“How dare you spy on me?” he shouted.
He crossed the room as Izzy tried to get back to her feet, but the straps of her backpack had gotten entangled with her easel and she couldn’t free herself in time. Rushkin kicked at her, the toe of his shoe catching her first in the thigh, then in the stomach, then on the side of her head. She cried out from the pain.
“You filthy little sneak!” Rushkin cried. “After all I’ve done for you.”
He continued to kick at her. When she finally got herself free from her backpack and tried to rise, he hit her with his fists, driving her back down again. Finally all she could do was curl up into as small a ball as she could make of herself and try to ride out the storm of his anger. Rushkin ranted and flailed at her, hitting his fists against the sides of the easel as often as he hit her. She could make no sense of what the betrayals were that he was shouting about. After a while, she didn’t care. All she wanted was for the hurting to stop. But then, when his rage finally did run its course, he fell to his knees in front of her and began to weep.
“Oh no, Isabelle,” he moaned. “What have I done? What have I done? How can you ever forgive me …”
No, Izzy thought. There’ll be no forgiveness this time. But she couldn’t seem to talk. Her mouth was swollen, her lips bruised. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache. Every breath she took woke a piercing stitch of pain in her side.
With fumbling fingers she pushed herself away from the easel and tried to stand. She only got as far as her knees. She crouched there on the floor, regarding Rushkin through a flood of tears, both of them kneeling as though they were supplicants in a church of pain.
“Go,” he told her in a broken voice. “Get away. Now. While you can. Before the madness takes hold of me again.”
She wanted to move, but it hurt too much. “I … I can’t …”
She flinched when he rose to his feet and reached for her. He hauled her up and half carried, half dragged her toward the door. The gust of cold air that hit her face when he opened the door helped to revive her a little, but everything seemed to spin in her sight as he pushed her outside. She fell in the snow on the landing, unable to make her way down the stairs. When the door opened behind her again, she ducked her head, but not in time.
“Go!” Rushkin cried, and he flung her backpack at her.
The weight of it hitting her was enough to knock her away from the landing and she went tumbling down the stairs with only the snow to cushion her fall as she hit the various steps on her way down. The fall seemed to take forever, but finally she reached the bottom. She lay there in the snow, trying to breathe as shallowly as she could to stop the fierce pain in her side. She looked up when the door slammed above her, but her vision was so blurred that she couldn’t see a thing.
She pulled herself up into a sitting position by grabbing hold of the bottom rail, then bent over again to vomit up the remains of her breakfast. Her head drooped until it was almost touching the foul-smelling puddle. It seemed hours before she could move once more. She shivered as much from the cold as from shock and finally managed to make it to her feet.
She didn’t think she’d ever make it home. She fell three times on the way, but no one helped her.
Everyone who passed by stepped around her, avoided looking at her. They probably thought she was drunk, or stoned. Whenever she could get up and move, she stumbled along, holding on to the sides of buildings with one hand, dragging her backpack with the other. She didn’t know why she didn’t just leave it behind, but she couldn’t seem to open her hand enough to let it fall. Thoughts were too hard to form clearly, but she got the strange idea that if she let go of the backpack, she’d be letting go of everything. She’d never get home, never survive, never stop hurting.
So she clutched her backpack and dragged herself along, one painful step at a time.
VIII
Kathy was in her bedroom, working on a new story, when a weak thumping on the front door of the apartment brought her out to investigate the source of the sound. She opened the door and at first didn’t recognize the small figure leaning up against the doorjamb, arms wrapped around herself, backpack trailing onto the ground by her feet. It wasn’t until Izzy lifted her head that Kathy realized who it was. It took her a moment longer for Izzy’s battered condition to register.
“Sorry,” Izzy mumbled. “Couldn’t … find … my key …”
“My God!” Kathy cried. “What happened to you?”
Izzy tried to focus as three or four images of her roommate’s face did a slow spin in her blurry gaze.
All the Kathys looked worried, so she attempted a smile to assure them that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that she just wanted to have a bit of a lie down, really, and then she’d be fine, but her lips were so stiff from the cold, so bruised and swollen from the beating and subsequent falls, that after those first few words she couldn’t do much more than speak in monosyllables.
“Got … got mugged,” she managed.
Now, why did she say that? she found herself wondering. Why didn’t she just tell the truth? But what was the truth? The harder she tried, the less she could remember of what had happened. Memory and last night’s dreams were all mixed up in her head. Rushkin and John and Paddyjack. Rushkin attacking her, Rushkin attacking Paddyjack, John attacking Rushkin. Crossbow quarrels and dead cats with wings and ribbons fluttering in a crazy pattern that sounded like someone going tap-tap-tap against a hollow stick. Falling down a flight of stairs into the snow. Had that been her, or Paddyjack? Or both of them?
“Just need … need to … to lie down,” she mumbled through her swollen lips. “Tha’s all.”
And then she collapsed into Kathy’s arms.
As Kathy carefully pulled her into the apartment and stretched her out on the carpet, Izzy’s fingers finally relaxed enough to let go of her backpack. What happened next took place in a blur of disjointed images and sounds. Izzy kept fading in and out of consciousness, feeling like someone working a faulty radio dial who couldn’t quite tune in to the station she was looking for. She heard Kathy on the phone.
She thought she remembered riding in the ambulance. She was sure she’d been lucid while the doctor was talking to her, but then why had the doctor looked exactly like Jilly? She closed her eyes so that she only had to listen.
“– couple of cracked ribs, multiple bruises, mild concussion,” the Jilly/doctor was saying in a Pakistani accent.
It was like she was ticking off items on a grocery list, Izzy thought. Standing inside Injuries “R” Us, saying, And yes, I’ll have one of those broken arms, too, but only if they’re fresh.
“You say she was mugged?” the doctor went on.
“That’s what she said.”
Kathy’s voice, responding. It sounded as though it came from very far away. The other side of the room. The other side of the city.
“Have you spoken to the police?”
“God, I hadn’t even thought of it. Is she going to be okay?”
“We’d like to keep her for observation overnight, but I think with a little rest she’ll soon be back on her …”
The station in Izzy’s head faded out again. It went to static, then blank. The next time she woke up she was in a hospital room. She stared up at the white-tiled ceiling and tried to remember what she was doing here. Behind her temples, a gang of little men appeared to have been commissioned by someone to dismantle her brain. She could feel the demolition ball swinging back and forth, crashing into either side of her head with a throbbing regularity. Then the image changed and it wasn’t little men inside her head, but a gang of teenage boys, surprising her in the lane by Rushkin’s studio, laughing as they knocked her down and then started to kick her …
The mugging, she thought. That’s why she was here. She’d been mugged. She could remember curling up into as small a ball as she could, trying to shield herself from the blows, trying to survive. No wonder she felt the way she did. Every part of her body bruised
and her head filled with this awful stabbing pain.
She wondered if there were any painkillers on her bedside table. Slowly turning her head, she found Kathy instead, dozing on the chair beside her bed. Kathy’s eyes flickered open as though sensing Izzy’s gaze upon her.
“How long have you been sitting there?” Izzy asked.
Her lips were still swollen and her mouth and jaw still hurt, but she could talk at least. She had a vague memory of standing in the hallway of their apartment and not being able to shape anything but the simplest of words.
“All night,” Kathy replied. “But I slept through most of it. How’re you doing?”
“Okay, I guess. My head hurts.”
“I don’t wonder.”
Izzy looked down at the length of her body, at the shape it made under the bedding that the hospital had provided.
“Is … is anything broken?” she asked. She found she was too scared to try to move an arm or a leg.
Kathy shook her head. “Everything’s still there – bruised, but otherwise fine.”
“I guess I was lucky.”
Kathy sat on the side of the bed and gave her a gentle hug. “Oh, ma belle Izzy,” she said softly. “You gave me such a scare.”
“You and me both.”
IX
The two detectives in charge of Izzy’s case came by to take her statement while she and Kathy were sharing Izzy’s lunch. They were both big men, looming impossibly tall and bulky above the bed in their rumpled suits. Izzy could sense Kathy’s protective instinct bristle as they introduced themselves, remembering Rochelle’s experience, but the one who did all the talking proved to be soft-spoken and polite, and Izzy felt there was a genuine concern behind his questions. When she apologized and explained that she couldn’t really tell them much, they didn’t seem to be particularly surprised.
“It’s all right,” the detective assured her. “I think most people finding themselves in the situation you did would consider themselves lucky to remember their own names, never mind retain a useful description of their assailants.”
Still, Izzy tried. She closed her eyes, trying to call up a clear image of the kids who’d attacked her, but it was no use. Although she could make out their shapes, their faces were all an indistinguishable blur.
The memory of their attack woke a fit of shivers.
“The important thing to concentrate on now,” the detective went on, “is to get better. Everything else we can deal with later.”
Before they left, her doctor, an attractive Pakistani woman who didn’t look at all like Jilly this time, came by to check in on her, making for quite a crowd around Izzy’s bed. The detective who had done most of the talking left her his card with instructions for her to give him a call if she remembered anything else. He also wanted to set up an appointment for her to come down to the precinct to go through the mug books, but her doctor said that would have to wait a few days. Izzy was happy to follow her orders; the last thing she wanted to do was look at page after page of pictures of criminals.
The detectives left. The doctor left. And finally, Izzy was allowed to leave as well.
She was discharged from the hospital later that afternoon. When a nurse and Kathy took her down in the wheelchair, Izzy found herself blinking like a mole in the glare of the bright sun on the snow. After a few moments she realized that Alan and Jilly were waiting for them at the front door with Alan’s Volkswagen bug. They treated her with the exaggerated concern that friends will offer to the sick, and she would have been royally embarrassed if she hadn’t felt so awful. Her headache had subsided to a muted throb, but that seemed small consolation because every other part of her body hurt every time she moved or took a breath. She was so swollen and bruised she hadn’t recognized herself when she looked in the bathroom mirror before she left her room.
“Now you know how you’d look if you put on a few pounds,” Kathy had joked.
“And gone punk with my makeup.”
“Morbidly punk. But maybe it suits you. I think the purple bruises complement the green in your eyes. And black’s always been your color.”
Izzy would have given her a whack, but she felt too weak.
“Let’s just go home,” she said.
For once she got to sit in the front seat without there being a long discussion as to who had sat there the last time, and considering how much taller Kathy was, she really deserved the extra legroom.
“It’s like what happened to Rochelle all over again,” Jilly said from the backseat once they were on their way.
But Izzy shook her head. “No, I just got beat up.”
“And the cops were almost human,” Kathy said.
Izzy started to drift off as the conversation turned to what shits the police usually were. An image of her attackers floated into her mind as she dozed, but she could make out their faces now. They all looked like Rushkin, which didn’t make any sense at all. She woke when they arrived at the Waterhouse Street apartment, desperately clutching the braided-ribbon bracelet on her wrist.
“Did you tie ribbons on the fire escape outside my window the other night?” she asked Kathy later, when the two of them were alone in her bedroom.
“Ribbons? What kind of ribbons?”
Izzy gave her a little shrug. “I don’t know. I guess it was something I dreamed.”
Like she’d dreamed Rushkin killing her winged cat. Attacking Paddyjack. Attacking her …
Except the ribbons were real – she had the proof on her wrist. When Kathy finally left her so that she could sleep, she managed to shuffle her way to the window. The envelope with the other two bracelets she’d put in it was gone. She pressed her face against the icy windowpane.
“I didn’t mean what I said,” she whispered, her breath frosting the glass. “I don’t care what you are. I love you too much to ever really send you away.”
There was no reply. John didn’t come walking down the alley and climb up the fire escape to be with her, appearing at that exact moment the way he always did when she wanted to be with him. But then she hadn’t been expecting a reply. She didn’t expect to ever see him again.
That was the second of many nights that she cried herself to sleep over what she’d lost by sending him away.
X
Newford, April 1975
Of all her friends, Rushkin and John were the only ones who didn’t come by to visit her at one point or another while she was convalescing in the Waterhouse Street apartment. A regular stream of visitors were in and out of the place for the whole of the three weeks she was cooped up, never staying long enough to tire her out, just letting her know that they were thinking of her. Even Albina came by.
But she never heard from John. She did hear from Rushkin. Though in some ways she thought he needn’t have bothered. He sent a letter that had nothing to say about what had happened to her or that he hoped she’d get well soon. Rushkin, it seemed, was having his own problems:
Isabelle,
As you understand, I must go away for a time. I hope you will continue to use the studio in my absence. I have left a key for you under the clay flowerpot by the back door.
I can’t say how long I will be, but I promise to contact you before I return so that, should you wish, you will not have to see me. If this should be the case, I will understand. My behavior has been unforgivable.
Yours, in humility,
Vincent
But she didn’t understand. Not what Rushkin was referring to. Nor why John had once been able to appear whenever she needed him, week after week, for so many months, as though he could read the need as it quickened in her heart, but that he could no longer read it now.
She was afraid that she’d inadvertently sent him back into the otherworld from which her art had brought him. The painting remained unchanged; it still retained its vitality, but John himself might as well never have existed.
She vowed, in the days as she slowly mended, to bring no more beings across from the before. John had been
right. Who was she to play God? Who was she to bring an innocent such as Paddyjack across and then abandon him in the unfamiliar streets of the city? But Kathy disagreed.
“You told me yourself,” she argued. “You don’t force them to come across. All you do is open the door for them. You offer them the possibility of a shape or a form as rendered in one of your paintings, but they’re the ones who choose whether or not they find it agreeable. They decide if they want to climb into the skin you’ve made for them, not you.”
“But if it’s dangerous for them …”
“Ma belle Izzy, it’s no more dangerous for them than it is for us. For all we know, that’s the way we come into being as well, but we simply don’t remember it. Maybe we were all no more than bits of spirit floating around somewhere and instead of checking out a painting, we got to decide whether or not we wanted to slip inside our mothers’ wombs.”
“But I’m not God,” Izzy said. “I can’t assume that kind of responsibility.”
“I’m not saying you are.”
“But how can I be responsible for them all?”
“That’s where I disagree with John,” Kathy said. “I mean, it’d be no different from how it works with us. You get born and then you’re pretty much left to make your own way through life.”
“That’s not true. We have parents to help us through the formative years.”
“Not all of us do.”
“You know what I mean,” Izzy said.
“Of course I do. But the difference here is that the beings you bring into existence are already mature. Think of what John was like. If you want to play it safe, just don’t paint any infants or children.”
Izzy shook her head. “I don’t know …”
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