XII
Jilly searched high and low, but no matter where she looked in her studio, she couldn’t find the two tubes of oil paint she’d bought the day before at Amos & Cook’s. She knew she’d brought them home and left them, still in their distinctive orange and white plastic bag, on the table beside her easel, but when she went to start work this morning, they simply weren’t there. And then, as she searched for the missing paint tubes, she discovered that a pair of brushes were gone as well—one of them a favorite—along with a glass jar that had been half-full of turpentine, and a small piece of hardboard that she’d been saving for the next time she went to paint on location out on the street.
Isabelle must have taken them, she decided, although why she would need them, Jilly couldn’t even begin to guess. It wasn’t as though Isabelle hadn’t brought half her studio down from the island with her.
And besides, it wasn’t like Isabelle to just take something without asking first. At the very least she would have mentioned it in her note. But there didn’t seem to be any other logical explanation.
“Is that what happened?” she asked Rubens. “Did Isabelle take that stuff? Or maybe it was the Good Neighbors. You know, the Little People. Do you have them out on the island?”
Rubens ignored her. He sat on the broad windowsill, staring through its panes at the three alley cats on the fire escape outside that were wolfing down the dry cat food that Jilly had put out for them earlier.
Rubens’s presence made them fidgety and eventually all three fled, nervousness overcoming their hunger.
Not until they were gone did Rubens finally deign to look at her.
“You’re going to have to learn to get along,” filly informed him. “You can’t just go around playing the heavy with every cat you meet, you know. Next time the window might be open and one of them’ll come in and give you a good box in the ears.”
She left him to think that over while she rummaged about in her closet for a jacket she felt like wearing on her trek back to the art shop to buy new supplies. Eventually she gave up and put on the sweater she’d been wearing yesterday. She was giving it a critical look in the mirror when she heard a knock on the studio door. Opening it, she was surprised to find John Sweetgrass standing out in the hall.
“Well, hello,” she said. “That didn’t take you long.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I meant it didn’t take you long to track Isabelle down. How’d you even know she was in the city?
Oh, I know. Somebody at Joli Coeur told you, right?” He gave her a blank look. “Do I know you?”
“Give me a break, John. I’m not in the mood for jokes. I was all set to get back to this piece I’ve been working on, only to find out that I have to go back to Amos & Cook’s to buy some more paints first—after just having been there yesterday.”
“You must have me mistaken with someone else. My name’s not John.”
“Oh, that’s right. It’s Mizaun Kinnikinnik now, right?”
He shook his head. “Is Isabelle Copley here?”
But now it was July’s turn to give him a puzzled look. “You’re really not John Sweetgrass?”
“I already told you that. Now, will you please answer my question.”
Jilly gave him a long look. She hated to think that she had somehow stumbled into that category of whites who thought all Native Americans looked the same, but there was no way she could deny the fact that to her he looked exactly like Isabelle’s old boyfriend.
“Is there some point to your wasting my time like this?” he asked when she didn’t reply.
“What?”
“I’m looking for Isabelle Copley. Is she here or not?”
“Your name’s not John?”
“Look, lady—”
“And you really don’t know me?”
“I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you. Just answer my question. If a simple yes or no’s too hard, you could just move your head. Nod for yes and—”
“Screw you,” Jilly told him, smiling sweetly. “Come back when you’ve learned some manners. Or better yet, don’t come back at all.”
Then she slammed the door in his face and engaged its two deadbolts. He knocked again, but this time she ignored it. The nerve of him. Who did he think he was to stand there and pretend he didn’t know her, not to mention treat her like she was something that had gotten stuck to the bottom of his shoe?
When he continued to bang on the door, she called out, “If you’re still here by the time I count to three I’m dialing nine-one-one. I’ve got the phone in my hand. One. Two ...”
The banging stopped.
“Three,” Jilly finished softly.
She waited a little longer, then went over to the window by the fire escape. Shooing Rubens away, she heaved the window up and stepped out onto the metal landing. Rubens immediately jumped back up onto the sill, but she closed the window before he could get out. At the bottom of the fire escape, she turned down the alley that led onto Yoors Street, hugging the brick wall as she went. Before she stepped out onto the sidewalk, she peeked around the corner. She was just in time to see the man who said he wasn’t John heading off in the other direction. He moved with a stiff angry stride that had none of the loose ambling gait that she always associated with the John Sweetgrass she knew.
This was so weird, she thought. She’d seen him just a few days ago and while it wasn’t as though they’d ever been great buddies or anything, he’d never been flat-out rude to her before. And it wasn’t just the rudeness. There’d been a meanness in his eyes that was out of keeping with the John Sweetgrass she remembered.
She waited until he turned the far corner before going back up to her studio. She’d better warn Isabelle, she thought, while running through a second act of
“Cat Trying to Escape Through Window” with Rubens when she climbed back into the studio from the fire escape. She had her hand on the phone and was already dialing the number at Wren Island when she realized what she was doing.
“Shit.”
Isabelle was in town now—probably organizing her studio at Joli Coeur. Where she didn’t even have a phone yet.
Sighing, Jilly realized that she’d have to walk over to talk to Isabelle. But maybe it wouldn’t be a complete loss, she thought as she left her studio by the more conventional method of the front door.
She’d at least be able to get her stuff back from Isabelle. She didn’t really care about any of it except for the brush. She really loved that brush.
XIII
By the time Isabelle reached her new studio in Joli Coeur, she felt as though the day had taken on a kind of surreal air. She laid the plastic bag she’d gotten from the security guard down on the windowsill and looked out on her view of the river.
She still couldn’t get over how things had worked out for her at the bus terminal. It was what usually happened to Kathy, not her. But then maybe part of Kathy’s legacy had been the kind fate that had allowed the letter to finally arrive in her mailbox yesterday, and for these packages to still be waiting for her after so many years when, by all rights, they should have been lost to her forever.
Or maybe it wasn’t fate. Maybe it was like the security guard had said: the two of them had gotten caught up in one of Kathy’s stories and his keeping these parcels for her was just a part of the story that had been hidden until now—the way the winter hid the ongoing story of the fields and woods under a blanket of snow.
How long would it take for the whole story to be laid out for her? she wondered. But then she thought of Rushkin, and of Jilly having seen John Sweetgrass downstairs from where she was standing at this very minute, and she wasn’t so sure she wanted to know the whole story. Not all ofKathy’s stories had ended with their protagonists happy, or even surviving.