John was looking away, across the roof at where Kathy and Izzy had so recently been standing, so he missed the smile.
“She doesn’t make you uneasy?” he asked, always the worrier. Isabelle knew he meant the Izzy numena. “After what happened to Rushkin when he did a self-portrait?”
“I don’t really think I have anything to worry about when it comes to Izzy.” John nodded. “That’s what Barbara said when I told her what you’d done.”
“How is Barbara?”
“She’s downstairs. I saw her arrive just as I did, but I didn’t go in. I wanted to come up here first.”
He fell silent and in that silence Isabelle realized that a serious discussion was in the offing, whether she wanted it or not.
“What’s bothering you?” she asked.
“The same thing that’s bothering you,” he replied. Before she could say something about how she hated the way he turned a question around on her the way he did, he went on. “It’s us. Our relationship—or maybe our lack of it. And we’re neither of us happy.”
“I know,” Isabelle said. “I think, given enough time, I’ll deal with it. I’m not hiding things anymore—especially not from myself. But I can’t work miracles either. I can’t just feel better by snapping my fingers. And I have to tell you that it doesn’t help when we can’t even seem to be friends.”
“Friends don’t lie to each other.”
“I know that,” Isabelle told him. “I’m not lying to you. I never deliberately lied to you.”
“But I did,” John said. “I lied to you about what I did to the men who attacked Rochelle. I lied to you about an aunt I never had and her apartment and my staying there and how she felt about you. Every time your questions came too close to answers I didn’t feel I could give you, I lied.”
Isabelle didn’t know what to say. All she could do was look at him in astonishment.
“And then,” he went on, “I let my pride get in the way of coming back to you. If it wasn’t for me, the farmhouse would never have burned down. If not for my pride, I would have dealt with Rushkin the night he came after Paddyjack and everything would have been different.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Isabelle said, finally finding her voice. It felt odd to her how their roles seemed to have been reversed this time. “Rushkin was to blame—right from the start. It was always Rushkin.”
“And the lies?” he asked.
Isabelle thought carefully about what she said next. “It all happened a long time ago, John. I was confused by a lot of things at the time, not the least of which was who—no, make that what you were.
But that’s not a good enough excuse. I had no business pushing at you the way I did.”
“But how can you ever believe me again?”
“How can I not? I know what it took for you to tell me this. I believe in you enough to know that you won’t lie to me again. It’s not like I’ve been perfect either, you know.”
“I thought you’d hate me.”
“Not when you’re willing to admit to the mistake,” Isabelle said. She took him by the hand. “And I guess that just makes you human, doesn’t it? It shows you can make a mistake and screw up with the rest of us.”
“Human,” John said softly.
“That’s right. Human.” She gave him an odd look. “You’re no different from Cosette, are you? For all your talk about how it doesn’t matter, all you’ve ever wanted was to be human. To bleed and dream.”
“To be real,” he said.
“I don’t know exactly what you are,” Isabelle told him, “where you came from or even how it works that I could bring you over, but the one thing I’m sure of is that you’re real. And I don’t care about any of the other questions anymore, except for one: are we going to be friends, or are you going to slip out of my life again? Because this time I’m not sending you away.”
“This time I won’t go away,” John said.
Isabelle stood up. “So let’s rejoin the party, friend.”
But when she tried to draw him to his feet, he wouldn’t budge. Instead he pulled her gently down beside him on the bench again.
“I’d rather stay here with you for a while,” he said, putting his arm around her.
Isabelle smiled. She settled into a more comfortable position, head leaning against his shoulder, legs stretched out in front of her. When she looked up, the sky was filled with stars the way it always was on the island. It was as though the normal pollution of city lights had been washed away for this one night by an aura of enchantment—an enchantment springing from the collective spirit of goodwill, rising up from the party below and being generated, here on this rooftop bench, between John and herself.
“So would I,” she said.
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Memory and Dream n-5 Page 60
