Charles De Lint: Memory and Dream

I know I’m the last person in the world to give advice, Izzy, but before I go, I have to tell you this: you have to stop feeling so guilty all the time. You can only shoulder so much responsibility for what goes wrong in the world, or for what goes wrong in the lives around you. None of what happened was your fault. To lay blame, there has to be intent, and you just never knew what you were doing—not until it was too late.

I wish it was as simple for me, but my ghosts are a little harder to lay to rest. Besides, it’s five o’clock in the morning now. It’s a time for ghosts and memories and trying to figure out which are real and which aren’t. I always think better with paper, but once I got out my pen, I found myself finally writing this letter to you instead. I’ve been putting it off for weeks, but I can’t wait any longer.

I’m sorry about all the trouble this is going to cause you. The last thing I want to do is leave my friends having to clean up after me, but I don’t have any choice, Izzy. I don’t think I ever did. All I ever had was a stay of the inevitable.

You’re probably wondering about this key. It opens locker number 374 at the Newford Bus Terminal. By now you’ll know that I left every-thing to the Foundation—everything except for what you’ll find in this locker. This is what I’m leaving for you. For you and Alan, if you want to share it with him.

So that’s it, then. There are no more stories. No, that’s not quite right. There will always be stories.

There are just no more of them for me. The stories are going to have to go on without me.

Don’t cry for me, ma belle Izzy. Remember me only in the good times. You know, I’ve been writing this letter in my head for as long as I can remember being alive. I didn’t know who I was writing it to until I met you.

love

Kathy

IV

Twilight found Isabelle standing on the headland looking south across the lake, the small, flat key of a locker in the Newford Bus Terminal held so tightly in her right hand that its outline was now imprinted on her palm. The wind came up from the woods behind her, tousling her hair and pressing the skirt of her dress tight against her legs. It carried a mossy scent in its air, deep with the smell of the forest’s loam and fallen leaves and the sharp tang of cedars and pine.

The dusk was brief. As she watched the lake, the line between water and sky slowly melted away, but still she stood there, gazing into the darkness now. Nightfall hid her look of grief. With careless confidence, it washed away the sight of her red and puffy eyes as it had smudged the border between lake and sky, but it could make no imprint upon what had been reawoken inside her. Though Kathy’s letter lay at home on the kitchen table where Isabelle had left it, she could still see the slope of its words across her retinas; she could still hear Kathy’s voice, the familiar inflections brought back to mind by the parade of sentences as they took her down each handwritten page.

The letter had disturbed Isabelle—disturbed her far beyond the way it had appeared so suddenly out of nowhere, bringing with it fresh grief as though Kathy had been buried only this morning, rather than five years ago. The letter was authentic, of that Isabelle had no doubt. It was Kathy’s handwriting. What it said, it said in Kathy’s voice. But the tone was all wrong.

The spirit behind this letter was dark and troubled, plainly unhappy, and that hadn’t been Kathy at all.

Oh, Kathy could be moody, she could be introspective, but that side of her only came out in her stories, not in who she was or how she carried herself. The Kathy that Isabelle remembered had been almost relentlessly cheerful. She’d certainly been capable of seriousness, but it always carried with it a whimsical undercurrent of good humor and wonder, a lighthearted magic.

The author of this letter had taken that magic out of the light and made a home for it in the shadows.

Granted, Kathy had been in the hospital when she wrote it, knowing she was going to die, but the letter read like a suicide note.

A sudden image leapt into Isabelle’s mind: Alan and herself, arguing in the graveyard after the funeral.

He’d been saying ... he’d been saying ...

The memory shattered before she could recall it in its entirety, but the tightness in her chest returned, bringing with it another touch of vertigo. She found she had to lie down in the thick grass that crested the headland—lie down before she fell. The dizziness passed as she rested there, eyes closed. The constriction in her chest slowly eased and she was able to breathe more normally. But the grief remained.

She turned her head, cheek against the grass, and looked out over the cliff into the darkness that hid the lake. Why did the letter have to come now? Why couldn’t it have stayed lost? She didn’t want to think of Kathy having lived her whole life the way she’d made it out that she had in the letter: hiding a desperate unhappiness behind a cheerful facade. She wanted to think of it as just another one of Kathy’s stories, as made-up as the part of the letter where Kathy talked of wandering about in their old haunts when of course she couldn’t have done so. She’d been bedridden in intensive care the week before she’d died.

But Kathy wouldn’t have made up a letter such as this. She couldn’t have been so cruel. And if it wasn’t a lie ...

In her mind, Isabelle kept returning to the last thing Kathy had written: I’ve been writing this letter in my head for as long as I can remember being alive. I didn’t know who I was writing it to until I met you.

It made her heart break.

A fresh swell of tears rose up behind her eyes, but this time she managed to keep them at bay. She sat up and opened her hand. She knew without having to look in the locker that what was waiting for her there would only bring her more pain, would reveal more of this stranger who had written to her in her friend’s voice, with her friend’s handwriting.

She didn’t want to know this stranger.

Let me keep my own memories, she thought.

Don’t cry for me, ma belle Izzy, Kathy had told her in the letter. Remember me only in the good times.

And that was what she’d done. She had concentrated on the good times they’d shared together.

When she called Kathy’s features to mind it was never those of the frail figure overwhelmed by the hospital bed, but the other Kathy, the one she’d known first. The Kathy with whom she’d had such an instant rapport. She could remember with an immediacy that had yet to fade how she’d felt when the red-haired girl who was to be her roommate had come into the room they were assigned at Butler U.

Isabelle had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.

“I’m what I am because of you,” she told the memory of her friend.

Kathy had changed her from farm girl to bohemian artist, almost overnight—never by telling her what to do, but by cheerful example and by teaching her to always ask questions before she so readily accepted the way things were supposed to be done. By the time Isabelle returned to start her second year, not even she would have recognized her earlier self anymore, that farm girl had become such a stranger.

A stranger, yes, but not entirely. One had only to scrape the surface to find remnants of that old naivete, of the work ethic instilled in her by her parents and the commonsensical approach to life acquired by working close to the land. And that must be how it had been for Kathy as well, Isabelle realized.

Underneath the bold-as-brass young woman Isabelle had met in university she’d carried a wounded child along with her, hidden, but still capable of exerting its influence.