It would be winter soon, Isabelle thought. She’d paused in her packing to sit in the wing-backed chair by the bedroom window. She could see the island’s autumned fields from her vantage point, running off to the cliffs before they dropped into the lake. In the aftermath of last night’s storm, the sky was a perfect blue, untouched by cloud. She watched a crow glide across that cerulean expanse, then swoop down toward the fields. When it was lost to sight, her gaze moved back toward the house, where the forest encroached a little closer every year. The rich cloak of leaves was already beginning to thin, the colors losing their vibrancy. Movement caught her gaze again and she saw that the raggedy stand of mountain ash by one of the nearer outbuildings was filled with cedar waxwings, the sleek yellow-and-brown birds gorging on this year’s crop of the trees’ orange berries. Putting her face closer to the glass, she could hear their thin lisping cries of tsee, tsee.
Autumn was her favorite time of year. It bared the landscape, it was true, heralding the lonely desolation of the long months of winter to come, but it made her heart sing all the same with a joy not so dissimilar to what she felt when she saw the first crocuses in the spring. It was easy to forget—when the trees were bare, the fields turned brown and the north winds brought the first snows—that the world went on, that it wasn’t coming to an end. She agreed with what Andrew Wyeth was supposed to have said about the season: something did wait, underneath the drab masquerade that autumn eventually came to wear. The whole story didn’t show. But that was the way it was with everything. There were always other stories going on under what you could see—in people as much as landscapes.
Isabelle smiled at herself and rose from her chair. She knew what she was doing. Procrastinating.
She was going to miss the island—that was a given. Especially now. This was when she normally laid in a few months’ worth of supplies against that time when the channel between the island and the mainland became impassable. For anywhere from two to six weeks she would be cut off from all contact with the outside world, except by phone. She savored that forced hermitage. It was a time when she collected herself after the summer and its inevitable influx of visitors, and often got her best work done. As things were going now, she probably wouldn’t be able to return to the island until the channel froze over in early December. But it was too late to go back on the promise she’d made to Alan. Whether she liked it or not, she would be living in the city for at least a few months. Which reminded her: she should give Jilly another try.
Rubens was moping about in her studio when she went in to use the phone.
“You know what’s up, don’t you?” Isabelle said.
She punched in Jilly’s phone number. Cradling the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she hoisted the orange tom onto her lap and scratched the fur up and down his spine until he began to purr.
She was half expecting her call to go unanswered again, but after the third ring she heard the sound of the phone being picked up on the other end of the line, quickly followed by Jilly’s cheerful hello.
“Hello, yourself,” Isabelle said. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”
“Were you? I was over at Amos & Cook’s picking up some paints and I kind of got distracted on the way home. I ended up down by the Pier, watching these kids showing off on their Rollerblades. You should have seen them. They were just amazing. I could’ve watched them all day.”
Isabelle smiled. A rarer occasion would be a time when Jilly wasn’t distracted by one thing or another.
“Tell me something new,” she said.
“Ah ... the Pope’s staying with me for the weekend?”
“Rats. And here I was hoping that I could hit you up for a place to stay.”
“You’re coming to town? When? How long are you staying?”
Rather than taking the questions on an individual basis, Isabelle backtracked, explaining how Alan had come out to the island with his proposal for the omnibus of Kathy’s stories that Isabelle had agreed to illustrate.
“You mean in your old style?” Jilly asked.
“That’s the plan.”
“How do you feel about it?”
Isabelle hesitated. “Excited, actually,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And what was it like seeing Alan again?” Jilly wanted to know.
“Sort of weird,” Isabelle said. “In some ways, it was like I’d only just seen him last week.”
“I’ve always liked him,” Jilly said. “There’s something intrinsically good about him—an inborn compassion that you don’t find in many people these days.”
“You could be talking about yourself,” Isabelle pointed out.
Jilly laughed. “Not a chance. I had to learn how to be a good person.”
Before Isabelle could add her own comment to that, Jilly steered the conversation back to Isabelle’s current concern. “You’re welcome to stay with me,” she said, “although it sounds like you’re going to be in town for a while, so it could get a little cramped.”
“I was hoping to stay just for a couple of nights while I find myself something.”
“Are you bringing Rubens?”
“I couldn’t leave him behind on his own.”
“Of course not,” Jilly said. “But having a pet’ll make it a little harder to find a place unless—hey, do you remember the old shoe factory on Church Street?”
“The one by the river?”
“That’s the place. Well, some people bought it at the beginning of the summer and have turned it into a kind of miniature version of Waterhouse Street.”
Isabelle remembered having read about it in the features section of one of the papers. The ground floor was taken up by boutiques, cafes and galleries, while the two upstairs floors consisted of small apartments, offices, studio spaces and rented rooms.
“They call the place Joli Coeur,” Jilly went on, “after that Rossetti painting. They’ve even got a reproduction of it—a giant mural in the central courtyard on the ground floor.”
“I saw a picture of it in the paper,” Isabelle said. “Have you been in at all?”
“A couple of times. Nora has a studio in there. She says it’s all sort of communey, with everybody running in and out of everybody else’s place, but I’m sure no one would bother you if you made it plain that you didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. “I think I could use a bit of chaotic bohemia about now—just to get me back into the mood of what it was like when Kathy was writing those stories.”
Jilly laughed. “Well, I’d call this place more baroque than boho, but I suppose there’s really not that much difference between the two. At least there never was in the Waterhouse Street days. Do you want me to give them a call to see if they have any studio spaces free?”
“Do you mind?”
“Of course not. I think you’ll like staying there. You wouldn’t believe the old faces I’ve run into. I even saw that old boyfriend of yours the other day—what was his name? John Sweetgrass.”
Everything went still inside Isabelle. A cold silence rose up inside her, tightening in her chest, and she found it hard to take a breath. In her mind’s eye, she saw a painting, consumed by flames.
“But that ... that’s—”
Impossible, she’d been about to say, but she caught herself in time. “That’s so ... odd,” she said instead. “I haven’t thought of him in years.” Until yesterday. Until Alan came with his proposal and woke up all the old ghosts inside her. John and the others had been on her mind ever since.
“He doesn’t go by the name John anymore,” Jilly went on. “He calls himself Mizaun Kinnikinnik now.”
Isabelle remembered a long-ago conversation in a Newford diner, John telling her about the Kickaha, about names. The tightness in her chest was easing, but the chill hadn’t gone away. How could Jilly have seen him? She looked out the window of her studio. The view was different from here, the fields choked with rosebushes, the woods loo
ming dark behind them. It was easy to imagine hidden stories when she looked at their dark tangle.
“Are you still there, Isabelle?” Jilly asked.
Isabelle nodded, then realized that her friend couldn’t see the gesture. “How did he look?” she asked.
“Great. Like he hasn’t aged a year. But I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him. I was on my way out and he was on his way in and I haven’t seen him since. I did ask Nora about him and she says a friend of his runs the little boutique that sells Kickaha crafts and arts on the ground floor. You’ll have to look him up when you get to town.”
“Maybe I will,” Isabelle said.
As if she’d have a choice. As if he wouldn’t come to her first.
“I should finish my packing,” she told Jilly. “I’ll probably be leaving in another hour or so.”
“I’ll set an extra plate for dinner. And I should have some news about Joli Coeur by the time you get here.”
“Thanks, Jilly. You’re a real sweetheart.”
But Isabelle didn’t get back to her packing right away. She hung up the receiver and then sat there, stroking Rubens, trying to gain some measure of calm from the touch of his fur, his weight on her lap. But all she could think of was John, of the presences that she felt sometimes in the woods around her home—itinerant remnants of a lost time, cut adrift from their own pasts, but no longer a part of her present. And so they waited in the woods. For what, she’d never been quite sure. For her to take up that part of her art once more? To take a few pigments, some oil, a piece of canvas and an old brush and add others to their ranks?
She’d never been entirely sure if she’d made them real with her art, or if they were real first, if a part of her had recognized them from some mysterious else-where so that she was able to render their likenesses and bring them across. The only thing of which she was entirely certain was that she believed in them. For all these years she’d believed in them and in the part she’d played to bring them forth. But ifJohn was still alive, that changed everything. It created new riddles to unravel and made a lie of what Rushkin had taught her was real.
Rushkin, she thought. Considering all he’d done to her, why should she ever have believed anything he’d told her?
But she knew the reason before she even asked herself the question. No matter what Rushkin had done, she’d always believed that there were some things he held sacred. Some things he would never soil with a lie. If she couldn’t believe that, she didn’t know what to believe anymore.
She was bound to those errant spirits that had come across from their otherwhere. That much was real. Their lives still touched hers as though she were the center of a spider’s web and each fine outgoing strand was connected to one of them. She could close her eyes and see them. But if it wasn’t her art that made the connection, then what was?
II
The two red-haired women sat on a rococo burgundy chesterfield in the middle of a small glade surrounded by old birch trees. The glade had all the appearance of a living room, with the birches for walls, the sky for ceiling and the forest floor, mostly covered with an Oriental rug, underfoot. Though a breeze blew across the fields beyond the glade, inside the air was still. Inclement weather never intruded.
Lanterns hung from the white boughs above, unlit now since sunlight streamed into the glade, providing ample illumination. Standing across from the chesterfield were a pair of mismatched club chairs with a cedar chest set in between them to serve as a table. Beside the older woman was an empty bookcase with leaded glass panes, its one book presently lying open on her lap.
The older woman carried herself with a stately grace. She appeared to be in her early thirties, a striking figure in her long grey gown, rust underskirt and her thick red hair. She might have stepped from a Waterhouse painting, the Lady of Shalott, trailing her hand in a lilied river; Miranda watching a ship sink off her father’s island.
Her companion had half her years, was gangly where she was all slender curves, scruffy where she was so neatly groomed, but the resemblance between the two was such that they might easily have been sisters, or mother and daughter. If the younger girl’s hair was a bird’s nest of tangles, her choice of clothing torn blue jeans and an oversized woolen sweater spotted with burrs and prickly seeds, it was simply because she was endlessly active. She had no time to comb her hair or mend her clothes when there was so much to do.
But she was quiet now, sitting beside the older woman, the two of them unable to look away from the indistinct figures that gamboled about in the field just beyond the birch walls of their curiously situated room. The red-brown shapes romping about in the grass caught the bright sunlight and pulled it deep into their coloring until they appeared to glow from within.
“Look at them, Rosalind,” the younger woman said. “They’re so new. They must still remember what it was like in the before.”
Rosalind shook her head. “There’s not enough of them here to allow them memory. They’ll be gone in another hour.”
Cosette nodded glumly. She could see that one or two of them already were becoming less distinct.
The distant hills could be seen through an arm or a torso, flashes of lake appeared through hair that was turning to a soft, red-brown mist.
“What do you remember of before?” she asked, turning her head from the meadow to her companion.
It was an old question, but one she never grew tired of asking.
“There was story,” Rosalind said. Her voice was thoughtful, full of remembering. Of trying to remember. “Stories. And one of them was mine.”
Cosette was never sure if she actually remembered that there’d been stories, or if it was only from Rosalind having told her of them so often. What she did know was that she carried an ache inside her, that she’d lost something coming from before to here.
“We miss our dreams,” Rosalind had explained once. “We have no blood, so we cannot dream.”
“But Isabelle dreams,” Cosette had protested.
“Isabelle has the red crow inside her.”
Sometimes Cosette would run madly across the fields, dangerously close to the cliffs, run and run until finally she fell exhausted to the turfy ground. Then she’d lie with her hair tangled in grass and roots and weeds and stare up into the sky, looking for a russet speck against the blue, red wings beating like the drumming of a pulse.
Red crow, red crow, fly inside me, she’d sing in her husky voice.
But she could still prick her finger with a thorn and the red crow wouldn’t fly from the cut. She couldn’t bleed—not red blood, not green fairy-tale blood, not any blood at all.
And she couldn’t dream.
Sleep wasn’t necessary for her kind, but when she did close her eyes to seek it, there was only the vast darkness lying there in her mind until she woke again. When she slept, she went into an empty place and came back neither refreshed nor touched by the mythic threads of story that the red crow brought to others when they slept.
“It’s because we’re not real,” she’d whispered once, shaken with the enormity of the thought that they were only loaned their lives, that their existence depended on the capriciousness of another’s will, rather than how every other person lived, following the red crow’s wheel as it slowly turned from birth to death.
But Rosalind had quickly shaken her head in reply. Taking Cosette in her arms, she’d rocked the younger woman against her breast.
“We are real,” she’d said, a fierceness in her voice that Cosette had never heard before. “Don’t ever believe differently.”
It had to be true.
We are real.
She took Rosalind’s hand now and repeated it to herself like a charm. Her gaze was held and trapped by the red-brown shapes frolicking in the sun beyond the birch glade.
We are real.
Not like them. They’ll fade and go away, back into the before, but we’ll remain because we’re real.
Even if we can’t dream.
; “Isabelle’s going back to the city, you know,” she told Rosalind. “She’s going to paint like she did before.”
She never looked away from the dancing shapes. Many were fainter now, their outlines vague, certain limbs almost completely washed away. They were becoming patterns of red-brown mist, rather than holding to true shapes as the sun and the dreams of this world burned them away.
“I know,” Rosalind said.
“I’m going to follow her.” Cosette finally looked away, turning her attention back to her companion.
“This time I’m going to learn how she reaches into the before and brings us back.”
“We’ve always known how she does it,” Rosalind said. “She paints.”
“I can paint.”
“Yes, but she dreams, so it’s not the same.”
Cosette sighed at the truth of it. It wasn’t the same at all.
“I’m still going to follow her,” she said.
“And then?” Rosalind asked.
“I’m going to reach into the before myself and bring back a red crow for each of us.”
“If only you could,” Rosalind murmured, the trace of a poignant smile touching the corners of her mouth. “It would be like in the story—one for memory and one for dream.”
“But none for the man who has no soul.”
Rosalind nodded again.
“Never for him,” she agreed.
The man who had no soul was only a dark figure in Cosette’s mind, an image of menace, lacking any detail. Thinking of him now stole all the warmth from the sunlight. Cosette shivered and drew closer to her companion. She hadn’t actually ever met him, only observed him from a distance, but she would never forget the emptiness that lay behind his eyes, the dark hollow of who he truly was that he could cloak so efficiently with his false charm and gaiety.
“You mustn’t tell the others,” she said. “That I’m going, I mean.”
“Paddyjack won’t need to be told.”
Cosette nodded. “But he won’t follow me if someone doesn’t think of it for him. If we have to take a chance, let it only be one of us that takes the risk.”
“But—”
Memory and Dream n-5 Page 17
