Memory and Dream n-5

by Charles de Lint

  “Promise me,” Cosette said.

  “I promise.” Rosalind’s grip tightened on Cosette’s fingers. “But only ifyou promise that you’ll be careful. Promise me you won’t let that dark man find you.”

  Cosette promised, but it wasn’t a pledge she was sure she could keep. She could only try.

  She looked away again, out between the birches to the field beyond. The figures were all gone now.

  There were only the autumn fields, red and gold and brown, and the lake farther off, a blue that was almost grey. The red-brown shapes had been washed away as easily as Isabelle might lift transparent pigment from wet paper.

  That could happen to me, she thought. That could happen to all of us. But she took the fear and held it inside herself, leaving it unspoken.

  “I like this Alan,” she said instead. “Maybe if Isabelle doesn’t want him, I’ll take him.”

  “He’s far too old for you,” Rosalind said with a laugh.

  Cosette’s lips formed a sulky moue that wasn’t at all serious.

  “I only look young,” she informed her companion.

  “That’s true,” Rosalind said, still smiling. “And you never play the fool. You’re far too mature for that.”

  Cosette poked her in the ribs with her elbow.

  “Hush you,” she said.

  Rosalind let go of Cosette’s hand and put her arm around the younger woman’s shoulders. They spoke no more of departures or danger. Instead, they watched the day pass beyond their glade, the light change on the fields as the afternoon crept toward dusk, and pretended, if just for these few hours, that they wouldn’t miss each other. That nothing was changed. That the red crow flew inside their bodies and when they slept, they could dream.

  III

  Newford, September 1992

  Driving back to the city, Alan was glad that he’d taken Marisa’s advice and not tried to apologize for or make sense of his and Isabelle’s estrangement all those years ago. His stay at Wren Island had contained enough odd and strained moments all on their own without his needing to bring up any old baggage. It was funny, though. He didn’t remember Isabelle as being so moody in the old days. She’d been somewhat serious, and certainly quieter than Kathy, but then everyone had been quieter than Kathy.

  Thinking of Kathy woke a deep pang of loss. It was a familiar sorrow, but no less difficult to bear for that familiarity. He wondered if it was memories of Kathy that had brought on Isabelle’s extreme shifts of mood. Lord knew the memories seemed so fresh to him at the moment that they were leaving him more than a little off-balance. It wasn’t just the senselessness of her death that ate at him, but that he missed her so terribly. While time was supposed to heal all, it had yet to heal him. He thought it never might.

  There were times when he was able to go a week or more without thinking of her, but something always came up to remind him and then that deep sorrow would return, lodged so firmly inside that there was no escaping it. The court battles with her family and working on the omnibus didn’t help either.

  Sometimes he thought that if he could just get the book out, he’d be able to close the door on the past and get on with his life, but most of the time he felt that would never happen. He wasn’t even sure he wanted it to. Forgetting seemed too much like a betrayal.

  Traffic was light going into the city and he made good time on the highway. The recent cassette of a New Jersey songwriter named Kate Jacobs was on the car stereo. She came across as folky and wise, with just a touch of sly humor, and he found himself relaxing to the sound of her voice, though he couldn’t help but wonder, After what?, as he listened to the title cut, “The Calm Comes After.” A miracle, he supposed. He reached the downtown core before the lunch crowds began to congest the streets and had no trouble driving into Lower Crowsea, which was somewhat of a miracle in itself. By the time he pulled into his garage, it was just under two and a half hours from when Isabelle had left him off at her landing on the mainland.

  The first thing he planned to do was change; then he’d get on the phone to the New York paperback house that was interested in the omnibus to pass along the good news that Isabelle had come on board.

  They could use one of the paintings hanging in the Newford Children’s Foundation to start the publicity machine rolling and he’d send out galleys of the unpublished stories to get some new quotes. Since Kathy’s work had been out of the limelight for five years now, it was important to choreograph her return so that it was just right.

  With his head full of business details, he went up the stairs to his apartment, then stopped dead at the sound of music that was coming from the other side of the apartment’s front door. He was certain he hadn’t left the stereo on. With his key in hand, he moved forward again, an uneasy feeling prickling across his shoulder blades, but before he could put the key in the lock, the door swung open and Marisa was standing there.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Her familiar half-smile had a touch of nervousness about it and Alan could see why. She’d obviously made herself at home in his absence. She was barefoot, wearing one of his long-sleeved shirts over a pair of her own jeans. Her hair was a disheveled blonde tangle and her eyes were puffy and red, as though she’d been crying.

  “I saw you pull up into the garage,” she went on, “but I didn’t have time to change.” She gave the shirt she was wearing a fidgety pluck with her fingers. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Alan said.

  “I left so fast, I never even thought to pack anything. George, I mean.” She backed up a little so that Alan could come inside. “I left him last night. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Alan closed the door behind him. Of course, he thought. After all this time, she finally left George just when Isabelle had come back into his life. Then he felt like a heel for even thinking such a thing. Tears were brimming in Marisa’s eyes and her lower lip trembled.

  “I . I tried to think of where I could go,” she said, “and then I realized that you’re the only person I really know. After all these years of living here, you’re the only person I can trust.”

  “You can stay as long as you want,” Alan told her, and he meant it.

  “I don’t want to get in the way of ... you know ... you and Isabelle ....”

  “There’s nothing to get in the way of,” Alan said. Not yet. Maybe never.

  “I ... would you hold me, Alan? I just need somebody to hold me ...”

  As he put his arms around her, she buried her face in his shoulder and began to cry. Alan steered her toward the sofa. He sat there holding her for a long time, murmuring words of comfort that he wasn’t sure were true. Everything wasn’t necessarily going to get better for her. He knew how Marisa felt about him, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about her anymore. She’d waited so long to get out of her marriage—maybe too long.

  She fell asleep finally. Being careful not to disturb her, Alan rose from the sofa after putting a pillow under her head. Sitting on the edge of the coffee table, he regarded her for a long time. After a few minutes, he pushed an errant lock away from her forehead, kissed her lightly on the top of her head and rose to his feet. He crossed the room and sat down at his desk, but found himself unable to concentrate on his work. Instead, he looked at Marisa, sleeping so peacefully now on the sofa.

  From the first time he’d met her, he’d sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She seemed to have an inborn wisdom about her, but she’d stayed in a marriage that only made her miserable and had gone sour long before he’d met her. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people’s art and ideas—which is how Alan had met her in the first place. He’d placed an ad in The Crowsea Times for a part-time book designer
and she’d been the first person to respond. After the interview, he hadn’t bothered to see anyone else, but simply gave her the job.

  “Now, remember,” he’d warned her, “when I said part-time, it’s really quite part-time. I rarely do more than three or four books in a year.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not doing it for the money, but because I want to be doing something. We were just transferred to the city and I feel completely at loose ends.”

  “We?” Alan had found himself asking with a certain measure of disappointment.

  “My husband George and I. He’s a financial consultant with Cogswell’s. It’s because of his work that we came here.”

  It was a good year before Alan got any inkling that the marriage was in trouble, but by that time he’d managed to teach himself to think of her as a friend and coworker and nothing more; beyond that he drew a line that was admittedly hard not to cross at those times that Marisa got into one of her teasing moods. But even if he had known that her marriage was in trouble, Alan wouldn’t have let it change their relationship. He was far too old-fashioned to court a woman who was already married, if only in name, though that hadn’t stopped him from wishing that she’d simply walk out on George once and for all.

  Alan sighed. And now she had, now she was here, and all he could do was think about Isabelle and feel guilty about his being attracted to Marisa, even though he doubted Isabelle would care in the least what he and Marisa might get up to. There was certainly nothing going on between Isabelle and himself, nothing even implied or possible, so far as he could see.

  It was the story of his life, Alan thought. He was never in the right place at the right time.

  He remained at his desk for a while longer, shuffling papers that he couldn’t concentrate on. Finally he arose and went into the bedroom so that he wouldn’t disturb Marisa with his call to New York.

  IV

  Isabelle didn’t even have time to finish parking before Jilly had come down from her Yoors Street studio and was out on the pavement to meet her. She was wearing her usual jeans and scuffed brown construction boots, but Isabelle didn’t recognize the oversized sweater. It was a deep yellowish-orange, which made Jilly’s blue eyes seem a more startling blue than normal. When Isabelle stepped out of the Jeep, Jilly bounced up to her and gave her a big hug.

  “It’s so great to see you!”

  “You, too,” Isabelle said, returning the hug.

  Stepping back, Jilly surveyed the contents of Isabelle’s Jeep. The backseat and storage compartment was stuffed with a tall pile of boxes and suitcases and various sacks and bags, while on the passenger’s seat was a woven straw cat carrier from which Rubens watched the proceedings with a mournful expression. Jilly went around to the other side of the car and opened the passenger’s door.

  “Poor fella,” she said, crouching by the front of the cage and poking her finger through the mesh to scratch his nose. Once Rubens looked a little more settled she stood up and surveyed the back of the Jeep again. “Boy, you really were serious about staying awhile.”

  “You know me. I always bring too much.”

  “I think it’s called being prepared,” Jilly said dubiously.

  Isabelle laughed. “Or something.”

  “So do you want to come up for some tea, or would you like to go check out your new studio?”

  “They had room at Job Coeur?”

  Jilly nodded. “Third floor, with a huge bay window overlooking the river.”

  “Who’d you have to kill to get that?”

  “Nothing so drastic. The renovating of the top floor was only just finished this week, so they hadn’t even started renting space yet. The ad’s not going into the paper until tomorrow.”

  Knowing that she at least had a place of her own, a weight lifted inside Isabelle. She’d been nervous the whole drive in, not sure quite what was waiting for her in the city. She’d never been very good at depending on the kindness of others for a place to stay. But now, with a studio found, and buoyed by Jilly’s infectious enthusiasm, her own excitement finally began to grow.

  “Let’s go see it,” Isabelle said. “We can always have tea in one of those cafes on the ground floor.”

  Jilly grinned. “I thought you’d say that,” she said, “so I already locked up before I came down.” She picked up Rubens’s carrier and slipped into the seat, perching the case on her knee. “Ready when you are.”

  Isabelle shook her head in amusement. She always forgot how spontaneous Jilly was. The small artist was a witch’s brew of energy and wide-ranging interests, bubbling away in a cauldron and constantly spilling over to splatter anyone standing in the nearby vicinity. When Jilly had you in tow, everything took on new meaning. The ordinary was transformed into the extraordinary, the odd or unusual became positively exotic.

  “Do they have parking?” she asked as she slipped behind the wheel on the driver’s side.

  “‘Fraid not. You’ll have to park on the street. But you can get a permit if you’ve got the patience to wade through an afternoon or so of City Hall bureaucracy.”

  “What? You’re not on a first-name basis with whoever’s in charge?”

  “Well,” Jilly said. “Now that you mention it, Sue’s got an office on the second floor. Maybe she could help us.”

  “I was kidding,” Isabelle told her.

  Jilly smiled. “I knew that. But you should still give Sue a call. Do you know how to get there?” she added as Isabelle pulled away from the curb. “It hasn’t been that long.”

  Jilly shrugged and settled back into her seat to fuss with Rubens through the mesh of his carrying case while Isabelle maneuvered them through the thickening afternoon traffic.

  “You’re going to love the big city, old fella,” Jilly told Rubens. “There must be hundreds of lady cats just waiting for a handsome tom like you to come courting.”

  “Oh please.”

  Jilly shot Isabelle a quick grin. “Well he’s got to have something to make up for being uprooted from house and home the way he has.”

  “It’s only for a few months.”

  “People months,” Jilly corrected. “But how long is that in cat months?”

  “This is true,” Isabelle said.

  V

  The offices of the Newford Children’s Foundation were situated in a building not nearly so prepossessing as one might imagine from its name, taking up only the ground floor of an old Edwardian-style house in Lower Crowsea. The outside of the house bore little resemblance to the blueprint from which it had been constructed. The original architectural lines were blurred with the addition of various porches and skylights, a sunroom along one side wall, the wall on the other side half-covered in ivy. Inside, it was changed as well. The front foyer led into a waiting room that had once been a parlor, while the remaining rooms on the ground floor had been converted into offices. Only the original kitchen at the rear remained as it had been, still overlooking a postage stamp of a backyard.

  Because she lived in one of the two apartments upstairs, Rolanda Hamilton could often be found in the Foundation’s offices during off-hours, catching up on her paperwork. She was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, broadnosed and full-lipped with short corkscrew hair the color of chestnuts. Alone in the office, she’d dressed for comfort rather than style. Her white sweatshirt made her coffee-colored skin seem darker than usual while her long legs were comfortably ensconced in a pair of baggy jeans. Her Reeboks were a dark magenta—the same color as the large plastic hoop earrings she was wearing.

  She’d discovered not long after beginning work here that, since the salary for an office support person wasn’t in their budget, she, like the other four counselors that the Foundation employed, had to do double duty: counseling the children they worked with during the day, and then trying to find time to bring files up to date, send out the donation mailings, balance the budget and whatever else needed to be done that they hadn’t been able to get to during the course of their working day. It was an
endless task, but Rolanda had yet to bum out on the job as had so many others before her.

  There was a reason why she was so dedicated to the furtherance of Kathy Mully’s ideals. Rolanda had grown up in the projects, where her mother had instilled in her a respect for hard work and doing what was right. Her younger brother had been shotgunned when his gang got into a turf war with another crew. He died en route to the hospital and never saw his twelfth birthday. Her older brother was in jail, serving seven to ten for armed robbery. Two of her cousins were also in jail. The boy next door that she’d played with before she entered her teens was serving a life sentence for murder one.

  These were statistics that her mother liked to recite whenever Rolanda got into trouble herself, like the time she got sent home from fifth grade for beating up a white girl during recess.

  “But Mama,” she’d wailed as her mother gave her a slap across the back of her head as soon as they returned home from the school. “She called me a stupid nigger.”

  “You are a stupid nigger if you can’t do better at school than listen to some white trash mouth off”

  “It’s not fair. She started it.”

  “And you finished it.”

  “But—”

  “You listen to me, girl. There’s nothing fair about having to try twice as hard to do well and then still have ’em spit in your face, but I’ll be damned if I won’t have one child of mine do well. You hear me?

  Are you going to make your mama proud, girl, or do I have to be shamed by you as well?”

  The projects ground you down, and Rolanda had never understood how her mother had resisted the oppressive heartbreak of its weight upon her frail shoulders. Five-foot-one and barely a hundred pounds, Janet Hamilton was tougher and more resilient than men twice her size. She had raised three children on her own when her husband abandoned her. She’d worked two jobs and still managed to keep their house clean and regular meals on the table. She’d always had time for her children, and even when she’d lost two of them to the projects, her spirit refused to bow under the loss.