“Grant here,” he said.
“I hate it when you do that. Why can’t you answer the phone with a simple hello the way everybody else does?”
Alan smiled, recognizing Marisa’s voice. He glanced over to the mantel-piece, where a self-portrait she’d painted a few years ago hung just above a row of the East Street Press’s first editions. In the dim light, her shock of blonde hair seemed to glow, casting a light that radiated from the canvas.
“I don’t think I’ll ever measure up to your standards of propriety,” he told her. “The next thing I know, you’ll be wanting me to wear a tie to bed.”
“That depends. Are we talking necktie or bow tie? And would a tie be all you were wearing?”
Alan smiled. “And how are you, Marisa?”
“Right now I’ve got this picture in my head of you wearing nothing but a tie and I’m trying to decide if it’s amusing or scary.”
“Thanks so very much for that boost to my self-esteem.”
“You’re welcome,” Marisa said. “But that’s not why I was calling. Did you see the news tonight?”
“Margaret Mully in all her untrammeled glory? ‘Fraid so.”
When he’d left the courthouse, Alan hadn’t felt as though he was coming away with a victory. But he should still have called Marisa to give her the news. It was like her not to bring that up.
“Well, congratulations anyway,” she said.
“Carson told me that her lawyers have already filed for an appeal.”
“Oh. And here I thought you’d finally won.”
“We did get the injunction lifted,” Alan said.
“So that’s good, right?”
“Well, it means we can go ahead and publish that omnibus edition we’ve had planned. And even if none of Kathy’s royalties go to the Foundation, at least I can give them any profit that I make. Christ knows they need the money.”
“And Isabelle’s still going to do the illustrations?”
Alan hesitated, then owned up. “Actually I haven’t asked her yet.”
“Alan!”
“Well, there didn’t seem to be any point until I knew we could actually do the book. What if she’d done all the work and then we couldn’t publish?”
“The only person who might buy that line is yourself,” Marisa told him, “and frankly, if you do, then you’re dumber than I thought.”
Alan sighed. He looked across the room to where the night pushed up against the panes of his bay window. Beyond, in the darkness, he could sense ghosts haunting Waterhouse Street. Why was he the only one to remember how things once were? Or rather, why was he the only one who wanted to?
“Alan? Are you still there?”
“I don’t know if she’ll talk to me,” he said.
Now it was Marisa’s turn to hesitate.
“When was the last time you spoke to her?” she finally asked.
“At the funeral. No. One time after that. I tried calling her, but she hung up on me.”
He’d also written, but his letter had come back, Isabelle’s address scratched out and RETURN TO
SENDER scrawled across the front of the envelope.
“If you can’t talk to her,” Marisa began. “If she won’t talk to you ..” She gave up and started again:
“Alan, why’ve you made it seem all along as though she’d be doing the book?”
“Because without her, it wouldn’t come out right. It wouldn’t be ... com-plete.
“It was something Kathy always talked about before she died,” he went on. “How she’d give anything to have Isabelle illustrate one of her books. It never happened while she was still alive, so I wanted to do it now, with this book.”
“You made it sound as though Isabelle was completely behind the project.”
“I never lied to you about it, Marisa.”
“No, but when I said I didn’t think her style was right for Kathy’s work, you told me she’d be doing the kind of paintings she did before she got into her abstract period.”
“Because that’s what I was going to ask her to do,” Alan said. “When I finally did talk to her, that is.
If I ever talk to her.”
“Do you want me to call her?”
“No. It’s something I’ve got to do. If Isabelle’s going to work with me on the project, we’ve got to be able to communicate with one another. It doesn’t have to be like it was, but ... we just ..”
Alan’s voice trailed off and for a long moment there was only the hum of the empty line in his ear.
“It wasn’t just Kathy,” Marisa said then, somehow finding in his silence what he wasn’t putting into words. “You were in love with Isabelle, too, weren’t you? You were in love with them both.”
“I don’t know what I was anymore. Young. Stupid.”
“We were all young and stupid once.”
“I suppose.”
“God, don’t you sound morose. Do you want some company tonight?”
“What about George?”
“George is working late. It might do him good to come home and find me out for a change.”
The bitterness in her voice made Alan want to ask her why she didn’t just leave George, once and for all, but it was an old question and, like so many that he carried around himself, one for which there was no easy answer.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I think I’m just going to turn in. I’ll give Isabelle a call tomorrow morning and let you know how things work out.”
“Nothing’s permanent,” Marisa said.
Marisa could do that, just say something out of the blue, leaving whoever was with her scrambling for a connection. Alan wasn’t sure if she meant his melancholy, Isabelle’s refusal to speak with him, or her own relationship with George. Right now, he didn’t have the energy to find out.
“I know,” he said. “Thanks for calling, Marisa.”
“Talk to you tomorrow?”
“Promise.”
Cradling the receiver, Alan let himself sink into the sofa. He looked back up above the mantelpiece to where Marisa’s self-portrait hung. She’d managed to perfectly capture that half-smile of hers that so defined her in his mind. Her hair was quite a bit longer now than it was in the painting, but that didn’t matter. It was the smile that made it work, the smile that made it timeless. In forty years Marisa would still have that smile and this self-portrait would still be true no matter how much the rest of her changed—unless her husband finally succeeded in taking her ability to smile away.
Alan’s gaze traveled down to the row of his press’s first editions, then over to the right side of the mantelpiece where a five-by-seven color photograph stood in a dark wood frame. The picture was ten years old and showed three of the street’s ghosts: Kathy and Isabelle and himself, on the steps outside Isabelle and Kathy’s Waterhouse Street apartment, happy and so young, unencumbered by death or the messes their lives had become.
Nothing’s permanent.
He knew what he should do: put aside the past. Make his peace with Kathy’s ghost and the way Isabelle had cut him out of her life. Accept Marisa’s advances and take her away from a doomed relationship that she couldn’t seem to leave by herself.
Maybe publishing the book would help him do it. Maybe it would just make things worse.
Why did life always have to be so complicated?
III
July 12
Gracie Street Newford
Ma Belle Izzy,
I know you’ve outgrown that name, but I thought you’d let me use it one last time.
I started to write a story last night. This is how it began: There was a hollow space inside his mind, like an empty house, a haunted place that knew only echoes. His thoughts were few and pale, fluttering like moths through that empty expanse, and they made no difference to who he was.
Nothing he did or thought made any difference at all.
And then I stopped because I knew I was writing about me again, about the hollow places inside me, and I finally
understood that stories could never fill them.
I get letters from people telling me how much they enjoy my stories, how much the stories have helped them, allowing them to see the hope that’s still out there in that big old world where most of us spend our days. They know there’s no such thing as magic, but they also know that the magic in the stories is just standing in for the magic people carry inside themselves.
I always want to write back and tell them that the stories are lies. There is no hope, there is no real happiness. At the end, nobody really lives happily ever after, because nobody lives forever and underneath the happiness there’s always pain.
I went out walking last night, down among all our old haunts. Old Market. Lower Crowsea.
Waterhouse Street. I stood for a while in front of our old building and pretended that you were inside, drawing at the kitchen table, and all I’d have to do was go up the stairs and step inside and there you’d be, blinking up at me from whatever you were working on, but then a bunch of college kids came down the street and went up the walk to the door and I couldn’t hang on to my make-believe any-more.
Across the street I could see a light on in Alan’s apartment, but I didn’t ring his bell. He’d know, you see, just like you would if you could see me, and now that I’ve finally gathered up the courage, I don’t want anybody to stop me. That’d just be so ... I don’t know. Pathetic, I suppose. So I just went home and went to bed instead.
I thought there’d be something sweet that I could still find out there in our old world, something to keep me strong, but it’s all ghosts now, isn’t it? You’re gone. I’m gone. Everybody except for Alan’s gone and without you, Alan’s not enough. He’s got too much darkness inside him—the same kind of darkness I have, I think. He just wears his differently. We always needed you, Izzy, like the shadows need a candle, or they can’t dance.
I had a strange dream when I fell asleep. I dreamt that after I died, you painted me and I could come back and this time all the darkness inside me was gone. I know that’s not quite the way your paintings worked, but I thought it was funny when I woke up, to find myself thinking about all of that again. Do you still think about it, or did Wren Island wash it all away? I always wanted to ask you, but I didn’t want to bring up those particular ghosts if you’d managed to put them to rest.
I know I’m the last person in the world to give advice, Izzy, but before I go, I have to tell you this: you have to stop feeling so guilty all the time. You can only shoulder so much responsibility for what goes wrong in the world, or for what goes wrong in the lives around you. None of what happened was your fault. To lay blame, there has to be intent, and you just never knew what you were doing—not until it was too late.
I wish it was as simple for me, but my ghosts are a little harder to lay to rest. Besides, it’s five o’clock in the morning now. It’s a time for ghosts and memories and trying to figure out which are real and which aren’t. I always think better with paper, but once I got out my pen, I found myself finally writing this letter to you instead. I’ve been putting it off for weeks, but I can’t wait any longer.
I’m sorry about all the trouble this is going to cause you. The last thing I want to do is leave my friends having to clean up after me, but I don’t have any choice, Izzy. I don’t think I ever did. All I ever had was a stay of the inevitable.
You’re probably wondering about this key. It opens locker number 374 at the Newford Bus Terminal. By now you’ll know that I left every-thing to the Foundation—everything except for what you’ll find in this locker. This is what I’m leaving for you. For you and Alan, if you want to share it with him.
So that’s it, then. There are no more stories. No, that’s not quite right. There will always be stories.
There are just no more of them for me. The stories are going to have to go on without me.
Don’t cry for me, ma belle Izzy. Remember me only in the good times. You know, I’ve been writing this letter in my head for as long as I can remember being alive. I didn’t know who I was writing it to until I met you.
love
Kathy
IV
Twilight found Isabelle standing on the headland looking south across the lake, the small, flat key of a locker in the Newford Bus Terminal held so tightly in her right hand that its outline was now imprinted on her palm. The wind came up from the woods behind her, tousling her hair and pressing the skirt of her dress tight against her legs. It carried a mossy scent in its air, deep with the smell of the forest’s loam and fallen leaves and the sharp tang of cedars and pine.
The dusk was brief. As she watched the lake, the line between water and sky slowly melted away, but still she stood there, gazing into the darkness now. Nightfall hid her look of grief. With careless confidence, it washed away the sight of her red and puffy eyes as it had smudged the border between lake and sky, but it could make no imprint upon what had been reawoken inside her. Though Kathy’s letter lay at home on the kitchen table where Isabelle had left it, she could still see the slope of its words across her retinas; she could still hear Kathy’s voice, the familiar inflections brought back to mind by the parade of sentences as they took her down each handwritten page.
The letter had disturbed Isabelle—disturbed her far beyond the way it had appeared so suddenly out of nowhere, bringing with it fresh grief as though Kathy had been buried only this morning, rather than five years ago. The letter was authentic, of that Isabelle had no doubt. It was Kathy’s handwriting. What it said, it said in Kathy’s voice. But the tone was all wrong.
The spirit behind this letter was dark and troubled, plainly unhappy, and that hadn’t been Kathy at all.
Oh, Kathy could be moody, she could be introspective, but that side of her only came out in her stories, not in who she was or how she carried herself. The Kathy that Isabelle remembered had been almost relentlessly cheerful. She’d certainly been capable of seriousness, but it always carried with it a whimsical undercurrent of good humor and wonder, a lighthearted magic.
The author of this letter had taken that magic out of the light and made a home for it in the shadows.
Granted, Kathy had been in the hospital when she wrote it, knowing she was going to die, but the letter read like a suicide note.
A sudden image leapt into Isabelle’s mind: Alan and herself, arguing in the graveyard after the funeral.
He’d been saying ... he’d been saying ...
The memory shattered before she could recall it in its entirety, but the tightness in her chest returned, bringing with it another touch of vertigo. She found she had to lie down in the thick grass that crested the headland—lie down before she fell. The dizziness passed as she rested there, eyes closed. The constriction in her chest slowly eased and she was able to breathe more normally. But the grief remained.
She turned her head, cheek against the grass, and looked out over the cliff into the darkness that hid the lake. Why did the letter have to come now? Why couldn’t it have stayed lost? She didn’t want to think of Kathy having lived her whole life the way she’d made it out that she had in the letter: hiding a desperate unhappiness behind a cheerful facade. She wanted to think of it as just another one of Kathy’s stories, as made-up as the part of the letter where Kathy talked of wandering about in their old haunts when of course she couldn’t have done so. She’d been bedridden in intensive care the week before she’d died.
But Kathy wouldn’t have made up a letter such as this. She couldn’t have been so cruel. And if it wasn’t a lie ...
In her mind, Isabelle kept returning to the last thing Kathy had written: I’ve been writing this letter in my head for as long as I can remember being alive. I didn’t know who I was writing it to until I met you.
It made her heart break.
A fresh swell of tears rose up behind her eyes, but this time she managed to keep them at bay. She sat up and opened her hand. She knew without having to look in the locker that what was waiting for her there would only bring her
more pain, would reveal more of this stranger who had written to her in her friend’s voice, with her friend’s handwriting.
She didn’t want to know this stranger.
Let me keep my own memories, she thought.
Don’t cry for me, ma belle Izzy, Kathy had told her in the letter. Remember me only in the good times.
And that was what she’d done. She had concentrated on the good times they’d shared together.
When she called Kathy’s features to mind it was never those of the frail figure overwhelmed by the hospital bed, but the other Kathy, the one she’d known first. The Kathy with whom she’d had such an instant rapport. She could remember with an immediacy that had yet to fade how she’d felt when the red-haired girl who was to be her roommate had come into the room they were assigned at Butler U.
Isabelle had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.
“I’m what I am because of you,” she told the memory of her friend.
Kathy had changed her from farm girl to bohemian artist, almost overnight—never by telling her what to do, but by cheerful example and by teaching her to always ask questions before she so readily accepted the way things were supposed to be done. By the time Isabelle returned to start her second year, not even she would have recognized her earlier self anymore, that farm girl had become such a stranger.
A stranger, yes, but not entirely. One had only to scrape the surface to find remnants of that old naivete, of the work ethic instilled in her by her parents and the commonsensical approach to life acquired by working close to the land. And that must be how it had been for Kathy as well, Isabelle realized.
Underneath the bold-as-brass young woman Isabelle had met in university she’d carried a wounded child along with her, hidden, but still capable of exerting its influence.
“Sure, I was unhappy growing up,” Kathy had told Isabelle once. “But I learned not to hang on to pain. I exorcise my demons through my stories.”
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