“What do you mean?”
“He’s earmarked forty percent of what would go to him as an ongoing donation to the Foundation.”
“Wow. I can’t believe he’s giving up all that money.”
“Some people would say the same thing about the painting you gave us to auction.”
“That’s different,” Izzy began, but then she shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not.”
“I couldn’t ask for better friends,” Kathy told her. She tried to stifle a huge yawn, but wasn’t successful. “I have to go to bed,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
Kathy’d been losing weight, Izzy realized, taking a good look at her roommate. It wasn’t something you noticed right away, because of the baggy clothes she usually wore. But she was thinner, and there were rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.
“Don’t overdo things,” Izzy warned.
“I won’t,” Kathy said as she stumbled off to bed. “I’m just so happy that everything’s actually going to happen.” She paused at the doorway to her bedroom to look back at Izzy. “You know, that maybe I can save some kids having to go through the shit I had to.”
But you don’t look happy, Izzy thought as Kathy continued on into the bedroom. You look dead on your feet.
XVI
July 1978
It seemed as though everybody that Kathy and Izzy knew showed up for the open-house party to celebrate the opening of the Newford Children’s Foundation. The only exceptions were Rushkin and John, both of whom had been invited—Rushkin by Izzy and John by Kathy, who’d run into him in the Walker Street subway station the week of the benefit. The house had been furnished in what Jilly called Contemporary Scrounge, because everything had been acquired from flea markets and yard sales.
“The furniture just has to do its job,” Kathy had said, resenting any money spent that didn’t go directly to the kids. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.”
To offset the battered desks and filing cabinets, Izzy and Kathy, along with a number of their other artist friends, had spent a few weeks repainting all the rooms, making curtains, wallpapering, painting wall murals in the kitchen and offices and generally giving the rooms a more homey feel. The centerpieces of the waiting room, which also housed the reception desk, were the two paintings that Izzy had based on Kathy’s stories: La Liseuse and The Wild Girl. She’d given them to Kathy a year ago.
“I’m so glad you hung them here,” Izzy said, as she and Kathy finally got a break from greeting the guests and were leaning up against a wall in the waiting room, sipping glasses of wine.
Kathy smiled. “I love the way they look in here. I know you based them on stories in Angels, but they perfectly suit what the Foundation’s all about. The Wild Girl is all the kids we’re trying to help and La Liseuse is a perfect image of what so many of them have never had and never will have: the quintessential mother figure, about to read them a story before bed. I can’t imagine them anywhere else.
In fact, they’re part of the Foundation’s assets now and I’ve written in a stipulation in our charter that says they’re always to hang in the Foundation’s waiting room, no matter where we eventually move, no matter what happens to me personally.”
“I like that,” Izzy said. “I think that’s my favorite thing about any of the arts, that we each get to put our own interpretation upon the message that’s being conveyed. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate, there’s only honest or dishonest.”
“I see her from time to time, you know,” Kathy said. “Rosalind.”
Izzy looked at her, feeling a little confused. Considering what she knew of Rosalind’s feelings about meeting Kathy, she was surprised to discover that the numena had managed to overcome her shyness in the matter.
“Really?” she said finally.
“Oh, I’ve never talked to her or anything,” Kathy explained, “but I catch glimpses of her from time to time—across a street, sitting in a cafe, walking through a park. It’s both odd and neat to see someone from one of my own stories walking about in the city. It gives me a better idea what it must feel like for you when you bring the numena across.”
Izzy really wished that Rosalind could overcome her shyness. She just knew that the two of them would get along famously. She’d often considered secretly setting up a meeting between the them, but then she’d think of John, she’d think of how Rosalind had entrusted her with her feelings, and she wouldn’t let it go any further than a thought.
“And Cosette?” she asked. “Do you ever see her?”
Kathy shook her head. “I’m too civilized to visit the kinds of places that she’d hang around—don’t you think? But I’ll bet Jilly’s seen her.”
“I think Jilly knows every fourth person in the city.”
“More like every third—and she’s working on the rest.” Kathy paused. “How come you’ve never told her about the numena? It’s so up her alley.”
Izzy shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to be selfish or anything, but I feel like everything would change if I told anybody else.”
“You told me.”
“That’s different,” Izzy said. “That’s more like telling another part of myself.”
“Are we going to be friends forever?” Kathy asked.
Izzy turned to look at her roommate. Kathy looked so serious that Izzy stifled the humorous response she’d been about to make.
“We’ll be friends forever,” she assured Kathy.
Kathy gave her a quick smile. “That’s good, because, you know, you’re the only good thing I ever had in my life that didn’t turn around and hurt me.”
“Look around you,” Izzy said. “All these people are your friends, Kathy. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“I know. But the way I feel about them isn’t the same as I feel about you.”
Izzy put down her wineglass to give Kathy a hug. “That’s because a person can only ever have one real best friend,” she said, “and we’re stuck with each other.”
Kathy hugged her back. “Stuck together. Like salt and pepper.”
“Crackers and cheese.”
“Bacon and eggs.”
“Now I’m getting hungry,” Izzy said.
“Me, too.”
Izzy plucked her wineglass from the windowsill where she’d set it down earlier; then, arm in arm, they aimed their way through the crowd to see what was left of the potluck dinner.
XVII
August 1978
A few weeks after the open house at the Newford Children’s Foundation, Izzy came back from sharing a picnic lunch with Tom Downs to find her studio looking as though it had been vandalized. There were sketchbooks, loose papers and art books scattered everywhere. The floor was a jumble of paint tubes, brushes, pencils, sticks of pastel and the like. The easel lay on its side, her current work-in-progress beside it on the floor—faceup, she realized, thanking whatever gods there were for small mercies.
She walked numbly through the mess. Straightening the easel, she replaced her canvas on it, then slowly took stock. Her first thought was that the place had been burglarized, but nothing appeared to be missing. A quick inventory of her numena’s gateway paintings told her that all were still present and hadn’t been harmed. But who could have done this?
She bent down to start putting pastel sticks back into their box when some sixth sense made her look under her worktable. There she saw a familiar red-haired figure leaning against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs.
“Cosette,” she said, the shock plain in her voice.