Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

She questioned the new numena that she brought across and they all professed gratitude to her for her giving them passage into this world, but they didn’t keep her company. None of the numena did anymore. Not even Annie.

XXI

February 1979

When she got the news that her father had died, Izzy didn’t feel a thing. She sat in the kitchen, phone in hand, listening as her mother explained how he’d had a heart attack while doing the morning chores, and it was as though she were hearing about the death of a stranger. She’d stopped going out to the island almost three years ago, and while she’d spoken to her mother on the phone in the interim, her last visit to the island was also the last time she’d talked to her father.

She’d always thought that her success as an artist would make him change his attitude, that he’d be proud of all that she’d accomplished, but if anything her success had worsened their relationship. They’d had a huge blowup that night, after which she’d packed her bag and walked down to the pier, rowing herself over to the mainland. From there she walked to the highway and hitchhiked back into the city.

Kathy had been angry when Izzy finally showed up at the apartment at four o’clock in the morning.

“You should have called me or Alan,” she’d told Izzy. “God, you could have been raped or killed.

Anybody could have picked you up.”

“I couldn’t stay,” Izzy explained, “and I was damned if I’d accept a ride from either of them.”

“But—”

“There’s no phone out by the highway,” Izzy had said. “And I didn’t think of calling before I left the farmhouse.”

Kathy looked as though she was going to say something more, but she must have realized how miserable Izzy was feeling because all she did was say, “Well, thank god you’re okay,” and give her a hug.

Her mother had called her the next day to try to apologize for her father, but this time Izzy wouldn’t accept any excuses for him. If he loved her, he had yet to show it and she was tired of waiting. All she’d said that day to her mother was “How can you live with him?”

She’d kept in contact with her mother, but they never spoke of her father again until the day he died.

Izzy went out to the island to stay with her mother and she attended the funeral for her mother’s sake, but she still felt nothing—not at the funeral home, not in the church, not as she watched the coffin being lowered into the grave. It was only later that night, after she and her mother returned to the island, that she felt anything. With her father three days dead, she lay in her old bedroom in the farmhouse and stared up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling. And then the tears came.

But they weren’t for the father who had just died. They were for the father she’d never had.

XXII

April 1979

“It’s not like it’d be forever,” Izzy said.

Izzy and Kathy sat on the front stoop of their apartment building, enjoying the mild spring evening.

From where they sat they could watch the traffic pass on Lee Street. Their own street was quiet tonight.

Over the years since they’d first moved to their Waterhouse Street apartment, the area had undergone a slow but steady change. The boutique and cafes were outnumbered now by convenience stores and pizza parlors, the bohemian residents by young couples and single working men and women on the rise, looking for an investment rather than a home.

“One day,” Alan had told them morosely, “all that’ll be left is ghosts and memories of us.”

And Alan, Kathy had told Izzy later, because she doubted that he’d ever move away. But the others did, and now Izzy had been put in the position to consider doing the same.

Her mother had decided to move to Florida to live with her sister. She wanted to put the island in Izzy’s name, but only if Izzy lived there. She didn’t want Izzy to sell it and then have strangers living there—at least not in her own lifetime. “Once I’m dead, you can do what you want with it,” she’d said when she called up to discuss it with Izzy. But Izzy had told her that she could never sell the island. She might have bad memories of her father, but the island itself retained its magic for her. She thought it always would.

“It’ll just be for a while,” Izzy went on to tell Kathy. “To see how it goes.”

“I know,” Kathy said. “You don’t have to explain. It makes perfect sense.”

“I love that land and it’d really be a great place to work.”

Kathy nodded. “And safe, too—for your numena.”

“Not that I’d ever know,” Izzy said.

She knew many of her numena had taken up residence on the island, but they didn’t communicate with her any more than the ones in the city did. She understood why. She’d let them down. She’d let them die. But that didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.

“I meant for both of us,” she went on. “The farmhouse is huge, Kathy. I’d be rattling around in it on my own.”

After having shared living space with Kathy for so many years, the idea of living without her seemed unimaginable. Izzy had any number of friends, and she knew she’d miss seeing them on a regular basis, but she wasn’t all that sure she could live without Kathy. They were more than best friends. Sometimes it seemed to her that they were two halves of some magical alliance that would be greatly diminished if they ever went their separate ways.

“I can’t live that far away from the city,” Kathy said. “It’s not just because of my writing, either. I know I get my inspiration from being here, but I suppose I could write anywhere.”

“It’s the Foundation.”

“Exactly. There’s still so much to do and I feel I have to stay involved until I can be sure it’ll run on its own.”

“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Izzy said.

Then why are you going? she asked herself. Wren Island held the best memories of her childhood, but also the worst. There was no question but that the years she’d lived in Newford far outweighed them.

Still, she felt as though she were in the grip of some old-fashioned covenant, like a knight under the spell of a geas in one of the Arthurian romances Kathy liked to read. She was called back to the island, not by her mother, but to fulfill some older, more binding contract that she couldn’t even remember having made. The only thing that could keep her from going was if Kathy asked her to stay.

But all Kathy said was “I’ll miss you, too, ma belle Izzy.”

XXIII

Wren Island, June 1979

Names, Izzy had realized a long time ago, before she even moved from the island to attend Butler U., had potency. They pulled their owners in their wakes, the way that dreams can, the way you can wake up from sleep and believe that what you dreamed actually occurred. And even later, even when you realized the mistake, it was difficult to readjust your thinking. You knew your boyfriend didn’t cheat on you, but you looked at him with suspicion all the same. You understood that you hadn’t really done the painting, but you found yourself looking for it all the same.

But if dreams were potent, names were more so, especially the ones people chose for themselves.

They might grow into the ones that were given to them, through the familiarity of use, if nothing else, but the ones they chose defined who they were like an immediate descriptive shorthand.

When she first moved to Newford from Wren Island seven years ago, she had put Isabelle behind.

Isabelle of the quiet moods and even temperament. Who avoided confrontations and was more comfortable with her sketchbook in the forest than with people. Who had inherited her father’s stubborn streak but never acquired the meanness it had manifested in him. Who didn’t argue, but merely agreed and went ahead and did what she felt she had to do anyway, dealing with the repercussions only if she had to.