17

They drove up in The Swimmer’s car, a battered green Dodge. The upholstery smelled of chlorine, he had two tiny water wings suspended from the rearview mirror, and the trunk was crowded with scuba equipment. The car ran all right; Isadora speeded and zipped in and out of lanes. She tried to ignore the rearview mirror as much as she could; when she peered into it she could see slices of Daniel’s life—his shirts, a belt, some pants—spread across the back seat. She had these movie flashes—the invisible man, she thought. She could almost feel Daniel’s arms under those rumpled shirt sleeves back there, she could almost see his face reflected in the shine of a belt on the car floor. It made her heated with want. Duse had told Isadora, though, that if this trip was too much, then Isadora could always mail the things, but Isadora knew she couldn’t stand worrying about lost mail or ripped packages. Not knowing where Daniel’s clothing was might be a more tender pain than not knowing where he himself was.

They arrived around noon, and Duse was in the front yard, weeding, her hair tied back with a yellow scarf. She stood up when she heard the car, coughing into a garden-gloved hand.

“You look terrible,” Duse said, pulling Isadora out of the car, pressing her hands to Isadora’s face.

“You don’t look so good either,” Isadora said, squinting in the sun. “You look tired.”

“Clients,” said Duse. “More and more. And every one of them keeps thinking I can make them miracles.”

She made them come inside. Allison stopped in the hall to look at the photo gallery. Isadora flinched when she saw the pictures of her father. It hurt her eyes and she had to shield them with the flat of her hand, she had to look away. Her own picture, blown up, was larger than her own face.

“So you’re Allison,” Duse said, but Isadora, looking at her mother, could tell she wasn’t really listening, that her eyes were still focused on Isadora. Duse sat them in the living room and then told Isadora that Daniel was nowhere in her death files, and that that was a good sign.

Allison shifted. “What kind of files?” she said.

“I pulled them all out,” Duse told Isadora. “I started working on them in bits and pieces because I knew you didn’t like seeing me at them. I don’t have as much faith in them as I used to—because of Martin—but still, sometimes they work, and I want to try everything, anything. I didn’t find even a trace of Daniel. To make sure, I even went to the library. I sat down with all these out-of-town obituaries and tried to make a trio.” She shook her head. “Not a thing. Of course, it’s different for me. I don’t carry him inside of me the way you do. It’s you who should be looking for signs, you know. All that need ought to pull something out in you, don’t you think?”

“Will you stop?” said Isadora. “Will you just stop?”

“All right,” said Duse. “Maybe he wasn’t your destiny after all, maybe that’s why he can’t be found.”

“He was my destiny,” said Isadora sharply. “But not the way you think. It had nothing to do with all that hocus-pocus stuff. We were right for each other. We need to be together, that’s all. He hit his head—” she said desperately. “He could be wandering around. You found the Rearson kid—”

“That’ll never end, will it?” said Duse. “I didn’t find any Rearson kid. How many times do I have to say that to get it through to anyone?”

“That doesn’t matter. The kid was found,” said Isadora. “That’s all that counts.”

“It isn’t all that counts,” said Duse. She sighed and then she looked at Isadora, she trailed one hand through her girl’s hair. “Baby, you find him,” she said. “You have to try, don’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It has to,” said Isadora.

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

“What about you?” said Duse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing,” said Allison. “Damn.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stories, all stories.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.