Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Izzy looked down at the length of her body, at the shape it made under the bedding that the hospital had provided.

“Is ... is anything broken?” she asked. She found she was too scared to try to move an arm or a leg.

Kathy shook her head. “Everything’s still there—bruised, but otherwise fine.”

“I guess I was lucky.”

Kathy sat on the side of the bed and gave her a gentle hug. “Oh, ma belle Izzy,” she said softly. “You gave me such a scare.”

“You and me both.”

IX

The two detectives in charge of Izzy’s case came by to take her statement while she and Kathy were sharing Izzy’s lunch. They were both big men, looming impossibly tall and bulky above the bed in their rumpled suits. Izzy could sense Kathy’s protective instinct bristle as they introduced themselves, remembering Rochelle’s experience, but the one who did all the talking proved to be soft-spoken and polite and Izzy felt there was a genuine concern behind his questions. When she apologized and explained that she couldn’t really tell them much, they didn’t seem to be particularly surprised.

“It’s all right,” the detective assured her. “I think most people finding themselves in the situation you did would consider themselves lucky to remember their own names, never mind retain a useful description of their assailants.”

Still, Izzy tried. She closed her eyes, trying to call up a clear image of the kids who’d attacked her, but it was no use. Although she could make out their shapes, their faces were all an indistinguishable blur.

The memory of their attack woke a fit of shivers.

“The important thing to concentrate on now,” the detective went on, “is to get better. Everything else we can deal with later.”

Before they left, her doctor, an attractive Pakistani woman who didn’t look at all like Jilly this time, came by to check in on her, making for quite a crowd around Izzy’s bed. The detective who had done most of the talking left her his card with instructions for her to give him a call if she remembered anything else. He also wanted to set up an appointment for her to come down to the precinct to go through the mug books, but her doctor said that would have to wait a few days. Izzy was happy to follow her orders; the last thing she wanted to do was look at page after page of pictures of criminals.

The detectives left. The doctor left. And finally, Izzy was allowed to leave as well.

She was discharged from the hospital later that afternoon. When a nurse and Kathy took her down in the wheelchair, Izzy found herself blinking like a mole in the glare of the bright sun on the snow. After a few moments she realized that Alan and Jilly were waiting for them at the front door with Alan’s Volkswagen bug. They treated her with the exaggerated concern that friends will offer to the sick, and she would have been royally embarrassed if she hadn’t felt so awful. Her headache had subsided to a muted throb, but that seemed small consolation because every other part of her body hurt every time she moved or took a breath. She was so swollen and bruised she hadn’t recognized herself when she looked in the bathroom mirror before she left her room.

“Now you know how you’d look if you put on a few pounds,” Kathy had joked.

“And gone punk with my makeup.”

“Morbidly punk. But maybe it suits you. I think the yellowish green bruises bring out a green in your eyes. And black’s always been your color.” Izzy would have given her a whack, but she felt too weak.

“Let’s just go home,” she said.

For once she got to sit in the front seat without there being a long discussion as to who had sat there the last time, and considering how much taller Kathy was, she really deserved the extra legroom.

“It’s like what happened to Rochelle all over again,” Jilly said from the backseat once they were on their way.

But Izzy shook her head. “No, I just got beat up.”

“And the cops were almost human,” Kathy said.

Izzy started to drift off as the conversation turned to what shits the police usually were. An image of her attackers floated into her mind as she dozed, but she could make out their faces now. They all looked like Rushkin, which didn’t make any sense at all. She woke when they arrived at the Waterhouse Street apartment, desperately clutching the braidedribbon bracelet on her wrist.

“Did you tie ribbons on the fire escape outside my window the other night?” she asked Kathy later, when the two of them were alone in her bedroom.

“Ribbons? What kind of ribbons?”

Izzy gave her a little shrug. “I don’t know. I guess it was something I dreamed.”

Like she’d dreamed Rushkin killing her winged cat. Attacking Paddyjack. Attacking her ....

Except the ribbons were real—she had the proof on her wrist. When Kathy finally left her so that she could sleep, she managed to shuffle her way to the window. The envelope with the other two bracelets she’d put in it was gone. She pressed her face against the icy windowpane.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” she whispered, her breath frosting the glass. “I don’t care what you are.

I love you too much to ever really send you away.”

There was no reply. John didn’t come walking down the alley and climb up the fire escape to be with her, appearing at that exact moment the way he always did when she wanted to be with him. But then she hadn’t been expecting a reply. She didn’t expect to ever see him again.

That was the second of many nights that she cried herself to sleep over what she’d lost by sending him away.

X

Newford, April 1975

Of all her friends, Rushkin and John were the only ones who didn’t come by to visit her at one point or another while she was convalescing in the Waterhouse Street apartment. A regular stream of visitors were in and out of the place for the whole of the three weeks she was cooped up—never staying long enough to tire her out; just letting her know that they were thinking of her. Even Albina came by.

But she never heard from John. She did hear from Rushkin. Though in some ways she thought he needn’t have bothered. He sent a letter that had nothing to say about what had happened to her or that he hoped she’d get well soon. Rushkin, it seemed, was having his own problems: Isabelle,

As you understand, I must go away for a time. I hope you will continue to use the studio in my absence. I have left a key for you, under the clay flowerpot by the back door.

I can’t say how long I will be, but I promise to contact you before I return so that, should you wish, you will not have to see me. If this should be the case, I will understand. My behavior has been unforgivable.

Yours, in humility, Vincent

But she didn’t understand. Not what Rushkin was referring to. Nor why John had once been able to appear whenever she needed him, week after week, for so many months, as though he could read the need as it quickened in her heart, but that he could no longer read it now.

She was afraid that she’d inadvertently sent him back into the otherworld from which her art had brought him. The painting remained unchanged, it still retained its vitality, but John himself might as well never have existed.

She vowed, in the days as she slowly mended, to bring no more beings across from the before. John had been right. Who was she to play god? Who was she to bring an innocent such as Paddyjack across and then abandon him in the unfamiliar streets of the city? But Kathy disagreed.

“You told me yourself,” she argued. “You don’t force them to come across. All you do is open the door for them. You offer them the possibility of a shape or a form as rendered in one of your paintings, but they’re the ones who choose whether or not they find it agreeable. They decide if they want to climb into the skin you’ve made for them, not you.”