Rolanda stared slack-jawed at the empty space above her bed.
“A story,” she finished softly.
She heard cries of astonishment rise up from downstairs, followed by the sound of the front door slamming. She made it to the window in time to see Cosette running off down the sidewalk. Something Cosette had said earlier echoed in her mind.
That’s what we all are—just stories.
She stared through the window, watching until the girl’s trim figure vanished from her field of vision, then slowly made her way down to the Foundation’s offices. The waiting room was in an uproar.
“—out of thin air, I swear—”
“—looked just like—”
“—not possible—”
Rolanda stood in the doorway, feeling as untouched by the noisy bewilderment of her coworkers and the children in the waiting room as though she were the calm eye in the center of a storm. She looked at the painting of The Wild Girl. There was no question but that Cosette had been the model. There was no question but that the world had changed on her and nothing would ever be the same again.
She had to speak to Isabelle Copley, she realized. She had to know where Cosette had come from, why she didn’t bleed, why she had weight and mass and presence but claimed she wasn’t real.
Shaun noticed her standing there in the doorway and called her name, but Rolanda ignored her coworker’s attention. Instead she retreated back up to her apartment. She put on her shoes and a jacket.
Stuck her wallet into a small waist pack and belted it on. And then she left the confusion behind.
She walked in the direction that Cosette had taken until she realized she had no idea where she was going. Stopping at the first phone booth along her way, she looked for Copley’s address in the white pages, but there was no listing. She thought for a moment, then looked up Alan Grant. She noted the number, but decided she wanted to speak to him in person, rather than over the phone. She wanted to be able to look him in the face before she decided how much she would tell him about what had brought her knocking on his door.
As she headed for Waterhouse Street she found herself wondering if he could dream, if he bled. If he was real. Or was he another story, like Cosette, strayed from some mysterious before? He’d never seemed any different from anybody else before, but then, Rolanda thought, up until last night, she’d never looked at anyone with the perspective she had now.
IV
Isabelle closed Kathy’s journal after having read the first twenty or so pages, unable to absorb any more in one sitting. Holding the book against her chest, she stared out the window of her studio. The view was quickly becoming familiar. The Kickaha River, the neighboring buildings, that line of rooftops across the water marching up from the slope of the riverbank into Ferryside like patches on a quilt ...
Another couple of days here and she’d be able to draw it from memory.
She sighed. Her chest was tight and her eyes kept welling with tears, but she was holding up better than she had the morning Kathy’s tardy letter had arrived. Whatever that meant.
Don’t avoid the issue, she told herself. Never mind the view or how you feel. The real question was, how much of the journal could she take at face value? Was Kathy truly being honest with what she’d written in its pages, or was she merely telling stories again, this time cloaking them as fact instead of fiction?
Isabelle pulled the book away from her chest and looked down at its plain cover. She ran her fingers across the worn cloth, feeling each ridge and bump and dent it had acquired while being toted around in Kathy’s bag.
No, Isabelle realized, the real question was, had Kathy truly been in love with her?
The idea of it felt completely alien to her—though not so much as it would have felt if Kathy had confided that same love to her back in the Waterhouse Street days. The journal was certainly accurate in predicting how that would have gone over. But she’d been a different person back then. She’d even had a different name. Izzy had become Isabelle. Izzy had been almost militantly heterosexual, while Isabelle counted any number of gays among her friends. In many ways, Isabelle was far more liberal than Izzy had ever been, for all her more conservative lifestyle. Isabelle ...
Isabelle didn’t know what she felt. The love she bore for Kathy ran as deep as that she’d known for any man—deeper, perhaps, for it had never ended. Not even with Kathy’s death. And while she’d never had any yearning to be sexually active with Kathy, she couldn’t deny that she’d loved to draw Kathy’s sensual body lines, loved to be held when times were bad, to comfort in turn, the welcoming hugs, to be out walking the streets with her at night, arm in arm, the kisses of hello and goodbye and sometimes even goodnight.
But that was because they’d been friends. Because she’d loved and admired Kathy. The leap of joy she’d felt seeing Kathy come up the street, the way she’d missed her so terribly when she first moved back to the island, that, too, had been because they were friends. The best of friends. So where did the one kind of love end and the other begin? Or were there merely gradations of love, differing in their intensities and nuances, but the love was the same?
If Kathy were still alive, Isabelle could have asked her. But Kathy wasn’t alive. No, she’d gone and died and ... and left ... and left her all alone ....
The tears that Isabelle had managed to hold at bay for so long could be held in no longer. They flooded her eyes with the suddenness of a summer storm. The journal fell from her lap onto the windowseat as she hugged her knees, pressing her face against her legs, crying until the knees of her jeans were soaked. When the flood was finally reduced to a sniffle, she went looking for a tissue but had to settle for a long streamer of toilet paper that she tore from the roll in the studio’s tiny bathroom. She blew her nose, once, twice, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, eyes rimmed with red and swollen, nostrils runny and florid, face flushed.
Portrait of the artist embracing her despair, she thought as she turned away.
But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present. She remembered how Kathy had put it—something she’d said once as opposed to having written about it in a story or one of the journal entries.
“It’s a mistake to go poking about in your own past,” she’d told her. “It makes you shrink into yourself. Every time you return you get smaller and more transparent. Go back often enough and you might vanish altogether. We’re meant to put the past behind us and be the people we are now, Izzy, not who we were.”
But what if your now is built upon unfinished business in the past? Isabelle knew what Kathy’s reply to that would be as welclass="underline" Why do you think the psychiatry industry is booming and that there are so many self-help books on the market?
Maybe so, Isabelle thought. But that didn’t help her now. Her now was inextricably tied to what had been left undone in the past. It wasn’t just Kathy. It was her numena. And John. And Rushkin.
But Kathy—how could she have known Kathy so well and yet not have known her at all? Isabelle felt like Mary in Kathy’s story “Secret Lives.” There was a journal in that story, too, only it was left behind when the dancer Alicia left her lover Mary without a word of explanation. She hadn’t died as Kathy had and the journal hadn’t appeared five years later. The journal in “Secret Lives” had been lying on the coffee table when Mary came home; Alicia had wanted her to find and read it.
Isabelle had never liked that story; not because the lovers were both women—that had merely made her uncomfortable at the time—but because of