Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Where?”

“On the island.”

Izzy gave her a confused look. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“Wren Island. It was your home, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But ... how do you know that?”

Rosalind considered that, then finally shook her head. “I don’t know. It simply feels as though I always have.” She laughed lightly. “But then always is a rather short time when you consider how long it’s been since I crossed over.”

She rose from the window seat. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“That you live on the island? Of course not.”

Rosalind shook her head. “No, that I go for a walk. I know it’s rude to leave so soon after we’ve met, but I feel as though I need to look for somebody.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know that either. I’m living on intuition at the moment.”

“Let me get you a coat,” Izzy said.

“Oh, the cold won’t bother me.”

“Yes, but everybody else is wearing one. You don’t want to stand out, do you?”

“They will only see me if I choose to let them.”

Izzy nodded slowly. “How come I can always see you—I mean, you know, those who have crossed over? It doesn’t matter where I am, here in the studio or out on the street, I can always see you.”

“You’re a maker,” Rosalind said. “Makers can always see those who have crossed over through the objects that they have made.”

She stepped closer to Izzy and touched a hand to Izzy’s cheek, the way a mother might touch her child; then she glided more than walked to the door of the studio, stepped out into the snowy night, and was gone. Izzy stood looking at the door for a long time. She remembered what Rosalind had said earlier about why she was going for this walk and couldn’t get it out of her mind.

I feel as though I need to look for somebody.

Izzy had the feeling that Rosalind wouldn’t find who she was looking for out on Newford’s streets.

Nor would she find it on the island. Izzy turned slowly to regard her easel. She took Rosalind’s painting from it and put up a fresh canvas that she’d primed earlier in the week. She didn’t even have to think about what she was doing as she began to block in the composition, because she was remembering another conversation now, something Kathy had once said:

“Sometimes I like to think that my characters all know each other, or at least that they could have the chance to get to know each other. Some of them would really get along.” She’d paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. “While some of them need each other. Like the wild girl. I think the only thing that could ever save her in the end is if she was to make friends with, oh, I don’t know. Someone like Rosalind. Someone full of peace to counter the wildness that the wolves left in her soul.”

“Are you going to write a story about it?” Izzy had asked, intrigued with the idea.

But Kathy simply shook her head. “I don’t feel that it’s my story to tell. I think they’d have to work that one out on their own.”

Except first they had to meet, Izzy thought as she continued to work on the new canvas. The underpainting was still all vague shapes of color and value, but she could already see the wild girl’s features in it. It was only a matter of translating them from her mind to the canvas. Because of what Rosalind had said about moving to Wren Island, Izzy didn’t plan to put the figure of the wild girl on a city street the way Kathy had in her story. Instead she meant to surround her with a tangled thicket of the wild rosebushes that grew on Wren Island. She hoped Cosette wouldn’t mind.

X

Izzy worked in a frenzy, finishing The Wild Girl in less than a week. The piece almost seemed to paint itself, translating itself effortlessly from her mind to the canvas, pouring out of her in a way that she’d never experienced before with her art. Jilly and Sophie had both tried to explain to her how it felt, those rare occasions when the process itself seemed to utterly possess them and they couldn’t put down a bad stroke if they wanted to, but she’d never really understood what they meant until she began work on Cosette’s painting. She also understood now how frustrated her friends felt that the experience wasn’t one they could call upon at will.

Rosalind was a regular visitor to the studio during that time, spending long hours in conversation with Izzy when she wasn’t exploring the city’s streets and meeting with her fellow numena. Rosalind liked both well enough, but she still spoke of moving to the island. By the third day of her company, Izzy realized that she was going to miss Rosalind when she did move. She was like a perfect combination of mother and friend, a relationship that Izzy would have liked to have had with her own mother. Rosalind was everything Izzy’s mother wasn’t: supportive, even-tempered, interested in not only the arts, but in everything the world had to offer. She radiated such a sense of well-being that in her company, worries and troubles were as impermanent as morning mist before the rising sun.

But Rosalind did have her weaknesses, as well. From the first moment that Rosalind had arrived Izzy wanted her to come back to the apartment to meet Kathy, but Rosalind was far too shy.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t,” she told Izzy. “I would feel terribly awkward.”

“But Kathy wouldn’t be weird about it at all. I just know she’d love to meet you. You were always one of her favorite characters.”

Rosalind sighed. “But that’s just it. You brought me across, but you don’t treat me as though I’m something you made up out of nothing. But Kathy would. She might not think she was doing so, she wouldn’t even mean to do so, but the only way she would be able to see me is as something she created on the page that has now been magically brought to life. How could she possibly think otherwise? It would seem such a natural assumption.”

Izzy was ready to argue differently, to try to explain that Kathy simply wouldn’t be like that, but she heard in Rosalind’s voice an echo of John’s, reminding her of her own inability to deal with him, and she knew Rosalind was right. She could deal with all of her numena as separate from herself, as real in their own right, except for John. Even now, no matter how hard she tried, no matter that she truly believed that she’d only given him passage into this world, she hadn’t made him up out of thin air, the act of having painted The Spirit Is Strong still lay between them and it wouldn’t go away.

“I ... I understand,” she said.

Rosalind gave her a sad smile. “I thought you would.” She glanced at the canvas on Izzy’s easel and used the unfinished painting to change the subject. “You have me so curious about this new painting,” she said. “How long before it’s done and you can tell me about the surprise?”

“Soon,” Izzy promised her.

But when she finished the painting the next day, Rosalind was out on one of her walkabouts through the city. Izzy busied herself with cleaning brushes and her palette and straightening up the studio, feeling ever more fidgety as the afternoon went by and still Rosalind hadn’t returned. Nor had the painting’s numena arrived. Finally Izzy’s patience ran its course and she just had to go out and look for Rosalind.

She found her wandering through the Market in Lower Crowsea, engrossed in studying all the varied wares that were displayed in the shop windows. Izzy ran up to her, bursting with her news.

“The painting’s finished,” she said.

Rosalind looked delighted.

“Now, don’t you go teleporting yourself back to the studio,” Izzy added. “I want to be there when you see it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rosalind assured her.