Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  The network tried to fix her up with men, hoodwinking her with a careless dinner invitation, putting her beside astrologists and herbalists and a few times beside doctors and lawyers. They were always nice enough, but she never let them take her home, she never went to dinner with them, and she said she didn’t have a phone. Instead of dating, Isadora wrote film scripts. When she told the network, casually, in conversation, Ellen asked if Isadora were doing automatic writing, she warned Isadora not to let a spirit have too much power over her pen, not to let it take control and write whatever it wanted. “I knew someone who taught themselves how to do that,” Ellen said. “You, of course, have a star. It’d come natural to you. That woman spent hours just doodling circles, over and over until she recognized a world. It got faster, she was reeling off the sentences, and then they got fouler and fouler, all about murder and possessed people. It took her months of special hypnosis to get rid of that.” The hypnosis jerked something tight up inside of Isadora, made her remember Martin, made her smell his aftershave. Isadora never mentioned writing to the network again, and they soon gave up asking because of her silence.

  She finished school and took a job writing human-interest articles for a paper. They said they might give her a byline after a year or two and she could pretty much be her own boss. She liked writing facts, making words clean and defined and understandable.

  She wrote one film script, a play really, about Duse. She meant it to be a purging, she wanted to understand. She sent the proposal around, and she got six rejections, all of them polite, all of them basically the same. The last one made her face brutal. Write about what you know, it said. Then, underlined, bracketed in blue, it said I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS. NO ONE IS REALLY LIKE THAT. Isadora carefully clipped the words out and framed them in silver over her headboard.

  Duse had her last stroke in the winter. Everyone told Isadora that it had been very quick. Ellen sat beside her at the funeral, clamping her arms about Isadora, tightening the pressure when Isadora started crying. Ellen kept trying to tell Isadora that Duse would be back, that there was no way on earth you could keep that one away, and she didn’t care what Duse had promised Isadora. Ellen said that she wanted to buy the house so someone would be there when Duse did come.

  “What?” said Isadora.

  But she couldn’t convince Ellen of anything, not that Duse didn’t already inhabit parts of the drapes, the weave of a rug, that just by running your fingers over the surface of a table, you couldn’t pick up a current Duse had left. Isadora couldn’t convince Ellen that she had no legacy from Duse. She’d see Ellen watching her, smiling as if the two of them shared some secret. One day, Ellen approached Isadora with a complaint. She had a headcramp, she said, and when Isadora fished out two aspirins from her purse, Ellen’s smile turned funny, she closed her fingers about the pills and shook her head. “You’re her daughter,” Ellen said, as if Isadora needed reminding.

  She couldn’t bear it. She was back and forth in that house trying to tie up loose ends, never alone. The phone was always ringing, but the calls had nothing to do with sympathy. All that pity traveled back to itself. Those callers just felt abandoned. They wanted to know when Isadora was setting up shop, when she would start doing whatever it was that Duse had taught her. When Isadora protested, when she said they were wrong, callers reminded her of her star. No one was bothered when Isadora said she couldn’t do anything, and even Ellen said that Duse herself had suggested that that gift wouldn’t flower until Duse had died. “Her identity was so strong,” Ellen said.

  “Nothing’s flowering,” said Isadora. “Everything’s dying.”

  But Ellen’s words were insidious; they cropped Isadora’s dreams short, they woke her up and made her turn on her light so she could study her palm. She got out of bed and began trying to make lists. She divided pages in half, on the left side she put the things Duse always considered her gifts, her rights of birth; on the opposite side, Isadora listed possible rational explanations for each talent. Palm reading was just book stuff, she thought. The psychometry—well, maybe Duse was just a good guesser, maybe she had an exceptionally logical mind. Duse’s dying when she said she would was just Duse’s carelessness, her refusal to take her medication. It had nothing to do with fate, with destiny. Maybe, too, Duse had just hypnotized herself right into unshakable belief. She thought she could do certain things—so she could.

  The thing Isadora couldn’t let go of, though, the thing that she wore like a splinter, was Duse’s insistence that Daniel was alive. She wouldn’t destroy that with a rational explanation.

  Duse was right. She didn’t come back. Isadora never dreamed about her, never saw one feature of that face swimming up toward her. She even found an old scarf of Duse’s lining a trunk, long and filmy and white, and she started missing Duse so much that she wrapped the scarf about her wrist, she shut her eyes and yearned and waited, but the only thing that happened was that her sweat prickled along her skin, and she daubed herself dry with it.

  She let Ellen buy the house. She spent another month gradually cleaning her things from the place, taking the things of Duse’s that she wanted. The network all gradually left her alone when they saw how Isadora wouldn’t help them, how she would give them her queer pinched-up looks when they offered her their palms. Some of the clients thought she was ungrateful, a few came right out and told her she was fresh. People started coming to the house to see Ellen now, never Isadora, and she began to like the easy way she could just drift in and out of there, without having to stop to be polite, without having to answer anything.

  Isadora was suddenly aware of a new face. This woman started showing up, a young woman who would always sit in the old chintz chair by the window, who was always surrounded by one or two of the network. Isadora never bothered to introduce herself and no one looked up anymore when she walked into the room. At first, Isadora thought the woman was just a friend of a client, or a client she had never met, but then she spotted her reading someone’s palm, she saw how the network was gravitating toward that woman.

  She began to hear Duse’s name threaded into the conversation less and less now. Ellen told her how that new woman was becoming the network’s new focus. She insisted to Isadora that no one, absolutely no one, could ever take Duse’s place, that everyone was still waiting for some sign from Duse. She said, that as a matter of fact, there were even some among them who thought that Duse herself had managed to send this woman their way. The woman’s name was Stephanie Barlow, Ellen said, and then, pitching her voice lower, Ellen said that Stephanie said she was a medium, that spirit voices came right up through her, although no one had really seen that happen yet. “Maybe even Duse will come through,” Ellen said.

  The whole Stephanie business made Isadora glum. That woman had heard about Duse from a neighbor, she herself had never even bothered to visit while Duse was alive, and now she was just making herself at home. What was worse was that everyone was letting her. Everyone but me, thought Isadora. She didn’t like the polite way Stephanie smiled when Isadora introduced herself; it ate away at her, until later, while she was eating her dinner, she realized what it was. Stephanie had not said one syllable about Isadora being Duse’s daughter, and not one of the network sitting around her had mentioned it either.

  So that was how it was. All that need looking for a focus, zooming in on one woman. Well, thought Isadora, if you didn’t have certainty in yourself, then you just had to go out and find someone else who did.

  It made her uneasy with jealousy. She watched those women, she saw the placid way they drew closer to Stephanie, the way they unburdened themselves as easily as they sipped Duse’s tea. Why couldn’t she have that, why wasn’t it simple for her, too? It reminded her of the time she had actually gone to Confession, of the way she had just wanted to feel her face loosen up into relief the way she saw the other church faces do. She wanted the answers everyone else seemed to have, the absolutes, and instead, that confession had made her even more rigid with ner
ves, more skittery with her own doubt.

  Isadora knew all about need. She suddenly realized just how much nothing she had, how she ached and missed and yearned. She had to escape—over and over, she told herself to go—and then she took action. She applied for journalism jobs as far away from Madison as she could manage. Out of five hundred resumes, she had three interviews, one of them in California, in La Jolla.

  It hit her on the plane. She had been too frantic about packing, about buying something professional to wear. Daniel’s parents lived in La Jolla. It was the closest contact to Daniel that she had had in months. They’d see her, wouldn’t they? They’d let her inside, let her see the rooms Daniel had grown up in, let her touch his things, the toys he loved, the stuffed animals he held in his arms before he even met her. For the first time in months Isadora felt herself taking in oxygen. She was giddy with hope, and that hope made her just a little superstitious. She fingered the marking in her palm. Calling his parents was one thing—actually being in the same city, actually being able to sit in the house Daniel grew up in, was another. Maybe the clue here was belief. She could make fun of the network all she wanted, but when it came right down to it, those women seemed content enough, they weren’t riding one panic attack into another the way she herself was. She remembered how Duse said Martin was her destiny, how you didn’t question things like that, according to Duse. This could be destiny, too, couldn’t it, this sudden single interview in Daniel’s hometown—a fated way to reconnect. Daniel’s alive, she said, touching her star, promising someone, something, that if he really were, if he were at home, then she would never doubt gifts again, she would send money to all the poor, she would eat right, she would do anything, anything, she would do everything.

  She was afraid to call. She dallied and then she went to her job interview, but she couldn’t concentrate. A few times she thought she had been asked a question. She’d jerk her head up, but the interviewer was just dandling a pencil, searching his mind for the next thing he needed to know. Even when the job was described to her (researching subscription information) and she knew she didn’t want it, she still couldn’t quite relax; she kept thinking I’m not meant to work here, I’m meant to find Daniel, that’s why I’m here, that’s why.

  When she left the interview, she walked around the block a few times and then she called Daniel’s parents, her eyes shut, her finger on her star. Her tongue felt pasted in her mouth. Please, she thought, oh please, please. Daniel’s mother answered, her voice silky, but she invited Isadora over, she seemed pleased to hear her voice.

  Daniel’s house was a white ranch with blue shutters. Isadora tried to feel what it must have been like for him to grow up there. Daniel’s mother had her sit in the living room on a red velvet couch. She apologized for her husband being out. “Golf,” she said, lifting her hands. “You know how it is.”

  They small-talked and then Isadora blurted out how unhappy she was about Daniel, she asked if there had been any news, all the time her finger pressing into her star.

  Daniel’s mother looked startled. “News?” she said. “About what?” She peered again at Isadora. “You don’t know, do you?” she said suddenly. “You never got the letter, did you?”

  Isadora pulled herself up straight. “What letter?” she said. “He’s alive, isn’t he?” She could feel something lighten right up inside of her.

  “Well, yes, I should hope so,” said Daniel’s mother. She looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then, very slowly, her voice low, she told Isadora about Daniel, about how he had shown up there at home one month after Isadora’s call, his grin sheepish and shamed, his hands in his pockets. They had shouted at him, had asked him where his head was, and didn’t he have any feelings for anyone but his own damned self? “We told him we had called the FBI, that you were splintering apart, that we were ready to go crazy ourselves. He hedged at first, he said he had no real explanation. He was always like that, but he told us he had written you a letter, that it explained everything. I told him he should call you, and he said he was going to.

  “He had some crazy excuse about the bump, how it had jolted his thinking, had made him think how chancy things were, how you could be almost killed in one moment and saved the next, that everything was timing.” Daniel’s mother snorted. “Timing, my foot. I told him I never heard a poorer excuse in my entire life, that it didn’t explain anything, but he wouldn’t listen. Not at first. He said I didn’t understand, that what he meant was that he was seeing things differently.” She sighed. “Honey, I hate to tell you this, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t the bump on his head as much as who was there—that woman, the one who reminded him of Allison.”

  Here she interrupted herself, she reached over and touched Isadora and Isadora felt something folding up inside of her, telescoping up. “He never really got over Allison. He carried her up inside of him for a long, long time after they split. He was almost going to patch things up once, but he was stubborn about that detective business.”

  “She didn’t hire a detective,” said Isadora, her voice dull, but Daniel’s mother just shook her head.

  “What does it matter?” she said. “Daniel believes that she did and he couldn’t stand her claiming that much of him, taking even his privacy from him.”

  “He said I did that too,” said Isadora.

  “Did he, honey?” Daniel’s mother was preoccupied, half listening.

  “He never called, he could have told me himself,” said Isadora. “I never got any letter, any news.”

  “He didn’t want you to find him, I guess,” she said. “I can’t believe he never called you, I can’t believe you didn’t get the letter. A letter’s the coward’s way out anyway.” She looked at Isadora. “Look, he won’t get over you, don’t you worry. He said he loved you. I remember that. He just said you made him feel a little smothered, that it made him react against you and he thought it was better that he just leave.

  “Oh now, don’t. Don’t look like that,” said Daniel’s mother. “I don’t feel very proud about my son, I don’t think what he did was right. Not one bit. He has the blame, not me, and now you’ll hate me.” She stretched forward and wrote something on a sheet of paper; she handed it to Isadora, all the time talking about how she was going to give Daniel a good piece of her mind. The idea, not calling Isadora, not letting her know.

  She was crying when she called information for Daniel’s number. She didn’t care that it was the very center of the night, that everything was sliding into another time, another morning, she didn’t think that he might not be there, or that he might be wrapped around another woman, another scent. She dialed the number, she let it ring and ring, all the time thinking how his hands felt when they were touching her, how his face felt against her own, how it was to see herself in his eyes, to see his motions matching hers.

  On the ninth ring, she put her finger to her starred marking. Please, she thought, please, please, and on the next ring, he picked it up. She heard his voice, slow with sleep, and then she felt herself crack open. She stumbled out her name and then his and then she waited. There was silence on his end. She waited for a sigh, for her own name so she would know he was there, so she would know that she had made a connection. His voice could mend the fissures, she thought; she could just reach out and grab onto it and pull herself to safety.

  “Daniel—” she said and then she heard it, her name, from his voice and she breathed it in as if it were oxygen.

  He apologized. He asked if he could please call her back in the morning. They could meet, he said, he would explain everything to her.

  “No,” she said. “You won’t be there. I know you won’t.”

  “Oh Isadora—” he said.

  “I know what happened,” she said. “I had to hear it from your mother. You told her and you couldn’t even tell me. How do you think that made me feel? I was supposed to be your wife,” she said, starting to cry.

  He whooshed out a breath. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I
tried to. I did write you a letter, I even put it into an envelope, but I just couldn’t bring myself to mail it, I couldn’t tell you because there wasn’t space enough. You were right there inside of my lungs, sometimes I felt that you were using up my air and it scared me.”

  “What are you talking about,” she said. “You’re the one who kept prodding me to move in with you, saying I was distant, secretive; you’re the one, not me.”

  “Well, that’s right,” he said, “but later, I don’t know. I just felt I had to have space for myself.”

  “That Jillian—” she started hesitantly.

  “You think I slept with her?” he said, his voice edged. “Now you’re suspicious. I went through all that with Allison, I’m not going through it with you.”

  “You saw Allison?” she said baffled.

  “We understand each other, that’s all.”

  “I went through hell.”

  “Isadora,” he said. “So did I.”

  “No. Not like me, not like I did.”

  “Look. I can’t talk about this anymore, not tonight. Give me a number, I’ll call you tomorrow. I promise. I swear.”

  “I want to be with you, I want to touch you, I want to taste you—”

  “Taste. That sounds like devouring.” He laughed a little.

  “Aren’t we going to be together, Daniel? Can’t we just try?”

  “I don’t know, Isadora,” he said. “We’ll talk. I don’t know.”

  She took her finger off her star. There was no protection for her, no hiding place, everything was up for grabs. “What if I say no?” she said, and he said that all that meant was that they wouldn’t see each other, that was all.

  She said, “I don’t want to ever see you again,” as if she really had the choice, as if that really gave her any control at all. She hung up, not even knowing if he had heard her and then she sat up on her hotel bed staring at her reflection in the mirror.

  She got up and started fiddling with the pencil on the dresser. She touched her starred marking with it, and then she dug and dug and dug until she drew blood.