Isabelle wasn’t even sure she believed in fate. Coincidence, surely. Perhaps even synchronicity. She liked to think there was such a thing as free will and choice, but there were times when events seemed to be the work of fate, and only fate: that Kathy should be her roommate at Butler U. Her first meeting with Rushkin. The arrival of yesterday’s letter and the claiming of today’s parcels.
Her gaze dropped down to the bag on the windowsill. What did fate have waiting for her in here?
She had lived this long, not having what was in this bag. There was nothing to make her open the packages. No one knew she had them, except for those two security guards and she wasn’t likely to run into them again.
There was no one to whom she would have to answer if she simply put the bag in the back of a closet and carried on with her life.
No one, except herself.
She sighed then and tried to shed her fear. For it was fear, plain and simple, that made her want to hide Kathy’s legacy and pretend it had never been delivered into her hands. It was still not too late, she thought, to escape the demands of the story to which the security guard had alluded, the story into which she could feel herself stepping. It waited like massed clouds on a far horizon, dark and swollen with events over which she would have no control, a storm that might easily sweep away all she held dear.
But she could do this much, she thought. If the story was there waiting for her, she could at least make the choice as to whether or not she would allow herself to step into it. She could wrest that much control from fate.
And so she sat down in the bay window and pulled the bag to her. She took the contents out and laid them beside her on the window seat. Book and painting. She chose to open the painting first. The tape was brittle and came easily away from the paper. She unwrapped the paper, but then she couldn’t move.
All she could do was stare at the familiar painting and feel the storm clouds leave that distant horizon to come swirling around her.
Paddyjack lay on her lap.
Her painting.
But it couldn’t be here. It had been destroyed in the fire with the others. She had seen it bum.
Unless memory had played her false and that had been the dream.
There was a knock on her door, but she didn’t answer it. She didn’t even hear it.
Like Gypsies In The Wood
Every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn’t bother to do it. It is a message
in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It’s saying, “I’m here and I believe that you are
somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.
—Attributed to Jeanette Winterson
I
Newford, December 1974
As the year wound to an end, Izzy could see her life spinning more and more out of her control.
There were just too many things to get done, and trying to juggle them all left her in what felt like a perpetual state of bewildered frenzy. There were the preparations for her first solo show at Albina’s gallery. She had her studies at both the university and with Rushkin. She was trying to maintain some vague semblance of a social life—or at least see John more than once a week and not be so tired when they did get together that she didn’t either fall asleep on him, or feel too cranky to properly enjoy his company.
She had no idea how she kept everything in balance or managed to get anything done at all. Still, by the end of December, not only was she keeping up with everything, but she’d still squeezed in the time to finish three paintings at the studio in back of Professor Dapple’s house.
The studio had originally been a greenhouse, but the professor had converted it into studio space for the use of those gifted students who, for one reason or another, didn’t have any other facility in which to work. At the time that Izzy started going, Jilly was the only other artist using the place. Since it had its own outside door, they could work in there at any time of the day or night without disturbing the professor. Jilly was the one who had christened it the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio after the professor’s cranky manservant, Olaf Goonasekara, who would glower at them through the greenhouse windows whenever he happened to be passing by.
Money being at a premium for both herself and filly, they worked with very limited palettes and tended to share brushes and other equipment when they could, but even then it was tight. Still they managed, working in monochrome when they were down to their last tube of paint.
At first Izzy had thought she would find it too frustrating to create in such conditions. She’d been spoiled at Rushkin’s studio, where everything she could possibly need was provided for. But while the opposite held true in the green-house studio, Izzy discovered that those same limitations were very freeing in terms of her art. Most of the time she had to rely on her own wits to get the effects and colors she needed, and while she soon appreciated just how much she had learned from Rushkin to allow her art to flourish as it did in these limited working conditions, she also came to realize that the painting she did here was allowing her to step out from under the broad shadow that Rushkin cast upon her art.
In that sense, she found it to be a very empowering experience. Less successful was her attempt to use her art to bring otherworldly beings across from their world to her own.
She finished the third of her paintings in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. They were all three portraits of beings that were partly of this world, but partly of some other: a strange gaunt scarecrow figure with twigs and vines and leaves for hair. A tiny woman that seemed to be a cross between one of the bohemians from Waterhouse Street and a ladybug. An alley cat with wings and a tail like a rattlesnake’s body, complete with the rattle at the end. Not one of the strange beings followed the laws of nature as laid out by Darwin. And not one of them manifested itself beyond its two-dimensional existence on her easel.
And that was because such creatures were impossible, she thought as she sat on the edge of one of the long tables in the greenhouse that had originally bent under the weight of the professor’s potted plants and flowers. She looked at her odd cat, crouching on a fire escape as though it was about to take flight, then let her gaze drift away from the easel to the professor’s backyard. It was snowing again, big lazy flakes that glistened in the light spilling from the professor’s house and the greenhouse studio.
Hopping off the table, she collected the other two paintings and stood them up on the easel beside that of the winged cat. There was just enough room for all three of them on the long piece of wood that served as the lower canvas holder.
She’d done other pieces here—monochromatic studies and various sketches—but these three were the only completed works to date. She knew she was biased, but she believed they had spirit. She was sure that they had as much heart as did her Smither’s Oak or The Spirit Is Strong, but they weren’t going to come alive because their subjects didn’t exist, except in her head. There was no bringing them across from some otherworld with her art because there was no otherworld, the creatures didn’t exist, and neither did the magic that was supposed to bring them over.
How could she have been so stupid as to think it could be otherwise?
Because she wanted to, she realized. It was partly because she wanted to believe that magic could exist in the world. But it was also because she didn’t want to believe that Rushkin had been lying to her.