Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Maybe I should just show you,” Cosette said.

She threw the blanket back and got up from the sofa. Walking over to Rolanda’s desk, she rummaged around in the papers on top until she turned around with the sharp Xacto blade that Rolanda used for opening parcels. She brought it back to the sofa.

“Look,” she said.

Rolanda cried out and grabbed at Cosette’s hand as the girl drew the blade across her palm, but she was too late.

“Oh, my god!”

“Don’t worry,” Cosette said calmly. She dropped the blade onto the floor and held her cut palm up to Rolanda’s face. “Just look.”

All the blood, Rolanda thought. She couldn’t stand to see all the blood .... Except there was none.

There was just a white line on Cosette’s palm, which was already beginning to fade.

“Wh-what ... ?”

“We don’t have any blood,” Cosette said. She held her hand upside down and shook it, then held it out again, palm up. “And that’s why we can’t dream. We don’t have a red crow beating its wings inside our chest. We ... we’re like hollow people.”

Rolanda couldn’t take her gaze away from Cosette’s hand. When she finally did, it was to look at the Copley painting of The Wild Girl.

It’s the one she did of me.

Slowly she looked back at Cosette and the bloodless cut on her palm. The painting was at least ten or fifteen years old. But Cosette herself couldn’t be much older than fifteen ....

It’s been fifteen years since she first brought me over.

She didn’t bleed. She was unchanged after fifteen years. Rolanda couldn’t suppress a shudder. The Foundation’s rules and regulations fell by the wayside. “What ... what are you?” Rolanda asked. “What do you want from me?” Cosette dropped her hand to her lap and she seemed to shrink into herself.

She lowered her face but not before Rolanda saw the tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t know what I am.”

Her voice was small, pitched so low that the short distance between them almost stole away its audibility. And then she began to weep.

For a long moment all Rolanda could do was stare at her. Then slowly she reached out, shivering when her hands touched the girl’s shoulders. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but there was nothing alien under her hands. All she felt was the warmth of Cosette’s body under the sweater, the tremor in her shoulders as she wept. No matter what she was, no matter how strange, she was still a child. Still hurting. Rolanda could no more turn away from her than she could from any child that came in through the Foundation’s doors.

She went down on one knee and drew Cosette into a comforting embrace. She held her until the tears finally subsided; then she took her upstairs and put her into her own bed. Long after she could hear the other counselors arrive downstairs and the day’s work begin, she sat there beside the bed, holding Cosette’s hand. She looked into the girl’s face and saw no rapid eye movement under Cosette’s eyelids. She touched the pale white palm, now unblemished.

We can’t dream. The red crow doesn’t beat inside our chests.

She was way out of her depth here, but she didn’t know to whom she could turn. The first thing anyone would do would be to take Cosette to a doctor and then specialists would be brought in and then

...

Rolanda sighed. The first priority at the Foundation was always the child, and she knew she couldn’t allow Cosette to be put through any of that. She’d seen E. T. and Firestarter. They were both fictions but, she thought, not so far from the truth of how events would go if the situations in them were true.

Which left them on their own.

“What am I going to do with you?” she whispered.

Cosette’s fingers tightened on her own, but otherwise she didn’t stir.

XII

Jilly searched high and low, but no matter where she looked in her studio, she couldn’t find the two tubes of oil paint she’d bought the day before at Amos & Cook’s. She knew she’d brought them home and left them, still in their distinctive orange and white plastic bag, on the table beside her easel, but when she went to start work this morning, they simply weren’t there. And then, as she searched for the missing paint tubes, she discovered that a pair of brushes were gone as well—one of them a favorite—along with a glass jar that had been half-full of turpentine, and a small piece of hardboard that she’d been saving for the next time she went to paint on location out on the street.

Isabelle must have taken them, she decided, although why she would need them, Jilly couldn’t even begin to guess. It wasn’t as though Isabelle hadn’t brought half her studio down from the island with her.

And besides, it wasn’t like Isabelle to just take something without asking first. At the very least she would have mentioned it in her note. But there didn’t seem to be any other logical explanation.

“Is that what happened?” she asked Rubens. “Did Isabelle take that stuff? Or maybe it was the Good Neighbors. You know, the Little People. Do you have them out on the island?”

Rubens ignored her. He sat on the broad windowsill, staring through its panes at the three alley cats on the fire escape outside that were wolfing down the dry cat food that Jilly had put out for them earlier.

Rubens’s presence made them fidgety and eventually all three fled, nervousness overcoming their hunger.

Not until they were gone did Rubens finally deign to look at her.

“You’re going to have to learn to get along,” filly informed him. “You can’t just go around playing the heavy with every cat you meet, you know. Next time the window might be open and one of them’ll come in and give you a good box in the ears.”

She left him to think that over while she rummaged about in her closet for a jacket she felt like wearing on her trek back to the art shop to buy new supplies. Eventually she gave up and put on the sweater she’d been wearing yesterday. She was giving it a critical look in the mirror when she heard a knock on the studio door. Opening it, she was surprised to find John Sweetgrass standing out in the hall.

“Well, hello,” she said. “That didn’t take you long.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I meant it didn’t take you long to track Isabelle down. How’d you even know she was in the city?

Oh, I know. Somebody at Joli Coeur told you, right?” He gave her a blank look. “Do I know you?”

“Give me a break, John. I’m not in the mood for jokes. I was all set to get back to this piece I’ve been working on, only to find out that I have to go back to Amos & Cook’s to buy some more paints first—after just having been there yesterday.”

“You must have me mistaken with someone else. My name’s not John.”

“Oh, that’s right. It’s Mizaun Kinnikinnik now, right?”

He shook his head. “Is Isabelle Copley here?”

But now it was July’s turn to give him a puzzled look. “You’re really not John Sweetgrass?”

“I already told you that. Now, will you please answer my question.”

Jilly gave him a long look. She hated to think that she had somehow stumbled into that category of whites who thought all Native Americans looked the same, but there was no way she could deny the fact that to her he looked exactly like Isabelle’s old boyfriend.

“Is there some point to your wasting my time like this?” he asked when she didn’t reply.

“What?”

“I’m looking for Isabelle Copley. Is she here or not?”

“Your name’s not John?”

“Look, lady—”

“And you really don’t know me?”

“I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you. Just answer my question. If a simple yes or no’s too hard, you could just move your head. Nod for yes and—”