11

She was there, in that apartment, by the end of August. She hadn’t let her parents drive her up there, and she had resisted Duse’s offer to find her a ride. Instead, she took the train.

She fixed her place up. She waxed down the floor and found a small table and matching chair at Goodwill. She loved her place. She found she could open the window in the kitchen and sit out on the ledge eating her breakfast, watching the students walking by. She felt safe. She liked walking around, liked the fact that no one knew her, liked going to classes and sitting there anonymously until it was time to leave. She had questions for the professors, she waited until class was over to ask them, or she went to their offices. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, not yet. She spent her afternoons studying or eating broccoli soup at the Del Rio. Sometimes, when it was warm, she lay on her back on the Diag, the flat grassy area in midcampus.

She was surprised to find that her favorite classes were not her writing classes or her literature classes, but the classes she was required to take—the sciences, math. She fell in love with botany. She liked the outdoor lab where they all tramped around and tugged down leaves, where they all learned how to identify a tree just by the veining of a leaf. She learned how to make salads from wild plants, how to make a soup from dandelions, which she began cultivating in her own patch of land by her apartment. She thought she liked plants so much because they did nothing more ominous than grow.

She called home every Sunday at three. When she phoned, she would lie flat on her wood floor, arching her back when it cramped, becoming a kind of human dust mop for the spidery webs of dirt that seemed to spawn on the floor. She wouldn’t let her parents come up to visit, though they always asked, and though she was always telling them how much in love with Ann Arbor she was, she wouldn’t let them love it too. She pleaded with them over the phone. “Not yet,” she said. She couldn’t tell them why. It would hurt them knowing she wanted to have one place that they hadn’t touched, that she needed a place that wasn’t owned or known by anyone else but herself. Something as minor as a visit would tint her feelings about Ann Arbor, and she was too fresh and happy to let that happen.

She was a little surprised at how easy it was to talk to Duse on the phone, how much it catapulted her back into childhood when she had knotted herself about Duse like a shoelace. Duse on the phone was really less invading than Duse in person. There was none of that suffocating sense of her. Duse never brought up the gift business, although once she did mention that she felt something hibernating in Isadora, something new, but as soon as she had uttered the words and felt Isadora’s chilled silence, she let the subject drop.

Martin was funny on the phone. He always wanted to know if Isadora was eating well, if she flossed her teeth. He kept reminding her about a six-month checkup, and he said he didn’t trust those teeth of hers to any other dentist, that she would have to come home and let him take a look. “Miss me, do you,” said Isadora.

“Miss nothing,” he said. “I wish I could work on my own teeth. I’d never go to another dentist if I could manage it.”

A few times, when it was very late at night, Isadora would find herself missing them. Sometimes she heard sounds, swift creakings of the floorboards, and her old night fear would jerk up again and she would have to get up and turn on all the lights. She would study her fear away. She would want to call Duse, but instead, she wrote. She kept a journal, a thing she called her selfsearch. Sometimes she lay her palms out flat on the desk and looked at her marking. If she squinted it didn’t look like a star at all.

She still depended on Duse. Once, she popped out one of her contact lenses, right in the kitchen. She thought she could hear it clicking on the linoleum. She knew it was there. She got down on all fours and started patting the floor, searching it out, as desperation swelled and pushed against her skin.

When the phone rang, she lifted an arm for it instinctively. She heard Duse’s voice. “Wait—” she said. “I dropped a lens in the kitchen.” She tried to focus in on Duse, to forget that lens for a minute. It was Duse who told her to look under the grating of the refrigerator, who mentioned it so casually, so matter of factly, that Isadora didn’t think to fight her. She simply stooped back down and fumbled her fingers right onto the lens. “Hey—” she said on the phone, smiling, pleased, but when she hung up, she told herself that it was no miracle. Not really. Duse had simply known the topography of most small kitchens and had simply taken a good guess. Isadora probably could have found the lens herself if her nerves had not been so twisted up.

Still, when her lens popped out again, when she misplaced a book or some class notes, she would call Duse. “You’re lazy,” Duse said, meaning, “Use your own gift, dig it out.” “I know,” Isadora said, meaning, “I don’t have the time to be clean and logical, I’m too nervous right now.”

Through it all, Isadora began to think that if you had to be mother and daughter, it was easier at a distance.

It was winter when Duse became famous. She had been watching the news when a woman came on the air, pleading, offering several thousand dollars for information leading to the recovery of her five-year-old baby girl. She held up a picture, her mascara running and splotching on her cheeks as she wept; but the thing that moved Duse the most was the way that woman had misbuttoned her blouse, leaving gaps that revealed white slices of bra as she bent forward. As soon as the woman was off, Duse wrote a letter to her, in care of the station. She said simply that she had this skill, that she knew how to touch pieces of clothing and know things about people, that she could read things right from the lines in the palm. She didn’t mention her death files—a thing like that would make that poor woman peel the skin off her own body. Duse offered to do a clothing reading for the woman for free.

She mailed the letter; she forgot about it. But a few weeks later the woman called her, hesitant, and then she came over. Her name was Alice Rearson, her daughter’s name was Katy. She was weeping, making Duse smother in her grief. The air became heavy with the damp of it. Duse had to refuse to do a reading that day because her concentration was so soggy, but the woman thanked her anyway, clutched her hands, and left Duse with a baby dress, pink and faintly smocked, stained with chocolate on one cap sleeve. She gave Duse a piece of paper with her name and number scrawled across the width. It made Duse a little uncomfortable the way that woman kept touching her, the way she treated Duse as if Duse offered some sort of salvation.

In the end, though, Duse couldn’t really get much from that dress. She made her head burn with trying, but all she felt was a subtle glimmering, a feeling that the baby would be found and returned—alive. Duse brooded about it. She felt failure closing up her air. Her sensations had been so weak and clumsy that she hated to give Alice any kind of hope at all. She tried her death files, but came up with nothing. It made her a little more hopeful—she hadn’t thought that the child was dead. When she called Alice, she told her what she had and she promised to mail the dress back, special delivery, so Alice wouldn’t have to make a trip out. Duse apologized for not being able to do more.

Alice’s voice cleared. She didn’t ask Duse any questions about where her girl was, who had taken her; she was so strangely content by Duse simply saying her baby was alive. She said that was the really important thing, that she didn’t want to try again because she felt it would be tempting fate. That was just the kind of response Duse could understand, but still, she couldn’t quite agree with it. Fate was to be pummeled into the paths you chose for yourself. Still Duse couldn’t shake her sense of not having done one damned thing, and when Martin came home that evening, she wrapped herself about him, asking to be held.

She knew he didn’t like hearing about her work, that that was a divider in their lives, but she wanted comforting and so she told him, she blurted it out. Then, “You’re mad,” she said, watching his face.

He shook his head.

“I couldn’t do anything for her.”

“Well,” he said. “Hope’s something.”

He stroked her red hair, pushed it free of her lean shoulders. “We’ll take a vacation,” he said. “We’ll get romantic about it. We can go to the beach and baste ourselves up in suntan oil and bake like potatoes.”

“Or french fry,” said Duse, holding out her arms, lifting one sleeve and exposing the pale fragile skin.

It was good to forget everything for a while. They went to Florida and Duse, amused, watched all the middle-aged men in their white shiny shoes and white shiny belts, the women in white sandals, their white hair tipped with blue. She immediately named the place the Land of the White Shoes, and she forbade Martin to ever buy a pair. She said he couldn’t own a white belt, either, and if she saw him with one of those white Panama hats, she would grab it and give it to the alligators. In retaliation, Duse went out and bought herself a one-piece black bathing suit which she wore every day, rinsing out the sea salt every night in the hotel bathroom sink. She sat under a black beach umbrella on a navy blue towel, and occasionally she would get up and swim with Martin. She was a dot of black in all that blue and when she walked out of that ocean, she saw how everyone watched her. Her hair, darkened by the ocean, was almost a true red.

It was almost the fourth day when Martin bought a newspaper. He said he didn’t like knowing what was going on when he was on vacation, that as far as he was concerned, they were in a vacuum. The only reason he bothered with a paper at all was to see what movies were around. He didn’t feel like being stuck in the hotel room calling theatre after theatre. He was leafing through the back pages when he saw a tiny article. Psychic Finds Girl, it said, and underneath was a picture of a woman holding a baby, the two of them staring stony-eyed into the camera. Alice Rearson, the caption read. “Oh shit,” he said.

Duse, sitting up, peered over his shoulder, shielding her eyes with the edge of her hand. “But that’s not true,” she said. “I never told her where to find that girl. I never told her much of anything. Why would she tell the papers a lie like that?”

According to the article, the baby had been found sitting in the back seat of a white station wagon, her mouth sticky and stained red from licorice, a few strings of the candy still clutched in her hand. The motor was running; the doors opened easily and yet the girl made no attempt to leave. It was just a local cop who saw her sitting there, who had kids of his own and who knew how dangerous it was to leave them alone in cars because they liked to turn on the windshield wipers and break them, they liked to beep the batteries right out of the horn. He walked over, waiting for the parents, ready to lean on them with a lecture. He said the girl had looked up at him once; she had stuck out her tongue and made a funny face. He made one back. He waited ten minutes and then he saw this man coming toward him, young, fresh-faced. When the man saw the cop, he bolted, and the cop instinctively gave chase. The man was easy enough to catch, although he did throw the pint of ice cream he was carrying at the cop, spattering the gray sidewalk with pistachio green. But once caught, he seemed to wilt right in the officer’s hands.

He was only twenty-four, on unemployment from a lost factory job, and he had been hotshotting about town. When he saw Alice Rearson’s daughter toddling in the dirt patches at the side of a suburban road, he pulled over and called to her. She was a friendly, guileless child and she came right over. He wasn’t sure why he took her, he later confessed. He said simply that she was cute and small and he was lonely. He thought it might be nice to have something need him.

She never fought him, the papers said. He told her he’d take her to the zoo, so she got in the car, and he kept his promise. They spent a whole muggy day at the animal cages. He fed her popcorn and candy and when she was sleepy he had her nap in the car while he drove home. He lived alone, a half hour from Alice, and when the girl cried for her mother, he gave her crushedup Valiums in her milk and put her to sleep.

It was Alice who gave the statement, who said that she had stopped worrying after seeing this psychic who told her her baby would be coming home. She named Duse, she told what Duse did, and then she said that talking too much was just tempting Providence, and she didn’t want to say anything else about Duse. She made it sound as if Duse had masterminded the whole rescue attempt, as if Duse had guaranteed the girl’s safety. The spaces Alice Rearson left in her statement could be filled in by anyone. The papers, it said, were now trying to contact Duse for a statement. “Oh Jesus,” said Duse.

Alice did tell the papers that she felt terrible about one thing, about one lie. “Here it comes,” thought Duse, lightening. Alice said she had lied about the reward. She didn’t have one hundred dollars to spare, let alone a few thousand. She was divorced, and her husband had a hard enough time as it was making his childsupport payments. She had offered that much money because she would say anything, anything, to find her child.

Duse put the paper down. She couldn’t clear her head of that story. It spoiled the vacation for her and she begged Martin to take her home.

There was a gift from Alice waiting for them, a hand-embroidered tablecloth with a note, but Duse left the cloth shrouded in its plastic case and tucked it into a drawer. She didn’t want it on her table.

The papers called, the neighbors, and her clients, but she told them all the truth. She said she hadn’t done one damned thing for Alice Rearson, and no one believed her. The papers insinuated that she was being secretive, holding out for a fee; the neighbors said she was being refreshingly humble. The mail began spilling into the house, scribbles about Jesus using Duse to do His will (and here Duse remembered that priest Isadora had gone to and it made her smile), letters asking for help, letters saying Duse was a miracle. Duse tried to answer each letter at first, but her simple denials seemed to win her even more converts. “Stop answering those things,” said Martin. He began to collect the mail for her, and it was odd, too, how for the first time he really became a part of her work—they had something to share. For a while he almost looked forward to getting the mail. It made him cheerful to see all those letters because he thought they might catapult Duse away from all that psychic stuff.

Duse did retreat a little. She didn’t like the vampirish way people sought her out. Her steady clients were discreet enough. They learned how quickly she would shut them out if they kept badgering her for details, if they expected her to do the same for them when they lost track of an uncle or nephew.

There were strange phone calls, voices begging: Find my son, find my daughter, she’s in L.A., in Houston, in Detroit, I think. Duse always vowed she would hang up as soon as a voice like that started in on her, she said she could tell by the first sound, but instead, she heard every voice out. She was polite when she said there was nothing she could do, and sometimes, too, when the callers were desperate, she would promise to call if she picked anything up. She kept a notebook of their names and she wrote everything in ink.

The one thing that made her furious was an editorial in the paper. The man who wrote the article called her the biggest huckster since P.T. Barnum. He said they both knew the secret of never giving a sucker an even break and he offered anyone five hundred dollars to prove that Duse was a fake. He intimated that she leeched off human emotion, that she grew fat on sorrow, and he said she had to be stopped. Duse fumed over that paper. It got so that she had the very article branded right into her, and she thrust the thing at Martin for him to read. He took the paper from her, read the first line and then threw it out, but she fished it from the basket. She gingerly picked the potato peelings from the surface, skimming the clinging food clots from the print with her hand.

That editorial tunneled into her, and she wasn’t surprised when it started a whole campaign of criticism against her. They said that because she wouldn’t come forth, because she pretended humility, she was more of a charlatan than Houdini. The one letter that was even obliquely commendatory compared her to Santa Claus, saying she was a beneficent myth. She was so enraged that she finally did write a letter to the paper and they printed it. She said, as she always had, that she had never claimed to have had anything at all to do with finding Katy Rearson. That was something from Alice Rearson’s mouth, not hers; from someone else’s pen. She said it wasn’t her fault that people yearned to believe. There was never anything you could do to stop that hammering need. The newspaper letters had nothing to do with her, she wrote, and she wished they would stop. She closed her letter with a statement that she had never asked for nor taken one penny from Alice Rearson because she hadn’t helped her.

Duse’s was a small celebrity. People forgot, became enmeshed in something else; the phone calls and letters dwindled and then stopped. Duse sent copies of everything to Isadora, writing her that this loony faith was not what she wanted, that these kinds of hungry people were not the ones she respected. She said that that was a thing that she could share with Isadora as well as with Martin, it was a thing that could bind them all together.

Isadora sat Indian-legged on her floor and read the mail. She was glad she wasn’t in Madison anymore. Ann Arbor gave her distance, made a thing like this manageable. Of all those letters, though, the one that inhabited her like a splinter was her mother’s own newspaper letter where she denied having anything at all to do with finding that child. Isadora was stuck on that one detail, that truth.

Isadora never thought that anyone at the university might know about Duse. Ann Arbor was a tight community, a closed world, and sometimes she didn’t think anything existed outside of it, that there were no families or gossip or home towns. She forgot how unique her mother’s name could sound in a mouth, how that name could ease into a conversation and be connected to Isadora’s because someone always knew someone who knew someone.

It happened first at a party. It was a large open event thrown by her botany professor, and Isadora found that not knowing anyone was an advantage, that she didn’t need hypnosis to feel brave enough to approach someone. It was easy enough to go over to the bar where everyone was sipping wine. If she was suddenly fright-stricken, she could always dip her hands into the bowls of popcorn and Cheese Ta-bits and eat. It was just party prattling, a group of people by the window, and Isadora just went over and introduced herself, she mentioned Madison. She saw how one male face in front of her suddenly piqued with interest. He told her he knew Madison, that he had transferred from the university there and that the thing he most remembered and was most glad to leave was the bats. Isadora laughed. He mentioned the student riots, the national guardsmen lining the streets in silver riot gear, and then he said he read about some psychic there who was pretty famous, who had found a little girl. “Isn’t that wild?” he said.

Isadora sweated into her black silk shirt. She told him she remembered it, but that the woman had said that she hadn’t done one damned thing, that she had had no part in finding that kid.

“Oh hell, that’s just false modesty,” he said. He irritated Isadora. She said again that Duse had never claimed anything, and then he asked her how the hell she knew. “I know,” said Isadora. “That woman is my mother.”

His face stilled contemptuously. She saw how it changed, what a difference it made, and she braced herself for more questions. She never knew what to say about Duse, and she was already feeling the hard knots working their way through her belly. She could lie, she supposed. She could say that she knew her mother had a talent; she could lie and say that she didn’t think her mother had one jot of talent at all; she could lie and say she was bored by the whole thing and didn’t want to dig out details for anyone. She wondered too what would happen if she said very casually that, oh, by the way she had this starred marking in her right palm that was supposed to indicate that she had some gift or another, but that she didn’t believe it. It was just a birthmark, probably.

When the questions came, they centered more on Isadora than on Duse. Isadora, after all, was right there, someone they could touch. Later, she would think that some of that was her fault, that she shouldn’t have said that she didn’t like talking about her mother, because she had given them no alternative but to ask about her instead.

Could Isadora read palms, someone asked, did she do those funny kinds of cards, what were they—tarot or something? A flatringed hand was placed on her arm, against the silk of her shirt. “No, I don’t do that,” said Isadora, stepping back, letting that hand release.

“I had my cards read once,” a woman said to Isadora. “I thought it was rubbish but then everything those cards said came true. God, I was devastated.”

“Sure, you were,” said the boy next to her. “What did the cards say—you’d lose your glasses, bounce a check?”

She ignored him for Isadora. “You really don’t read the cards?” she said.

“I don’t do that,” Isadora said. She frowned. She was suddenly bombarded with questions about feats people thought her mother might have taught her. Someone even brought up voodoo, although everyone laughed when he did. Isadora kept shaking her head, all the time feeling as though she were apologizing. She left the party early, and when she went out the front door, she could still hear those people swirling her about in their conversations.

It made her nervous. Duse had once acidly told her that just because she refused to admit the existence of something didn’t mean that that something didn’t exist. Isadora made herself crazy worrying about all the things that those people thought she could do. It was one thing to hear Duse telling her she had a gift, to hear Duse’s clients wonder about her while they, themselves, were talking about spirits and UFO’s; it was another to listen to people she shared a city with, people she knew were intelligent.

Isadora tried to concentrate on rational things. She studied her botany more than she had to, dragging that textbook out, memorizing tables and discoveries, diagramming her notebook pages up with cross sections of leaves and stems and roots. I don’t have a gift, she told herself. Duse doesn’t have any gift. Over and over, she wove those phrases into her mind. Even so, it was difficult. She was in class one day when she heard a voice in her mind, something saying her name. She started. I was half asleep, she told herself, I was dreaming, that’s all it was.

The worst times were at night when she lay flat in her bed and thought, when the chair and her familiar wood table were hidden and shadowed by the dark. She’d feel the hollows in her hand and remember her star. A birthmark. Christ, that’s all it ever was. Sometimes she thought it was a medal from a fall, a scar. She never forgot it was there. Sometimes she glanced into other hands. When someone in class raised their hand to answer a question, Isadora pivoted around to look at them. She wanted to believe that everyone had weird markings on them, that it meant nothing more sinister than human diversity.

She never stayed thinking in her bed long. She was up, kicking the sheets free, turning on every light in the place. She made brownies from the cheap mixes she got at the corner grocer, and she sat up eating them, picking them out of the pan with a bread knife, sliding them warm and soggy and underdone into her mouth.

Daytime she ran. She had initially started running to fulfill her gym requirement, and to make herself exhausted, to wear herself down so she could sleep out the nights. She wouldn’t run outside like most people. She wanted, instead, to become oblivious with motion, to be nothing but feet, moving, pacing out space. She ran on a small circular track in the gym. It always smelled of damp socks and sweat, but she didn’t care. She ran until her hair dripped down her back, until she could feel her heart pulsing frantic and alive in her throat, and then she would flop down on one of the tattered gray mats by the door, too tired and frail to worry, too sleepy to think about anything more serious than what she could bolt down for dinner before she tried to go to bed, before she hoped for dreamless peace.

Duse’s small fame colored the way Isadora met people. It was really nothing new; the old Madison shyness crept back into her bones. She tried to fight it, to edge her way back, telling herself fiercely that this was Ann Arbor, her place, and things were not the same as in Madison. Defiantly, she began bringing men home, people she liked. She had one curly-headed poet from an English class and she celebrated with new sheets, very bold and bright red. She liked making love with him, liked the way his body smelled of lime aftershave, and she liked how dead and deep she could sleep with him beside her. The problems started one morning when he wouldn’t leave, when he simply assumed that they would spend the whole day together. She watched the lazy way he spread his arms on the wood of her table, saw the way he helped himself to her cocoa mix. She wasn’t used to sharing time and so she told him she wanted to study. He took one of her paperback novels and started to read, proud of his own quiet. But, she repeated—she made those words a thrust—he had to go. The slow, hurt way he took his departure unnerved her—the way he kept looking at her, as if she had beat him. He was never so friendly and fond with her again, and more than she missed him, she missed the way the nights passed with him.

She had a few other men over, people who didn’t seem to need so much from her. Still, she could never open up to them, she was wary when anyone asked her anything, and if a man showed interest in anything psychic, she dropped him.

She began to feel that things were rotting away beneath her, that she was being too paranoid, too ridiculous, and in the end she went to health services to get a prescription for a tranquilizer. If she could be calm, she could think, she could sleep, she could make things right.

She spoke a little less frequently to Duse, to Martin. She never told Duse that people here knew who she was, and she certainly kept quiet about people intimating that Isadora, too, must have some gift. She didn’t mention how tense she was, how she couldn’t sleep, how her very bones seemed threaded with wire. Instead, she asked how Duse was, how Martin was, and she said, as she always did, that everything was fine, that she was happy, and that no, they couldn’t come up to visit. Not yet.