“So what is it about?” she asked. “Besides getting the stories back into print and raising some money for the Foundation?”
“Remember how Kathy was always talking about establishing an arts court for street kids? A house made up of studio space where any kid could come to write or draw or paint or sculpt or make music, all supplies furnished for them?”
Isabelle nodded. “I’d forgotten about that. She used to talk about it long before she became famous and started making all that money.”
And then, Isabelle remembered, when Kathy did have the money, she’d been instrumental in establishing the Newford Children’s Foundation, because she’d realized that first it was necessary to deal with the primary concerns of shelter and food and safety. She hadn’t forgotten her plans for the children’s Art Court, but she’d died before she could put them into practice.
“That’s what this money is going to do,” Alan said.
You don’t understand what you’re asking of me, Isabelle wanted to tell him, but all she could say was, “I still can’t do it.”
“Your depictions of her characters were always Kathy’s favorites.”
“I only ever did the two.”
Two that survived, at least. They hung in the Foundation’s offices—in the waiting room that was half library, half toy room.
“And they were perfect,” Alan said. “Kathy always wanted you to illustrate one of her books.”
“I know.”
And Kathy had never asked her to, not until just a few weeks before she died. “Promise me,” she’d said when Isabelle had come to see her at the Gracie Street apartment, the last time Isabelle had seen Kathy alive. “Promise me that one day you’ll illustrate one of my books.”
Isabelle had promised, but it was a promise she hadn’t kept. Fear prevented her from fulfilling it. Not the fear of failure. Rather, it was the fear of success. She would never again render a realistic subject.
Kathy had always seemed to understand—until right there at the end, when she’d chosen to forget. Or maybe, Isabelle sometimes thought, Kathy had remembered too well and the promise had been her way of telling Isabelle that she had nude a mistake in turning her back on what had once been so important to her.
“Why does it have to be me?” she asked, speaking to her memories of Kathy as much as to Alan.
“Because your art has the same ambiguity as Kathy’s prose,” Alan replied. “I’ve never seen another artist who could capture it half as well. You were always my first choice for every one of Kathy’s books.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Kathy didn’t want you to. She said you’d come around in your own time, but we don’t have that kind of time anymore. Who knows what’s going to happen when the Mullys take me back to court? We have to do this now, as soon as we can, or we might never have the opportunity again.”
“It’s been so long since I’ve done that kind of work ....”
“It’ll just be a cover,” Alan assured her, “and a few interior illustrations. I’d take as many as you’ll do—even one per story—but I’ll settle on a minimum of five. We can combine whatever new pieces you do with the two hanging in the Foundation’s offices. That should be enough.”
Just a cover. Just a few interiors. Except art was never “just” anything. When it was rendered from the heart, with true conviction, it opened doors. There were some doors that Isabelle preferred to keep closed.
“Couldn’t you just use the two I’ve already done?” she asked.
Alan shook his head. “It wouldn’t be much of an illustrated edition, then, would it?”
“Well, couldn’t you get somebody else to do the rest you need?”
“No. I want the continuity. One author, one artist. I’ve never liked books that mix various artists’
work to go with one style of writing.”
Isabelle didn’t either.
She toyed with the handle of her tea mug and stared out the window. A wind had sprung up and the flowers were bobbing and swaying in its breath. Out over the lake, dark clouds were gathering, rolling up against each other into a long smudge, shadowing the horizon. A storm was on its way, but the fact didn’t register for her immediately. She was thinking, instead, of Kathy’s stories, of how easily working with their imagery would lead her back into that bewildering tangle where dream mingled with memory.
It could be sweet, but it could be bitter, too. And dark. As dark as those clouds shadowing the sky above the lake. And the repercussions ...
If she closed her eyes, she would hear all the shouting and noise again, would see that first tiny burned body, would smell the sickly sweet odor of its charred flesh. And then her focus would widen to take in all the others.
She didn’t—wouldn’t—close her eyes. Instead she concentrated on Alan’s voice.
“I know your style is completely different now,” he was saying. “I don’t claim to understand all of your work, but I certainly respect it. I would never ask anyone to change their style as I’m doing now, but I know you’ve done this sort of work before. And like I said: this isn’t for our fame or fortune. It’s for Kathy. It’s to make her dream of the Art Court come true.”
Alan leaned forward. “At least give it a try, won’t you?”
Isabelle couldn’t look at him. Her gaze went out the window again. In the brief moment since she’d looked away, the storm clouds had rushed closer, across the water, piling up above the island. The first splatters of rain hit the window.
“If there’s anyone who’s going to be wondering where you are,” she said, “you’d better give them a call now before the phone lines go out.”
“What?”
She turned back to him. “I wasn’t paying attention to the weather,” she said.
As though the words were a cue, the rain suddenly erupted from the clouds overhead. It came down in sheets, falling so hard that it was impossible to see more than a few feet out the window.
“I can’t take you back to the mainland in this weather,” she explained. “And I often lose my phone and power in storms.”
“Oh.”
Isabelle turned and plucked her phone from where it sat on the sideboard behind her. It was a clunky old rotarydial, black, the plastic battered and scratched. She set it down in front of Alan, then rose from the table to give him some privacy.
“I don’t have anyone to call,” Alan said.
Isabelle paused. She stood a few feet away from him, her arms folded around herself to keep out a chill that had nothing to do with the coming storm. “You didn’t answer me,” Alan said.
Isabelle sighed. It was all too confusing. Kathy’s letter, the locker key, Alan’s reappearance in her life, this book that was so important to making Kathy’s dreams come true.
“Will you stay for dinner?” she asked, taking refuge in playing her role as Alan’s hostess.
“You’re avoiding the question.”
She looked at him with a different gaze than she had before, remembering instead what it was like to render the human face and form. Alan would be both easy and difficult to draw: dark-haired, square-shouldered, a sensitive face with kind eyes. His lines were all strong; it was the subtleties that would make or break the study. And if she painted him? Painted him not as other artists would, but as Rushkin had taught her? What would that painting call up from the before?
“Isabelle ... ?”
“I ... I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
“I didn’t agree to anything but that I’d think about it,” she warned him. “I know.”
Isabelle looked outside where the rain and clouds had changed the afternoon light to dusk.
“You’ll stay for dinner?” she asked again.
“I’d love to.”
He ended up staying the night.
III
Not long after dinner, Isabelle vanished into her studio to do some work and Alan didn’t see her again for the
remainder of the evening.
Over the preparations for dinner and the meal itself, they seemed to have fallen back into their old relationship with only a few moments of awkwardness, and he had already berated himself any number of times for not contacting her sooner. But as soon as they’d finished washing up and putting the dishes away, she suddenly gave him a surprised look, as though she had only just become aware of his being here in her house and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. A moment later she’d muttered something about having to work and left him standing downstairs by himself before it really registered that she was gone.
Her abrupt departure left him feeling more than a little confused and completely at loose ends.
Returning to the kitchen table, he finished off the last swallow of cooled coffee in his cup, rinsed it out and set it in the dish drainer. That small task completed, he wandered aimlessly through the large open-concept room that made up most of the downstairs of the refurbished barn, pausing in front of the various pieces of her art that hung on the walls, or were set on shelves, to study them more closely than he’d had the time to do earlier in the evening.
The paintings were all starkly abstract—utterly at odds with the work he was trying to commission from her for Kathy’s book; at odds even with the titles Isabelle had given them. Heartbeat was a field of deep blue violet, an enormous painting some six by ten feet, the uniform hue placed on the canvas with thousands of tiny brush strokes. The width of the paintbrush couldn’t have been more than a half-inch, Alan judged when he took a closer look. Set just off center in the blue violet field were three small yellow-orange geometric shapes that disconcertingly appeared to pulse when he stepped back to take in the painting as a whole.
Her wood sculptures were rendered more realistically—human faces and torsos and limbs that reached out of the wood at curious angles. Many of these were painted in a style that resembled tattooing, or aboriginal clay body painting.
Though he wasn’t particularly taken with this style of art—either the oil paintings or the sculptures—there was certainly no ignoring it. He would look away, but find his gaze drawn back, time and again, to this set of child’s fingers reaching out of a square block of polished wood, that stark oil painting with its descending swirl of spinning triangles running from one corner of the canvas to the other.
Finally he let the storm outside soothe his gaze. He walked back into the kitchen area and stood at the window to look out at the rain that still came down so strongly. The flowers on the south side of the barn were bent almost in two and many of the cosmos had lost their petals. Beyond them, everything was pushed into a dark grey haze, swallowed by the night and the storm. He remained at the window for a long time, leaving only when he realized that he was now studying the art behind him by way of its reflection in the glass, which made many of the pieces appear more disconcerting still.
As soon as he became aware of what he was doing, he gave the stairs a hopeful look, but they were empty except for Rubens—Isabelle’s large orange tomcat, who was sleeping, lower body on one stair, front paws and head on the next riser up. Isabelle remained ensconced in her studio.
Alan hesitated a moment longer, then finally made his way to the guest room, at the back of the house, that Isabelle had showed him before dinner. A towel and face cloth were laid out on the bed. The room itself was a cheery relief compared to the rest of the downstairs; Isabelle had taken all of its warmth away with her when she went up into her studio, leaving behind only the troubling questions that her art seemed to demand of a viewer.
The guest room was painted in soft pastel colors and simply furnished: a chest of drawers, a bookcase, a throw rug on the floor and a pillowed window-seat with a light in a sconce by the windowsill to allow one to sit up in the bay window and read at night. The double bed was situated so that one could look out that same window when sitting up against the headboard.
He was amused to find a complete collection of East Street Press books sitting on the bookshelf and spent an idle few minutes sitting on the edge of the bed, paging through them. There was only one piece of art hanging in this room—a very simply rendered watercolor landscape, which proved to be signed in one corner by his hostess. By the date that followed her name, Alan realized she must have done it while she was still a teenager. He wondered how it had survived the fire.
The power went, just as he was washing up, and he fumbled his way back to the guest room to light the candle that Isabelle had left him against just such a contingency. Leaving it burning on the night table, he undressed by its flickering light and got into bed. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but once he blew the candle out, plunging the room into darkness, he found the rattle of the rain outside to be oddly soothing. Lying there, he let the sound relax him.
How strange to live in a place such as this, he thought, where you could be so easily cut off from the mainland by a storm. He wondered if he should have called Marisa before the phone lines went. He realized that she would have been trying to reach him at his apartment this evening and of course she’d worry when all she got was his answering machine. Thinking of Marisa woke a whole new set of confusions that he really didn’t want to get into, but happily he fell asleep before the tangle of that particular relationship gained too firm a hold.
IV
an wasn’t sure what woke him. He couldn’t have been sleeping for more than a few hours when he was suddenly staring up at the ceiling above him, eyes open wide, sleep fled.
He’d been dreaming of Isabelle. Of her asking him to pose for her and then somehow he kept losing pieces of clothing and she kept losing pieces of clothing and finally the two of them were lying on this sofa that he imagined was in one corner of her studio. He’d just put his hand on a perfect breast when he started out of his sleep with a quick gasp.
He lay there, blinking in the dark, trying to figure out what had woken him. It was when he sat up that he realized he wasn’t alone. Sharply delineated against the growing light outside the window was the profiled silhouette of a figure sitting in the window seat, legs drawn up against her chest, arms wrapped around her knees. Alan’s dream involving his hostess had made a tent out of the sheets between his legs and he quickly drew his own knees up to his chest to hide the fact.
“Isabelle?” he asked, pitching his voice low.
The figure turned toward him. She seemed to be wearing little more than a man’s white shirt, which hung oversized on her slender frame. But whoever his night visitor was, he realized she wasn’t Isabelle as soon as she spoke.
“You seem rather nice,” she said, “and you’ve certainly got her working. It’s almost time for the dawn chorus and she’s still up there, filling sheet after sheet with sketches.”
Her voice was huskier than Isabelle’s, for all its youthfulness, and touched with a faint mockery.
From her silhouette, he noted that she was smaller than Isabelle as well, and far more slender. Almost boyish.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The girl spoke over the question, ignoring him. “I’d suggest that you simply use monochrome studies to illustrate the book—that would certainly make it easier on Isabelle, you know—but I have to admit I’m too selfish and lonely. It’ll be so nice to see a few new faces around here.”
Alan wasn’t really listening to what she was saying.
“I thought Isabelle lived here by herself,” he said.
“She does. All on her own, just herself and her art.”
“Then who are you? What are you doing here in my room?”
His desire for Isabelle had fled. Now all he wanted to know was what an adolescent girl was doing in his room in the middle of the night. His visitor put an elbow on her knee, cupped her chin with her hand, and cocked her head. The pose rang in Alan’s memory, but he couldn’t place it.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why she had such an extreme change of style in her art?” the girl asked.
“All I’m wondering is who you are and wh
at you’re doing here.”
“Oh, don’t be so tedious,” she told him, that trace of mockery caressing her words with silent laughter.
Naked under his covers, Alan felt trapped by the situation.
“Don’t you find Isabelle far more fascinating?” she added.
“Yes. That is ...”
“No need to be shy about it. You’re not the first to be taken by her charms, and you probably won’t be the last. But they all back away from the mystery of her.”
“Mystery,” Alan repeated.
Well, Isabelle was certainly mysterious—she always had been—though he would probably have chosen the word puzzling to describe her instead. Mystery seemed to better suit this half-naked girl who was in his bedroom. As the light grew stronger outside, he could see that indeed the man’s shirt was all she had on. And it wasn’t buttoned closed.
“If you’re at all serious, ask her about Rushkin,” the girl said.
“Serious about what?”
The girl swung her feet down and leaned forward, chin cupped by both palms now.
“I’m not a child,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend. I know you were dreaming about her tonight. I know all about what grows between a man’s legs and where he wants to put it.”
Alan flushed. “Who are you?” he demanded.
The girl stood up and pushed open the window behind her, which appeared to have been unlatched.
Alan hadn’t noticed that last night.
“Just remember,” she said. “What you don’t know or don’t understand—it doesn’t have to be bad.”
“All I want to understand is—”
“And it’s okay to be scared.”
Alan could feel his temper giving out on him, so he forbore answering for a moment. He took a steadying breath, then let it out. The air coming in from the window made his breath cloud briefly, but the girl didn’t appear to feel the cold at all.
“Why are you telling me all of this?” he asked.
The girl smiled. “Now that’s the first intelligent question you’ve asked all morning.”
Alan waited, but she didn’t go on.
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