Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

If Kathy were still alive, Isabelle could have asked her. But Kathy wasn’t alive. No, she’d gone and died and ... and left ... and left her all alone ....

The tears that Isabelle had managed to hold at bay for so long could be held in no longer. They flooded her eyes with the suddenness of a summer storm. The journal fell from her lap onto the windowseat as she hugged her knees, pressing her face against her legs, crying until the knees of her jeans were soaked. When the flood was finally reduced to a sniffle, she went looking for a tissue but had to settle for a long streamer of toilet paper that she tore from the roll in the studio’s tiny bathroom. She blew her nose, once, twice, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, eyes rimmed with red and swollen, nostrils runny and florid, face flushed.

Portrait of the artist embracing her despair, she thought as she turned away.

But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present. She remembered how Kathy had put it—something she’d said once as opposed to having written about it in a story or one of the journal entries.

“It’s a mistake to go poking about in your own past,” she’d told her. “It makes you shrink into yourself. Every time you return you get smaller and more transparent. Go back often enough and you might vanish altogether. We’re meant to put the past behind us and be the people we are now, Izzy, not who we were.”

But what if your now is built upon unfinished business in the past? Isabelle knew what Kathy’s reply to that would be as well: Why do you think the psychiatry industry is booming and that there are so many self-help books on the market?

Maybe so, Isabelle thought. But that didn’t help her now. Her now was inextricably tied to what had been left undone in the past. It wasn’t just Kathy. It was her numena. And John. And Rushkin.

But Kathy—how could she have known Kathy so well and yet not have known her at all? Isabelle felt like Mary in Kathy’s story “Secret Lives.” There was a journal in that story, too, only it was left behind when the dancer Alicia left her lover Mary without a word of explanation. She hadn’t died as Kathy had and the journal hadn’t appeared five years later. The journal in “Secret Lives” had been lying on the coffee table when Mary came home; Alicia had wanted her to find and read it.

Isabelle had never liked that story; not because the lovers were both women—that had merely made her uncomfortable at the time—but because of

Alicia’s meanness in leaving that journal behind. Mary discovered an entirely different woman from the one she’d known in the pages of that journal. Much of what Mary read was Alicia’s fantasies. But not all of it. Not enough of it.

“You don’t understand,” Kathy had said when Isabelle complained to her about the story. “She didn’t have any other way to tell the truth. Mary would never have listened to her. None of what she read should have come to her as a surprise. It only did because she wasn’t paying attention. Because she’d already defined the boundaries of who Alicia was and anything that didn’t fit inside them had to be discarded. The reason Alicia left was because Mary wasn’t in love with her anymore; she was in love with who Alicia had been.”

Was that the case with Kathy’s journal? Isabelle couldn’t help but wonder. Had the clues all been there in the years they were living together, but she’d been like Mary, unwilling to change her definition of who she thought Kathy was? Had the story been Kathy’s way of trying to tell her to pay more attention?

No, she told herself. That kind of speculation wasn’t dealing with unfinished business. That was poking around in the past. If she kept it up she really would become invisible. Maybe she already was ....

Isabelle looked across the room to where Paddyjack and the journal still lay on the window seat.

The only thing she was doing at the moment was driving herself crazy. She needed to talk to someone about it. To her surprise, the first person she thought of was Alan. She didn’t know what else was in the journal, but she knew she had to show it to him, uncomfortable as sharing parts of it would make her feel.

If nothing else, he had to know who Margaret Mully really was. If it was true. If it wasn’t just Kathy changing the world to suit herself—changing it so that it wouldn’t change her.

She collected the journal and stuck it in her shoulder bag. But before Alan got to see it, he had to make a promise, she decided as she prepared to leave the studio. He had to promise that what lay in its pages remained between them. She didn’t want to read about Kathy’s life in a newspaper, or hear about the journal being a forthcoming book from his East Street Press.

Isabelle checked to make sure she had her keys with her, then opened the door to the studio. The door swung open, but she remained rooted where she stood, staring out into the hall. Standing there waiting for her was another piece of her past. Dark-haired and darker-eyed, dressed in the same white T-shirt and jeans as always, the same silver feather earring hanging from his left earlobe, the same broad handsome features that she knew so well. John Sweetgrass. The only difference was the bracelet of braided ribbons he wore on his right wrist, more frayed than her own, the colors more faded. Almost a ghost of the bracelet she’d made—as his reappearance in her life was like that of a ghost.

Who was it that had said it took two to make a haunting? Christy Riddell, she supposed. Or Jilly.

The one to haunt, the other to be haunted. It was the story of her life.

“Izzy,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

She didn’t want there to be a distance in her eyes. She didn’t want to hold him at length the way she felt she must. She wanted to hold him close, to tell him she was sorry for that night all those years ago.

But all she could do was remember what Jilly had told her. She couldn’t see the meanness in his eyes that July had seen, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, hidden behind the mild gaze his dark eyes turned to her.

“Which John are you?” was all she could ask.

Something dark sped across his features. She wasn’t sure if it was hurt or anger.

“What makes you think there’s more than one of me?” he asked. “What makes you think there isn’t?”

John sighed. “Maybe my coming here was a mistake.”

He started to turn away, but Isabelle called him back. He hesitated. When he finally looked at her, Isabelle couldn’t bear the sadness in his eyes. He fingered the bracelet she’d woven all those years ago, but he didn’t speak.

“Why did you come, John?” she asked.

“Not to fight with you.”

“But not to make up either, or we’d have had this conversation a long time ago.”

John nodded. “That decision was yours to make. You sent me away.”

“I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. I dreamed of you that night. You and Paddyjack.”

“And you left us these,” John said, holding up the wrist enclosed by the cloth bracelet. “But it was already too late. You sent me away, Izzy, but I had to go as well. It was never going to be the same between us, not with you thinking you’d created me.”

“But I did. The painting—”

“Brought me across. You brought all of us across. But that doesn’t mean you made us. In the before, in our own world, we already were.”

Isabelle didn’t want to get into a repeat of that argument. “So why are you here today?” she asked.

“To warn you. It’s starting again.”

“You mean my paintings.”

John nodded.

“But I haven’t even begun the first one.”

“Doesn’t matter. The veil that lies between my world and yours is already trembling in anticipation.”