8

Isadora began to doubt Duse’s gift. She had never questioned the idea of a gift before. It had always seemed a given—clear and hard and irrefutable, as simple as breath. But Duse was defensive every time she brought the priest up in conversation, and it made her curious. It seemed funny to her how although neither the priest nor Duse denied the existence of gifts, both would refute the other’s interpretation. Duse insisted again and again that the priest was sinning against her identity, that he was making less of her than what she was by saying that every fool on the street had a gift, that she was not so special. “I’d like to see the grocer read my palm and tell me my future,” she said bitterly. “I’d like to see the lady down the street find a lost book the way I can. That priest never said what wonderful talents everyone is supposed to have, now did he? He just leveled everyone. He made them all ordinary.”

“Maybe he made them all special,” said Isadora hesitantly.

“Special, huh,” said Duse. “You think it’s special to be able to make soup from a pound of chuck roast? You want to be linked up with that?” She sighed. “He probably didn’t even think I could tell the future, did he?”

It startled Isadora a little. “I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t say whether he did or he didn’t. We talked about me more.”

“You,” said Duse. “You’re part of this gift thing, too, you know.”

Isadora knew. She would lie on her bed and think. Everyone has a gift. No one has a gift. Then she abruptly narrowed it down, she saw it becoming more dangerous, but she couldn’t stop herself. I have a gift. I don’t have a gift. The last step, of course, was the first, was Duse. Duse has a gift, Duse doesn’t have a gift. The shock of it, the surprise, made her uneasy. You can fool yourself any way you want. The priest had said that.

Her doubt made her days wobble; she was aware of layers of life, and she didn’t seem to be operating on a layer inhabited by anyone else. People were worrying about their sweaters pilling up, about their skin breaking out before a date, or even about passing a history exam; people thought about their kids getting into day camps and schools, about their husbands or wives loving them. There was that layer, and then there was the more terrible layer, the surface that took up with death, with disease, with all the things that are amusing in a soap opera and unspeakable in life. But hers was a narrow layer, she thought. Who else was worrying about crisscrossings in their flesh or feelings that wove themselves right into the fabric of their shirts, blueprinting them, marking them.

She thought about that a lot, and she began, slowly at first, to test Duse. She would borrow books from friends and then casually ask Duse to do a reading. She told Duse that it would really be helping someone out, that she wouldn’t even ask unless it was important. It startled Isadora how little Duse could sometimes manage to reveal, how faded most of the details were, and sometimes how completely wrong Duse was. She told Isadora that a book from an epileptic girl belonged to someone who would always be blessed with health, she saw a car accident for someone who had told Isadora that he would never even sit inside a car if he could help it because both his parents had been killed in accidents. You couldn’t say anything like that to Duse, though; she just narrowed her face and said that she wasn’t so much wrong as just premature, that the things she had managed to pull out from those objects simply hadn’t surfaced yet. “You wait,” she told Isadora. “I’m right. You’ll see.”

Duse saw that something was wrong, and when she offered to read Isadora’s palm, to read the very clothing Isadora had on, Isadora shook her head. “Why not?” Duse said. “You always badger me for readings.” She squinted at Isadora. “Do you have something to hide?”

“I’m all right,” said Isadora.

“No,” said Duse quietly. “I don’t think so.” But she left her alone.

On Monday Duse announced at dinner that she was thinking of offering herself as a kind of psychic consultant. She said she could put a small ad in the paper, something that said she would be willing to read palms, to try and locate people or find missing items, maybe to even scan someone’s body with her own two hands and see what she could pick up. Duse looked at Martin and then Isadora. “I wouldn’t charge unless I had helped someone,” she said. “I just feel as though it’s something I should do.”

Martin carefully set his fork against the rim of his plate. “You really want to do this, don’t you? I wish you didn’t.”

Isadora looked up, curious.

“All right,” he said. “All right, but you might get some real loonytunes, you know. Or you might get no one at all.”

“I’m good at spotting who’s serious and who isn’t,” said Duse. “I’ll just put a box number in the paper. People will have to sit down and write me if they want to see me, and I can touch the ink, the words, I can get a picture of them from that.”

“I don’t know,” said Martin. He started eating, teasing at his fish, flaking it into slivers.

“You won’t be here when people are,” Duse said, her voice stilling. “You can pretend it doesn’t exist at all.”

Martin looked down into the mush he was making of his food and then looked back at Duse.

“You’ll make me crazy splitting me into two pieces like this,” Duse said. She stopped eating, she put her hands on the table and waited until he rustled his napkin out, until he wiped his hands.

“All right,” he said.

“What about me,” said Isadora. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“You don’t want me to do it either?” Duse said.

Isadora fiddled with the ends of her hair. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Well then,” said Duse, smiling, taking the two of them in with her eyes and holding them there.

Isadora was in the school cafeteria when she saw Duse’s ad. It was just two lines, the words “psychic consultant,” carefully blocked, respectable, and a box number. It made Isadora feel exposed, and she quickly folded it up, pushing it in toward her stomach. She was eating with two other girls who were sprawled over different sections of newspaper—one of them was reading “Dear Abby” out loud, tapping her fingers against the bottom of the paper, rustling it. They weren’t friends of Isadora’s. They were completely indifferent as they both chewed on the ends of their milky plastic straws.

Isadora was fifteen that year. No one talked much about their parents. People ran away to California or New York City, carrying half their record albums and a few tee shirts and jeans in a pack on their back, slinging a guitar on one shoulder. It was rumored that one boy was living in a dorm room right at the university in town, even though his parents had Xeroxed his photo and posted it all over town with a reward offering. They didn’t trust the police. But even had Isadora shared the queer embarrassment of her peers at being taken care of, her situation was different. The issues were more charged. She didn’t think she could spread the paper out and roll her eyes at the girls slumped beside her, she couldn’t stab that ad with her finger and ask them if they believed that was Isadora’s mother, for God’s sake.

She had stopped telling anyone about her mother. She saw how it was—how they didn’t believe her, how they thought she was bragging, trying to lie some life into herself. And now it was hard enough, plagued with her own doubts as she was, without taking on other people’s sneers and insinuations, without seeing anyone’s hopeless belief. Isadora felt her lunch fisting up inside of her, and then, suddenly, she felt Duse’s hands prodding, pushing her toward something inescapable. Isadora began tugging the ad free when one of the girls glanced at her. “What’d you rip out?” she said. “Let me see.”

“You’re not going to answer this, are you?” she said.

Isadora looked down at the paper. “What do you mean?” she said. “Why not?”

“I don’t believe you,” said the girl, shaking her head. “People like that eat your money alive, tell you any damn thing just to get more. Jesus. A psychic consultant. That’s ridiculous.”

The other girl looked up, amused. “Hey, I know,” she said. “You should write a joke, something really hysterical. You could say you just ended a love affair with a spirit, but now you’re pregnant.”

“That’s perfect,” said the other girl. “Where’s that ad?”

Isadora crumpled the paper under the table, she dug at it with her nails until it was in pieces, until she could feel it fluttering down from her fingers to the dirty floor. “I don’t know,” Isadora said, standing, letting the last pieces drift down. “Maybe there’s another paper somewhere around,” she said. She left the table. She was glad it was Friday; she wouldn’t have to see them again until Monday.

Isadora lost her concentration. She worried the remaining hours of the day away. Everytime she spotted a newspaper in someone’s hand, she felt her shirt sticking to the sweaty patches on her back, she felt her scalp itchy with moisture. She imagined the whole school scribbling out letters, concocting stories for Duse, who, Isadora knew, would take every request seriously, who would pluck one out to respond to, to give away her identity, as if it were a gift. Even if Duse knew the letters were fake, she still might respond, just to chastise someone’s silliness, to make them see what they would now miss. Isadora saw how it would be, how easy it would be for anyone to make the connection, to add the daughter to the mother, to link them right together.

She walked home. She didn’t care how far it was, how stiffly her legs seemed to be moving. She was afraid of the bus conversation. She remembered one boy who used to stand at her bus stop. He was short and had one of those old-fashioned haircuts, the kind that makes your head look like the top of a hairbrush. He wouldn’t write “fuck” on the phone poles with the other boys, he didn’t have any smutty jokes to tell, and because of that, they ostracized him, they made his life a torment. She remembered how the other kids had grabbed his gym suit and shoved it into the mailbox, and when he said he’d get an F for not having it for gym, they all laughed, they waited until he threw a punch, and then, cleanly, in one neat move, someone broke that kid’s arm. Isadora remembered the sound it had made, remembered feeling the break inside her own skin. He hadn’t left the school, not yet; he had come back with his arm all plastered up in a sling, his face blank and dark. The whole time his arm was in a sling, he was driven to school, but the first day it was off, he stepped back on the bus, he let those hands draw him toward the end section, where he was hidden from the driver’s view by standing bodies, where no one in the front could see how they punched and prodded him, where the laughter hid the sounds he tried to make. Isadora always heard those sounds, even though she sat directly behind the driver.

Isadora slapped into the house listlessly. She thought about how Duse had to touch every damned object in the house, how she had to run those fingers of hers over every surface, smearing her prints into the polish of the table. When Isadora took off her jacket, she stuffed it deep into her closet so Duse couldn’t race her hands over it, couldn’t use her fingers like dowsers.

That evening when Isadora was slumped on the front stoop, watching the bats flap and die in the street, Duse poked her head out. “You okay?” she wanted to know.

“Sure, why not?” said Isadora. She felt cloudy with pain suddenly, and it startled her the way all that sadness was sweet somehow, the way she felt herself bracing for a release. It reminded her of all those times when she had felt like crying but there hadn’t really been anything wrong, nothing snagging into her life, there hadn’t been any wick to her sorrow. She just sometimes had these seasons of sorrow, when sadness pressure-cooked until she could lie on her bed and force herself to cry. She’d think about death and loss and disease and then she would cry, afraid to move because her tears might dam up. She rested her face against her sleeve, letting the tears collect and clot into the weave of her fabric.

“I know something’s wrong,” Duse said. “Don’t tell me there isn’t. Talk to me.”

Isadora twisted around a little so she could see Duse. “If you know what’s wrong, then you don’t need me to talk,” she said, turning back and resting her head against her knees. She waited, she tensed for Duse’s voice, but all that happened was that the front door slapped against the screen as Duse went back inside.

Isadora was crowded with words, drowning in them. She didn’t know who to talk to about how she felt about Duse’s ad. She had no really close friends and her father was really more Duse’s ally than her own. She knew he didn’t believe in palm reading and all that, and if she had been him, she would have made Duse stop. In the end, Isadora bought herself a notebook and hunched over the yellow paper, squinting, filling it up with her thoughts, expelling them. She smeared her fingers into the ink as she wrote, as her pen traveled and pushed her forward.

Isadora didn’t think anyone would answer Duse’s ad, not really, and she was surprised by the handfuls of mail that arrived. Duse read them all, and she sometimes held a letter up against her forehead, as if she could get a fix on the person who had written her, a scent right through the pages. Duse wouldn’t let Isadora read the letters and she even destroyed the envelopes right along with the mail. She said a relationship between a client and herself was like one between a doctor and his patient, that there were just some things you didn’t reveal, things that might embarrass someone. “But you can sit in on the sessions,” she said. “That’s something different. When people write in response to that ad, they’re just writing to me—what do they know about you?—but in session—well, Baby, then they’ll know about you, I’ll make sure they see that star gleaming up from your flesh before they even open their mouths.”

“Oh don’t—” said Isadora.

“Baby,” said Duse. “Your gift will show. Give it some time.”

It startled Isadora a little. She had been so busy wondering about Duse’s gift that she had forgotten her own. There had been such a release from that search, but now she felt it flowering up again, queasily unfolding. She gave her hands uneasy glances.

“Don’t worry,” said Duse. “It’s still there.”

Isadora had planned to be out when Duse had her sessions. She kept a careful check on the calendar hanging in the kitchen to see just when Duse might scribble in a time, and she was surprised when the doorbell rang one day when she herself had just gotten in from school. Isadora stayed in the background, too curious to leave, half afraid that if she came out on her own, Duse would parade her in front of the client. She strained to hear the voice, afraid she might recognize it. When the sounds were strange to her, she waited a bit, and then she crept toward the kitchen, slinking along the cool paint of the wall.

Isadora peered in as she passed the room. Duse was writing something. There was a middle-aged woman sitting on the couch beside Duse. She was a blonde, but her hair was cropped close to her skull. She used her hands like they were thorns, pricking the air, hurting it with the force of her moves. She told Duse that she had spirits following her around, that they were always whispering to her, making her do things she didn’t want any part of.

Isadora, listening, leaned her cheek closer to the wall. The woman said that spirits had made her steal magazines from the checkout counter of the Thrift-T-Mart, had made her shove a few Milky Ways into the front of her shirt. She had pressed them deep into her bra, and she said she could still sometimes feel the places where the hard edges of the wrappers had scratched her pale skin.

The woman went on and on, in a voice as tight as a wire. She said her spirits liked to play practical jokes on her, that they had short-sheeted her bed more times than she cared to remember. She said she didn’t know how many there were or what sex they were and she said they could change their shapes if they wanted and their voices, although she had never seen them. She handed Duse something. Isadora saw a whisper of fabric. “It’s a spirit scarf,” the woman said. “They hook right into the fabric. I feel them in the cloth against my neck.” She leaned forward a little and bent her head, showing Duse a rash she had along her neckline, given to her, she said, by those spirits out of pure meanness. Duse let the scarf drift through her fingers; she had lazy moves. Isadora, peeking out, saw the way Duse held her mouth, the way her eyes were tightening the way they did when she wanted to laugh.

“I don’t get much from this,” Duse said. “Oh a car, maybe, the country a little. You like to drive recklessly, don’t you.”

The woman frowned, took back the scarf, and gave Duse her palm. It wasn’t such a good reading, Isadora thought, not like the way her own always went. Duse talked mostly about the woman’s past, how she had been an only child growing up on a spindly farm in Wisconsin, how she had come to the city only when her parents died and the farm went to taxes. Isadora prickled at the details. She knows, Isadora thought; she really knows about this woman. Would someone have written all that in an initial letter, just an introduction for a reading?

“Hey,” said the woman, drawing back her palm. “What about the future? How come you’re not saying anything about that? What about those cockamamie spirits?”

Duse was silent for a minute. Isadora could feel the silence taking life, moving and slithering as if it had a belly to it. “Well,” said Duse. “I don’t see any spirits in your hand. You have a long life ahead of you, a good and strong marriage. Some kids. No travel.”

“That’s it?” The woman was angry, incredulous. She said Duse hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know, and she would be damned if she would pay for things she held inside herself.

“You don’t have to pay me anything,” Duse said. “I didn’t really expect you to.”

Isadora waited until she heard the door shut and then she came into the living room. “You heard that?” Duse said. “You can either sit in on the sessions and participate or not. If you don’t participate, then these things are private. I told you.”

“Something’s wrong with that woman,” Isadora said.

Duse’s mouth flickered. “Well—” she said, drawing out the word, starting to laugh despite herself, and covering that sound, holding it, with her cupped hand.

There were other people coming to the house, people Isadora was both fascinated and repelled by. Duse never made her come into the room, she never told anyone anything about Isadora. “That’s yours to tell,” Duse said. “I was wrong to take that on myself.” Duse changed her mind about Isadora knowing something about what went on in the sessions, too. Oh, she still didn’t want Isadora sitting right there with her and her client, but after each client left, if Isadora liked, Duse would sketch the problem. She said it wasn’t betraying any confidence because her clients really expected her to use any source she could, and you never knew, Isadora might just pick something up that she couldn’t, Isadora might be able to help.

Duse told Isadora how she separated the serious clients from the others. There were more and more people like the first woman, ill-dressed, slangy, spouting all kinds of crazy theories about being from Mars, riding spaceships. They couldn’t hold down jobs and they wanted Duse to tell them that it was because of a past life, because of something they had done back then. One man told Duse that strangers were always coming up to him and saying that they ought to bust his nose, for no reason at all. When he called people on the phone, they always hung up on him, they never called back. He didn’t like it when Duse told him he was just being paranoid, and even though she told him she couldn’t help him, he still came back. “He just wants to talk,” she said. “That’s all these kinds want anyway. I tell them I can’t do much for them, I show them how there isn’t one trace of Mars or spaceships in their palms or their clothes, but they don’t hear.”

The clients she liked to see were also the most disturbing, the most draining for her. They were people who had lost children or lovers, the ones who were stretching out their hands to Duse like suctioned tentacles, grasping for something to root onto, a strength of Duse’s that they could make their own. She had people who had been told they were dying of cancer, people who had tried doctors and special clinics and now, as a last resort, were trying Duse. Duse told Isadora that for these kinds of things she did body readings, she went right over and skimmed her hands over their body, trying to pick something up, something that felt different to her. Sometimes she would try to put herself into a trance to concentrate. Some of these clients were articulate; Isadora saw how good the cut of their clothing was, but, too, she felt the way they were bleeding.

She wasn’t sure exactly how, but Duse did calm those people. Isadora could hear the tensions sliding out of their voices even as Duse just took up their palms to read. She never told them anything especially profound, not that Isadora could see anyway, but sometimes just her saying that it was their destiny, and it could be changed, would brighten them. She never told them how to change anything, though; she always said they had the answer right inside of them, and it was their responsibility to glean it. Once, Duse found someone’s runaway son. The mother brought her one of his shirts and Duse, inhaling it, said he was still in the city. He was, too. The mother phoned Duse at midnight the next day to say he had come home, that he had been staying at a hotel with his girlfriend and they had run out of money. “How did you know he was here?” Isadora asked. But Duse just lifted her shoulders. “I just knew,” she said.

Isadora stayed home less and less. She just never felt really comfortable being in the same house with any of the clients. If she had seen anyone that she thought was like her, she might have stayed; but the more she realized that need, the more it pushed her away. She saw, too, that Duse magnetized, that she drew in every misfit and outcast, every person who could just as easily believe that cats were from Venus as that Duse could tell the future.

Sometimes Isadora misjudged the time. She would come in on the tail end of a session to see Duse soothing someone who was crying hysterically, catching at breath in raw gulps. Duse soothed with words, with the names of places where lost valuables could be found, with a description of the way a fate line lifted and marked the end of a struggle. Duse told Isadora once that people who were that upset sometimes never contacted her again, but that wasn’t a success. It was like all those old times at Olya’s, when Olya told her that people didn’t come back because of failure, not success. They blamed themselves.

All of Duse’s energies were going into her new business. She was sometimes depressed—when she couldn’t sense one damn thing from some kid’s muddy sneaker that a parent had brought to her wrapped in clean linen, when she saw death in a palm. At those times she would slump at dinner, and Martin, without speaking, would wrap himself about her, trying to nuzzle her into good spirits. They never discussed her work, not that Isadora could see, but sometimes Martin would ask Duse how her day went, and although neither one of them mentioned a client, they both knew what she was talking about.

Isadora never got used to seeing all those strange cars bumping up into their drive. She worried that someone she knew would find out, or worse, would show up. There was a craze at school now with Ouija boards, but no one took it seriously, everyone joked around. Kids made the triangle move across the letters on the wood board, forcing names of boys they liked to be spelled out. Kids giggled and played until some teacher would shout at them to leave their foolishness at home and open a book for a change.

Isadora spent a lot of time alone. She wrote a lot, letting all those shapes on the paper lull her. She was secretive about her notepads, and she always hunched her body right over them when she saw anyone approaching. Duse kept trying to get Isadora outside. “You’re too pale,” she said. “Someone’s going to mistake you for a spirit and have a heart attack right here in this house.”

“Redheads are meant to be pale,” Isadora said.

Duse didn’t really know where Isadora got all this writing business. Isadora hadn’t argued for bedtime tales when she was young. Martin used to bring her books, used to lift her up into his lap, but when she curled against him, it wasn’t so much for the story in that book as it was for the way his hands were displayed to her. She liked to look at the lines. And Duse, who had read Isadora’s palm enough times, hadn’t seen any writing talent there, any reason for her girl to be so consumed.

Isadora would walk half an hour down to the Thrift-T-Mart to pick up a special kind of writing pad she liked. They were cheap pads, with coarse yellow lined paper, and backed with a picture of a movie star. Isadora liked Tony Curtis because his hair didn’t look real to her; it was slick and oily and seemed to almost drip. When there wasn’t Tony Curtis, she bought Janet Leigh because of the weighted look of her lipstick, the pout of her eyes. Isadora wrote pages and pages, sometimes sketching pictures in the margins, but she never let Duse see one single syllable. She would cover the whole pad with her arm and wait until Duse had passed by her before she would begin her writing again.

Isadora kept her writing pads between her mattress and her box springs. Sometimes she put one of her flaming hairs between the pages so she would be able to tell if the pads had been tampered with. She wrote everything—stories, factual accounts of things she saw, her own thoughts. Sometimes she wrote about herself, and sometimes she divorced herself from her writing—she thought she was almost creating herself all over again into a new person, and it comforted her.

She stopped noticing Duse’s clients when she was writing. She could stay right in the den, curled into a chair working, and not tense up the way she usually did when she knew someone was talking with Duse. Once a woman came right in and stood over Isadora’s shoulder, and when Isadora looked up, the woman told her to be careful, that there was such a thing as automatic writing, and that she herself had once done it.

“What?” said Isadora, putting the lead sheet over her writing so the woman would stop looking at it.

“You hold the pen, but a spirit does the writing,” the woman said. “Don’t make that face, it’s true. We’re just telephones in a way, a link to the world for them. It got so I couldn’t pick up a pen without skittering obscenities all over the page.” She told Isadora it had only stopped with two years of hypnosis treatments and no writing at all, but even now she couldn’t hold a pen without trepidation, without her blood starting to bubble inside of her.

Isadora thought it was ridiculous, and she was glad when the woman went back to see Duse, but even so, something was taken from her. She could feel it, and when she picked up her pen again and flipped the pages back, she couldn’t concentrate, she was aware of that woman moving inside her cells.

She was irritable that evening. She didn’t want to say anything to Duse because she knew how she was. All she had to hear was Duse telling her that automatic writing was a gift or something. Isadora unfolded her hand under the table and looked at the star. She had used up years yearning for it, more years yearning for the gift it signaled, and now she just yearned for it to disappear. Writing was hers, she thought.

“What is it with you?” Duse said. “You haven’t done anything but play with your food.”

“I’m all right,” said Isadora.

“You’re forcing me to find out what’s wrong, you know,” Duse said. “I don’t like intruding, but I’m worried about you.”

“You can’t see into people’s lives like they were a crystal ball,” said Isadora.

“Oh no?” said Duse.

Isadora got up from the table, pushing away from it with both hands. She felt queer and small inside. When she went to sleep that night, she silenced her body under the sheets. She sweated, thinking all the time, saying in her mind the words, that Duse should go ahead and read her mind, that she should prove right then and there to Isadora that she had the talent. Prove it, prove something.

Isadora was awake for hours. She kept propping herself up on one elbow squinting into the redly lit clock face for the time. Four A.M. She kept repeating phrases in her mind, challenges for Duse to recite back to her. I wish you were ordinary, she thought. Silence was sandwiched in between every phrase. She kept waiting, expecting herself to be violently cracked open, to feel Duse revealing her, peeling at her layers as if she were some fruit. I don’t want to be an outcast, Isadora thought.

The more her body dragged down with sleep, the more her mind seemed to be twitching awake. Her thoughts fumbled. She began seeing shadows in the corners, pieces of clothing that she had carelessly flung from her now took on shape, now seemed to become something. She knew how Duse said she could sense things, but she didn’t want that, she didn’t want anything. What if there were spirits, what if they were vindictive, angry with her for denying Duse’s gift, and her own? Isadora got up and clicked on her desk lamp and took out the compass that she used for math. She idly etched at the star in her palm, pricking herself. She had planned on scarring the star away, but it hurt.

She sat down at her desk. Why were things so dramatic to think about, to imagine yourself doing, but so terrible when you actually did them? She put her hands up to her mouth and carefully bit off every nail she had.

She fell asleep at five, and in the morning her eyes were bagged, the fragile skin beneath them faintly purple. At breakfast she watched how Duse moved, how she held her robe closed in her fist while she bustled about the kitchen. “Why are you looking at me like that?” Duse said, reaching for the juice. “Don’t you feel well?”

“I guess,” said Isadora, shrugging, waiting. But Duse said nothing. She set down plates and cleared them away, and when she was through eating, she told Isadora that she was taking a shower and would Isadora please answer the phone if it rang because it might be a client who needed her.

Isadora felt no victory. Maybe Duse hadn’t even tried to look into her mind last night. Jesus. She got up from the table. This is stupid, she told herself; it has to stop.

She removed herself a little on her sixteenth birthday. She flattened her hands against her thighs and told Duse she didn’t want her palm read. Duse gave her a sharp look; she reminded Isadora that she always did that for her on her birthday, that she always made it a special, detailed reading. “I don’t care,” said Isadora. Duse was silent a moment. “Well, if you change your mind—” she started.

“I won’t,” said Isadora.

She couldn’t stand the way Duse wasn’t moving, the way that woman was just watching her, eyes squinted as if she wanted to see right through to Isadora’s soul. It made Isadora itchy. She got up suddenly, she said she had to go to the university library for something, and it wasn’t until she was half out that door that she glanced back and saw Duse, still thoughtfully standing there.

Isadora liked the university. She usually hung out in the Ratskeller, the gloomy student bar in the union. She called it the Rat the way she heard the students do, and she picked a good clean wood table in the center and bopped the flat of her hands on it in time to the tinny music they piped in. She watched the shaggy-haired boys playing chess. Sometimes she saw them cheating. It was a different world to be in; she forgot about Duse.

Sometimes she wished one of the boys would pick her up, other times she liked feeling invisible, being let alone to simply sit there fiddling with her Coke. When she got up to leave, to go back home, her stomach tensed.

Everything at home made her feel suddenly uncertain. She was aware of beginnings, of endings. She had always thought of Duse as her protector, as someone who knew everything, who had ways to control and order and make everything more magical in the process. Isadora didn’t think that anymore. She couldn’t stand to see Duse prowling in her death files anymore. The whole procedure seemed to underline death, to bring it out instead of control it. For the first time in her life, Isadora began to worry about death, to feel it, like a presence about her. Sometimes she’d be in a crowd of people and she’d think about them all being dead, all being nothing. Duse always said that mediums proved life after death, that spirits did exist, although she herself had no particular desire to have a dealing with one unless she could be in total control. “What do you care what death is like?” Duse once asked her. “It’ll be a surprise.” But Isadora imagined that not all surprises were pleasant.

She tried to get the newspaper before Duse did, to rip out the obituaries. She kept her face innocent. She told Duse that the dogs outside had bitten a page from the paper; she said the paper boy, in his careless speed, had forgotten a section. Duse always narrowed her eyes at Isadora and then she would climb into the car and go down to the Thrift-T-Mart and buy herself a fresh paper. She would bring it back inside the house and sit, meticulously flipping through every page, all the time aware of how Isadora’s eyes were feeding on her.

They began to have terrible fights, tugs-of-war of the will. Duse wanted to know why Isadora was pulling back; she accused her girl of denying her very self.

“Why do you know about my self?” Isadora said. “You’ve had lucky guesses, that’s all.”

“What?” said Duse. “What?”

“I went to sleep one night doing that stupid telepathy baloney, telling you to read my mind, almost begging you to prove you had the power to do it. You didn’t know that, did you? How could you have—you can’t tell anything.”

Duse made her mouth one tight line. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know I didn’t listen in, that I didn’t pick up on what you were telling me and decide it was better for you to find out for yourself just what kind of a gift I had? Maybe I just chose not to prove anything. And why in God’s name do I have to prove anything to you?”

“I wish you were ordinary,” Isadora spat out. “All this craziness. Do you ever really take a good look at some of your clients, the kind of people they are? People on the street, average people, laugh at you. I’ve seen it.”

“Who?” said Duse. “Who laughs?” She grabbed at her hair and twisted it into a knot, her fingers violent. “And if they laugh, it’s out of ignorance, out of fear, that’s all. And let me tell you something else, Baby. I’m not ordinary and you’re not ordinary either. You can think you are until the earth splits right open but it won’t change anything.”

“I just want to be left alone,” said Isadora, her anger pulling out of her, draining her.

“You want me out of your life?” said Duse. She looked at Isadora defiantly for a moment, and then she abruptly sat down, the anger washed from her face. “Oh my God, that’s it,” she said. “Everything comes creeping right on back to you, whether you want it to or not, doesn’t it.”

“I used to want my father dead,” said Duse. “Did you know that? In a way, I sometimes thought I even made that death happen, I created it. I made it so he couldn’t flicker through my thoughts, so that there wasn’t room. He just stopped existing for me. That’s the same as death, isn’t it? You know, it’s kind of funny, I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore. I stopped caring.” She washed her hands over her face. “You see this hand?” She held up her right palm. “You see where the lifeline wobbles to a close? That’s when I’ll be out of your life, but even then there’re spirits.” She put her hand down, she settled it into her lap. “What are you doing to yourself? I love you, Baby. All I want to do is just make it so nothing can hurt you, so nothing can ever touch you unless you want it to. I want you to be strong.”

“You want me to be you,” said Isadora.

“You’re wrong, Baby,” said Duse. “That isn’t what I want at all.” She bent toward Isadora, she tried to push away some of the red tendrils that were fluttering over Isadora’s face. “I want you to be you, and me to be me,” she said. Then she said that there were lots of kinds of deaths, not just the one riding in your palm. Then she turned and left the room, her eyes unfocused, curious.

Duse would never let Isadora see her predict a death again. She was casual about picking up the paper when it flopped in through the screen door, and she moved her death files into her room.

She studied Isadora. She’d finger her own red hair and see it mirrored back to her in the girl. Sometimes she had to hold herself back from just striding over to her and grabbing that clenched fist of hers and unballing it so she could read the lines, so she could see what was going on with her. But Isadora never let her close. “Do you know why she’s so moody?” Duse asked Martin, but he said it was just adolescence, that it would pass, like everything else.

She didn’t like the way Isadora’s face changed whenever Duse read a client’s palm or held up a piece of their clothing to inhale it, to make it a part of her. She would look up and see Isadora just standing there, frowning at her. When she tried to tell Isadora things she was picking up from a school friend she had seen Isadora with, Isadora said that no one believed that sort of stuff anymore, and then was silent.

“What sort of stuff—” began Duse. “Why are you all of a sudden so resistant?”

It hurt Duse a little, she didn’t understand why Isadora would doubt her. Oh, it didn’t change the things Duse was, it didn’t make her any less sure of herself. She was used to people disparaging her, ignoring her. What bothered her was that, in refusing to see gifts in Duse, Isadora was refusing to see them in herself as well. She saw how Isadora was, how she did nothing more now than sit alone and write and write until her eyes began hurting her. Duse could see her rubbing them, getting up to dribble ice water on them.

“Your star might fade, you know,” she told Isadora, and when Isadora brightened, Duse told her that never mind, she would want that gift someday, and she would be sorry. “It’s like a muscle,” she told Isadora. “You use it or it goes right to flab. It’ll disappear right from under you and you won’t know it until it’s too late.”

“What do I need a star for—” Isadora said.

“Because it’s who you are,” said Duse.

“It’s a birthmark,” said Isadora.

“You know,” said Duse slowly, “I won’t be around forever. You’ll want that gift.”

“I’ll never want it,” said Isadora.