“Why don’t you keep it,” she said.
“Really?”
“It’s the least I can do for you. Thanks again.”
She shook hands with both of them and left the office, the plastic bag clutched against her chest. It was an incredible coincidence how things had worked out, she thought as she walked across the bus terminal toward the exit. Or maybe it truly had been kismet and Kathy’s magic hadn’t entirely deserted her after all.
XI
Rolanda couldn’t stop dreaming about the strange young girl who had appeared so mysteriously in the Foundation’s office yesterday evening, appeared and then just as mysteriously vanished. The dream was as odd as the girl herself had been. It consisted solely of Cosette sitting on the edge of Rolanda’s bed, staring at her. Whenever Rolanda woke up and looked, the end of the bed was empty—which was how it should be, of course. Yet no sooner would she drift back into sleep again than the dream would return.
Finally Rolanda got up and decided to finish the financial report she’d been working on last night. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well make herself useful.
She brewed herself a strong cup of coffee in her own kitchen, then took it downstairs. She froze at the door of the office, and not simply because of the odd smell in the air. Her gaze fixed on the small figure curled up on the sofa. Cosette was still wearing the sweater and shoes she’d gotten from Rolanda earlier and she was using the arm of the sofa as a pillow. Her hands were clutched close to her thin chest, her torso and lower limbs forming a tight Z.
Rolanda slowly walked over to her desk and set down her coffee. Her hands were trembling and she spilled some of the dark liquid on one of the file covers, but she didn’t bother to mop it up. All she could do was stare at her mysterious visitor and wonder at the odor that permeated the room. Finally she went into Shauna’s office, where she collected a blanket. Returning to where Cosette was sleeping, she laid the blanket over the girl.
“I’m not asleep,” Cosette said.
Rolanda’s pulse skipped a beat. Slowly she sat down on the coffee table in front of the sofa. What are you doing here? she wanted to ask. How did you get in? But all she said was “I guess the sofa’s not all that comfortable, is it? I’ve got a bed upstairs that you can sleep in if you like.”
The girl regarded her with a solemn gaze. “I can’t dream, you know.” The abrupt shift in conversation didn’t phase Rolanda. She was used to it in this place.
“Everybody dreams,” she said. “You just don’t remember yours, that’s all.”
“Then why can’t I paint?” Cosette asked.
“I’m not sure I get the connection.”
Cosette sat up and pulled a still-wet canvas out from under the sofa. Turpentine, Rolanda thought when she saw it. That was what the odd smell was that she’d noticed earlier. She hadn’t been able to place it before because it was so out-of-place here.
“Look at this,” Cosette said. “It’s awful.”
Rolanda would have chosen the word primitive to describe it. In darkened tones of blue and red and purple, Cosette had rendered a rough image of a woman sleeping in a bed. The perspective was slightly askew and the proportions were off, but there was still a power about the simple painting, a sense of brooding disquiet that was completely at odds with the artist’s obvious limitations in terms of technique.
“I wouldn’t say it was awful,” she began, and then she looked more closely at the painting. The shape of the headboard ...
It was her bed, Rolanda realized. Cosette had painted her, sleeping in her bed upstairs. She hadn’t been dreaming. The girl really had been in her bedroom watching her.
“But you wouldn’t say it was good either, would you?”
Rolanda had a difficult moment trying to bring herself back to the conversation. The idea that Cosette had crept into her bedroom, had actually been sitting there, watching her, was unsettling. How had the girl gotten in? The front door was locked. And so was the door to her own apartment.
“Well, would you?” Cosette asked.
Rolanda cleared her throat. “How long have you been painting?” she asked.
“Oh, for years and years. But I can never get anything to look the way it really is. Not the way that Isabelle used to. If I was her, I’d never have given that up.
She spoke with such earnest weariness that Rolanda couldn’t help but smile.
“Have you ever taken any courses?” she asked. “Because it’s a long process, you know. Most artists take fine arts at a university or at least study under another artist. I can’t think of any who were already completely accomplished at your age.”
“I’m older than I look.”
Rolanda nodded. “You said that before.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“I believe you.”
“I just look like this because this is the way Isabelle brought me over. I’m not really a child.”
“Who is Isabelle?”
Cosette pointed to the painting of The Wild Girl that hung on the wall across the room. “That’s one of her paintings. It’s the one she did of me.”
“But that painting’s been here for years ....”
“I know. Didn’t I tell you I was older than I looked? It’s been fifteen years since she first brought me over.”
Rolanda felt as though she were in one of those old black-and-white comedies where conversations always went at cross-purposes. She regarded Cosette. It was true the girl looked like the subject of Isabelle Copley’s painting, but she couldn’t have sat for it. She simply wasn’t old enough. Rolanda wanted to confront Cosette with the impossibility of what she was saying, but the first thing you learned when you came to work for the Foundation was not to be confrontational with the clients—especially not at the beginning. They might be lying, you might know they were lying, but you didn’t call them on it.
By the time a child came to the Foundation, their life was already such a mess that the first priority was to make sure they were healthy and safe. Everything else was dealt with later.
“What do you mean about Ms. Copley bringing you over?” she asked instead. “Where did she bring you over from?”
Cosette shrugged. “From before.”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know. There are stories there, but they don’t belong to us anymore. We have to start a new story here. But it’s hard because we’re not like you. We can’t dream. The red crow doesn’t beat inside our chests.”
Rolanda found herself wishing she had the luxury of enough time to call someone: one of the other counselors. Alan Grant, whom Cosette had mentioned earlier. Or even this artist, Isabelle Copley. She knew she was missing something, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She might have put Cosette’s odd conversation down to drugs, except that Cosette showed none of the usual signs of a user.
She was so matter-of-fact, so normal. Except for what she was talking about.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” she told the girl, “but I’m not sure I understand what you mean about ...
well, any of this. Red crows and coming across from before and the like. But I want to understand.”
“Maybe I should just show you,” Cosette said.
She threw the blanket back and got up from the sofa. Walking over to Rolanda’s desk, she rummaged around in the papers on top until she turned around with the sharp Xacto blade that Rolanda used for opening parcels. She brought it back to the sofa.
“Look,” she said.
Rolanda cried out and grabbed at Cosette’s hand as the girl drew the blade across her palm, but she was too late.
“Oh, my god!”
“Don’t worry,” Cosette said calmly. She dropped the blade onto the floor and held her cut palm up to Rolanda’s face. “Just look.”
All the blood, Rolanda thought. She couldn’t stand to see all the blood .... Except there was none.
There was just a white line on Cosette’s palm, which was already beginning to fa
de.
“Wh-what ... ?”
“We don’t have any blood,” Cosette said. She held her hand upside down and shook it, then held it out again, palm up. “And that’s why we can’t dream. We don’t have a red crow beating its wings inside our chest. We ... we’re like hollow people.”
Rolanda couldn’t take her gaze away from Cosette’s hand. When she finally did, it was to look at the Copley painting of The Wild Girl.
It’s the one she did of me.
Slowly she looked back at Cosette and the bloodless cut on her palm. The painting was at least ten or fifteen years old. But Cosette herself couldn’t be much older than fifteen ....
It’s been fifteen years since she first brought me over.
She didn’t bleed. She was unchanged after fifteen years. Rolanda couldn’t suppress a shudder. The Foundation’s rules and regulations fell by the wayside. “What ... what are you?” Rolanda asked. “What do you want from me?” Cosette dropped her hand to her lap and she seemed to shrink into herself.
She lowered her face but not before Rolanda saw the tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t know what I am.”
Her voice was small, pitched so low that the short distance between them almost stole away its audibility. And then she began to weep.
For a long moment all Rolanda could do was stare at her. Then slowly she reached out, shivering when her hands touched the girl’s shoulders. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but there was nothing alien under her hands. All she felt was the warmth of Cosette’s body under the sweater, the tremor in her shoulders as she wept. No matter what she was, no matter how strange, she was still a child. Still hurting. Rolanda could no more turn away from her than she could from any child that came in through the Foundation’s doors.
She went down on one knee and drew Cosette into a comforting embrace. She held her until the tears finally subsided; then she took her upstairs and put her into her own bed. Long after she could hear the other counselors arrive downstairs and the day’s work begin, she sat there beside the bed, holding Cosette’s hand. She looked into the girl’s face and saw no rapid eye movement under Cosette’s eyelids. She touched the pale white palm, now unblemished.
We can’t dream. The red crow doesn’t beat inside our chests.
She was way out of her depth here, but she didn’t know to whom she could turn. The first thing anyone would do would be to take Cosette to a doctor and then specialists would be brought in and then
...
Rolanda sighed. The first priority at the Foundation was always the child, and she knew she couldn’t allow Cosette to be put through any of that. She’d seen E. T. and Firestarter. They were both fictions but, she thought, not so far from the truth of how events would go if the situations in them were true.
Which left them on their own.
“What am I going to do with you?” she whispered.
Cosette’s fingers tightened on her own, but otherwise she didn’t stir.
XII
Jilly searched high and low, but no matter where she looked in her studio, she couldn’t find the two tubes of oil paint she’d bought the day before at Amos & Cook’s. She knew she’d brought them home and left them, still in their distinctive orange and white plastic bag, on the table beside her easel, but when she went to start work this morning, they simply weren’t there. And then, as she searched for the missing paint tubes, she discovered that a pair of brushes were gone as well—one of them a favorite—along with a glass jar that had been half-full of turpentine, and a small piece of hardboard that she’d been saving for the next time she went to paint on location out on the street.
Isabelle must have taken them, she decided, although why she would need them, Jilly couldn’t even begin to guess. It wasn’t as though Isabelle hadn’t brought half her studio down from the island with her.
And besides, it wasn’t like Isabelle to just take something without asking first. At the very least she would have mentioned it in her note. But there didn’t seem to be any other logical explanation.
“Is that what happened?” she asked Rubens. “Did Isabelle take that stuff? Or maybe it was the Good Neighbors. You know, the Little People. Do you have them out on the island?”
Rubens ignored her. He sat on the broad windowsill, staring through its panes at the three alley cats on the fire escape outside that were wolfing down the dry cat food that Jilly had put out for them earlier.
Rubens’s presence made them fidgety and eventually all three fled, nervousness overcoming their hunger.
Not until they were gone did Rubens finally deign to look at her.
“You’re going to have to learn to get along,” filly informed him. “You can’t just go around playing the heavy with every cat you meet, you know. Next time the window might be open and one of them’ll come in and give you a good box in the ears.”
She left him to think that over while she rummaged about in her closet for a jacket she felt like wearing on her trek back to the art shop to buy new supplies. Eventually she gave up and put on the sweater she’d been wearing yesterday. She was giving it a critical look in the mirror when she heard a knock on the studio door. Opening it, she was surprised to find John Sweetgrass standing out in the hall.
“Well, hello,” she said. “That didn’t take you long.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I meant it didn’t take you long to track Isabelle down. How’d you even know she was in the city?
Oh, I know. Somebody at Joli Coeur told you, right?” He gave her a blank look. “Do I know you?”
“Give me a break, John. I’m not in the mood for jokes. I was all set to get back to this piece I’ve been working on, only to find out that I have to go back to Amos & Cook’s to buy some more paints first—after just having been there yesterday.”
“You must have me mistaken with someone else. My name’s not John.”
“Oh, that’s right. It’s Mizaun Kinnikinnik now, right?”
He shook his head. “Is Isabelle Copley here?”
But now it was July’s turn to give him a puzzled look. “You’re really not John Sweetgrass?”
“I already told you that. Now, will you please answer my question.”
Jilly gave him a long look. She hated to think that she had somehow stumbled into that category of whites who thought all Native Americans looked the same, but there was no way she could deny the fact that to her he looked exactly like Isabelle’s old boyfriend.
“Is there some point to your wasting my time like this?” he asked when she didn’t reply.
“What?”
“I’m looking for Isabelle Copley. Is she here or not?”
“Your name’s not John?”
“Look, lady—”
“And you really don’t know me?”
“I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you. Just answer my question. If a simple yes or no’s too hard, you could just move your head. Nod for yes and—”
“Screw you,” Jilly told him, smiling sweetly. “Come back when you’ve learned some manners. Or better yet, don’t come back at all.”
Then she slammed the door in his face and engaged its two deadbolts. He knocked again, but this time she ignored it. The nerve of him. Who did he think he was to stand there and pretend he didn’t know her, not to mention treat her like she was something that had gotten stuck to the bottom of his shoe?
When he continued to bang on the door, she called out, “If you’re still here by the time I count to three I’m dialing nine-one-one. I’ve got the phone in my hand. One. Two ...”
The banging stopped.
“Three,” Jilly finished softly.
She waited a little longer, then went over to the window by the fire escape. Shooing Rubens away, she heaved the window up and stepped out onto the metal landing. Rubens immediately jumped back up onto the sill, but she closed the window before he could get out. At the bottom of the fire escape, she turned down the alley that led onto Yoors Street, hugging the bric
k wall as she went. Before she stepped out onto the sidewalk, she peeked around the corner. She was just in time to see the man who said he wasn’t John heading off in the other direction. He moved with a stiff angry stride that had none of the loose ambling gait that she always associated with the John Sweetgrass she knew.
This was so weird, she thought. She’d seen him just a few days ago and while it wasn’t as though they’d ever been great buddies or anything, he’d never been flat-out rude to her before. And it wasn’t just the rudeness. There’d been a meanness in his eyes that was out of keeping with the John Sweetgrass she remembered.
She waited until he turned the far corner before going back up to her studio. She’d better warn Isabelle, she thought, while running through a second act of
“Cat Trying to Escape Through Window” with Rubens when she climbed back into the studio from the fire escape. She had her hand on the phone and was already dialing the number at Wren Island when she realized what she was doing.
“Shit.”
Isabelle was in town now—probably organizing her studio at Joli Coeur. Where she didn’t even have a phone yet.
Sighing, Jilly realized that she’d have to walk over to talk to Isabelle. But maybe it wouldn’t be a complete loss, she thought as she left her studio by the more conventional method of the front door.
She’d at least be able to get her stuff back from Isabelle. She didn’t really care about any of it except for the brush. She really loved that brush.
XIII
By the time Isabelle reached her new studio in Joli Coeur, she felt as though the day had taken on a kind of surreal air. She laid the plastic bag she’d gotten from the security guard down on the windowsill and looked out on her view of the river.
She still couldn’t get over how things had worked out for her at the bus terminal. It was what usually happened to Kathy, not her. But then maybe part of Kathy’s legacy had been the kind fate that had allowed the letter to finally arrive in her mailbox yesterday, and for these packages to still be waiting for her after so many years when, by all rights, they should have been lost to her forever.
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