Charles De Lint: Memory and Dream

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 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, unself-conscious 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 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.