Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

She paused as a deep sorrow rose up inside her. It grew not for herself; but for all the time she’d wasted.

“Because if I died now,” she said, “not many people’d miss me. I’m just not a part of their lives anymore. When Tom Downs died a couple of years ago, I remember going to his funeral and seeing all those people there and thinking if it was me they were burying, I could count the mourners on one hand.”

She looked up into John’s eyes. “I’m not just feeling sorry for myself. It’s more like pity. That I could have let my life come to this.”

“I’d miss you.”

Isabelle gave him a sad smile. “Even with all those lost years between us?” John nodded.

“Did you ... were you and Barbara lovers?” she asked.

“No. We were only friends. Good friends.”

“I wish we could have stayed friends,” Isabelle said.

She closed her eyes. She heard John say something, but she couldn’t make out what it had been, because she was stretched so thin now that she was invisible.

I hope you waited for me, Kathy, she had time to think.

And then she went away.

XXII

Left behind in Rushkin’s studio, John bowed his head. The hands that had been stroking Isabelle’s hair lay on his knees. The weight of Isabelle’s head was gone from his lap. He was alone now in the studio, except for the two bodies. Isabelle had been drawn back into the world, out of dreamtime. He could feel the pull of the world on himself as well, but he held on to her dreamtime for a few moments longer. Nothing waited for him there in the world.

He regarded the corpse nailed to the wall, then let his gaze travel to the other Rushkin, the one he’d killed. Which had he been—numena or maker? In the end, John realized he’d told Isabelle the truth: it didn’t matter. All that was important was that the monster was dead.

There were so many dead. Rushkin murdering Isabelle’s numena. He, Rushkin’s. How had it come to be that he’d embarked upon such a course for his life? He sighed. Why did he even ask?

It began with Isabelle’s friend, Rochelle. He’d tracked down and confronted her attackers, wanting to know why they had done such a thing. They’d only laughed at him. And then one of them had said,

“You should’ve stayed on the reservation and minded your own business, Geronimo, because now we’re going to have to shut your mouth for you.”

They hadn’t known what he was. They’d been no match for him. He hadn’t meant to kill them, but once they were dead, he’d rationalized that their deaths had served to even the scales of justice.

That was where it had begun. He’d vowed to take no more human lives, to devote himself instead to protecting Isabelle’s numena. But on the night of his greatest failure, as the farmhouse burned and all those innocent spirits died, he took the battle to Rushkin, tracking down his creatures and dispatching them until the monster fled the country. That should have been it. That should have ended it. Except Rushkin had returned with the last of his creatures and the killing began again.

“Has it ended now?” he asked Rushkin’s corpse.

The monster was dead. Whatever had animated it, numena or maker, was gone. But the fixed stare of that dead gaze seemed to be focused directly upon him, mocking him. You win, it said to him, by which it meant he’d lost everything all over again.

John closed his eyes, calling up Isabelle’s features, needing them to wash away the choking swell of his memories, of too many murders, of the dead monster that shared the studio with him. In his mind, he repeated what he’d said to Isabelle, what she hadn’t heard.

We were always friends, Izzy. Nobody could take that from me—not even you.

But the lies he’d told her still lay between them, for when truth was the only coin one had, even one lie rendered all one’s coins suspect. He was guilty of far more than one. Whenever Isabelle had pressed him too hard, when changing the subject no longer worked, the lies had come. No, he hadn’t killed Rochelle’s attackers. He lived with an aunt in Newford. She didn’t care for white girls. Her apartment looked like this. One led so easily into the next.

If he’d been asked what he regretted the most, it would be the lies. The lies, and the pride that had kept him away from her when he knew she needed him, when he could have been with her and prevented the deaths of so many. For if he’d been there with her on the night of the fire ...

He remembered what the monster had said just before he died: Everything has its price.

He’d finally fulfilled the promise he’d made all those years ago when the farmhouse on Wren Island burned down and the inferno claimed so many of his brothers and sisters. He’d finally put an end to the threat Rushkin presented. But in the process, he’d lost Isabelle once again.

He opened his eyes and regarded Rushkin’s corpse.

“You’re right,” he told it, his voice bitter. “I win.”

Rushkin was dead. Isabelle’s numena were safe. But his share of the victory was only the memories made of ashes and dust that would be his companions once more.

He let the dreamtime fade and returned to the lonely world into which Isabelle had called him all those years ago.

Two figures, holding hands, dominate the field.

The young woman on the right has a bird’s-nest mane of red-gold hair cascading past her shoulders. Her solemn grey gaze is on her companion, her head tilted slightly, her smile accentuated by the thickness of her lower lip. Her nose seems a touch large for her features, ears standing out a little too far, but the overall impression one receives is of a luminous beauty. She has a rainbow array of Indian printpatches on her jeans and is wearing a tie-dyed top under a jacket adorned with a ragtag assortment of scarves. In her free hand she is holding a small hardcover book out of which sticks a fountain pen, as though to mark her place.

The young woman on the left is smaller, almost a shadow of the other with her dark hair and bohemian blacks—T-shirt, jeans, sweater and scarf. She is smiling as well, but her dark eyes look out of the painting, directly engaging the viewer. She has a paintbrush tucked away behind one small, neat ear and in her free hand she holds a watercolor paint box and a spiral-bound sketchbook, the pages of which are wavy and swollen from many dried washes.

They are standing on a headland overlooking a lake, the meadows around them running riot with sweeps of goldenrod and wild asters. The landscape on a whole has been only vaguely detailed. It has a soft, hazy, almost sfumato quality about it, lending a dreaminess to the setting that should logically be at odds with the sharply focused rendering of the two figures. But such is not the case. By virtue of her use of broken color throughout, combined with a light feathering technique that is particularly effective in the two figures, the artist has integrated figures and background to a remarkable degree.

There is something at once innocent and sensual in how the two young women are standing, joined together by the clasp of their hands. One senses a great affection between the two. A study of photographs taken when the artist was in her twenties reveals that she has used herself and longtime friend, the late author Katharine Mully, as models for this piece. Considering the recent publication by the East Street Press of an omnibus of Mully’s stories illustrated by the artist, the significance of their joined clasp and what each holds in her free hand seems most apropos.

Two Hearts as One, Forever Dancing, 1993, oil on canvas, 40 X 30 inches. Collection of the artist.