Wren Island was a two-hour drive east of the city. After leaving the highway, he had to navigate a twist of narrow roads that eventually became little more than cart paths, weeds growing thigh-high except for the two ribbons of dirt wheel tracks that finally deposited him on the shore of the lake. A bright red Jeep was parked under a pine tree that towered skyscraper-high, its immense limbs overhanging the shore. The only other man-made artifacts were the island’s power and phone lines and the rickety wooden dock that pointed out into the lake toward the island. When he pulled up between the dock and the Jeep, he leaned on his car horn as he’d been instructed and then got out of the car to wait.
If it hadn’t been for the vehicles and power lines, he might have felt transported to an earlier century.
There was a sense of timelessness about the narrow roads, the old dock and its surrounding woods.
Shading his eyes, he looked toward the island, but could see no sign of habitation except for another decrepit wharf pointing back to where he was standing. A small rowboat was moored alongside it.
Just when he considered giving the car horn another try, he spied a figure come out of the island’s woods and step onto the dock. His pulse quickened as he watched Isabelle untie the rowboat and get into it, knowing that within minutes they would finally be seeing each other again. Five years was a long time, though sometimes it still seemed as though it was only yesterday that the three of them were sitting around a table in one of the small Crowsea cafes, deep in conversation, or sprawled out together for a picnic lunch in Fitzhenry Park: Isabelle in her bohemian blacks, Kathy her exact opposite with a rainbow array of Indian print patches on her jeans and her tie-dyed tops. He still wore the same commonsensical jeans and cotton shirts that he had back then, the jeans always in one piece and a touch too rich an indigo to make much of a fashion statement, the shirts varying only in terms of the lengths of their collars, which was due to availability rather than any particular choice of his own.
He felt nervous as he saw Isabelle push off from the dock and head his way. Too late to back out now, he told himself.
“Whatever you do,” Marisa had warned him when he called her that morning, “don’t get into whatever it was that set the two of you at odds with each other in the first place. Don’t talk about it, don’t apologize, and don’t expect her to. And don’t go dragging all sorts of old baggage along with you.
Just take it one moment at a time.”
“But I can’t just tuck all the memories away,” Alan had countered. “My mind doesn’t work that way and Isabelle’s probably doesn’t either.”
“Just try, Alan. Deal with the Isabelle of now, not the one you remember, because I doubt that one even exists anymore.”
“I’ll try,” Alan had promised her, but he knew it would be hard. Marisa was basically telling him to treat Isabelle as a stranger, and he had never been comfortable with strangers.
The distance was too great for him to be able to make out her features, to see how and if she had changed. All that was visible from where he stood was a smudge of a face surrounded by unruly dark hair as it fell past her shoulders. He could tell she was wearing faded blue jeans and a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, so he knew that her wardrobe had expanded. Her rowing had good form, the strokes all firm and strong, but then she’d always been physically fit. It wasn’t until she came within comfortable hailing distance and turned her head to call out a quick hello that he could finally make out her features.
They hadn’t changed at all and, just like that, he could feel himself falling in love with her all over again.
For a moment he thought of Marisa and had a pang of unexpected guilt, but he refused to acknowledge it. If she hadn’t been married, if Marisa had ever managed to deal with the problems that being married entailed for her, things might have worked out differently. But they hadn’t and seeing Isabelle now, he wasn’t sure that they ever would. He realized that his heart had probably belonged to Isabelle from the first day Kathy had introduced them to each other in the Student Center and not even that disastrous day at the funeral could change that.
The funeral. A dark cloud of memories expanded inside him, and it was only with a great effort that he managed to put them away.
Isabelle reached the dock at that moment. With a few quick oar strokes, she expertly turned the boat until both she and its squared-off stern were facing him. For a long moment all they could do was look at each other. Seeing her like this brought Kathy’s death home to Alan in a way that it never had before. He wondered if whenever he saw Isabelle, he would think of Kathy; wondered, too, if it would be the same for Isabelle.
“It’s been a long time,” Isabelle said finally, and that was enough to break the sensation Alan had of their experiencing a fleeting stay in time’s relentless march from one moment to the next.
“Too long,” he said. “Country life still seems to suit you. You look great.”
“Yes, well ...”
She was still quick to blush, Alan saw. The rowboat’s transom bumped against the dock.
“Did you have any trouble finding the place?” she asked.
“None at all.”
“Good.” She gave him an expectant look, then added: “Well, hop in.”
“Oh. Right.”
Alan couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on the water. Except for riding the ferry out to Wolf Island, it might have been years. He felt completely out of his element as he got into the boat and it began to dip under the addition of his unbalanced weight. Isabelle leaned forward and caught his hand just when he was sure he was going over the side. She steered him to the seat in the stern. As he smiled his thanks, he could feel a hot flush rise up the back of his neck. Isabelle wasn’t the only one who’d always been quick to feel self-conscious.
“Urn, can I help with the rowing at all?” he asked to cover his embarrassment.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Do you know how?”
“Well, theoretically. There was a rowboat at my grandparents’ cottage ....”
“They had a place on the Kickaha River, didn’t they? I remember we ...” She paused, then cleared her throat. “We all went up there one weekend ....”
Alan desperately wanted to talk about Kathy. It had been so long since he’d been with someone who had known her as well as he had. He was tired of talking about her work, of all that was entailed in getting the omnibus published, fighting Kathy’s parents, going to court, the book’s design, paperback rights. The Kathy that got discussed then wasn’t real. That Kathy was only one small facet of someone far more important to him. But he remembered Marisa’s warning, so he didn’t take up where Isabelle’s voice had trailed off.
“Of course, I was just a kid back then,” he said instead, “and all my parents would let me do was splash around with the oars along the shore.”
He seemed to have done the right thing, for he could see the tension ease in Isabelle’s shoulders. She gave him a small smile.
“Then just relax,” she told him. “I can always use the exercise.”
As Alan tried to get comfortable on the hard wooden seat under him, she dipped the oars into the water and gave a strong pull. The rowboat bobbed as it caught a swell, then shot forward. Alan put a hand on either gunwale and tried to take her advice, but he found it hard to relax.
“Did you bring a swimsuit?” she asked.
“Isn’t the water kind of cold?”
Isabelle shrugged. “Most years it’s still fairly comfortable right up until the end of September.”
Alan dipped a hand in. The water felt like ice and it was only the middle of the month.
“You’re kidding—right?”
Isabelle’s only response was the mischievous gleam that danced in her eyes. Alan was taken once again with how easily they had fallen into how things had been before the funeral, but he had the feeling that Isabelle was making just as much of an effort as he was to make it so. For all her friendliness, she still carried an air of
distraction about her and he could sense a darkness haunting the smile that she so readily turned his way.
Stop analyzing her, he told himself. Stop looking for who she was and then comparing those memories to who she might be now. But it was hard. Without their even having to mention it, the past spilled out all around them. Most of all he could feel the presence of Kathy’s ghost, as though she were sitting on the wooden planks of the rowboat between them.
To shift his mind from the gloomy turn his thoughts had taken, he looked over Isabelle’s shoulder to Wren Island. Except for the old dock and the path leading away from it up into the forest, the wooded shoreline was wild and overgrown, a setting that seemed completely at odds with the bright primary colors and geometric shapes that made up so much of Isabelle’s more current work—or at least what Alan had seen of it in the Newford galleries.
“It just doesn’t seem to fit,” he said.
“What doesn’t?”
“You—living out here. What I’ve seen of your work over the last few years seems to owe so much of its inspiration to the city—all the squared lines like city blocks, the sharp angles and the loud lights.
Wren Island strikes me as a place that would inspire you to choose just the opposite for your subjects.”
Isabelle smiled. “And yet when I lived in Newford, I was doing mostly landscapes or portraits that included elements of landscape.”
“Go figure,” Alan said, returning her smile.
“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “I know why I live here. I like the wildness of it and I like my privacy.
I like knowing I’m safe, that I can step out of my front door in the middle of the night and walk around for as long as I like without ever once having to feel nervous about being mugged or bothered by one thing or another. I like the quiet—though, once you live in a place such as this, you realize that it’s never really quiet. Yet the sounds are natural—not sirens and traffic and street noisc and the sense of peace isn’t short-lived. It stays with you.”
“I always forget that you grew up here,” Alan said. “I met you in the city, so I can’t help but think of you as a city girl.”
“I’m hardly a girl anymore.”
“Sorry. Woman. You know what I mean.”
She nodded. “After the fire, I didn’t think I could ever come back again.” She had an expression in her eyes now that Alan couldn’t read at all. “It took time,” she said after a moment, “but I made it work.”
The fire. For a long time it had been one of those awful landmarks around which other less important events were considered and fit into the timeline of one’s life. Before the ... after the ... It was like a divorce, or a death ....
Alan wasn’t sure how to react. He felt he should say something, but was at a total loss as to what.
Happily, the boat drifted up against the island’s dock just then and the moment passed. Isabelle seemed to shake off whatever dark mood had gripped her and managed a vague smile.
“Here we are,” she said.
Shipping the oars, she stepped gracefully out of the boat, putting one hand on the bow to keep it from drifting away from the dock. She tied its line to an old iron docking ring, then steadied the boat so that Alan could get out. He managed to do it without mishap, if lacking her easy grace.
“Have you had lunch yet?” Isabelle asked.
He shook his head.
“Well, let’s go up to the house. I made us some sandwiches earlier. Nothing fancy: just feta cheese, Greek olives and tomatoes. It’s all I had on hand.”
“Sounds great,” Alan assured her as he followed her up the narrow path that led them off into the woods.
II
The house was a converted barn standing on a point of land overlooking the lake. While forest lay thick on the side of the island facing the mainland, here it was open fields, farmland only recently reclaimed by nature. The path came up out of the thick stands of spruce pine, cedar and birch to wind its way in between ivy-covered outbuildings that were mostly falling in upon themselves. Dense thickets of wild rosebushes grew in unordered profusion about the buildings, half hiding curious stone statuary and weathered fieldstone walls that seemed to both begin and end with no clear purpose.
The barn itself was enveloped with vegetation. Ivy grew thick on the south wall, framing the pair of large picture windows that looked out upon a riot of tall flowers: phlox, deep violet mallow and sunflowers, cosmos and purple coneflowers. The garden caught both the morning and afternoon light, but Isabelle’s studio was up on the second floor in the back where another large picture window flooded the loft with a strong northern light. The main body of the structure was shaded by three immense elm trees—two on the east side, one on the west—whose age could be counted in centuries, rather than decades. They seemed to have found a healthful sanctuary here while disease had taken most of their kindred on the mainland.
The island had been in Isabelle’s family for generations, but had only ceased to be a working farm at the end of the seventies, upon her father’s death. When her mother moved to Florida to live with her sister, she had left the island in Isabelle’s care. The farmhouse itself had burned down during the first year Isabelle had moved back to the island, and she had opted to convert the bam into a house and studio, rather than rebuild the original house. All that remained of her childhood home was a tall fieldstone fireplace rising out of a hill of sumac and raspberry bushes.
Alan had only been out to the island once before the night of the fire, so Isabelle gave him a brief tour of the grounds and the remodeled barn before she served him lunch in the kitchen area overlooking the garden and lake. He made suitably appreciative comments where appropriate and she found the whole visit to be proceeding in a remarkably friendly fashion, considering the terms on which they’d parted.
Alan looked about the same as he always had, and being with him like this made Isabelle realize how much she’d missed his easy company. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who had refused to see Kathy when she was in the hospital, who’d said such terrible things to her at Kathy’s funeral.
But people dealt with their grief in different ways, she realized. She knew how much Alan had cared for Kathy. He probably hadn’t been able to face seeing her on her deathbed. He’d probably gone a little crazy—she knew she had—and that was what had made him act the way he had at the funeral. If only they could have comforted each other, instead of allowing things to have gone the way they did.
Sitting across the table from him, she fingered the small, flat key in the pocket of her jeans and remembered what Kathy had written in her letter about the contents of the locker it would open.
This is what I’m leaving for you. For you and Alan, if you want to share it with him.
She wanted to show him the key, to tell him about the letter, but something held her back. She felt comfortable with him, certainly, but there was still a surreal edge to the afternoon that left her feeling oddly distracted and more than a little confused. Parting on such bad terms as they had, she was hard put to understand why she was so happy to see him. And then there was the presence of Kathy’s ghost—all those memories that seeing him called up in her mind. It made for a strange and eerie brew that stirred and churned inside her, with the source of much of its disquiet, she knew, being due to the strange coincidence of Alan’s having called her after all these years—less than twenty-four hours after she’d received Kathy’s long-lost letter. It seemed too pat. It seemed almost .. arranged.
So she said nothing. Instead, she waited to hear the proposition that had brought him all the way out here to see her. When she realized what he wanted from her, all it did was further muddy the waters and leave her feeling more confused than ever.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I just couldn’t.”
“But—”
“You know how much I love Kathy’s stories,” she added, “but I don’t paint in an illustrative style anymore. I’m really the wrong person
for this book—
though I think it’s a wonderful idea. I can’t believe that those stories have been out of print for as long as they have.”
“But the money—”
“You couldn’t offer me enough to do it. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not about making money for us,” Alan said.
Isabelle studied him for a long moment. “Of course,” she said. “I should have known that. It never has been about money for you, has it? Maybe that’s why you’ve had so much success.”
The three slim volumes of Kathy’s shortstory collections had put Alan’s East Street Press on the literary map. Specializing as it had on illustrated shortstory and poetry collections by local writers and artists, the press had been considered to be nothing more than one more regional publisher until the New York Times review of Kathy’s first collection started a bidding war among paperback publishers and the final mass-market rights had gone for two hundred thousand dollars—an astonishing sum for a collection of literary fairy tales.
They were new stories, her own stories, set in Newford’s streets. But there was magic in them. And faerie. Which hardly made them bestseller material.
But surprisingly, the book had surpassed all of the paperback publishers’ expectations; as had the two subsequent volumes—still published first by the East Street Press in handsome illustrated volumes, but distributed nationally by one of the major houses who had also taken an interest in the other books that Alan had produced. Kathy’s collections had spawned two plays, a ballet, a film and innumerable works of art. Kathy hadn’t exactly become a household name, but her literary posterity had certainly been assured.
Interest in the fourth collection had been high, but then Kathy died, throwing her estate into the legal wrangle that had now lasted five years. And for five years Kathy’s books had only been available in libraries and secondhand stores.
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