She wasn’t expecting the ribbons to actually be there—dozens of bright, colored ribbons, narrow streamers of torn cloth fluttering in the wind.
She stared at them for a long time before she finally turned back to her bedroom. Dropping the sheets, she put on her jeans and a sweater, two pairs of socks, another sweater. Her fingers fumbled with the latch at the window, got it open. She gasped at the blast of cold air that burst in. Her face and hair were white in moments as a cloud of twisting snow was blown over her. Brushing the snow from her face with the back of her hand, she clambered out the window, socked feet sinking into the deep snow.
She looked out at the backyard, but there was no sign of her passage through the snow—just as there was no sign of Paddyjack’s presence in the snow that lay so thick on the fire escape. There were only the ribbons. She untied them, one by one, stuffing them into the pockets of her jeans until she’d collected them all. Only then did she return to her bedroom and shut the window on the storm.
After changing into dry clothes, she took the ribbons and laid them out on her mattress. She hesitated for a moment, looking at her painting of John. His expression seemed to have changed from the one she’d painted to one of recrimination. Shivering again, she put the painting back into the closet and turned on a light. She blinked in the sudden glare until her eyes adjusted to the brightness.
All these ribbons.
She fingered each one, rearranged them on her mattress in varying patterns, let them dry. After a while she began to weave them into bracelets, just like the ones she’d made in summers on the island using scraps of leather and cloth, sometimes vines or the long stems of grasses and weeds. When she’d used all the ribbons up she had three cloth bracelets lying on her mattress in place of the scattering of torn cloth. She stared at them, unsure as to why she’d felt compelled to do what she’d just done, then put one on. The other two she stored away in her backpack, stuffing them deep down under her sketchbook, paint box, pencils and the other art supplies that she toted around with her.
It was only then, turning the bracelet around and around on her wrist, that she tried to work out exactly what had happened tonight. What was the dream and what was real? Beyond the ribbons, was any of it real? Rushkin hunting her creations with a crossbow, the winged cat hanging dead from his belt.
John standing up to him. He and Paddyjack fleeing into the night. And she herself, both sleeping in her bed and out there in the storm. She couldn’t have been doing both. It had to be one or the other. Since she’d woken in her own bed, it had all been a dream.
Except for the ribbons.
She fell asleep without making any sense of it at all. Fell asleep with the light on, banishing shadows, and the fingers of her left hand hooked under the cloth bracelet she wore on her right wrist. She slept fitfully, waking before her alarm clock sounded, but at least she didn’t dream again that night.
VII
The ribbon bracelets Izzy had made the night before were still there in the morning, one on her wrist, the two others at the bottom of her backpack. She took them out and studied them in the morning light, sitting up on her windowsill, turning them round and round between her fingers. The interweaving of the brightly colored ribbons created a muted kaleidoscope effect, a pleasing, random pattern that was all the more enchanting when she held them up against the view outside her window, the colors standing out in bright counterpoint to the panorama of white snow that the storm had left behind the night before.
After a while she took the best two of the three and put them into an envelope. She wrote “For Paddyjack and John” on the outside. Braving the cold, she opened her window just wide enough so that she could lean out and tie the envelope to the railing of the fire escape. She closed the window and eyed her offering, shivering from her brief encounter with the weather. It seemed to have dropped another dozen degrees now that the storm had moved on.
She still wasn’t sure about the ribbons—if they meant that last night’s dream had been a true experience, with the ribbons’ appearance serving as surety, or if the dream had simply been a warning to her from her subconscious concerning the fragility of her creations’ existence in this world and finding the ribbons on her fire escape had been no more than one of those odd moments of synchronicity that carried only as much weight as one was willing to invest in them.
And really. Couldn’t anyone have tied them to the fire escape? She hadn’t looked out her window last night—not when she got home, not when she went to bed, not until after she’d had the dream. They could have been there all the time. For all she knew, Kathy could have put them there. Lord knew, Kathy could get some quirky ideas—get them, and follow up on them.
It was possible, Izzy supposed, but then all she had to do was close her eyes and she would hear the tick-tappa-tapping of Paddyjack’s fingers on his forearm, could see him sitting there on the fire escape in the falling snow, with the ribbons fluttering all around him, their wind-driven dance perfectly synchronized to the rhythm he was calling up. And then she remembered the silence, fast-forwarding her memory through Rushkin’s attack, until the image that finally lay in her mind was of Paddyjack and John, walking hand in hand, down the lane, over the snow, away ....
Izzy shook her head. No, she didn’t want to remember that, because then she’d see again the coldness in John’s eyes.
Sighing, she refastened the remaining bracelet back onto her wrist and left her seat by the window.
Kathy wasn’t up yet, so she had a quick breakfast of dry cereal and black coffee—she had to remember to buy some milk on the way home today—collected her backpack and left the apartment. Even bundled up as she was, the cold hit her like a shock when she stepped outside. She tried to adjust to the chill by shoveling the walk, but by the time she had walked halfway to Professor Dapple’s house, the cold had crept in under her coat and seeped through her boots and mittens. She was completely chilled when she finally arrived at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio.
She felt a twinge of guilt as she unlocked the door. She was actually due at Rushkin’s place this morning, but first she had to see for herself that the paintings were still safe. She couldn’t seem to escape that question John had asked her in the park.
Do you still have those dreams you told me about?
The one she’d had last night was far different from the dreams of fire she’d been having the previous year, or the more recent ones of someone looking for her, but it had still involved danger to her creations.
She was certain the paintings were safe. How could they be anything else but? No one knew about them except for her and Kathy—and of course, Jilly. But she still had to see them for herself No one was up yet at the professor’s, but Izzy was too cold to shovel his walks as well. Let Olaf do that—it would give him something concrete to grumble about. She kicked away at the drift that was piled up against the studio door until she could get it open, then slipped inside and savored the warmth.
The windows were all patterned with frost and she took a moment to admire them before she got up the courage to take her paintings out from under the table where she had stored them. They were still there, all three of them, not one of them damaged. She lined them up in a row on the lower canvas holder of her easel, just as she’d done the night she finished Rattle and Wings, and stood back to look at them. It was only then that she saw that something was wrong.