Candles for Isabel

By Emily Tallman

Someone was banging on the door. The sound pulled her out of sleep, but she fought it. Bang bang bang. She opened her eyes to complete darkness, and she remembered she was sleeping in the closet. The only light came in through the crack between the doors and reflected off of the glass doorknob. Bang bang bang.

“All right. Hold on, I’m coming.”

After opening the closet, she stumbled to the door. It was her cousin Louisa, frowning, with a grocery bag under her arm.

“Isabel, why don’t you put a shirt on before answering the door?”

Isabel looked down at her bare chest, pale breasts partially concealed beneath her curly brown hair, and shrugged.

“I didn’t really think about it, Louisa. It’s hot. You woke me up. I was just trying to answer the door.”

“Well, what if I had been a rapist or something?”

She pushed past Isabel and set the grocery bag on the counter.

“Why would a rapist come and bang on my door at eight in the morning?” Isabel asked, “I’m almost 25 years old and you still treat me like a child.”

Without answering, Louisa started taking canned food out of the bag. She was wearing a crisp linen dress and light pink heels. She must have just come out of early Mass, Isabel thought, as she picked a gray t-shirt up off the floor and put it on.

“I brought you some food, napkins, paper plates…it is hot in here, and dark! Did you forget how hot Fresno gets in the summer? Why haven’t you had the electricity turned on yet?”

“Louisa, I’m broke.”

Isabel knew what Louisa was going to say next, so she turned her back on Louisa and started taking clothes out of one of the cardboard boxes on the floor.

“Why don’t you ask your parents to help you out? They’re worried about you. You were gone almost a year! You haven’t even called them since you’ve been back.”

“Well, the phone wasn’t hooked up yet. That’s what I used the rest of my money on, and it should be working soon. I’ll call them when it’s working.”

Isabel knew she wasn’t going to call them, so she hoped Louisa would drop the subject. She noticed her cousin had finished unpacking the groceries and was looking around the apartment. The only things in the room were several cardboard boxes that had formerly been stored in Louisa’s garage. Isabel didn’t have a bed, and had been sleeping on a pile of blankets inside the walk-in closet. The dark closet was actually the coolest place in her apartment, thanks to the thick brick walls of the old house. She saw Louisa’s eyes pass over this, taking in the clothes strewn on the floor, the dirty cups in the sink, and the half-empty bottle of vodka on the counter. The smell of old alcohol and dirty clothes hung in the air. Louisa sighed, and pushed her glossy black hair behind her ears.

“You need to start getting your life back together. You can’t just keep yourself holed up in here forever, Isabel.”

Ignoring Louisa, she kept unpacking her old clothes, although she didn’t have anywhere to put them. She stacked them on the floor under the window. Louisa turned on the faucet and started washing the cups in the sink.

“You don’t have to do that. I don’t have any dish soap anyway.”

Isabel got up from the floor and turned off the faucet. Louisa set down the cup she’d been rinsing and looked at her.

“He couldn’t wait for you forever, you know. You were only supposed to be gone for the semester, remember?”

Isabel remembered. Joseph had wanted to get married as soon as Isabel got back from the semester in England. She had already been wearing a ring, and he was talking about where they might go for their honeymoon. But before the semester was over she dropped out of school and got on a plane to Italy instead of coming home.

“He cheated on me. Don’t make it sound like it’s my fault we broke up.”

“Well, you didn’t call him for four months. No one even knew what country you were in half the time. Did you expect him to wait for you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I expected.”

Louisa rolled her big eyes, exasperated. Isabel didn’t know what else to say. Hearing her cousin talk about her failed relationship gave it a strange, soap-opera quality. Louisa seemed more interested in the drama of Isabel’s life than she was. They were both quiet for a few seconds and could hear the sound of someone downstairs clanking dishes around.

“Can I have your new phone number, then?”

Louisa took a little gold pen and a slip of paper out of her purse and Isabel gave her the number.

“My phone’s electric, though, ‘cause it’s cordless. It won’t work until I get the power turned on. But thanks for the food. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get a job…”

“Don’t worry about it. Just take care of yourself. You’ve been home for two weeks already and no one has heard from you. I don’t think you would have even called me, if your boxes weren’t at my house. You’re worrying everyone. And you look like a mess. How much weight have you lost? Twenty pounds?”

It was actually closer to thirty pounds, but she didn’t answer. She felt Louisa’s eyes go from her unwashed hair to her crumpled, dirty shirt to her bare feet. Louisa folded the paper grocery bag neatly and put it under her arm, gave Isabel a quick hug, and left. Isabel could hear her going carefully down the rickety wooden staircase that led to her door at the side of the house. Isabel was certain Louisa would probably go and report everything she’d seen at the apartment to Isabel’s mother. She stopped pretending to unpack her boxes, and decided to take a shower to cool off. There was no hot water, but when it was over 100 degrees outside that didn’t matter much. There was also no window in the bathroom, so it was dark without the light on. She told herself this was all right: at least she couldn’t see how moldy the shower was.

Isabel rarely left the apartment, except to use the last of her money at the liquor store down on Belmont Avenue. In the evenings she lit candles and drank Popov vodka and went through her boxes of belongings, not yet ready to unpack it all. Sometimes the gay couple that lived downstairs would come out on the porch and drink glasses of wine and she’d listen as their deep voices floated up to her window. They owned the house, and had agreed to let her rent the upstairs studio apartment for $200 a month, cash only, no deposit required. The tiny studio probably did not meet the city’s strict building and renting codes, but it was the only thing she could afford. She was grateful to have seen the “For Rent” sign, especially after staying at Louisa’s house her first two days back in town.

That evening, Isabel began to unpack a box she’d been avoiding. She opened the cardboard flaps and revealed a photo of herself and Joseph, taken a few weeks before she had left. It was their engagement picture, the one that was supposed to be published in the newspaper when they formally announced their engagement after Isabel came back from England. In the photo, they were standing on the lawn in front of the Catholic church they had both attended. They had also met each other there for the first time as children, at catechism. The huge white building rose up behind them and out of the picture. Isabel wore a yellow dress and stood in front of Joseph, his arms around her waist. Her hair was shining in the sunlight, her cheeks rosy. Joseph’s dark hair was freshly cut and he was clean-shaven and smiling, leaning his head on her shoulder. Isabel took the picture out of the box and set it aside.

The next photo in the stack was of Isabel and her mother, taken at Louisa’s 30^th birthday party two years before. They were seated at the kitchen table in her mother’s house, and a reproduction of a painting of The Last Supper hung on the wall behind them. Her mother wore a red checked apron, and a large gold crucifix hung on a chain around her neck. Isabel studied her mother’s face, which was like an older, plumper version of her own. She thought about the tense phone conversations with her mother she’d had while she was at school in England, and how her mother had tried to convince her not to break up with Joseph. He represented a world her mother wanted Isabel to be a part of, and marrying him would ensure her place in it. But Isabel had insisted on breaking it off. After that the phone conversations became so strained that Isabel stopped calling altogether.

She lifted this photo out and set it face down on the first one, not wanting to think about her mother anymore. She put her hand back in the box and fished out another photo. This one was of her. Joseph had taken it at the airport the day she had left, and later he’d sent it to her. Her hair was in a ponytail and she was smiling, standing in front of the gate with her large rolling suitcase beside her. She remembered the day clearly: getting on an airplane for the first time in her life to go to a college in England, being terrified when the plane left the ground, feeling exhausted ten hours later when she finally arrived in a gray and foreign land where no one knew her.

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