“You don’t need a fairy,” Rolanda said. “You’re already real.”
“I don’t dream. I don’t bleed.”
“Maybe that’s a blessing.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to feel so ... so hollow inside.”
“Perhaps,” Rolanda admitted. “But I think you’re making more of what other people feel than what they actually do. Lots of people go through their whole lives with a sense of being unfulfilled. Of feeling hollow.”
But Cosette wasn’t prepared to listen to that line of argument.
“I’ll do good deeds,” she said. “We’ll all do good deeds. And then when Isabelle paints the fairy for us, we’ll all become real. The red crow will beat its wings in our chests and we’ll dream and bleed just like you.”
“But—”
“I have to find Isabelle and ask her.”
She stood up on the bed and danced about excitedly, bouncing on the mattress, clapping her hands.
“Thank you, Rolanda!” she cried. “Thank you!”
Rolanda stood up. “Don’t get too excited,” she began. “That was only—”
But she spoke to herself. Her guest had disappeared, vanishing with a sudden whuft of displaced air.
Rolanda stared slack-jawed at the empty space above her bed.
“A story,” she finished softly.
She heard cries of astonishment rise up from downstairs, followed by the sound of the front door slamming. She made it to the window in time to see Cosette running off down the sidewalk. Something Cosette had said earlier echoed in her mind.
That’s what we all are—just stories.
She stared through the window, watching until the girl’s trim figure vanished from her field of vision, then slowly made her way down to the Foundation’s offices. The waiting room was in an uproar.
“—out of thin air, I swear—”
“—looked just like—”
“—not possible—”
Rolanda stood in the doorway, feeling as untouched by the noisy bewilderment of her coworkers and the children in the waiting room as though she were the calm eye in the center of a storm. She looked at the painting of The Wild Girl. There was no question but that Cosette had been the model. There was no question but that the world had changed on her and nothing would ever be the same again.
She had to speak to Isabelle Copley, she realized. She had to know where Cosette had come from, why she didn’t bleed, why she had weight and mass and presence but claimed she wasn’t real.
Shaun noticed her standing there in the doorway and called her name, but Rolanda ignored her coworker’s attention. Instead she retreated back up to her apartment. She put on her shoes and a jacket.
Stuck her wallet into a small waist pack and belted it on. And then she left the confusion behind.
She walked in the direction that Cosette had taken until she realized she had no idea where she was going. Stopping at the first phone booth along her way, she looked for Copley’s address in the white pages, but there was no listing. She thought for a moment, then looked up Alan Grant. She noted the number, but decided she wanted to speak to him in person, rather than over the phone. She wanted to be able to look him in the face before she decided how much she would tell him about what had brought her knocking on his door.
As she headed for Waterhouse Street she found herself wondering if he could dream, if he bled. If he was real. Or was he another story, like Cosette, strayed from some mysterious before? He’d never seemed any different from anybody else before, but then, Rolanda thought, up until last night, she’d never looked at anyone with the perspective she had now.
IV
Isabelle closed Kathy’s journal after having read the first twenty or so pages, unable to absorb any more in one sitting. Holding the book against her chest, she stared out the window of her studio. The view was quickly becoming familiar. The Kickaha River, the neighboring buildings, that line of rooftops across the water marching up from the slope of the riverbank into Ferryside like patches on a quilt ...
Another couple of days here and she’d be able to draw it from memory.
She sighed. Her chest was tight and her eyes kept welling with tears, but she was holding up better than she had the morning Kathy’s tardy letter had arrived. Whatever that meant.
Don’t avoid the issue, she told herself. Never mind the view or how you feel. The real question was, how much of the journal could she take at face value? Was Kathy truly being honest with what she’d written in its pages, or was she merely telling stories again, this time cloaking them as fact instead of fiction?
Isabelle pulled the book away from her chest and looked down at its plain cover. She ran her fingers across the worn cloth, feeling each ridge and bump and dent it had acquired while being toted around in Kathy’s bag.
No, Isabelle realized, the real question was, had Kathy truly been in love with her?
The idea of it felt completely alien to her—though not so much as it would have felt if Kathy had confided that same love to her back in the Waterhouse Street days. The journal was certainly accurate in predicting how that would have gone over. But she’d been a different person back then. She’d even had a different name. Izzy had become Isabelle. Izzy had been almost militantly heterosexual, while Isabelle counted any number of gays among her friends. In many ways, Isabelle was far more liberal than Izzy had ever been, for all her more conservative lifestyle. Isabelle ...
Isabelle didn’t know what she felt. The love she bore for Kathy ran as deep as that she’d known for any man—deeper, perhaps, for it had never ended. Not even with Kathy’s death. And while she’d never had any yearning to be sexually active with Kathy, she couldn’t deny that she’d loved to draw Kathy’s sensual body lines, loved to be held when times were bad, to comfort in turn, the welcoming hugs, to be out walking the streets with her at night, arm in arm, the kisses of hello and goodbye and sometimes even goodnight.
But that was because they’d been friends. Because she’d loved and admired Kathy. The leap of joy she’d felt seeing Kathy come up the street, the way she’d missed her so terribly when she first moved back to the island, that, too, had been because they were friends. The best of friends. So where did the one kind of love end and the other begin? Or were there merely gradations of love, differing in their intensities and nuances, but the love was the same?
If Kathy were still alive, Isabelle could have asked her. But Kathy wasn’t alive. No, she’d gone and died and ... and left ... and left her all alone ....
The tears that Isabelle had managed to hold at bay for so long could be held in no longer. They flooded her eyes with the suddenness of a summer storm. The journal fell from her lap onto the windowseat as she hugged her knees, pressing her face against her legs, crying until the knees of her jeans were soaked. When the flood was finally reduced to a sniffle, she went looking for a tissue but had to settle for a long streamer of toilet paper that she tore from the roll in the studio’s tiny bathroom. She blew her nose, once, twice, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, eyes rimmed with red and swollen, nostrils runny and florid, face flushed.
Portrait of the artist embracing her despair, she thought as she turned away.
But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present. She remembered how Kathy had put it—something she’d said once as opposed to having written about it in a story or one of the journal entries.
“It’s a mistake to go poking about in your own past,” she’d told her. “It makes you shrink into yourself. Every time you return you get smaller and more transparent. Go back often enough and you might vanish altogether. We’re meant to put the past behind us and be the people we are now, Izzy, not who we were.”
But what if your now is built upon unfinished business in the past? Isabelle knew what Kathy’s reply to that would be as well: Why do you think the psychiatry industry is booming and that there are so many self-help books on the market?
; Maybe so, Isabelle thought. But that didn’t help her now. Her now was inextricably tied to what had been left undone in the past. It wasn’t just Kathy. It was her numena. And John. And Rushkin.
But Kathy—how could she have known Kathy so well and yet not have known her at all? Isabelle felt like Mary in Kathy’s story “Secret Lives.” There was a journal in that story, too, only it was left behind when the dancer Alicia left her lover Mary without a word of explanation. She hadn’t died as Kathy had and the journal hadn’t appeared five years later. The journal in “Secret Lives” had been lying on the coffee table when Mary came home; Alicia had wanted her to find and read it.
Isabelle had never liked that story; not because the lovers were both women—that had merely made her uncomfortable at the time—but because of
Alicia’s meanness in leaving that journal behind. Mary discovered an entirely different woman from the one she’d known in the pages of that journal. Much of what Mary read was Alicia’s fantasies. But not all of it. Not enough of it.
“You don’t understand,” Kathy had said when Isabelle complained to her about the story. “She didn’t have any other way to tell the truth. Mary would never have listened to her. None of what she read should have come to her as a surprise. It only did because she wasn’t paying attention. Because she’d already defined the boundaries of who Alicia was and anything that didn’t fit inside them had to be discarded. The reason Alicia left was because Mary wasn’t in love with her anymore; she was in love with who Alicia had been.”
Was that the case with Kathy’s journal? Isabelle couldn’t help but wonder. Had the clues all been there in the years they were living together, but she’d been like Mary, unwilling to change her definition of who she thought Kathy was? Had the story been Kathy’s way of trying to tell her to pay more attention?
No, she told herself. That kind of speculation wasn’t dealing with unfinished business. That was poking around in the past. If she kept it up she really would become invisible. Maybe she already was ....
Isabelle looked across the room to where Paddyjack and the journal still lay on the window seat.
The only thing she was doing at the moment was driving herself crazy. She needed to talk to someone about it. To her surprise, the first person she thought of was Alan. She didn’t know what else was in the journal, but she knew she had to show it to him, uncomfortable as sharing parts of it would make her feel.
If nothing else, he had to know who Margaret Mully really was. If it was true. If it wasn’t just Kathy changing the world to suit herself—changing it so that it wouldn’t change her.
She collected the journal and stuck it in her shoulder bag. But before Alan got to see it, he had to make a promise, she decided as she prepared to leave the studio. He had to promise that what lay in its pages remained between them. She didn’t want to read about Kathy’s life in a newspaper, or hear about the journal being a forthcoming book from his East Street Press.
Isabelle checked to make sure she had her keys with her, then opened the door to the studio. The door swung open, but she remained rooted where she stood, staring out into the hall. Standing there waiting for her was another piece of her past. Dark-haired and darker-eyed, dressed in the same white T-shirt and jeans as always, the same silver feather earring hanging from his left earlobe, the same broad handsome features that she knew so well. John Sweetgrass. The only difference was the bracelet of braided ribbons he wore on his right wrist, more frayed than her own, the colors more faded. Almost a ghost of the bracelet she’d made—as his reappearance in her life was like that of a ghost.
Who was it that had said it took two to make a haunting? Christy Riddell, she supposed. Or Jilly.
The one to haunt, the other to be haunted. It was the story of her life.
“Izzy,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
She didn’t want there to be a distance in her eyes. She didn’t want to hold him at length the way she felt she must. She wanted to hold him close, to tell him she was sorry for that night all those years ago.
But all she could do was remember what Jilly had told her. She couldn’t see the meanness in his eyes that July had seen, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, hidden behind the mild gaze his dark eyes turned to her.
“Which John are you?” was all she could ask.
Something dark sped across his features. She wasn’t sure if it was hurt or anger.
“What makes you think there’s more than one of me?” he asked. “What makes you think there isn’t?”
John sighed. “Maybe my coming here was a mistake.”
He started to turn away, but Isabelle called him back. He hesitated. When he finally looked at her, Isabelle couldn’t bear the sadness in his eyes. He fingered the bracelet she’d woven all those years ago, but he didn’t speak.
“Why did you come, John?” she asked.
“Not to fight with you.”
“But not to make up either, or we’d have had this conversation a long time ago.”
John nodded. “That decision was yours to make. You sent me away.”
“I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. I dreamed of you that night. You and Paddyjack.”
“And you left us these,” John said, holding up the wrist enclosed by the cloth bracelet. “But it was already too late. You sent me away, Izzy, but I had to go as well. It was never going to be the same between us, not with you thinking you’d created me.”
“But I did. The painting—”
“Brought me across. You brought all of us across. But that doesn’t mean you made us. In the before, in our own world, we already were.”
Isabelle didn’t want to get into a repeat of that argument. “So why are you here today?” she asked.
“To warn you. It’s starting again.”
“You mean my paintings.”
John nodded.
“But I haven’t even begun the first one.”
“Doesn’t matter. The veil that lies between my world and yours is already trembling in anticipation.”
“Is it so wrong, bringing you across?” Isabelle asked. “I know what I’m doing. This time I’ll be responsible. I won’t let any of you be hurt again.”
John regarded her steadily for a long moment. Isabelle tried, but she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.
“Rushkin’s back as well,” he said finally. “And this time he’s not alone.”
“The other John,” Isabelle said.
“What do you mean?”
Isabelle told him what had happened at Jilly’s apartment this morning. “He might look like me,” John said, “but he’s not.”
“So Rushkin made—brought him across?”
John shrugged. “That’s something you’ll have to ask him when you see him.”
“I don’t want to see him—not ever again.”
“Then why are you here? Why are you so set on bringing more of us across? Surely you knew it would call him to you.”
Isabelle nodded. “I’m doing it for Kathy.” She told him about the book Alan had planned, the children’s Art Court. And then she asked him, “How did you survive, John? The Spirit Is Strong was destroyed in the fire. I thought you couldn’t live if your painting had been destroyed.”
“My painting wasn’t destroyed.”
Isabelle looked for the lie, but it wasn’t there. Not in his features, not in his eyes, not so she could read it. Of course it wouldn’t be, she thought. This was John and the one thing he didn’t do was lie.
She’d ignored that truth once, but she wouldn’t do it again.
“You and Paddyjack,” she said softly. “Did I imagine all those deaths, then? Did any of the paintings bum?”
“We survived,” John said, “but the others weren’t so fortunate.”
“How? Who rescued you?”
John shook his head. “That’s not important right now. What you have to think about is what you’re going to do when Rushkin comes for you again.”
> “I’ll kill him before I let him hurt anybody again.”
“Will you?”
Isabelle wanted to make it a promise, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what the hold was that her old mentor had always had on her, but it was still there.
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
“We bless you for bringing us across,” John told her, “but our lives are in your hands.”
“I know.”
“You’re the only one who can stand up to him in this world.”
“Will he still be so strong?”
“Stronger.”
“Then what can I do?”
“That’s something nobody can decide for you,” John said.
“If I don’t do the paintings ...”
“Then he’ll still be out there, waiting. He will always be a piece of unfinished business. The only way you can be free of him is to stand up to him.”
“And if I do ...”
“You will have to be sure that you’re stronger than him.”
“I don’t want to be like him,” Isabelle said.
“I didn’t say as ruthless—I said stronger.”
“But—”
“Rushkin has put a piece of himself inside you,” John told her. “That’s the hold he has over you.
What you have to do is find that piece and exorcise it. That’s what will make you stronger than him. Not force. Not matching his ruthlessness with a ferocity of your own.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then I would think very carefully upon what you’re about to do.”
“Will you help me?” Isabelle asked.
“I am helping you. But you’re the one who invited him into your life. Only you can best him.”
When he started to turn away, Isabelle called him back a second time.
“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she said. “I never meant to drive you away or for anyone to be hurt.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you come back to me?”
“I’ve already told you, Izzy.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest that she was about to make.
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