Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Not this time, she thought, hauling herself over the fence. Her heartbeat went into double-time as she floundered through the snow. She opened her mouth to cry out a warning to Paddyjack, but before she could make a sound, his rescue was taken out of her hands.

Another figure appeared behind the first, leaping upon the hooded man and wresting the crossbow from his grip. It was John, Izzy realized, as he tossed the crossbow into the deep snow of the backyard.

The hooded figure threw a punch at him, but John easily deflected the blow. He struck back, dropping the man to his knees.

The whole scuffle took place in a strange silence. When John had leapt on the hooded man, Paddyjack had left off his tick-tappa-tapping. Now he clambered quickly down the fire escape. The snow didn’t seem to slow either him or John down. It was almost as though they could walk over its surface, they moved with such ease.

“John!” Izzy cried, when she realized that the two were leaving.

He turned to look at her and the coldness in his eyes struck a deeper chill in Izzy than might have any amount of wind and snow. He held her gaze for a long moment before he turned away again. Taking Paddyjack by the hand, he led the little treeskin off into the night, leaving Izzy alone in her backyard.

Alone with the snow and the storm—and the hooded man, who had made it back onto his feet once more. Except his hood had fallen back from his face and now she could see that it was Rushkin standing there by the side of her building. Rushkin with the stiff corpse of a winged cat hanging from his belt.

Rushkin glowering at her with all the fury of one of his towering rages distorting his features. When he started for her, Izzy scrambled backward in the snow, trying to get away, but her legs were all entangled and she—

—woke in her bed with the sheets all wound about her legs, her breath coming in sharp, sudden gasps. The T-shirt she was wearing clung damply to her skin. She stared wild-eyed about her bedroom, expecting Rushkin to come lurching out of the shadows at any moment, crossbow in hand. But there was no one waiting for her in the darkness—only her painting of John.

She looked at it and her chest went tight. Just a dream, she told herself, as she had earlier, when she was dreaming that she was out wandering on snowy Lee Street. But the look in John’s eyes before he left with Paddyjack remained imprinted in her memory. The coldness of it. And behind that coldness, the hurt, the ache that twinned her own, all wrapped around with an unfamiliar anger that she’d never seen in him before.

I put that there, she thought before remembering again that it was only a dream. But it had all seemed so very real.

Izzy slowly disentangled her legs from the sheets, then wrapped them around her as she began to shiver. She pulled the sheets free from the end of her mattress and got up, trailing them behind her as she made her way to the window. She went to look at the night and the snow outside her window, to tear her gaze away from the painting at the foot of her mattress and all the hurt that looking at it called up in her.

She wasn’t expecting the ribbons to actually be there—dozens of bright, colored ribbons, narrow streamers of torn cloth fluttering in the wind.

She stared at them for a long time before she finally turned back to her bedroom. Dropping the sheets, she put on her jeans and a sweater, two pairs of socks, another sweater. Her fingers fumbled with the latch at the window, got it open. She gasped at the blast of cold air that burst in. Her face and hair were white in moments as a cloud of twisting snow was blown over her. Brushing the snow from her face with the back of her hand, she clambered out the window, socked feet sinking into the deep snow.

She looked out at the backyard, but there was no sign of her passage through the snow—just as there was no sign of Paddyjack’s presence in the snow that lay so thick on the fire escape. There were only the ribbons. She untied them, one by one, stuffing them into the pockets of her jeans until she’d collected them all. Only then did she return to her bedroom and shut the window on the storm.

After changing into dry clothes, she took the ribbons and laid them out on her mattress. She hesitated for a moment, looking at her painting of John. His expression seemed to have changed from the one she’d painted to one of recrimination. Shivering again, she put the painting back into the closet and turned on a light. She blinked in the sudden glare until her eyes adjusted to the brightness.

All these ribbons.

She fingered each one, rearranged them on her mattress in varying patterns, let them dry. After a while she began to weave them into bracelets, just like the ones she’d made in summers on the island using scraps of leather and cloth, sometimes vines or the long stems of grasses and weeds. When she’d used all the ribbons up she had three cloth bracelets lying on her mattress in place of the scattering of torn cloth. She stared at them, unsure as to why she’d felt compelled to do what she’d just done, then put one on. The other two she stored away in her backpack, stuffing them deep down under her sketchbook, paint box, pencils and the other art supplies that she toted around with her.

It was only then, turning the bracelet around and around on her wrist, that she tried to work out exactly what had happened tonight. What was the dream and what was real? Beyond the ribbons, was any of it real? Rushkin hunting her creations with a crossbow, the winged cat hanging dead from his belt.

John standing up to him. He and Paddyjack fleeing into the night. And she herself, both sleeping in her bed and out there in the storm. She couldn’t have been doing both. It had to be one or the other. Since she’d woken in her own bed, it had all been a dream.

Except for the ribbons.

She fell asleep without making any sense of it at all. Fell asleep with the light on, banishing shadows, and the fingers of her left hand hooked under the cloth bracelet she wore on her right wrist. She slept fitfully, waking before her alarm clock sounded, but at least she didn’t dream again that night.

VII

The ribbon bracelets Izzy had made the night before were still there in the morning, one on her wrist, the two others at the bottom of her backpack. She took them out and studied them in the morning light, sitting up on her windowsill, turning them round and round between her fingers. The interweaving of the brightly colored ribbons created a muted kaleidoscope effect, a pleasing, random pattern that was all the more enchanting when she held them up against the view outside her window, the colors standing out in bright counterpoint to the panorama of white snow that the storm had left behind the night before.

After a while she took the best two of the three and put them into an envelope. She wrote “For Paddyjack and John” on the outside. Braving the cold, she opened her window just wide enough so that she could lean out and tie the envelope to the railing of the fire escape. She closed the window and eyed her offering, shivering from her brief encounter with the weather. It seemed to have dropped another dozen degrees now that the storm had moved on.

She still wasn’t sure about the ribbons—if they meant that last night’s dream had been a true experience, with the ribbons’ appearance serving as surety, or if the dream had simply been a warning to her from her subconscious concerning the fragility of her creations’ existence in this world and finding the ribbons on her fire escape had been no more than one of those odd moments of synchronicity that carried only as much weight as one was willing to invest in them.

And really. Couldn’t anyone have tied them to the fire escape? She hadn’t looked out her window last night—not when she got home, not when she went to bed, not until after she’d had the dream. They could have been there all the time. For all she knew, Kathy could have put them there. Lord knew, Kathy could get some quirky ideas—get them, and follow up on them.