Remembering that conversation, Isabelle lifted a hand to touch the black velvet choker that hid the prominent scar on her throat. That day in the tenement was probably the closest she’d ever come to knowing what Kathy had been feeling when she took her own life. The scar was Isabelle’s reminder that it had really happened, but it always felt as though it had happened to someone else. Not because she was building false memories again, but because she finally felt fulfilled and couldn’t imagine welcoming death now.
“I suppose we should mingle,” she said.
Jilly nodded. “An administrator’s job is never done.”
“Oh, please. I’m only going to paint here and make sure we stay stocked with materials.”
“I rest my case.”
Isabelle aimed a kick at her shin, but Jilly dodged into the crowd before it could connect.
III
Later, Isabelle went up through her darkened apartment and onto the roof. She could still hear the party from where she stood. Though the night was cool, the press of the crowd made it hot enough inside for most of the windows to be left open. Geordie and his friends were beginning what had to be their twentieth set of the evening. Isabelle looked out over what she could see of the city’s skyline and let the waltz the band was playing take her thoughts away. She started when a hand touched her elbow and a soft, familiar voice said, “Ma belle Izzy.”
She turned to find Kathy standing beside her – the Kathy of twenty years ago, hennaed hair, patched jeans, ready smile. Rushkin had been right. It had been possible to bring Kathy back – but not as she truly was. Only as Isabelle remembered her.
Maybe it was better this way, Isabelle thought. At least this time Kathy was happy.
“Let’s dance,” Kathy said. “Your turn to lead.”
So they moved in three-quarter time to the tune that drifted up from the windows below, dancing together as they had from time to time in their dorm at Butler U., or in the apartment on Waterhouse Street. Really, Isabelle thought, the whole night reminded her of Waterhouse Street, except now it was bohemia without the extremes, Cosette’s sense of fashion notwithstanding.
When the waltz ended, they stepped apart and Isabelle saw another figure standing by the edge of the roof where the railings of the fire escape protruded above the lip of the cornice encircling the roof.
This was always the oddest part, she thought as her younger self approached – to see what could be her daughter, in Kathy’s company.
The two numena joined hands, unselfconscious in their intimacy.
“Don’t be such a stranger,” Izzy said. “We miss seeing you.”
Kathy nodded. “It’s hard for us to come here.”
Because of who might see them, Isabelle thought, finishing in her mind what they left unsaid. It wouldn’t do for the dead to walk, or for there to be two versions of herself wandering about the city.
That could raise too many questions with no easy answers.
“I’ve been too busy to come to the island,” she told them.
“That’s what Rosalind says,” Kathy said. “But we still miss you.” Izzy smiled. “Paddyjack most of all.”
“And … John?” Isabelle asked.
“Ah, Solemn John,” Kathy said, using Cosette’s name for him. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
Stepping forward, they each gave her a kiss, one on the right cheek, the other on the left; then they disappeared, returning to where their source painting hung in the refurbished barn on Wren Island. The other numena on the island still preferred their odd little rooms that they’d set up so long ago in the woods, but Kathy and Izzy had made a home for themselves in her old house.
Isabelle sighed, considering John.
Ask him? she thought. First she had to find him. She hadn’t seen much of John in the last year, although more so in the past few months when he’d pitched in to help with the arts court. But then they were never alone. They could never talk. Not that Isabelle knew what she’d say to him. There was so much lying between them now, not the least of which was the fact that while she grew older every day, adding grey hairs and lines to her features as the years took their toll, he never changed. When she was sixty, he’d still be the eternal John Sweetgrass, forever a young man in his twenties as she’d first painted him.
“Ask me what?” John said.
Isabelle turned. She hadn’t heard him approach, but she wasn’t at all surprised to find him here, sitting on the wooden bench she’d brought up onto the roof a few days after first moving into the apartment. This seemed a night for visits and old friends, as witness the party going on below.
“If you think of me,” she said as she joined him on the bench.
“All the time.”
But … ? Isabelle wanted to say. Instead she held her peace. She didn’t want any serious discussions – not tonight. Tonight was Kathy’s night, absent though she was. It was for celebrating, not brooding. From downstairs rose the sprightly measures of a jig and she wondered what John would say if she asked him to dance, especially to that. The thought of it made her smile.
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 neither of us is 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 no
t 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 are 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.
###
Afterword
I’m writing this afterword twenty years after Memory & Dream first came out. I had not reread it in the interim, and I’d forgotten most of what my younger self wrote back then, which made going through the manuscript to prepare it for digital publication far more entertaining – especially since so much of the story deals with art.
Most of my longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that an appreciation for art has motivated a great deal of my creative output. I have a busy life inside my head. Mostly there’s music playing, but my mind is filled with a lot of visual imagery, too.
Unfortunately I don’t have the necessary skill set to bring most of it to life the way I see or hear it. Music’s not too bad, especially if there’s a clear melody line because I can usually pick it out on one instrument or another. But even music is not so easy when I might be imagining the chattering trills of a Northumbrian pipe tune or the sweeping notes of a grand piano as it plays out a delicate score.
Visual art is even more frustrating. Some of you may have heard me say that if I could only capture the images I see in my head on paper or canvas, I probably wouldn’t be writing stories. I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but I’ve certainly written whole books just because a vision was lodged so firmly in my mind that I had to find a way to express it. I had to “paint” the scene with words, characters and setting. Most of this very book came about because of persistent images that wouldn’t let go of me.
In truth, I believe that most of us are capable of doing almost anything that captures our interest. We might not be geniuses at it, but we can usually peck away until the end result is relatively pleasing. At least to us.
But for me, when it came to art…
I couldn’t come close.
Back in the early nineties, around the time that this novel was being written, MaryAnn and I were visiting with our friend Terri Windling at her home in Tucson, AZ. Her house was right near the edge of the desert in the east part of town. One day Terri and I were driving into town and we got to talking about art. More specifically, we talked about the huge improvement in Terri’s own art.
Throughout the years that I’d known Terri, her art had progressed from her initial, more modest efforts to work that is exquisite and individual. I asked her how she got there. Terri told me that she’d had this exact same conversation with an artist friend of hers and he (I think it was a he, I could be wrong) told her the most obvious thing: You have to start practicing as soon as you can and then just keep at it.
We all know this. But sometimes you just need the right person telling you at the right point in time for it to actually stick.
So while we were in a drugstore I bought myself a pad of paper and a pencil and went at it.
Of course, this isn’t a rags-to-riches story. I didn’t put in my ten thousand hours and become a great artist. But I got better. And I discovered something important. That old adage about it being the journey, not the destination? Also true.
I’ve since done over a thousand drawing and paintings and I have maybe ten that I really like. Invariably, every time I started one I hoped to get something I’d like at the end.
But it turned out that the end result wasn’t the important part about doing art for me. I just liked the doing. This was the first time that I’d entered into a creative endeavor and the final result didn’t seem to matter.
Let me expand on that a little. I love telling stories. Long before I was published, I would sit up late at night writing them, and if I hadn’t been able to make my living as a writer, I’d still be doing it.
But once something becomes a career choice, a little pressure gets added. I write for myself, telling stories that I’d like to read, but haven’t been written yet. That’s what started me with books like Moonheart. I wanted to read a fantasy that wasn’t all set in a secondary world. I wanted to set it in the contemporary world – our world – and to include elements of a thriller or police procedural in it. But I wanted a sense of wonder as well.
Because I couldn’t read that book, I had to write it. (And needed MaryAnn to convince me that it could be done. As I said above, sometimes you just need that push from the right person at the right time.)
But once I’d started selling my work, even though I still wrote for myself, a little voice in the back of my head kept reminding me that there was now a readership for these stories. That voice isn’t a bad thing because it makes sure that there’s always an entry point for my readers, and that the story leaves them satisfied, but sometimes I wish that little bit of extra pressure wasn’t there.
It’s the same thing with music. I’ve been playing music for longer than I’ve been writing. But whether I’m covering somebody else’s song, or writing my own, I’m aware that eventually there will be an audience for it.
There’s that little pressure again.
But with art, the pressure is gone. It doesn’t matter what I try or how wrong it goes because there’s no audience for it. I just do it for myself. The pleasure I get from the process really is enough.
Even so, there’s been a side benefit to my sketching and painting. Just as playing and writing music helps me with the pacing of a story, the practice of visual art has trained my eye and taught me to look at the world differently. And it certainly helps me get into the heads of characters who happen to be artists, such as those you’ve just met in this book.
It’s always nice to hear back when you get it right and it’s been gratifying to know that most artists cite this as their favourite of my novels.
It’s certainly one of mine.
Ottawa, Winter 2014
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgments are made to:
Kiya Heartwood for the use of a verse of “No Goodbyes, No Regrets” from the album True Frontiers; copyright ©1993 by Kiya Heartwood; reprinted by permission of the artist. http://www.kiyaheartwood.com/
Ingrid Karklins for the use of a quote from the liner notes of her album, A Darker Passion; copyright ©1992 by Ingrid Karklins; reprinted by permission of the artist.
Lorenzo Baca for the use of the poem “From th
e Quiet Stream” from his collection, More Thoughts, Phrases and Lies; reprinted by permission of the author.
Jane Yolen, who introduced me to the poetry of Joshua Stanhold in her book about his daughter and their relationship, The Stone Silenus (Philomel/The Putnam Publishing Group);
copyright ©1984 by Jane Yolen. http://www.janeyolen.com/
Michael Hannon for the use of “WHAT THE CROW SAID” from his poem, “Fables,” copyright ©1984 by Michael Hannon; reprinted by permission of the author.
###
About the Author
Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada. His many awards include the World Fantasy Award, the Canadian SF/Fantasy Aurora Award, and the White Pine Award, among others. Modern Library's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll (voted on by readers) put eight of de Lint's books among the top 100. With 37 novels and 18 collections of short fiction published to date, de Lint writes for adults, teens and children. His new middle grade book is Seven Wild Sisters, illustrated by Charles Vess (Little Brown, 2014). His most recent adult novel, The Mystery of Grace (Tor, 2009), is a fantastical ghost story and a heart-wrenching tale of love, passion and faith. His newest young adult novel is Over My Head (Triskell Press, 2013). His latest collection of short fiction is The Very Best of Charles de Lint (Tachyon Publications, 2010). For more information, visit his web site at http://www.charlesdelint.com.
You can also connect with him at:
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