed about Martin twice. The first time they were walking over the money boxes her father Richard had buried. Her own was still there, marked by a stone. She saw Martin, his back hunched, the spade glittering in the night like some earth-bound star. She saw him trying to dig out her box, to free it from the black earth before someone else claimed it. They were treating the whole adventure like some treasure hunt, and her smile was secretive and knowing on her face. When she woke up, she was shivering, her whole body pulled back to the dream, but when she shut her eyes, she was more awake than before. She couldn’t talk about it. She tried telling Isadora, but when she saw how it made Isadora jitter a step back, she turned that dreamtelling into a yawn, she said it was probably nothing.