Memory and Dream

Like Gypsies In The Wood

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.

It was disheartening to realize that for all his artistic talent, he really was quite mad.

She smiled. Maybe it was because of his artistic talent that he was mad.

After a while, she put her paintings away and cleaned up. She paused at the door, looking back before she turned off the light. The experiment had been a failure in some ways, but at least it had reminded her that she did have her own individual talent. It wasn’t all borrowed from working in Rushkin’s shadow. And one thing she knew. She wasn’t going to give it up. So long as the professor let her work here, she was going to share the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio space with Jilly and continue to stretch her own artistic muscles, free from Rushkin’s influence, for she’d come to understand over the past few weeks that she couldn’t do otherwise and still consider herself her own woman. And besides, the hours she spent here seemed to be the only time she ever felt any real peace. The only coin she had to pay in was lost sleep.

She turned off the light and the studio plunged into darkness. Locking the door, she pocketed the key and then trudged off through the snow for home.

II

Newford, February 1975

The show at The Green Man Gallery didn’t do as well as Izzy had hoped. Of the fourteen paintings available for sale, only two sold. Both were street scenes of Lower Crowsea: competent, but indistinguishable from those painted by the many other artists who used the same locale as their own source of inspiration.

“You’re going to have to put your own stamp on your work” was how Albina summed it up.

Izzy gave her a glum nod. The two of them had retired to the back of the gallery to commiserate over a pot of tea after taking the show down. In the pocket of her black jeans Izzy had a check worth a grand total of a hundred and fortyfour dollars—her share of what the two paintings had sold for, minus the gallery’s cut. She did better at The Green Man, she realized, when she didn’t have her own show, when her paintings were just scattered here and there throughout the gallery, tossed in among the works of all the other artists that Albina represented.

“What you’re doing is lovely,” Albina went on. “It’s beautifully rendered, but it doesn’t tell me anything about you. The lack doesn’t show up so much when you only have one or two pieces hanging, but it becomes quite plain over a whole show. The viewer wants more from you, Izzy. They might not be able to articulate it, but they want a connection to you. They want to know what you feel about your subject and that’s simply not coming across with your work.”

“I’m getting the picture,” Izzy said.

The In the City review had said much the same thing. The city’s daily papers hadn’t even covered the show.

Albina smiled sympathetically. “But don’t be too discouraged. January’s not the best time for a show, what with everybody starting to realize just how much they spent over Christmas. Why don’t we think of doing another one in the fall?”

“You’d do that even though this one was such a disaster?”

“It wasn’t a complete disaster.”

Izzy pulled out her check. “No, we really had some big sales, didn’t we?”

“Actually, there were a couple of other offers,” Albina said. “I was just getting around to telling you about them.”

“There were? What do you mean, like commissions?”

Albina shook her head. “I’m talking about the two paintings that you wouldn’t sell. I’ve had inquiries on both—serious inquiries for The Spirit Is Strong.”

“What do you mean by serious?” Izzy asked.

“Someone’s offered us five thousand dollars for it.”

“You’re kidding. Who’d pay that kind of money for anything I’ve done?” Albina shrugged. “I’ve no idea. The offer was made through a lawyer. Apparently the buyer wants to remain anonymous.”

“Five thousand dollars,” Izzy repeated.

It was a phenomenal sum. The most one of her paintings had ever gone for to date was a tenth of that amount.

“If we accept the offer,” Albina said, “it’ll put you on a whole new plateau in terms of what you can ask for your work. The buyer might be anonymous, but word still gets around. If you can produce more works of a similar quality, I can guarantee that your next show will be far more successful.”

“And somebody wants to buy Smither’s Oak as well?”

Albina nodded. “I have an offer of seven hundred dollars in on it.”

“Another anonymous buyer?”

“No. Kathryn Pollack wants to buy it.”

Izzy gave her a blank look.

“She owns Kathryn’s cafe, over on Battersfield Road. She said she knew you.”

“Oh, you mean Kitty. We met through filly, who’s got a part-time job there.” Izzy paused for a moment before adding, “She wants to pay that much for it?”

“Well, I’m sure she’d offer less, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

“No, no. It’s not that. I just wouldn’t expect her to pay that kind of money for one of my paintings.”

“She used to go to Butler U.,” Albina explained, “and that oak behind the library was one of her favorite places to sit and study. And probably to do other things as well. In my time we called it ‘the Kissing Oak.’”

“We thought of it as a part of what we called ‘the Wild Acre.’”

“It’s that, too. Doesn’t it bring back the memories.”

Izzy smiled. “As if you’re that old.”

“It was over thirty years ago,” Albina said, returning Izzy’s smile. “Truth is, I’ve some fond memories of that old tree myself. I think your painting’s worth every penny of that seven hundred dollars, if not more.”

“I just feel weird, selling certain paintings.”

“Because they feel like your children?”

Izzy nodded.

“I would think you’d be more pleased to have them hanging somewhere where they’ll be loved and appreciated, rather than piling up in the back of your cupboard.”

Izzy thought about Rushkin’s studio and all the breathtaking work that was in it, hidden from the world: hanging frame against frame, stacked in corners, piled up against the walls, five or six canvases deep.

“You’re right,” she said.

“So I can go ahead and complete the deals?”

“On Smither’s Oak,” Izzy said. “But I can’t sell the other one.”

“Five thousand dollars is a great deal of money,” Albina told her. “It buys a lot of art supplies.”

“I know. And it’d pay my rent for a year. It’s just ...”

She didn’t know how to explain it. Her experiments at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio had proven to her that her art couldn’t magically transport beings from some otherworld into this one, but even knowing that, she couldn’t quite shake the conviction that John’s presence in her life was tied to the existence of The Spirit Is Strong; that as long as she kept it, everything would be fine between them.

“If you don’t want to sell it,” Albina said, “I’m not going to pressure you.”

Not on purpose, Izzy thought, she wasn’t. But it was five thousand dollars. And hadn’t Albina just finished saying that selling one of her paintings at that price would raise the selling price of all of her work? Who knew when that opportunity would arise again? Who knew if it ever would? But if she weighed her career against friendship, there was simply no contest.

“I can’t sell it,” she said. “It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the fellow who—” Little white lie time. “—sat for it. I just had the loan of it for the show.”

“Then that’s that,” Albina said. “Do you want to leave any of the other pieces here, or do you have something new you want to hang?”

Izzy thought of the paintings at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to give them up just yet. She also wasn’t sure what Rushkin’s reaction to them was going to be, since he’d made it quite plain that any work she did he wanted done in his studio. Their relationship had been going so smoothly of late that she didn’t want to throw a kink in the works. Rushkin was so quick to take offense at even fancied slights, she couldn’t imagine what he’d do if he found out about the paintings she’d done in the green-house—especially when she tried to explain why she’d done them there, not to mention the freedom she’d discovered working away from his studio in the coach house. She supposed she’d have to tell him at some point, but she planned to put that off for as long as she could. Hanging them in The Green Man Gallery was not the way to go about keeping them secret from him.

“Nothing at the moment,” she said, finally. “Do you really think any of these will sell now when no one wanted them in the show?”

Albina nodded. “They’re still good, Izzy. They’re just not as good as what you’re capable of. They may sit here for a while, but I guarantee we’ll have sold them all by the summer.”

“Really?”

“Really. So you’d better get started on some new pieces for me.” Albina laid her hand between her breasts. “But envision them from here. Put your heart into them, the way you did with Smither’s Oak and The Spirit Is Strong.”

III

That night, while they were sitting on a bench down by the Pier, Izzy tried to give John The Spirit Is Strong, but he wouldn’t take it.

“Where would I put it?” he asked. “It’s not like I’ve got my own place and I can’t really see it sharing the same wall as my aunt’s black velvet Elvis and her crucifixes. I’d rather you stored it for me.

I’d feel safer that way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He looked blankly at her.

“Why would my storing the painting for you make you feel safer?” Izzy asked.

“Because if I kept it at my aunt’s place, she’d probably throw it out. Why? What were you thinking?” Then he laughed. “Are you still wondering if I’m real or not?”

“I can’t help feeling that if something happened to the painting it would happen to you as well.”

“Like what?”

“Like if I gave it away to anybody but you, you’d walk out of my life.”

“Izzy. You don’t have to—”

“I was offered five thousand dollars for that painting, but I turned it down.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

Izzy nodded.

“And you turned it down?”

“Well, what was I supposed to do? You’re like this big mystery in my life. I don’t know where you came from and I don’t know where you’re going. All I know is I painted this piece and you walked into my life. I can’t help but think that you’d walk right out again if anybody but you or I owned it.”

“You know that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to leave you because of some painting.”

Izzy shook her head. “No, I don’t know that. All I know is that I love you, but then I get all screwed up because I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m what you see—nothing more or less.” He turned to face her, dark eyes serious, and put his hands on her shoulders. His gaze held hen. “There’s no mystery here.”

“I guess.”

John smiled. “But I have to tell you. Nobody ever thought I was worth anything before—and they certainly wouldn’t have given up five grand for my sake.” Keeping one arm around her shoulders, he leaned back against the bench once more and drew her close. “I appreciate it, Izzy.”

They looked out over the lake, watching the crowds at the concession stands and strolling along the boardwalk. The ferry made its return from Wolf Island, landed to exchange one load of passengers for another, then started back out across the water again.

“Tell me something about your past,” Izzy said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything. You tell me about the reserve and your people, but never anything about yourself “

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“There’s got to be something.”

John shook his head. She had turned to look at him, but his gaze remained on the distant horizon.

“Were you so bad?” Izzy asked. “Is that it? I wouldn’t think the less of you, you know, because you’re so good now. I could only admire the turnaround you’d made in your life.”

“I wasn’t bad or good,” John said finally. “Before I met you, I was nothing, Izzy.’

“Nobody’s nothing.”

“That depends upon your perspective. Let’s just say I was in a different story from the one I’m in now.”

“And how does this story end?”

John shrugged. “That’s not something we can know. We have to live it through and find out, just the way everybody else does.”

Only everybody else has a past, Izzy thought, but she knew there was no point in trying to take this particular conversation any further. There never was. Sighing, she snuggled against him and tried to put the questions out of her mind and be happy with what she had.

IV

Newford, March 1975

“Did you read those new stories yet?” Kathy asked when she got home.

Izzy looked up from the art-history book she was studying and felt a twinge of guilt. Even with her show over, she still never seemed to have enough time to do half the things she wanted to do. She had two papers due at the end of next week; she was behind in her studying, which was not good considering she had finals coming up in less than a month; John was beginning to complain about how little time she had for him; her other friends were starting to tell her that they were feeling neglected; and then there was Rushkin. He was working her so hard that she could barely keep her eyes open in class after leaving his studio. She hadn’t been to the greenhouse studio in weeks.

“I feel so bad,” she said. “I just haven’t had the time.”

“That’s okay.” Kathy hung up her coat and then settled into the pile of cushions by the window. “I understand.”

“No, really. I feel like my life went insane last December and it’s never recovered.”

Kathy nodded. “We should get a cat,” she said. “A big scruffly tomcat with a chewed ear and an attitude.”

Izzy blinked. For all that she was used to the way both Jilly and Kathy switched topics almost in the middle of a sentence, it could still catch her off guard sometimes.

“Whatever for?” she asked.

“I think we need some male energy in here.”

“You could get a boyfriend.”

“I don’t think so. They’re too much responsibility.”

“Oh, and a cat isn’t?”

“Not in the same way,” Kathy said. “I mean, look at you, juggling a million things in your life, and then having to worry about what John’ll think if you can’t get together with him this night or that. A cat’s not like that. They’re much more easygoing.”

Izzy laughed. “You’ve obviously never owned a cat.”

“But am I that wrong? I think men are like dogs, always in your face about something or other, while women are like cats, just content to take things as they come.”

“I think a man would say just the opposite.”

“But it wouldn’t be true. Or at least,” Kathy added, “it would only be true on the surface. The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn’t work that way for a woman.

We celebrate strength—in our partners as well as in ourselves. Do you want some tea?”

Izzy shook her head. “I just made myself a cup.”

“Yes, well. I’m parched.”

Izzy watched her roommate make her way into the kitchen. A few moments later she emerged with a beer. She gave Izzy a vague wave before going into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Izzy looked down at her book, then sighed. Time enough to study tomorrow. She got up and collected the loose sheaf of manuscript that consisted of Kathy’s latest stories and settled back in her reading spot. An hour later she was tapping on Kathy’s door. She opened it wide enough to poke her head in before Kathy had a chance to respond.

“Are you awake?” Izzy asked.

Kathy was sitting crosslegged on her mattress, doing nothing so far as Izzy could tell, merely sitting there, the empty beer bottle lying beside her on the blanket.

“You didn’t have to read them right away,” Kathy said when she saw the manuscripts in Izzy’s hands.

“Have you been rAlking to Jilly about what I’ve been working on at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio?” Izzy asked.

“Are you kidding? Sometimes I think she’s busier than you are.”

“I haven’t been around much, have I?”

“Try not at all. Sometimes I think I should file missing persons reports on the both of you.”

“And you haven’t been to the studio either?”

“What’s this all about, Izzy?”

Izzy left the doorway to sit on the end of Kathy’s bed. “It’s this story,” she said, tapping the top manuscript, which was the last of the three Kathy had left for her to read. “Where did you get the idea for the character you call Paddyjack?”

Kathy looked embarrassed. “What makes you think I had to get the idea from somewhere? Maybe I just made it up.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I suppose.”

“C’mon, Kathy. This is important.”

“Why’s it so important?”

“You tell me first,” Izzy said.

“But you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

Izzy shook her head. “If what I think is true, that’s the last thing I’ll think. Trust me on this.”

Kathy gave her a look full of curiosity.

“Where did he come from?” Izzy asked.

“It’s ...” Kathy began; then she started over. “I was coming home from Perry’s Diner one night. You were at the studio and I didn’t feel like cooking just for myself, so I went out. It was kind oflatc going on to eleven—and I was just walking along, thinking about this new story I’d been working on ....”

“And?” Izzy prompted her when she fell silent.

“And I saw him. I just happened to glance down the driveway of number twelve and there he was, sitting on the steps that lead down to Bernie’s apartment. I saw him as plain as day. All skinny and weird looking, in his ragged scarecrow clothing and that funny hair poking out from under his hat that looks like a bomb exploded in a bird’s nest.”

“It’s not hair,” Izzy said.

“I know.” Kathy paused. “How do you know? Have you seen him, too?” Izzy shook her head. “I called him over.”

“Say what?”

Now it was Izzy’s turn to feel embarrassed. She knew just how Kathy had felt relating her story, because what she had to tell Kathy was even more preposterous. But she went ahead and told her all the same, from Rushkin’s theories to how she’d gone to paint at the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio with the express purpose of putting them to the test.

“What a neat idea,” Kathy said when she was done.

“But don’t you see?” Izzy said. “It’s not just an idea. It actually worked!”

“But—”

“Wait a sec and I’ll prove it.”

She dropped the manuscripts onto the mattress beside the empty beer bottle and went back into her own room, where she fetched a couple of the preliminary sketches for her painting from out of her knapsack. When she came back into the room, she handed them to Kathy.

“Is that your Paddyjack?” she asked.

Kathy nodded slowly, her eyes widening. “This is totally amazing. What do you call him?”

“I didn’t give him a name. I haven’t named any of the pieces I’ve done there yet.

“This is exactly like what I saw. I mean, I know it could have been just some weird junkie, dressed up funny, but he was too skinny. And that face—there’s nothing really human about that face.”

“I know. I did it on purpose. I didn’t want to do another person, because that wouldn’t prove anything.”

Kathy laid the drawings down. “You don’t really think you brought John over, do you?”

“What am I supposed to think? He just appeared in my life—right after I finished the painting.”

“Yeah, but he’s ...”

“Real?”

Kathy nodded.

“So’s Paddyjack,” Izzy said.

“This is too weird.”

“But he’s here, isn’t he? I painted him. I called him up out of my mind and now he’s real. Just ...” She gave Kathy a pained look. “Just like John.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It happened exactly the same way,” Izzy said. “I painted him, and then he showed up outside the library—exactly the same as in my painting. Right down to the earring. I can still remember meeting him by Rushkin’s studio last autumn and lending him the money to buy a jacket because all he was wearing was a T-shirt and it was cold. But he said it didn’t bother him. Maybe they don’t have the same kind of feelings as we do.”

“I’ve seen guys wearing T-shirts in the middle of the winter.”

Izzy gave her a look.

“Okay,” Kathy said. “Maybe not quite the middle of winter. But some people are like that. The cold just doesn’t bother them.”

“He’s got no past.”

“That you know of. You told me a few weeks ago when you tried to give him that painting that you’re sure he doesn’t tell you anything just so he can seem mysterious.”

“Nobody knows him.”

“Everybody knows him.”

“But only because I’ve introduced them to him. I don’t know where he lives. 17

“You told me he lives with his aunt.”

“Who doesn’t like white girls, so I’ve never been over. I don’t know the address. I don’t even have a phone number for him. I never contact him. He just shows up—and it’s always when I happen to have some free time to spend with him. How does he know?”

“So what are you saying? That he’s got no life except for when you’ve got time for him? For God’s sake, Izzy. I’ve run into him myself dozens of times.”

Izzy sighed. Leaning back, she lay full length across the end of the bed. She turned her head to look at Kathy, the blanket rasping against her cheek.

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said. “I can’t believe that Paddyjack is real, but he is. And because he’s real, because I know now that I did bring him across, I know that I did the same thing for John.”

“There is such a thing as coincidence.”

Izzy shook her head. “I know.”

“Then you should talk to him.”

“I do. But he’s a master at changing topics or just not answering questions that he doesn’t feel like answering.”

Kathy leaned her head on her knees and looked down at her. “Even if you did bring him across ...

what’s so wrong about that?”

Izzy shrugged. “It doesn’t seem healthy.”

“Whoa. Where’s that coming from?”

“Think about it. How would you feel if you wrote a story about some great guy and then he becomes real?”

“I’d be careful who I wrote about.”

“I’m serious, Kathy. Don’t you think being responsible for his existence would put a strain on your relationship? I mean, it’s like I’m John’s mother or something.”

Kathy shook her head. “Sorry. I can’t buy into that. I’ll grant you that if it’s true, if you really can paint people into life, it would make you feel pretty weird. But think about it beyond John. You’ve tapped into something magic. You’ve proved that there is more to the world than what we can normally see of it. You should be filled with awe and wonder. I know I get all kinds of little tingles running up and down my spine just thinking about it.”

“But you don’t have John to think about.”

“That’s true. Maybe you could paint somebody for me.”

Izzy sat up. “You’re not being much help.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m being serious.”

“I know you are. So talk to him, ma belle Izzy. What else can you do?”

V

The next evening Izzy made her way to the Silenus Gardens, that part of Fitzhenry Park which was dedicated to the poet Joshua Stanhold. Guided by the pools of light cast by a long row of lampposts, she walked through that silence peculiar to winter. This far into the park the only sound she heard was her own muffled footsteps. A dusting of snow had fallen earlier in the evening, but the clouds had moved on now, leaving behind a sky deep with stars. Her breath frosting in the air, Izzy brushed the snow from the wrought-iron bench that stood directly below the tall bronze statue of Stanhold. She tucked the back of her jacket under her to insulate her from the cold metal and sat down. And then she waited.

She’d thought long and hard about where she wanted to meet John. It had to be somewhere relatively private, so that they could talk without being interrupted, but she also wanted it to be someplace that gave her a sense of empowerment because otherwise she didn’t think she’d be able to muster the strength she was going to need to sustain her through what was to come. The Silenus Gardens was perfect on both counts.

The first collection of poetry she’d ever owned had been Stanhold’s The Stone Silenus. She’d bought it on Kathy’s recommendation, a month or so after they began rooming together at Butler U., and then went on to get his collected works. The images of satyrs and fauns that pervaded his work spoke directly to the heart of the somewhat animistic country girl she’d been when she first arrived in the city—not so much because they reminded her of the lost countryside of her youth as that the images in his poetry seemed to lend a certain approval to the feeling she’d always had in those woods around her home: that they were full of spirits and, moreover, that they were communing with her, if she could but make out what they were saying.

Here in the shadow of Stanhold’s statue was the only place she’d ever found away from Wren Island that gave her an echo of that magical sense that otherwise she only retained in memory. So what better place to meet with a piece of magic that she’d called into being herself?

She didn’t have long to wait. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes after her own arrival that she saw John’s familiar figure come ambling down the path toward her. At least she didn’t have to wonder how he always knew just when and where to find her anymore, she thought. Since she’d brought him into this world, how could there not be a strong, if one-sided, connection between them? She certainly never knew where he was at any particular time unless he’d told her in advance.

John paused on the path in front of her. He regarded her for a long moment before he finally sat down beside her. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jean jacket, impervious, as always, to the cold, but now Izzy knew why that was as well.

“It won’t be long before spring returns,” he said after a few moments of their sitting together in silence. “You can feel it lying under the snow, waiting and expectant. Ready for its turn upon the stage.”

“Have you ever seen a spring before?” Izzy asked. She’d called him across in the autumn of last year.

John turned to look at her. “What makes you think I haven’t?”

“I know, John. I know all about how you came here. I don’t know exactly where it is that you came from, but I do know it wasn’t anywhere in this world.”

His eyebrows lifted quizzically, but he didn’t reply.

“I brought somebody else across,” Izzy went on. “I haven’t seen him yet myself, but Kathy did. She wrote a story about him without ever having seen my painting, so that’s how I know he’s real. She described him exactly like the weird little man I painted.”

John nodded slowly. “The treeskin.”

“The what?”

“That’s what we call them—part tree, part manitou. Little mysteries made of bark and vine and bough.”

“So you know about him?”

“How could I ignore him? The poor little fellow’s been lost and scared ever since he arrived.

Someone had to look after him.”

“I never thought of that.”

John shrugged. “No one can think of everything.”

A flash of irritation went through Izzy. Though she doubted he’d done it on purpose, she didn’t like to be on the defensive. Not today.

“Why did you always play me along?” she asked.

She was surprised at how calm she felt. She’d barely slept the night before and all day long she’d been nervously rehearsing what she was going to say, how she was going to say it. But now that the moment had come, all her nervousness had fled. She felt only a melancholy resignation inside, a sense that something was ending, that she was bringing it to an end, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

“Because your knowing changes everything,” John said.

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t meet as equals anymore. Every time you look at me now, you’re going to be reminded of how you brought me across from the before. You feel responsible for me. You think that I can’t be who or what I want to be without affirmation from you.”

“That’s not true. I mean, I know I brought you across, but ...” She sighed. “No. You’re right. That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

“And the funny thing is, that’s the way it is for everyone. You can decide to call yourself Janet, but if everybody you ever meet insists on calling you Izzy, then you’re going to be Izzy whether you want the name or not. It’s that way for every facet of our lives—from the way we look to the careers we choose for ourselves. We all depend on other people to confirm who we are and what we’re doing here. The only difference with you and me is that with us this sense of confirmation is more specific. You think I exist because you painted me into existence. I know that I was somewhere else, in some before, and that you merely called me over.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying you didn’t make me. You just brought me here. The way you could go to Australia and bring a native of that country into this one. There’s no difference. None at all.”

“Except that Australia’s on the map.”

John nodded. “While in the before, there is only story.”

“You said that before, this thing about stories. First you said you came from nothing, then you said it was just a different kind of story from the one we’re in now.”

John looked away, over the snowy common of the Silenus Gardens.

“I don’t remember the before,” he said finally. “I came here and I had a name in my head. You painted me as a Kickaha, so I know the Kickaha. I know their history and their customs. You painted me in an urban setting, so I know this city. Everything else I learned as our story unfolded.”

“What about Rushkin? You tried to warn me against him when we first met.

John shook his head. “No. When we first met on the library steps I just wanted to make a connection with you. I didn’t know what he was until later. I didn’t warn you about him until we met in the lane behind his studio.”

“So what is he?”

“A monster.”

“That’s what he calls you.”

An anguished look crossed John’s features. “He feeds on us, Izzy. I don’t know how, but it has something to do with the way he destroys the paintings that call us over.”

“But he didn’t destroy them,” Izzy said. “The paintings he destroyed were the copies he made, not mine.”

John shrugged. “Whatever.”

“I know my own work, John. He didn’t destroy them.”

“You thought the painting fragment I showed you was your own work, too.”

“I know. But I was wrong. I just got confused because he’s so good. Naturally if he’s going to copy one of my paintings, it’d be perfect.”

“So how do you know which he burned?”

“Do you still have those dreams you told me about?”

Izzy shook her head. “Not for a few months. Now I keep dreaming about someone looking for me.”

“For you, or your paintings?”

“Me, I think,” Izzy said; then she shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“And have you done any paintings like the one of the treeskin at Rushkin’s studio where he could copy them?”

“No, but what does that prove?”

“It’s not just that we have a connection to you,” John told her. “You have a connection to us as well.

When we die, you are aware of it. You see it happen, if only in your dreams. You used to dream about Rushkin destroying your paintings. Now you’re dreaming about him looking for them.”

“How can that even be possible?” Izzy asked.

“After bringing us over from the before,” John said mildly, “you’re still arguing about what’s possible?”

“But why would Rushkin do it? I know he’s got problems, a bad temper, but he’s not evil.”

“Why is it that you can’t picture him as evil? Because he creates such beautiful works of art?”

Could that really be the reason? Izzy thought. And was it also the reason that she let him mistreat her in ways she wouldn’t take from any other person? Had her values become so twisted around that she simply couldn’t perceive of Rushkin as a monster because of his talent?

“Here’s another experiment you can try,” John said. “Since he can’t seem to find the paintings you’ve done at the professor’s greenhouse, the next time you want to call one of us over, do the painting at his studio where he won’t have any trouble finding it. Leave it there for him to ‘copy.’ Then wait for the dreams to start again.”

“What an awful thing to say! I couldn’t do something like that.”

“Why not? Is it any worse than turning a blind eye to what he does to us? We’re real, Izzy. You might call us over, but once we’re here, we’re real. I’ll grant you we’re different. We don’t need to eat and we can’t dream. We don’t age. Physically, we don’t change at all from how we’re brought across.

But we’re still real.”

“Stop it!” Izzy cried. She shook her head and turned away from him. “You’re mixing me all up until I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“You mean you don’t know what you want to believe. You’ve no problem believing that you’re like some little god who can bring whatever she wants to life with a few daubs of paint and a canvas, but not that these creations might have a life of their own beyond your influence. And heaven help anyone who suggests that perhaps you should take responsibility for what you’re doing. That perhaps your precious Rushkin presents a danger to us—a danger that you could avert simply by accepting the truth and keeping us away from him.”

It was going all wrong, Izzy realized. She’d only come here tonight to try to get John to open up to her. She hadn’t been expecting a confrontation. She’d wanted to get closer to him, but instead they were being driven apart. When she looked at him now, she saw a stranger sitting beside her on the bench.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

“I’m not trying to do anything except get you to face up to the responsibility of your actions.”

“You lied to me before when I asked you about the connection between my painting and yourself.

Why should I believe you now?”

“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you the whole—”

But Izzy didn’t let him finish.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” she said.

She stood up from the bench, shivering from the cold that had lodged inside her—a cold that had nothing to do with the winter fields lying about them. She stuck her hands in her pockets to keep them from trembling.

“Izzy, you’re taking this all—”

“Please. Just let me go.” Her throat felt swollen and it was hard to get the words out. “Don’t ... just don’t come looking for me ... anymore ....”

Then she fled. Before he could see her tears. Before he could call after her. Before he could weave a new set of lies to replace the old ones that weren’t working anymore. Because even as she ran from him, she wanted to believe the lies. Wanted to pretend he’d never said any of those horrible things to her.

Wanted to be with him and everything to be like it had been before.

God help her. She loved him and he wasn’t even real.

Behind her John rose from the bench. He took a few steps after her, but then hesitated. He didn’t follow after her. He stood watching her go until she was no more than a tiny figure, running far down the path, a dark, distant speck against the white snow.

“I never meant to fall in love with you,” he said softly.

But she was no longer even in sight.

VI

You did what?” Kathy said. “How could you break up with him? I thought you were so happy with him.”

Izzy turned away from the window and gave her a miserable look. The sky had clouded over again on her way home and now it had started to snow once more, big fat flakes drifting down. She wished it were raining. Rain would suit her mood far better.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I just go so confused. And then he started lecturing me about my responsibility to those I brought over from this ‘before’ he keeps talking about ....”

“But you do have to be responsible towards them.”

“I know that. I just didn’t want to hear it right then. I wanted him to—I don’t know. Confide in me, I suppose. I wanted to understand, but not like that.”

“Then maybe you should have given him a copy of the script. How was he supposed to know?”

“You’re not helping, Kathy.”

“I’m sorry.” Kathy left the pillow where she was sitting and settled down beside Izzy. “It’s just all so weird. I can hardly believe any of it’s real.”

“You saw Paddyjack.”

“True. But John—he never seemed any different from the rest of us, you know? And he’s really got it in for Rushkin, doesn’t he?”

Izzy nodded. “The thing is ..... Izzy hesitated. She’d never told Kathy about the violence in Rushkin’s personality. She’d never told anyone. She knew the flaw in Rushkin, but she still couldn’t help but feel that the violence was also somehow her own fault. That if she could only be better, he wouldn’t get so mad at her.

“You just don’t see it,” Kathy finished for her.

“I guess. But John never lies.”

“Not that you know of.”

It was like talking to John about Rushkin, Izzy thought. That same confusion of, who do you believe?

“Everyone has secret landscapes inside them,” Kathy said. “There’s no way to tell how deep they go.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s just another way of saying ‘still waters run deep.’ All we know about each other is that face we present to the world. Inside we could be anything. Anybody.”

“So who’s the real villain?” Izzy wanted to know. “John or Rushkin?”

“Lover or mentor.”

“Or maybe it’s me. Since I’m the one bringing people across from this otherworld. Maybe I’m the villain.”

“Never a villain,” Kathy assured her. “But maybe there is no otherworldat least not in the sense that either of them are telling you. Maybe you’re bringing them up out of yourself.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Maybe they come from those secret landscapes,” Kathy said. “The place where we go when we dream. The place where the muses whisper to us and we bring back the inspiration for our art. Accepting magic as a given, if you can bring back inspiration, then why not an actual manifestation of that inspiration?”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“And painting a nonexistent person’s portrait and so making them real does?”

“I don’t know,” Izzy said. “I don’t even think I care. I just wish I could turn back time to before ...

before this evening ever happened.”

As Izzy’s eyes filled with tears, Kathy put an arm around her. Izzy burrowed her face in the crook of Kathy’s shoulder and began to cry. When she finally sat up again, Kathy took a Kleenex tissue from out of her sleeve and passed it over. Izzy blew her nose.

“The worst thing is,” she managed after a while, “I’ve got no way to get hold of him so I can’t even tell him I was wrong, or that I’m sorry or anything.”

“If he loves you, he’ll be back.”

Izzy shook her head. “You don’t understand. I called him a liar. He told me once that his word was the only currency he had that was of any worth. He’s got too much pride to come back to me. Don’t you see? I’m never going to see him again. I told him not to ever see me again.”

When she started to cry again, Kathy drew her back into her arms.

“Oh, ma belle Izzy,” she said, the words getting lost in Izzy’s hair. “What are we going to do for you?”

This time when she stopped crying, Izzy let her roommate lead her into her bedroom.

“Do you want me to keep you company for a while?” Kathy asked.

Izzy shook her head. “Could you ... could you take the painting out of my closet and lean it up against the wall where I can see it?”

Kathy looked in the closet and found The Spirit Is Strong standing in among a stack of papers and hardwood panels.

“Are you sure this is such a good idea?” she asked as she pulled it out. “It’s all I’ve got left of him.”

After propping the painting up against the wall, Kathy stood there for a long moment before kneeling down beside Izzy’s mattress. She smoothed the hair back from Izzy’s brow and gave the exposed skin a kiss.

“Call me if you need anything,” she said.

Izzy nodded. She waited until Kathy had left the room; then she pressed her face into her pillow and started to cry once more. It took her a long time to fall asleep; when she did, she found no comfort in dream.

It began innocuously enough. She was outside, walking through the falling snow, the whole city muffled in silence. Even when a cab passed her on the street, the sound of its motor was muted. No one else seemed to be abroad, a rare occurrence in this part of town. Even when the deep frosts settled onto the city, there were always one or two hardy souls to be found out and about on Waterhouse Street.

But tonight she had it to herself. She walked down Waterhouse to Lee Street. Perry’s Diner was closed, the windows dark. Only the neon sign was lit above the front door. When she looked up and down Lee, there were no cars, no pedestrians. The clubs, the restaurants and stores were all closed. The snow continued to fall, thick and fast. Underfoot it was gathering into lazy drifts that spun across the width of the street, the snow pushed and whirled in small dervishing twisters by a rising wind.

She didn’t know why she turned into the alleyway just past the diner. Her feet seemed to know where they wanted to go and she was content to follow, but her complacency died in her chest when she entered the mouth of the alley and looked down its length. There, on the landing of a fire escape that seemed to have been taken directly from her painting, was the winged cat. But it wasn’t the presence of the cat that woke the sudden terror in her. At the bottom of the fire escape, half-hidden by the swirling snow, a squat hooded figure holding a cross-bow was creeping up its metal steps. The cat watched the figure rise up toward it, the tip of its tail flicking nervously with a rattling sound.

“No!” Izzy cried.

But she was too late. Before the word left her throat, the crossbow had been fired. Its shaft plunged into the cat’s chest just as it was spreading its wings in flight. The impact of the blow drove it back against the side of the fire escape. Izzy stared in horror. The crossbow shaft protruded from the tiny creature’s chest—a stiff, unnatural additional limb. There was no blood. Just the limp form of the cat, sprawled in the snow. A living, breathing piece of magic reduced to dead flesh. And the figure, head turning now toward Izzy, features hidden under the shadow of its hood.

Izzy fled. She ran down Lee Street, stumbling through the snow, until she collapsed in the doorway of a grocer’s. There she pressed her face against the cold glass of the display window, her eyes open wide, because if she closed them, the winged cat’s death would play out again in her mind’s eye. She tried to think of something else, but that only brought John back to mind. John. The wild skeltering of her thoughts slowed down as something occurred to her. She remembered something he’d said to her earlier in the evening and heard his voice repeating it now as clearly as if he were standing right beside her instead of only in her memory.

Do you still have those dreams you told me about?

Izzy straightened up from the window. She looked out at Lee Street through the falling snow.

Dreams. This was just a dream. An awful, horrible dream, but that was all. The winged cat wasn’t dead because the painting was safe in the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio where no one could harm it. No one even knew it existed, except for Kathy, and she’d only learned about it tonight.

Standing up, Izzy made her way back out onto the sidewalk. There was no real danger to anyone she’d brought across from John’s before. This was only happening because John had woken the fear of it in her, not because she was dreaming her creations’ actual deaths. It was all “what if”—her mind playing out her fears while she was safely asleep in her bed and the paintings were hidden away, three of them in the greenhouse, John’s in her bedroom.

She started back toward the alleyway. It was harder going because the wind was against her and the snow on the pavement seemed to have risen another foot since she’d fled down it what seemed like only moments before. Her earlier footprints were already filled, the drifts stretching smooth and unmarred.

When she reached the alley and looked down its length to the fire escape, there was no sign of either the winged cat’s corpse or the strange little hooded man with the crossbow.

Turning, she made her way past the diner and started back up Waterhouse Street once more. Just a dream, she told herself as the wind got in under her coat. Her feet felt like blocks of ice in her boots, her cheeks bright red with the cold. But weren’t you supposed to wake up from a dream, once you knew you were dreaming?

She had to laugh at herself. Yeah, right. It wasn’t as though there were rules to dreaming. Dreams were the place where anything could happen. You could play out your fears, or live out a fantasy, but none of it was real. And it all happened at its own pace. It wasn’t as though you could control what you dreamed. She’d heard of people who could, but she’d always put that down to their simply having a good imagination. They weren’t really controlling their dreams—they’d simply convinced themselves that daydreams were real dreams.

The next time she went to the library, she decided, she’d pick up a book on dreaming. Maybe she should just do that now. Dream herself walking over to the Lower Crowsea Public Library and checking out a book. She could dream herself reading it and who knows what her subconscious would make it say. Except, knowing her luck, she’d also dream that the librarian at this time of night—never mind that in the real world the library wasn’t open past nine—was Professor Dapple’s unpleasant manservant. He’d probably hit her on the head with the book, rather than let her take it out.

She became aware of a sound then, realizing that she’d been hearing it for some time—it just hadn’t registered until now. Tick-tappa-tappa-tick-tick-tappa-tick ...

It was like the sound of sticks, rhythmically clacking against each other. Simple wooden clappers. It was odd to hear them here, ticking and tapping so clearly in the hush that the snowfall had placed upon the city.

... tick-tick-tappa-tick-tappa-tappa ...

She hesitated for a moment, then followed the strange sound. It led her down the driveway where Kathy had first seen Paddyjack—now that she had read Kathy’s story, the little man would always be Paddyjack to her. The snow was even deeper here, in between the buildings, and she found herself wishing for the snowshoes that she used to wear back home on the island when she went exploring in the winter fields. As it was, she made her slow way down to the end of the driveway to where a ramshackle garage leaned precariously against its neighbor. In the summer it was overhung with grapevines; tonight it was the heavy snowfall that blurred its shape.

Still following the curious tick-tappa-ticking, she slogged through the narrow path between the two garages and out onto the old carriage lane that lay behind the buildings of Waterhouse Street, separating its properties from the ones on the street one block north. The lane was choked with thigh-high drifts, but Izzy forced her way through them until the lane took her to just behind the building where she and Kathy lived.

Thinking of the little creature from her painting as she had been earlier, she wasn’t at all surprised to find that it was him making the tick-tappa sound. He was crouched up on the fire escape beside her bedroom window, tapping the knobby twiglike fingers of his right hand against the forearm of his left arm.

The railings of the fire escape had all been festooned with torn lengths of long narrow strips of cloth that seemed to have been dyed from a palette of bright primary and secondary colors. Red and yellow and blue. Orange and green and violet. Attached to the fire escape, they were like the streamers of some Maypole gone all askew, fluttering and dancing in the wind as if they were actually keeping time to the strange, almost melodic rhythm that Paddyjack was calling up, fingers rap-a-tapping against his arm.

Tick-tappa-tappa-tick-tick-tappa-tick ...

Izzy was enchanted—by both the scene and the sound. She felt just as if she’d stepped into some winter fairy tale, courtesy of her own and Kathy’s imaginations, rather than the more traditional ones collected by Lang or Grimm. The little treeskin’s presence seemed all the more precious for being here in the middle of the city, with the snowy winds blowing and the streets all hushed except for the lovely music he woke, fingers on limb.

... tick-tick-tappa-tick-tappa-tappa ...

Now if she could only figure out what he was doing. Though why should he have to be doing anything? she immediately asked herself: Couldn’t what he was doing be as natural as birdsong in the spring, the cicada in summer, the geese flying overhead on a crisp autumn day?

Granted, she thought. But then why appear outside her bedroom window? Why the ribbons?

She wondered if he’d talk to her—if he could even talk. Perhaps the only sound he could make was the rhythm he played on his body.

There was only one way to find out.

The small metal gate leading into the backyard behind her building was too bogged down in snowdrifts to open properly, so she moved toward the short chainlink fence separating the lane from the yard, planning to climb over it. And then, hands on the metal bar that ran along the top of the fence, she saw him again—the little hooded figure with his crossbow, creeping along the side of the building where the snow was less deep.

Not this time, she thought, hauling herself over the fence. Her heartbeat went into double-time as she floundered through the snow. She opened her mouth to cry out a warning to Paddyjack, but before she could make a sound, his rescue was taken out of her hands.

Another figure appeared behind the first, leaping upon the hooded man and wresting the crossbow from his grip. It was John, Izzy realized, as he tossed the crossbow into the deep snow of the backyard.

The hooded figure threw a punch at him, but John easily deflected the blow. He struck back, dropping the man to his knees.

The whole scuffle took place in a strange silence. When John had leapt on the hooded man, Paddyjack had left off his tick-tappa-tapping. Now he clambered quickly down the fire escape. The snow didn’t seem to slow either him or John down. It was almost as though they could walk over its surface, they moved with such ease.

“John!” Izzy cried, when she realized that the two were leaving.

He turned to look at her and the coldness in his eyes struck a deeper chill in Izzy than might have any amount of wind and snow. He held her gaze for a long moment before he turned away again. Taking Paddyjack by the hand, he led the little treeskin off into the night, leaving Izzy alone in her backyard.

Alone with the snow and the storm—and the hooded man, who had made it back onto his feet once more. Except his hood had fallen back from his face and now she could see that it was Rushkin standing there by the side of her building. Rushkin with the stiff corpse of a winged cat hanging from his belt.

Rushkin glowering at her with all the fury of one of his towering rages distorting his features. When he started for her, Izzy scrambled backward in the snow, trying to get away, but her legs were all entangled and she—

—woke in her bed with the sheets all wound about her legs, her breath coming in sharp, sudden gasps. The T-shirt she was wearing clung damply to her skin. She stared wild-eyed about her bedroom, expecting Rushkin to come lurching out of the shadows at any moment, crossbow in hand. But there was no one waiting for her in the darkness—only her painting of John.

She looked at it and her chest went tight. Just a dream, she told herself, as she had earlier, when she was dreaming that she was out wandering on snowy Lee Street. But the look in John’s eyes before he left with Paddyjack remained imprinted in her memory. The coldness of it. And behind that coldness, the hurt, the ache that twinned her own, all wrapped around with an unfamiliar anger that she’d never seen in him before.

I put that there, she thought before remembering again that it was only a dream. But it had all seemed so very real.

Izzy slowly disentangled her legs from the sheets, then wrapped them around her as she began to shiver. She pulled the sheets free from the end of her mattress and got up, trailing them behind her as she made her way to the window. She went to look at the night and the snow outside her window, to tear her gaze away from the painting at the foot of her mattress and all the hurt that looking at it called up in her.

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.

Paddyjack was fine, but her fanciful ladybug with its tiny human face and the winged cat had undergone a significant change since the last time she’d looked at them. Both paintings had lost the vitality she remembered them having. The main figures seemed to blend into the background now, and all the highlights and contrasts that had made them come alive were gone, diminishing their sense of presence.

The colors had gone from vibrant to muddy and even the compositions themselves seemed to suffer.

She wished now that she had shown them to someone else before. It was too easy to believe that she simply hadn’t gotten them right in the first place, despite her memory to the contrary. But paintings didn’t lose their vitality just like that. Oils didn’t lose their vibrancy and become dulled in such a way over the passage of a couple of months.

An image flashed in her mind: the small hooded figure with his crossbow. Firing. The quarrel striking the winged cat where it was perched on the fire escape and driving it back against the wall with the force of its impact ....

Just a dream, she told herself.

But her fingers strayed to the bracelet on her wrist.

No, she thought. Even if Rushkin were responsible, even if he had been out there in the storm last night, hunting down her creations, how could she have dreamed about it happening? She wasn’t clairvoyant—not even close. Except ... bringing her creations over in the first place, that was an act of magic all in itself. If that was possible, then why not something else? If the borders of reality were going to tear, why should they tear along some tidy little perforation? This was possible now, but this was still impossible—everything neatly contained within its own particular box, changed, perhaps, but still safe, still contained.

If only she had someone to help her understand the perimeters of this new world she found herself in, someone to show her which parts she could still count on and which had changed. But the only person she’d had was John, and she’d driven him away. Even though his conversations could be so ambiguous, she still felt certain that he meant her no harm. There was no one else she could trust—no one with the necessary knowledge. In the magical borderland she now found herself in there was only John. John and Rushkin.

She saw the crossbow quarrel again, the flash of its feathers before it plunged into the winged cat’s chest ....

It was just a dream, she told herself; as though repetition would make it true. The paintings in front of her seemed to say otherwise, but she didn’t know what to think anymore. Rushkin was the one who had shown her how to bring her creations across from the otherworld in the first place. Why should he mean them harm? Why should he mean her harm?

In the end, she realized she had no one else to whom she could turn. She left her paintings on the easel and locked up the studio, trudging off through the cold and the snow to the coach house, where Rushkin would be waiting for her. He’d be angry, yes, but only because she was late, she told herself. He wasn’t her enemy. He might be John’s, but Rushkin had taught her too much, he had too much light inside himself that he was willing to share with her, for Izzy to be able to consider him her enemy as well.

But anger was an understatement, Izzy realized as she stepped out of the cold into Rushkin’s coach-house studio. Rushkin was in one of his rages. She started to back out the door before he could hit her, but he was too quick. He grabbed her by one arm and spun her back into the studio. When he let go, Izzy floundered for balance and crashed into her easel, falling to the floor with it under her.

“How dare you spy on me?” he shouted.

He crossed the room as Izzy tried to get back to her feet, but the straps of her backpack had gotten entangled with her easel and she couldn’t free herself in time. Rushkin kicked at her, the toe of his shoe catching her first in the thigh, then in the stomach, then on the side of her head. She cried out from the pain.

“You filthy little sneak!” Rushkin cried. “After all I’ve done for you.”

He continued to kick at her. When she finally got herself free from her backpack and tried to rise, he hit her with his fists, driving her back down again. Finally all she could do was curl up into as small a ball as she could make of herself and try to ride out the storm of his anger. Rushkin ranted and flailed at her, hitting his fists against the sides of the easel as often as he hit her. She could make no sense of what the betrayals were that he was shouting about. After a while, she didn’t care. All she wanted was for the hurting to stop. But then, when his rage finally did run its course, he fell to his knees in front of her and began to weep.

“Oh no, Isabelle,” he moaned. “What have I done? What have I done? How can you ever forgive me ...”

No, Izzy thought. There’ll be no forgiveness this time. But she couldn’t seem to talk. Her mouth was swollen, her lips bruised. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache. Every breath she took woke a piercing stitch of pain in her side.

With fumbling fingers she pushed herself away from the easel and tried to stand. She only got as far as her knees. She crouched there on the floor, regarding Rushkin through a flood of tears, both of them kneeling as though they were supplicants in a church of pain.

“Go,” he told her in a broken voice. “Get away. Now. While you can. Before the madness takes hold of me again.”

She wanted to move, but it hurt too much. “I ... I can’t ....”

She flinched when he rose to his feet and reached for her. He hauled her up and half carried, half dragged her toward the door. The gust of cold air that hit her face when he opened the door helped to revive her a little, but everything seemed to spin in her sight as he pushed her outside. She fell in the snow on the landing, unable to make her way down the stairs. When the door opened behind her again, she ducked her head, but not in time.

“Go!” Rushkin cried, and he flung her backpack at her.

The weight of it hitting her was enough to knock her away from the landing and she went tumbling down the stairs with only the snow to cushion her fall as she hit the various steps on her way down. The fall seemed to take forever, but finally she reached the bottom. She lay there in the snow, trying to breathe as shallowly as she could to stop the fierce pain in her side. She looked up when the door slammed above her, but her vision was so blurred that she couldn’t see a thing.

She pulled herself up into a sitting position by grabbing hold of the bottom rail, then bent over again to vomit up the remains of her breakfast. Her head drooped until it was almost touching the foul-smelling puddle. It seemed hours before she could move once more. She shivered as much from the cold as from shock and finally managed to make it to her feet.

She didn’t think she’d ever make it home. She fell three times on the way, but no one helped her.

Everyone who passed by stepped around her, avoided looking at her. They probably thought she was drunk, or stoned. Whenever she could get up and move, she stumbled along, holding on to the sides of buildings with one hand, dragging her backpack with the other. She didn’t know why she didn’t just leave it behind, but she couldn’t seem to open her hand enough to let it fall. Thoughts were too hard to form clearly, but she got the strange idea that if she let go of the backpack, she’d be letting go of everything. She’d never get home, never survive, never stop hurting.

So she clutched her backpack and dragged herself along, one painful step at a time.

VIII

Kathy was in her bedroom, working on a new story, when a weak thumping on the front door of the apartment brought her out to investigate the source of the sound. She opened the door and at first didn’t recognize the small figure leaning up against the doorjamb, arms wrapped around herself, backpack trailing onto the ground by her feet. It wasn’t until Izzy lifted her head that Kathy realized who it was. It took her a moment longer for Izzy’s battered condition to register on her.

“Sorry,” Izzy mumbled. “Couldn’t ... find ... my key ....”

“My god!” Kathy cried. “What happened to you?”

Izzy tried to focus as three or four images of her roommate’s face did a slow spin in her blurry gaze.

All the Kathys looked worried, so she attempted a smile to assure them that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that she just wanted to have a bit of a lie down, really, and then she’d be fine, but her lips were so stiff from the cold, so bruised and swollen from the beating and subsequent falls, that after those first few words she couldn’t do much more than speak in monosyllables.

“Got ... got mugged,” she managed.

Now why did she say that? she found herself wondering. Why didn’t she just tell the truth? But what was the truth? The harder she tried, the less she could remember of what had happened. Memory and last night’s dreams were all mixed up in her head. Rushkin and John and Paddyjack. Rushkin attacking her, Rushkin attacking Paddyjack, John attacking Rushkin. Crossbow quarrels and dead cats with wings and ribbons fluttering in a crazy pattern that sounded like someone going tap-tap-tap against a hollow stick. Falling down a flight of stairs into the snow. Had that been her, or Paddyjack? Or both of them?

‘just need ... need to ... to lie down,” she mumbled through her swollen lips. “Tha’s all.”

And then she collapsed into Kathy’s arms.

As Kathy carefully pulled her into the apartment and stretched her out on the carpet, Izzy’s fingers finally relaxed enough to let go of her backpack. What happened next took place in a blur of disjointed images and sounds. Izzy kept fading in and out of consciousness, feeling like someone working a faulty radio dial who couldn’t quite tune into the station she was looking for. She heard Kathy on the phone.

She thought she remembered riding in the ambulance. She was sure she’d been lucid while the doctor was talking to her, but then why had the doctor looked exactly like Jilly? She closed her eyes so that she only had to listen.

“—couple of cracked ribs, multiple bruises, mild concussion,” the Jilly/doctor was saying in a Pakistani accent.

It was like she was ticking off items on a grocery list, Izzy thought. Standing inside Injuries ‘R.’ Us, saying, And yes, I’ll have one of those broken arms, too, but only if they’re fresh.

“You say she was mugged?” the doctor went on.

“That’s what she said.”

Kathy’s voice, responding. It sounded as though it came from very far away. The other side of the room. The other side of the city.

“Have you spoken to the police?”

“God, I hadn’t even thought of it. Is she going to be okay?”

“We’d like to keep her in for observation overnight, but I think with a little rest she’ll soon be back on her ...”

The station in Izzy’s head faded out again. It went to static, then blank. The next time she woke up she was in a hospital room. She stared up at the white-tiled ceiling and tried to remember what she was doing here. Behind her temples, a gang of little men appeared to have been commissioned by someone to dismantle her brain. She could feel the demolition ball swinging back and forth, crashing into either side of her head with a throbbing regularity. Then the image changed and it wasn’t little men inside her head, but a gang of teenage boys, surprising her in the lane by Rushkin’s studio, laughing as they knocked her down and then started to kick her ....

The mugging, she thought. That’s why she was here. She’d been mugged. She could remember curling up into as small a ball as she could, trying to shield herself from the blows, trying to survive. No wonder she felt the way she did. Every part of her body bruised and her head filled with this awful stabbing pain.

She wondered if there were any painkillers on her bedside table. Slowly turning her head, she found Kathy instead, dozing on the chair beside her bed. Kathy’s eyes flickered open as though sensing Izzy’s gaze upon her.

“How long have you been sitting there?” Izzy asked.

Her lips were still swollen and her mouth and jaw still hurt, but she could talk at least. She had a vague memory of standing in the hallway of their apartment and not being able to shape anything but the simplest of words.

“All night,” Kathy replied. “But I slept through most of it. How’re you doing?”

“Okay, I guess. My head hurts.”

“I don’t wonder.”

Izzy looked down at the length of her body, at the shape it made under the bedding that the hospital had provided.

“Is ... is anything broken?” she asked. She found she was too scared to try to move an arm or a leg.

Kathy shook her head. “Everything’s still there—bruised, but otherwise fine.”

“I guess I was lucky.”

Kathy sat on the side of the bed and gave her a gentle hug. “Oh, ma belle Izzy,” she said softly. “You gave me such a scare.”

“You and me both.”

IX

The two detectives in charge of Izzy’s case came by to take her statement while she and Kathy were sharing Izzy’s lunch. They were both big men, looming impossibly tall and bulky above the bed in their rumpled suits. Izzy could sense Kathy’s protective instinct bristle as they introduced themselves, remembering Rochelle’s experience, but the one who did all the talking proved to be soft-spoken and polite and Izzy felt there was a genuine concern behind his questions. When she apologized and explained that she couldn’t really tell them much, they didn’t seem to be particularly surprised.

“It’s all right,” the detective assured her. “I think most people finding themselves in the situation you did would consider themselves lucky to remember their own names, never mind retain a useful description of their assailants.”

Still, Izzy tried. She closed her eyes, trying to call up a clear image of the kids who’d attacked her, but it was no use. Although she could make out their shapes, their faces were all an indistinguishable blur.

The memory of their attack woke a fit of shivers.

“The important thing to concentrate on now,” the detective went on, “is to get better. Everything else we can deal with later.”

Before they left, her doctor, an attractive Pakistani woman who didn’t look at all like Jilly this time, came by to check in on her, making for quite a crowd around Izzy’s bed. The detective who had done most of the talking left her his card with instructions for her to give him a call if she remembered anything else. He also wanted to set up an appointment for her to come down to the precinct to go through the mug books, but her doctor said that would have to wait a few days. Izzy was happy to follow her orders; the last thing she wanted to do was look at page after page of pictures of criminals.

The detectives left. The doctor left. And finally, Izzy was allowed to leave as well.

She was discharged from the hospital later that afternoon. When a nurse and Kathy took her down in the wheelchair, Izzy found herself blinking like a mole in the glare of the bright sun on the snow. After a few moments she realized that Alan and Jilly were waiting for them at the front door with Alan’s Volkswagen bug. They treated her with the exaggerated concern that friends will offer to the sick, and she would have been royally embarrassed if she hadn’t felt so awful. Her headache had subsided to a muted throb, but that seemed small consolation because every other part of her body hurt every time she moved or took a breath. She was so swollen and bruised she hadn’t recognized herself when she looked in the bathroom mirror before she left her room.

“Now you know how you’d look if you put on a few pounds,” Kathy had joked.

“And gone punk with my makeup.”

“Morbidly punk. But maybe it suits you. I think the yellowish green bruises bring out a green in your eyes. And black’s always been your color.” Izzy would have given her a whack, but she felt too weak.

“Let’s just go home,” she said.

For once she got to sit in the front seat without there being a long discussion as to who had sat there the last time, and considering how much taller Kathy was, she really deserved the extra legroom.

“It’s like what happened to Rochelle all over again,” Jilly said from the backseat once they were on their way.

But Izzy shook her head. “No, I just got beat up.”

“And the cops were almost human,” Kathy said.

Izzy started to drift off as the conversation turned to what shits the police usually were. An image of her attackers floated into her mind as she dozed, but she could make out their faces now. They all looked like Rushkin, which didn’t make any sense at all. She woke when they arrived at the Waterhouse Street apartment, desperately clutching the braidedribbon bracelet on her wrist.

“Did you tie ribbons on the fire escape outside my window the other night?” she asked Kathy later, when the two of them were alone in her bedroom.

“Ribbons? What kind of ribbons?”

Izzy gave her a little shrug. “I don’t know. I guess it was something I dreamed.”

Like she’d dreamed Rushkin killing her winged cat. Attacking Paddyjack. Attacking her ....

Except the ribbons were real—she had the proof on her wrist. When Kathy finally left her so that she could sleep, she managed to shuffle her way to the window. The envelope with the other two bracelets she’d put in it was gone. She pressed her face against the icy windowpane.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” she whispered, her breath frosting the glass. “I don’t care what you are.

I love you too much to ever really send you away.”

There was no reply. John didn’t come walking down the alley and climb up the fire escape to be with her, appearing at that exact moment the way he always did when she wanted to be with him. But then she hadn’t been expecting a reply. She didn’t expect to ever see him again.

That was the second of many nights that she cried herself to sleep over what she’d lost by sending him away.

X

Newford, April 1975

Of all her friends, Rushkin and John were the only ones who didn’t come by to visit her at one point or another while she was convalescing in the Waterhouse Street apartment. A regular stream of visitors were in and out of the place for the whole of the three weeks she was cooped up—never staying long enough to tire her out; just letting her know that they were thinking of her. Even Albina came by.

But she never heard from John. She did hear from Rushkin. Though in some ways she thought he needn’t have bothered. He sent a letter that had nothing to say about what had happened to her or that he hoped she’d get well soon. Rushkin, it seemed, was having his own problems: Isabelle,

As you understand, I must go away for a time. I hope you will continue to use the studio in my absence. I have left a key for you, under the clay flowerpot by the back door.

I can’t say how long I will be, but I promise to contact you before I return so that, should you wish, you will not have to see me. If this should be the case, I will understand. My behavior has been unforgivable.

Yours, in humility, Vincent

But she didn’t understand. Not what Rushkin was referring to. Nor why John had once been able to appear whenever she needed him, week after week, for so many months, as though he could read the need as it quickened in her heart, but that he could no longer read it now.

She was afraid that she’d inadvertently sent him back into the otherworld from which her art had brought him. The painting remained unchanged, it still retained its vitality, but John himself might as well never have existed.

She vowed, in the days as she slowly mended, to bring no more beings across from the before. John had been right. Who was she to play god? Who was she to bring an innocent such as Paddyjack across and then abandon him in the unfamiliar streets of the city? But Kathy disagreed.

“You told me yourself,” she argued. “You don’t force them to come across. All you do is open the door for them. You offer them the possibility of a shape or a form as rendered in one of your paintings, but they’re the ones who choose whether or not they find it agreeable. They decide if they want to climb into the skin you’ve made for them, not you.”

“But if it’s dangerous for them ...”

“Ma belle Izzy, it’s no more dangerous for them than it is for us. For all we know, that’s the way we come into being as well, but we simply don’t remember it. Maybe we were all no more than bits of spirit floating around somewhere and instead of checking out a painting, we got to decide whether or not we wanted to slip inside our mothers’ wombs.”

“But I’m not God,” Izzy said. “I can’t assume that kind of responsibility.”

“I’m not saying you are.”

“But how can I be responsible for them all?”

“That’s where I disagree with John,” Kathy said. “I mean, it’d be no different from how it works with us. You get born and then you’re pretty much left to make your own way through life.”

“That’s not true. We have parents to help us through the formative years.”

“Not all of us do.”

“You know what I mean,” Izzy said.

“Of course I do. But the difference here is that the beings you bring into existence are already mature.

Think of what John was like. If you want to play it safe, just don’t paint any infants or children.”

Izzy shook her head. “I don’t know ....”

“Nobody can force you to do it,” Kathy said. “I’m not trying to force you. But I do think you were given a gift and to not use it, to not give these beings a chance to live—the choice to live—is to abuse that gift. Not in the same way John says Rushkin does, of course, but it’s wrong all the same. Sure it’s a dangerous world out there, but it’s just as dangerous for us and we make do.”

“But why put anyone in a position where they have to risk that clanger in the first place? Don’t you think it would be better to just leave them where they are?”

“I can tell you’re not planning to have children.”

Izzy sighed. “It’s a consideration, isn’t it?”

But Kathy remained firm in her belief. “If they didn’t want to come across, they wouldn’t inhabit the bodies you paint for them. They make the choice.”

“But—”

“Then think of it this way,” Kathy said. “One of the reasons the world’s in such sad shape is that no one believes in magic or wonder anymore. The beings you bring across could well spell the difference between the flat, grey world that most of us see and one filled with actual manifestations of enchantment and mystery. Confronted with the results of your magic, people might learn to look up from the narrow field of vision that lies directly in front of them and actually see the world they’re in and the people they share it with. When that happens, maybe we’ll finally start to take care of it and each other better.”

“It still doesn’t seem fair to make them risk their lives like that for us.”

“It’s not just for us,” Kathy said. “It’s for them, too. You can’t tell me they don’t like it here, or why else would they choose to cross over? I’ll tell you this: I don’t think I ever met anyone so enamored with being alive as John is.”

Izzy couldn’t deny that. “Okay,” she said. “But that’s still an awfully big assignment you’re setting for me.”

“But one worth attempting. I can’t think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don’t care what form one’s art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it’s not doing its job. And I don’t mean just making things that are pretty. I’m talking about confronting the problems we see and trying to do something about it. Trying to get other people to see those problems and lend their help. That’s why I write the kinds of stories I do.”

They left the argument unresolved. Izzy needed time to mend both her body and her heart. Her body mended quicker. Long after she was able to get about once more, she still missed John and was no closer to understanding why he wouldn’t come back to her than she’d ever been. He’d been so quick to read her heart before. Why couldn’t he feel her regret now? She’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. She knew that. God, she’d known it not ten minutes after all those horrible things she’d said had come spewing out of her mouth. All she wanted to do now was say she was sorry. She knew she’d always love him, no matter what he was, or where he’d come from. But she couldn’t tell him any of that unless he came to her. She had no way of reaching him herself.

In her worst moments she felt that he did know, but he still refused to return, and that was the worst feeling of all.