She’d kept in contact with her mother, but they never spoke of her father again until the day he died.
Izzy went out to the island to stay with her mother and she attended the funeral for her mother’s sake, but she still felt nothing—not at the funeral home, not in the church, not as she watched the coffin being lowered into the grave. It was only later that night, after she and her mother returned to the island, that she felt anything. With her father three days dead, she lay in her old bedroom in the farmhouse and stared up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling. And then the tears came.
But they weren’t for the father who had just died. They were for the father she’d never had.
XXII
April 1979
“It’s not like it’d be forever,” Izzy said.
Izzy and Kathy sat on the front stoop of their apartment building, enjoying the mild spring evening.
From where they sat they could watch the traffic pass on Lee Street. Their own street was quiet tonight.
Over the years since they’d first moved to their Waterhouse Street apartment, the area had undergone a slow but steady change. The boutique and cafes were outnumbered now by convenience stores and pizza parlors, the bohemian residents by young couples and single working men and women on the rise, looking for an investment rather than a home.
“One day,” Alan had told them morosely, “all that’ll be left is ghosts and memories of us.”
And Alan, Kathy had told Izzy later, because she doubted that he’d ever move away. But the others did, and now Izzy had been put in the position to consider doing the same.
Her mother had decided to move to Florida to live with her sister. She wanted to put the island in Izzy’s name, but only if Izzy lived there. She didn’t want Izzy to sell it and then have strangers living there—at least not in her own lifetime. “Once I’m dead, you can do what you want with it,” she’d said when she called up to discuss it with Izzy. But Izzy had told her that she could never sell the island. She might have bad memories of her father, but the island itself retained its magic for her. She thought it always would.
“It’ll just be for a while,” Izzy went on to tell Kathy. “To see how it goes.”
“I know,” Kathy said. “You don’t have to explain. It makes perfect sense.”
“I love that land and it’d really be a great place to work.”
Kathy nodded. “And safe, too—for your numena.”
“Not that I’d ever know,” Izzy said.
She knew many of her numena had taken up residence on the island, but they didn’t communicate with her any more than the ones in the city did. She understood why. She’d let them down. She’d let them die. But that didn’t make the pain any easier to bear.
“I meant for both of us,” she went on. “The farmhouse is huge, Kathy. I’d be rattling around in it on my own.”
After having shared living space with Kathy for so many years, the idea of living without her seemed unimaginable. Izzy had any number of friends, and she knew she’d miss seeing them on a regular basis, but she wasn’t all that sure she could live without Kathy. They were more than best friends. Sometimes it seemed to her that they were two halves of some magical alliance that would be greatly diminished if they ever went their separate ways.
“I can’t live that far away from the city,” Kathy said. “It’s not just because of my writing, either. I know I get my inspiration from being here, but I suppose I could write anywhere.”
“It’s the Foundation.”
“Exactly. There’s still so much to do and I feel I have to stay involved until I can be sure it’ll run on its own.”
“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Izzy said.
Then why are you going? she asked herself. Wren Island held the best memories of her childhood, but also the worst. There was no question but that the years she’d lived in Newford far outweighed them.
Still, she felt as though she were in the grip of some old-fashioned covenant, like a knight under the spell of a geas in one of the Arthurian romances Kathy liked to read. She was called back to the island, not by her mother, but to fulfill some older, more binding contract that she couldn’t even remember having made. The only thing that could keep her from going was if Kathy asked her to stay.
But all Kathy said was “I’ll miss you, too, ma belle Izzy.”
XXIII
Wren Island, June 1979
Names, Izzy had realized a long time ago, before she even moved from the island to attend Butler U., had potency. They pulled their owners in their wakes, the way that dreams can, the way you can wake up from sleep and believe that what you dreamed actually occurred. And even later, even when you realized the mistake, it was difficult to readjust your thinking. You knew your boyfriend didn’t cheat on you, but you looked at him with suspicion all the same. You understood that you hadn’t really done the painting, but you found yourself looking for it all the same.
But if dreams were potent, names were more so, especially the ones people chose for themselves.
They might grow into the ones that were given to them, through the familiarity of use, if nothing else, but the ones they chose defined who they were like an immediate descriptive shorthand.
When she first moved to Newford from Wren Island seven years ago, she had put Isabelle behind.
Isabelle of the quiet moods and even temperament. Who avoided confrontations and was more comfortable with her sketchbook in the forest than with people. Who had inherited her father’s stubborn streak but never acquired the meanness it had manifested in him. Who didn’t argue, but merely agreed and went ahead and did what she felt she had to do anyway, dealing with the repercussions only if she had to.
Kathy was the first to call her Izzy, making a play on Isabelle with her ma belle Izzy, but she herself was the one who took to the name and wore it into her new life. Izzy wasn’t simply a role she played, a coat she put on to protect her from inclement weather that was easily discarded once more. All those years in Newford she was Izzy. Being Izzy let her fit in with the art crowd at university, her Waterhouse Street cohorts, the bohemian scene in Lower Crowsea. Being Izzy had opened all the doors that shy Isabelle wouldn’t even have paused at before. She only signed Isabelle’s name to her paintings because of Rushkin, because it had been easier to do so than argue with him about what he perceived as the inappropriateness of going by a nickname in the world of fine art.
But Izzy hadn’t been all strength and chutzpah. Names were potent, but changing your name couldn’t entirely discard the baggage you had to carry along from the past to where you were now. Izzy still had her insecurities. Izzy was still capable of being browbeaten by the Rushkins of the world, abandoned by the Johns, mugged by a gang of street punks who didn’t know what her name was and certainly didn’t care. Izzy still preferred to avoid confrontations and to hide her pains deep in the shadowy recesses of her mind, where they wouldn’t be easily stumbled upon.
Names were potent, Izzy understood, but in the end they were still only labels, easy tags that could never hope to entirely encompass the complex individuals they were supposed to describe. All they could ever do was reflect some aspect of the face you wanted to turn to the world, not define it. But they helped—in the same way that labels made it easier to choose between one thing and another. Coffee or tea? Smoking or nonsmoking section? Expressionism or Impressionism?