Lifelines Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Louise: 2008

  Louise: 1971

  Elke: 2008

  Louise: 1971

  Richard: 2008

  Louise: 1972

  Margot: 2008

  Louise: 1973

  Dieter: 2008

  Louise: 1973

  Margot: 2008

  Louise: 1974

  Elke: 2008

  Louise: 1978

  Richard: 2008

  Dieter: 2008

  Louise: 2008

  Richard: 2008

  Margot: 2008

  Richard: 2008

  Dieter: 2008

  Elke: 2008

  Louise: 2008

  All at One Time: 2008

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Heidi Diehl

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Diehl, Heidi, author.

  Title: Lifelines / Heidi Diehl.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036017 (print) | LCCN 2018038739 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781328482792 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328483720 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.I3447 (ebook) | LCC PS3604.I3447 L54 2019 (print)|

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036017

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  Cover illustrations © Shutterstock

  Author photograph © Steve Gunn

  v1.0519

  For my mother, Margrit Meinel Diehl

  and in memory of my father, John Dornfield Diehl

  A walk expresses space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone, and that is another space too.

  —Richard Long

  Louise

  * * *

  2008

  Louise was a passenger in her own car. Richard, her husband, the inveterate cyclist, was driving her to the airport. When they got to Amazon Parkway, he turned left instead of making the right that led to the freeway, the fastest route there. They passed the rose gardens, then the pizza place run by second-wave hippies. Soon the streets were unfamiliar. Houses sank into hard yellow grass. Flowers, their stems bleached and brittle, offered no premonition of the rainy season ahead. Louise had lived in Eugene a long time; it was nearly impossible that this terrain could feel new. But Richard taught urban design, and he never took the same route twice. That detour made us discover those donuts, he liked to remind her. We never would have found that park. Life presented constant opportunities for research, he told his graduate students.

  And maybe he wanted her to miss her flight.

  It was October, and for the first time in many years, Louise was not shackled to the school calendar. At fifty-nine, she was newly retired, or perhaps just unemployed. Until a few months earlier, she’d taught art at a private school across town—the Cedar School, with its experimental curriculum and sliding-scale tuition—but in June, the principal had confirmed the swirling rumors: the strapped school would be closing for good.

  Normally at this point in the fall, Louise would have been dreading the annual barbecue at the vice principal’s house—a time for teachers to get together and moan about their seasonal panic, to swap verbal recipes for horrible dips made of sour cream. Now she longed for that familiar slump. The usual classroom anxieties had filled her recent dreams, and it took a few minutes in the middle of the night to remember that she wasn’t going back.

  This drive to the airport prompted similar feelings: she was urgently nostalgic for Eugene’s hippie pizza and ordered green spaces, even though it was all still right there, the colors softened by fog.

  Richard squeezed the wheel. “Remind me what I’m doing with the wood.”

  Louise had charged him with maintaining her project while she was gone, adding a piece to the cumulative sculpture she had been working on for almost twenty years on the land behind their house.

  “The next piece is in the garage,” she said. “With the drawings.” She’d cut plywood into triangles and squares already, their sides four or five feet long, and painted them. Each new shape was added to a line in the yard that pushed forward and turned back as its tail end decomposed. The rules were simple: a new piece and two photos on the 18th of every month, documenting how the untreated wood had faded and settled into the earth. The wood’s decay was the most interesting part—it gave her a way to measure time, to feel its pressure. An ongoing reminder, a clock. The 18th project was at once a utopian vision—that plotted spectrum against the green grass—and a document of its failure. Fading and breakdown left in its wake. To see both the possibility and the aftermath offered a gratifying sense of control.

  What will you do when you run out of space? people often asked. That wasn’t the threat. Their two-acre yard cut into a patch of forest at the edge of the property. She could work on the project at the same rate for decades longer; the wood’s decay cleared space for a return, and that promised room had always reassured her. Money was the real limitation. The question was whether she and Richard could afford to stay in the house now that Louise had lost her job and her pension.

  “What about the camera?” Richard asked.

  “One shot from the ladder, one from the roof,” Louise said. “You know how to do it.”

  He’d done it before. Taken over for Louise when she was out of town. But it was unusual for her to go away without him. The two of them timed their trips around the project—camping on the coast, visiting their scraps of extended family. Some things were unavoidable, of course. Graduations, weddings, parents’ weekends: occasionally they fell on the 18th. Louise would ask their younger daughter, Margot, to set the next piece, or else a friend, if the whole family was away.

  “What if the pictures come out wrong?” Richard asked. Back when she’d first devised the project—an eroding line—Richard had been the one to suggest the photos in regular increments. She hadn’t switched to digital photography, at least not for the strict confines of the project. Her simple rules made it easier to keep going.

  “You’ve always done it right,” Louise said.

  Richard nodded. He knew exactly how to take the pictures, but knowing and wanting to be told were two different things.

  Louise would be taking three flights that day. The first leg was from Eugene to Las Vegas, and then the second would go on to New York, a city she’d never visited. The place where artists were supposed to go, the center of the market she eschewed. She was happy to make her work far from that inflated scene, and she tended to say this out loud, so that Richard could hear her. Because New York was also where Louise’s ex-husband, Dieter, lived.

  But now Louise’s daughter Elke was there, too. Elke, who was thirty-five, and the daughter of Dieter, not Richard, had moved to New York from the West Coast that year. Louise and Dieter had split up when Elke was a baby, and Louise had barely seen him since.

  For the twenty-five years Louise and Richard had been married, they’d maintained a tacit agreement that Louise wouldn’t see Dieter any more than necessary, an understanding that would have seemed absurd—paranoid, extreme—if ever spoken aloud. Instea
d this arrangement was enforced in the way they lived. Louise and Richard on the West Coast, Dieter on the East. Elke the one to move between them. The envoy, the dual citizen, the constant reporter.

  But today New York would only be a layover; Louise knew that her ultimate destination vexed Richard even more. Elke was going to meet Louise in the airport, and together they’d fly to Germany, where Dieter’s family still lived. It was in Düsseldorf that Louise had met Dieter; Düsseldorf was where Elke had been born. But Louise had left Dieter and Germany and art school in 1974. She’d never been back.

  Elke had called last week, though, asking her to return. “My grandmother died.” The very first thing Elke had said, efficient in her delivery of this news. Her professional mode. Elke was a corporate recruiter, or rather she had been until a month ago, when she was laid off from her job, the one she’d relocated to New York for.

  Sitting in the kitchen with the cordless, Louise had to study Elke’s words. Her grandmother. Hannelore. Dieter’s mother, in Bad Waldheim.

  Louise fumbled with her condolences. She’d known that Hannelore had Alzheimer’s; she’d been slipping away for years. This was not unexpected. Yet the news came with a swift punch. Hannelore, Louise’s former mother-in-law, had, at one time, been both an ally and a burden. Sitting now at her own kitchen table in Oregon, Louise remembered how Hannelore had helped her care for infant Elke, how she’d cared for Louise, too. Louise could nearly taste the soured milk that Hannelore had poured for her, nutrition necessary, she’d said, while Louise was nursing.

  “There’ll be a funeral,” Elke said. “At the end of next week.”

  “So you’ll be going there.” Elke had the time. She’d been looking for a new position—she had the job-hunting skills, obviously—but hadn’t been lucky so far.

  “That’s the thing.” Elke’s voice had gone soft now. “I was wondering if you would go with me.”

  Louise thought of the half inch of sugar that was always left at the bottom of the milk’s cool glass. Hannelore’s advice gentle and insistent at once. But she was in her own kitchen now, not at Hannelore’s flowered bench. She couldn’t go back. Out of the question. Ridiculous, for everyone involved.

  “Why,” Louise asked carefully, “do you want me to go with you?”

  “I don’t want to go by myself.”

  “Dieter will be there. You won’t be alone.”

  “I know that,” Elke said. “I want you to be there, too.”

  “That’s his family, not mine. Germany’s not my place.”

  “I was born there. You’ve never been back.”

  The line was quiet. The sound of a siren from Elke’s end.

  “The funeral is on the twenty-first,” Elke said. “So we could spend time in Düsseldorf. I’d like to see your old haunts, and it’d be good for your work. To see your art school again. We could go to Berlin, too, go to museums. You could look up your friend Ute. You have more time now. You should be focusing on your art.”

  “Does Dieter know about this?”

  “Not yet,” Elke said. “He’s leaving for Germany tomorrow. I thought I’d run it by you first.”

  A sign that Elke knew she was being nuts. And yet there was something desperate and vulnerable in her daughter’s voice that made Louise want to consider her request. And beyond that, Louise felt she owed it to Hannelore. When Louise left Düsseldorf with baby Elke, she hadn’t gone to see Hannelore. She’d never said goodbye.

  “I’ll have to talk to Richard about it,” Louise said.

  And she did, that evening, though she already knew how he’d respond.

  “It’s not really the time for expensive trips,” he’d said at the kitchen table. They needed to make more of a dent in the house payments, he argued—they’d remortgaged in order to send Margot to Reed, on top of the huge mortgage they’d started out with when they bought the house in ’89—and with Louise working less, that task would be harder.

  “One flight is not going to cost us the house,” Louise said.

  “The economy is tanking,” Richard said. “Our property value is pretty much guaranteed to drop. I don’t want to be underwater on the house.”

  “She’s only asking me to go for a week.” Louise had to consider what was best for Elke, too.

  “It’s up to you,” Richard said. “If you feel you should go.” But his face made his misgivings clear.

  Now, in the car, Richard was braking at a four-way stop. He squinted at the intersection. Four drivers, stridently cordial, waiting for the other cars to go. A distinctly Eugenian contest of patience and manners, or rather a contest for displaying those qualities. No, you go, I insist.

  “I’ll give you a full report on Margot’s show,” Louise said. Their daughter, Margot, was in an experimental band—Sky Mall, a name Louise wasn’t supposed to laugh at—and somehow the ramshackle outfit was touring Europe. Funding for the arts, Margot had told Louise—Europe was so much more progressive than the States. Margot was twenty-three; she’d graduated from Reed last year and embarked on this foray into the avant-garde. Louise knew Richard was hoping Margot would get back to her plans for a PhD program in political geography, but she was proud of their daughter’s imagination. Louise could understand Margot’s creative ambitions. Elke’s corporate career had always mystified her.

  “I can’t believe the coincidence,” said Louise. She wanted to emphasize that she wouldn’t be spending much time with her ex-husband and his family—she’d be going to Belgium, with Elke. They’d see Margot.

  Richard nodded. “It’s fated,” he said. “A cosmic journey.”

  Elke had said something similar, without Richard’s note of sarcasm. She’d called Louise the day after her sudden request, jazzed and confident. “I just talked to Margot,” said Elke. “Her band’s going to be playing in Belgium. It’s actually not that far from where we’ll be. We could go see them play. Or drone, or whatever it is they do.”

  Never mind that Margot lived in Portland, two hours from Eugene, that Louise could see her band perform much closer to home.

  “It’s serendipitous timing,” Elke said.

  Now Richard kept glancing over as they followed the long road into the airport. In his professional life, he solved problems with information that could be measured and qualified. An errant wife must have been like a dangerous intersection—study patterns of use, collect data, implement calming measures. A problem to be solved with staggered lights, a subtle gradation in the asphalt.

  “Margot says their music is made entirely with microphones,” Louise said. We’re improvising, Mom, Margot had told her. It’s like this perfect fleeting world when we finally get it right.

  “They drone,” Richard said.

  “We’ll have to go see them drone when she gets back to Portland.”

  “Psychedelic drone, she keeps saying,” Richard said. “What does that even mean?”

  At the terminal, he reached for the glove compartment and pulled out a little homemade sign to prop on the dashboard—Clergy on Call. Louise wasn’t sure what Richard was pretending to be—a monk, a priest—but he used the sign in parking crunches in downtown Eugene or on campus, where, because he usually biked, he’d never bought a permit. He relied instead on the suggestion of spiritual emergency. The trick worked, most of the time.

  Richard wheeled her suitcase into the terminal. The departure desks made an unbroken line. Louise could have brought her students here, instructed them to sketch. Lessons in perspective everywhere she looked, though she no longer had to think this way. There was something wonderful, selfish about that—everything she saw could feed her own work—but she was uneasy, too. If they had to sell the house, she’d lose her studio and the site of her project.

  Richard stayed with her until the x-rays. “Imagine the plane is resting on a giant bowl of pudding,” he said. Louise hated flying. “That’s all the stratosphere is, anyway.” It was his turn to soothe. The human joint, their friends called Richard. Something in his loose limbs
, his easy expression. The way he asked questions. He could have been an investigative journalist. A therapist, probing gently, or a radio host, ready to expound.

  “Hurtling through tapioca,” said Louise. She promised she’d call, they’d Skype, and then he left her to go through.

  On the other side of the terminal, moving sidewalks floated forward, carrying Louise through the airport’s soft buzz. Outside the broad windows, there was tarmac and forest. And beyond that, a glimpse of the Cascades—another lesson. Think about what happens when you look into the distance, Louise used to tell her students. The things that were farther away were lighter; they were harder to see. How could you convey that distance? With texture, with shadow, with shade.

  Later, as the plane lifted up, Louise thought of what she’d once read, that a crash was most likely to happen during takeoff or landing. The risk was strongest in that liminal space. Between things. So she found only temporary relief once the plane reached its cruise. With a complimentary half ounce of pretzels, she waited for the dangerous return to earth.

  She’d be arriving in New York that evening. Louise pictured Elke at the baggage claim, where they’d planned to meet. At thirty-five, Elke still wore the same expression she’d had as a little girl: determined, making up for the shortcomings of those around her. She was taller than Louise, and wore shoes that exaggerated her vantage point further. Elke carried herself with an awareness of what she looked like, gorgeous and impeccable, a bit weary, as though her appearance was still another burden she had to bear.

  And though Elke resembled her father, Louise couldn’t picture what Dieter would look like now. A loser, she feared, though perhaps that could also be satisfying. She could recall his voice, the way he leaned on certain syllables. German words came swimming through her mind—those perfect, absurd names for things. Elke had told Louise that Dieter had a dog. Lebensabschnittsgefährtin, Louise thought, a companion for old age. Together in the evening of life. As far as she knew, Dieter was otherwise alone.