Memory and Dream

Adjani Farm

I

Wren Island, September 1992

Alan had been surprised at Isabelle’s reaction to his call earlier that morning. She’d seemed somewhat distracted, it was true, but genuinely friendly, as though the funeral and the five years since she’d stopped speaking to him had never occurred, as though she were still living on Waterhouse Street and he was simply phoning her at her old apartment, across the street from his own. When he told her that he had a proposition for her, one that he preferred to make in person rather than over the phone, she’d agreed to see him and then given him the somewhat complicated instructions he needed to get out to her place.

Wren Island was a two-hour drive east of the city. After leaving the highway, he had to navigate a twist of narrow roads that eventually became little more than cart paths, weeds growing thigh-high except for the two ribbons of dirt wheel tracks that finally deposited him on the shore of the lake. A bright red Jeep was parked under a pine tree that towered skyscraper-high, its immense limbs overhanging the shore. The only other man-made artifacts were the island’s power and phone lines and the rickety wooden dock that pointed out into the lake toward the island. When he pulled up between the dock and the Jeep, he leaned on his car horn as he’d been instructed and then got out of the car to wait.

If it hadn’t been for the vehicles and power lines, he might have felt transported to an earlier century.

There was a sense of timelessness about the narrow roads, the old dock and its surrounding woods.

Shading his eyes, he looked toward the island, but could see no sign of habitation except for another decrepit wharf pointing back to where he was standing. A small rowboat was moored alongside it.

Just when he considered giving the car horn another try, he spied a figure come out of the island’s woods and step onto the dock. His pulse quickened as he watched Isabelle untie the rowboat and get into it, knowing that within minutes they would finally be seeing each other again. Five years was a long time, though sometimes it still seemed as though it was only yesterday that the three of them were sitting around a table in one of the small Crowsea cafes, deep in conversation, or sprawled out together for a picnic lunch in Fitzhenry Park: Isabelle in her bohemian blacks, Kathy her exact opposite with a rainbow array of Indian print patches on her jeans and her tie-dyed tops. He still wore the same commonsensical jeans and cotton shirts that he had back then, the jeans always in one piece and a touch too rich an indigo to make much of a fashion statement, the shirts varying only in terms of the lengths of their collars, which was due to availability rather than any particular choice of his own.

He felt nervous as he saw Isabelle push off from the dock and head his way. Too late to back out now, he told himself.

“Whatever you do,” Marisa had warned him when he called her that morning, “don’t get into whatever it was that set the two of you at odds with each other in the first place. Don’t talk about it, don’t apologize, and don’t expect her to. And don’t go dragging all sorts of old baggage along with you.

Just take it one moment at a time.”

“But I can’t just tuck all the memories away,” Alan had countered. “My mind doesn’t work that way and Isabelle’s probably doesn’t either.”

“Just try, Alan. Deal with the Isabelle of now, not the one you remember, because I doubt that one even exists anymore.”

“I’ll try,” Alan had promised her, but he knew it would be hard. Marisa was basically telling him to treat Isabelle as a stranger, and he had never been comfortable with strangers.

The distance was too great for him to be able to make out her features, to see how and if she had changed. All that was visible from where he stood was a smudge of a face surrounded by unruly dark hair as it fell past her shoulders. He could tell she was wearing faded blue jeans and a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, so he knew that her wardrobe had expanded. Her rowing had good form, the strokes all firm and strong, but then she’d always been physically fit. It wasn’t until she came within comfortable hailing distance and turned her head to call out a quick hello that he could finally make out her features.

They hadn’t changed at all and, just like that, he could feel himself falling in love with her all over again.

For a moment he thought of Marisa and had a pang of unexpected guilt, but he refused to acknowledge it. If she hadn’t been married, if Marisa had ever managed to deal with the problems that being married entailed for her, things might have worked out differently. But they hadn’t and seeing Isabelle now, he wasn’t sure that they ever would. He realized that his heart had probably belonged to Isabelle from the first day Kathy had introduced them to each other in the Student Center and not even that disastrous day at the funeral could change that.

The funeral. A dark cloud of memories expanded inside him, and it was only with a great effort that he managed to put them away.

Isabelle reached the dock at that moment. With a few quick oar strokes, she expertly turned the boat until both she and its squared-off stern were facing him. For a long moment all they could do was look at each other. Seeing her like this brought Kathy’s death home to Alan in a way that it never had before. He wondered if whenever he saw Isabelle, he would think of Kathy; wondered, too, if it would be the same for Isabelle.

“It’s been a long time,” Isabelle said finally, and that was enough to break the sensation Alan had of their experiencing a fleeting stay in time’s relentless march from one moment to the next.

“Too long,” he said. “Country life still seems to suit you. You look great.”

“Yes, well ...”

She was still quick to blush, Alan saw. The rowboat’s transom bumped against the dock.

“Did you have any trouble finding the place?” she asked.

“None at all.”

“Good.” She gave him an expectant look, then added: “Well, hop in.”

“Oh. Right.”

Alan couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on the water. Except for riding the ferry out to Wolf Island, it might have been years. He felt completely out of his element as he got into the boat and it began to dip under the addition of his unbalanced weight. Isabelle leaned forward and caught his hand just when he was sure he was going over the side. She steered him to the seat in the stern. As he smiled his thanks, he could feel a hot flush rise up the back of his neck. Isabelle wasn’t the only one who’d always been quick to feel self-conscious.

“Urn, can I help with the rowing at all?” he asked to cover his embarrassment.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Do you know how?”

“Well, theoretically. There was a rowboat at my grandparents’ cottage ....”

“They had a place on the Kickaha River, didn’t they? I remember we ...” She paused, then cleared her throat. “We all went up there one weekend ....”

Alan desperately wanted to talk about Kathy. It had been so long since he’d been with someone who had known her as well as he had. He was tired of talking about her work, of all that was entailed in getting the omnibus published, fighting Kathy’s parents, going to court, the book’s design, paperback rights. The Kathy that got discussed then wasn’t real. That Kathy was only one small facet of someone far more important to him. But he remembered Marisa’s warning, so he didn’t take up where Isabelle’s voice had trailed off.

“Of course, I was just a kid back then,” he said instead, “and all my parents would let me do was splash around with the oars along the shore.”

He seemed to have done the right thing, for he could see the tension ease in Isabelle’s shoulders. She gave him a small smile.

“Then just relax,” she told him. “I can always use the exercise.”

As Alan tried to get comfortable on the hard wooden seat under him, she dipped the oars into the water and gave a strong pull. The rowboat bobbed as it caught a swell, then shot forward. Alan put a hand on either gunwale and tried to take her advice, but he found it hard to relax.

“Did you bring a swimsuit?” she asked.

“Isn’t the water kind of cold?”

Isabelle shrugged. “Most years it’s still fairly comfortable right up until the end of September.”

Alan dipped a hand in. The water felt like ice and it was only the middle of the month.

“You’re kidding—right?”

Isabelle’s only response was the mischievous gleam that danced in her eyes. Alan was taken once again with how easily they had fallen into how things had been before the funeral, but he had the feeling that Isabelle was making just as much of an effort as he was to make it so. For all her friendliness, she still carried an air of distraction about her and he could sense a darkness haunting the smile that she so readily turned his way.

Stop analyzing her, he told himself. Stop looking for who she was and then comparing those memories to who she might be now. But it was hard. Without their even having to mention it, the past spilled out all around them. Most of all he could feel the presence of Kathy’s ghost, as though she were sitting on the wooden planks of the rowboat between them.

To shift his mind from the gloomy turn his thoughts had taken, he looked over Isabelle’s shoulder to Wren Island. Except for the old dock and the path leading away from it up into the forest, the wooded shoreline was wild and overgrown, a setting that seemed completely at odds with the bright primary colors and geometric shapes that made up so much of Isabelle’s more current work—or at least what Alan had seen of it in the Newford galleries.

“It just doesn’t seem to fit,” he said.

“What doesn’t?”

“You—living out here. What I’ve seen of your work over the last few years seems to owe so much of its inspiration to the city—all the squared lines like city blocks, the sharp angles and the loud lights.

Wren Island strikes me as a place that would inspire you to choose just the opposite for your subjects.”

Isabelle smiled. “And yet when I lived in Newford, I was doing mostly landscapes or portraits that included elements of landscape.”

“Go figure,” Alan said, returning her smile.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “I know why I live here. I like the wildness of it and I like my privacy.

I like knowing I’m safe, that I can step out of my front door in the middle of the night and walk around for as long as I like without ever once having to feel nervous about being mugged or bothered by one thing or another. I like the quiet—though, once you live in a place such as this, you realize that it’s never really quiet. Yet the sounds are natural—not sirens and traffic and street noisc and the sense of peace isn’t short-lived. It stays with you.”

“I always forget that you grew up here,” Alan said. “I met you in the city, so I can’t help but think of you as a city girl.”

“I’m hardly a girl anymore.”

“Sorry. Woman. You know what I mean.”

She nodded. “After the fire, I didn’t think I could ever come back again.” She had an expression in her eyes now that Alan couldn’t read at all. “It took time,” she said after a moment, “but I made it work.”

The fire. For a long time it had been one of those awful landmarks around which other less important events were considered and fit into the timeline of one’s life. Before the ... after the ... It was like a divorce, or a death ....

Alan wasn’t sure how to react. He felt he should say something, but was at a total loss as to what.

Happily, the boat drifted up against the island’s dock just then and the moment passed. Isabelle seemed to shake off whatever dark mood had gripped her and managed a vague smile.

“Here we are,” she said.

Shipping the oars, she stepped gracefully out of the boat, putting one hand on the bow to keep it from drifting away from the dock. She tied its line to an old iron docking ring, then steadied the boat so that Alan could get out. He managed to do it without mishap, if lacking her easy grace.

“Have you had lunch yet?” Isabelle asked.

He shook his head.

“Well, let’s go up to the house. I made us some sandwiches earlier. Nothing fancy: just feta cheese, Greek olives and tomatoes. It’s all I had on hand.”

“Sounds great,” Alan assured her as he followed her up the narrow path that led them off into the woods.

II

The house was a converted barn standing on a point of land overlooking the lake. While forest lay thick on the side of the island facing the mainland, here it was open fields, farmland only recently reclaimed by nature. The path came up out of the thick stands of spruce pine, cedar and birch to wind its way in between ivy-covered outbuildings that were mostly falling in upon themselves. Dense thickets of wild rosebushes grew in unordered profusion about the buildings, half hiding curious stone statuary and weathered fieldstone walls that seemed to both begin and end with no clear purpose.

The barn itself was enveloped with vegetation. Ivy grew thick on the south wall, framing the pair of large picture windows that looked out upon a riot of tall flowers: phlox, deep violet mallow and sunflowers, cosmos and purple coneflowers. The garden caught both the morning and afternoon light, but Isabelle’s studio was up on the second floor in the back where another large picture window flooded the loft with a strong northern light. The main body of the structure was shaded by three immense elm trees—two on the east side, one on the west—whose age could be counted in centuries, rather than decades. They seemed to have found a healthful sanctuary here while disease had taken most of their kindred on the mainland.

The island had been in Isabelle’s family for generations, but had only ceased to be a working farm at the end of the seventies, upon her father’s death. When her mother moved to Florida to live with her sister, she had left the island in Isabelle’s care. The farmhouse itself had burned down during the first year Isabelle had moved back to the island, and she had opted to convert the bam into a house and studio, rather than rebuild the original house. All that remained of her childhood home was a tall fieldstone fireplace rising out of a hill of sumac and raspberry bushes.

Alan had only been out to the island once before the night of the fire, so Isabelle gave him a brief tour of the grounds and the remodeled barn before she served him lunch in the kitchen area overlooking the garden and lake. He made suitably appreciative comments where appropriate and she found the whole visit to be proceeding in a remarkably friendly fashion, considering the terms on which they’d parted.

Alan looked about the same as he always had, and being with him like this made Isabelle realize how much she’d missed his easy company. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who had refused to see Kathy when she was in the hospital, who’d said such terrible things to her at Kathy’s funeral.

But people dealt with their grief in different ways, she realized. She knew how much Alan had cared for Kathy. He probably hadn’t been able to face seeing her on her deathbed. He’d probably gone a little crazy—she knew she had—and that was what had made him act the way he had at the funeral. If only they could have comforted each other, instead of allowing things to have gone the way they did.

Sitting across the table from him, she fingered the small, flat key in the pocket of her jeans and remembered what Kathy had written in her letter about the contents of the locker it would open.

This is what I’m leaving for you. For you and Alan, if you want to share it with him.

She wanted to show him the key, to tell him about the letter, but something held her back. She felt comfortable with him, certainly, but there was still a surreal edge to the afternoon that left her feeling oddly distracted and more than a little confused. Parting on such bad terms as they had, she was hard put to understand why she was so happy to see him. And then there was the presence of Kathy’s ghost—all those memories that seeing him called up in her mind. It made for a strange and eerie brew that stirred and churned inside her, with the source of much of its disquiet, she knew, being due to the strange coincidence of Alan’s having called her after all these years—less than twenty-four hours after she’d received Kathy’s long-lost letter. It seemed too pat. It seemed almost .. arranged.

So she said nothing. Instead, she waited to hear the proposition that had brought him all the way out here to see her. When she realized what he wanted from her, all it did was further muddy the waters and leave her feeling more confused than ever.

“I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I just couldn’t.”

“But—”

“You know how much I love Kathy’s stories,” she added, “but I don’t paint in an illustrative style anymore. I’m really the wrong person for this book—

though I think it’s a wonderful idea. I can’t believe that those stories have been out of print for as long as they have.”

“But the money—”

“You couldn’t offer me enough to do it. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t understand. It’s not about making money for us,” Alan said.

Isabelle studied him for a long moment. “Of course,” she said. “I should have known that. It never has been about money for you, has it? Maybe that’s why you’ve had so much success.”

The three slim volumes of Kathy’s shortstory collections had put Alan’s East Street Press on the literary map. Specializing as it had on illustrated shortstory and poetry collections by local writers and artists, the press had been considered to be nothing more than one more regional publisher until the New York Times review of Kathy’s first collection started a bidding war among paperback publishers and the final mass-market rights had gone for two hundred thousand dollars—an astonishing sum for a collection of literary fairy tales.

They were new stories, her own stories, set in Newford’s streets. But there was magic in them. And faerie. Which hardly made them bestseller material.

But surprisingly, the book had surpassed all of the paperback publishers’ expectations; as had the two subsequent volumes—still published first by the East Street Press in handsome illustrated volumes, but distributed nationally by one of the major houses who had also taken an interest in the other books that Alan had produced. Kathy’s collections had spawned two plays, a ballet, a film and innumerable works of art. Kathy hadn’t exactly become a household name, but her literary posterity had certainly been assured.

Interest in the fourth collection had been high, but then Kathy died, throwing her estate into the legal wrangle that had now lasted five years. And for five years Kathy’s books had only been available in libraries and secondhand stores.

“So what is it about?” she asked. “Besides getting the stories back into print and raising some money for the Foundation?”

“Remember how Kathy was always talking about establishing an arts court for street kids? A house made up of studio space where any kid could come to write or draw or paint or sculpt or make music, all supplies furnished for them?”

Isabelle nodded. “I’d forgotten about that. She used to talk about it long before she became famous and started making all that money.”

And then, Isabelle remembered, when Kathy did have the money, she’d been instrumental in establishing the Newford Children’s Foundation, because she’d realized that first it was necessary to deal with the primary concerns of shelter and food and safety. She hadn’t forgotten her plans for the children’s Art Court, but she’d died before she could put them into practice.

“That’s what this money is going to do,” Alan said.

You don’t understand what you’re asking of me, Isabelle wanted to tell him, but all she could say was, “I still can’t do it.”

“Your depictions of her characters were always Kathy’s favorites.”

“I only ever did the two.”

Two that survived, at least. They hung in the Foundation’s offices—in the waiting room that was half library, half toy room.

“And they were perfect,” Alan said. “Kathy always wanted you to illustrate one of her books.”

“I know.”

And Kathy had never asked her to, not until just a few weeks before she died. “Promise me,” she’d said when Isabelle had come to see her at the Gracie Street apartment, the last time Isabelle had seen Kathy alive. “Promise me that one day you’ll illustrate one of my books.”

Isabelle had promised, but it was a promise she hadn’t kept. Fear prevented her from fulfilling it. Not the fear of failure. Rather, it was the fear of success. She would never again render a realistic subject.

Kathy had always seemed to understand—until right there at the end, when she’d chosen to forget. Or maybe, Isabelle sometimes thought, Kathy had remembered too well and the promise had been her way of telling Isabelle that she had nude a mistake in turning her back on what had once been so important to her.

“Why does it have to be me?” she asked, speaking to her memories of Kathy as much as to Alan.

“Because your art has the same ambiguity as Kathy’s prose,” Alan replied. “I’ve never seen another artist who could capture it half as well. You were always my first choice for every one of Kathy’s books.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Kathy didn’t want you to. She said you’d come around in your own time, but we don’t have that kind of time anymore. Who knows what’s going to happen when the Mullys take me back to court? We have to do this now, as soon as we can, or we might never have the opportunity again.”

“It’s been so long since I’ve done that kind of work ....”

“It’ll just be a cover,” Alan assured her, “and a few interior illustrations. I’d take as many as you’ll do—even one per story—but I’ll settle on a minimum of five. We can combine whatever new pieces you do with the two hanging in the Foundation’s offices. That should be enough.”

Just a cover. Just a few interiors. Except art was never “just” anything. When it was rendered from the heart, with true conviction, it opened doors. There were some doors that Isabelle preferred to keep closed.

“Couldn’t you just use the two I’ve already done?” she asked.

Alan shook his head. “It wouldn’t be much of an illustrated edition, then, would it?”

“Well, couldn’t you get somebody else to do the rest you need?”

“No. I want the continuity. One author, one artist. I’ve never liked books that mix various artists’

work to go with one style of writing.”

Isabelle didn’t either.

She toyed with the handle of her tea mug and stared out the window. A wind had sprung up and the flowers were bobbing and swaying in its breath. Out over the lake, dark clouds were gathering, rolling up against each other into a long smudge, shadowing the horizon. A storm was on its way, but the fact didn’t register for her immediately. She was thinking, instead, of Kathy’s stories, of how easily working with their imagery would lead her back into that bewildering tangle where dream mingled with memory.

It could be sweet, but it could be bitter, too. And dark. As dark as those clouds shadowing the sky above the lake. And the repercussions ...

If she closed her eyes, she would hear all the shouting and noise again, would see that first tiny burned body, would smell the sickly sweet odor of its charred flesh. And then her focus would widen to take in all the others.

She didn’t—wouldn’t—close her eyes. Instead she concentrated on Alan’s voice.

“I know your style is completely different now,” he was saying. “I don’t claim to understand all of your work, but I certainly respect it. I would never ask anyone to change their style as I’m doing now, but I know you’ve done this sort of work before. And like I said: this isn’t for our fame or fortune. It’s for Kathy. It’s to make her dream of the Art Court come true.”

Alan leaned forward. “At least give it a try, won’t you?”

Isabelle couldn’t look at him. Her gaze went out the window again. In the brief moment since she’d looked away, the storm clouds had rushed closer, across the water, piling up above the island. The first splatters of rain hit the window.

“If there’s anyone who’s going to be wondering where you are,” she said, “you’d better give them a call now before the phone lines go out.”

“What?”

She turned back to him. “I wasn’t paying attention to the weather,” she said.

As though the words were a cue, the rain suddenly erupted from the clouds overhead. It came down in sheets, falling so hard that it was impossible to see more than a few feet out the window.

“I can’t take you back to the mainland in this weather,” she explained. “And I often lose my phone and power in storms.”

“Oh.”

Isabelle turned and plucked her phone from where it sat on the sideboard behind her. It was a clunky old rotarydial, black, the plastic battered and scratched. She set it down in front of Alan, then rose from the table to give him some privacy.

“I don’t have anyone to call,” Alan said.

Isabelle paused. She stood a few feet away from him, her arms folded around herself to keep out a chill that had nothing to do with the coming storm. “You didn’t answer me,” Alan said.

Isabelle sighed. It was all too confusing. Kathy’s letter, the locker key, Alan’s reappearance in her life, this book that was so important to making Kathy’s dreams come true.

“Will you stay for dinner?” she asked, taking refuge in playing her role as Alan’s hostess.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

She looked at him with a different gaze than she had before, remembering instead what it was like to render the human face and form. Alan would be both easy and difficult to draw: dark-haired, square-shouldered, a sensitive face with kind eyes. His lines were all strong; it was the subtleties that would make or break the study. And if she painted him? Painted him not as other artists would, but as Rushkin had taught her? What would that painting call up from the before?

“Isabelle ... ?”

“I ... I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

“I didn’t agree to anything but that I’d think about it,” she warned him. “I know.”

Isabelle looked outside where the rain and clouds had changed the afternoon light to dusk.

“You’ll stay for dinner?” she asked again.

“I’d love to.”

He ended up staying the night.

III

Not long after dinner, Isabelle vanished into her studio to do some work and Alan didn’t see her again for the remainder of the evening.

Over the preparations for dinner and the meal itself, they seemed to have fallen back into their old relationship with only a few moments of awkwardness, and he had already berated himself any number of times for not contacting her sooner. But as soon as they’d finished washing up and putting the dishes away, she suddenly gave him a surprised look, as though she had only just become aware of his being here in her house and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. A moment later she’d muttered something about having to work and left him standing downstairs by himself before it really registered that she was gone.

Her abrupt departure left him feeling more than a little confused and completely at loose ends.

Returning to the kitchen table, he finished off the last swallow of cooled coffee in his cup, rinsed it out and set it in the dish drainer. That small task completed, he wandered aimlessly through the large open-concept room that made up most of the downstairs of the refurbished barn, pausing in front of the various pieces of her art that hung on the walls, or were set on shelves, to study them more closely than he’d had the time to do earlier in the evening.

The paintings were all starkly abstract—utterly at odds with the work he was trying to commission from her for Kathy’s book; at odds even with the titles Isabelle had given them. Heartbeat was a field of deep blue violet, an enormous painting some six by ten feet, the uniform hue placed on the canvas with thousands of tiny brush strokes. The width of the paintbrush couldn’t have been more than a half-inch, Alan judged when he took a closer look. Set just off center in the blue violet field were three small yellow-orange geometric shapes that disconcertingly appeared to pulse when he stepped back to take in the painting as a whole.

Her wood sculptures were rendered more realistically—human faces and torsos and limbs that reached out of the wood at curious angles. Many of these were painted in a style that resembled tattooing, or aboriginal clay body painting.

Though he wasn’t particularly taken with this style of art—either the oil paintings or the sculptures—there was certainly no ignoring it. He would look away, but find his gaze drawn back, time and again, to this set of child’s fingers reaching out of a square block of polished wood, that stark oil painting with its descending swirl of spinning triangles running from one corner of the canvas to the other.

Finally he let the storm outside soothe his gaze. He walked back into the kitchen area and stood at the window to look out at the rain that still came down so strongly. The flowers on the south side of the barn were bent almost in two and many of the cosmos had lost their petals. Beyond them, everything was pushed into a dark grey haze, swallowed by the night and the storm. He remained at the window for a long time, leaving only when he realized that he was now studying the art behind him by way of its reflection in the glass, which made many of the pieces appear more disconcerting still.

As soon as he became aware of what he was doing, he gave the stairs a hopeful look, but they were empty except for Rubens—Isabelle’s large orange tomcat, who was sleeping, lower body on one stair, front paws and head on the next riser up. Isabelle remained ensconced in her studio.

Alan hesitated a moment longer, then finally made his way to the guest room, at the back of the house, that Isabelle had showed him before dinner. A towel and face cloth were laid out on the bed. The room itself was a cheery relief compared to the rest of the downstairs; Isabelle had taken all of its warmth away with her when she went up into her studio, leaving behind only the troubling questions that her art seemed to demand of a viewer.

The guest room was painted in soft pastel colors and simply furnished: a chest of drawers, a bookcase, a throw rug on the floor and a pillowed window-seat with a light in a sconce by the windowsill to allow one to sit up in the bay window and read at night. The double bed was situated so that one could look out that same window when sitting up against the headboard.

He was amused to find a complete collection of East Street Press books sitting on the bookshelf and spent an idle few minutes sitting on the edge of the bed, paging through them. There was only one piece of art hanging in this room—a very simply rendered watercolor landscape, which proved to be signed in one corner by his hostess. By the date that followed her name, Alan realized she must have done it while she was still a teenager. He wondered how it had survived the fire.

The power went, just as he was washing up, and he fumbled his way back to the guest room to light the candle that Isabelle had left him against just such a contingency. Leaving it burning on the night table, he undressed by its flickering light and got into bed. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but once he blew the candle out, plunging the room into darkness, he found the rattle of the rain outside to be oddly soothing. Lying there, he let the sound relax him.

How strange to live in a place such as this, he thought, where you could be so easily cut off from the mainland by a storm. He wondered if he should have called Marisa before the phone lines went. He realized that she would have been trying to reach him at his apartment this evening and of course she’d worry when all she got was his answering machine. Thinking of Marisa woke a whole new set of confusions that he really didn’t want to get into, but happily he fell asleep before the tangle of that particular relationship gained too firm a hold.

IV

an wasn’t sure what woke him. He couldn’t have been sleeping for more than a few hours when he was suddenly staring up at the ceiling above him, eyes open wide, sleep fled.

He’d been dreaming of Isabelle. Of her asking him to pose for her and then somehow he kept losing pieces of clothing and she kept losing pieces of clothing and finally the two of them were lying on this sofa that he imagined was in one corner of her studio. He’d just put his hand on a perfect breast when he started out of his sleep with a quick gasp.

He lay there, blinking in the dark, trying to figure out what had woken him. It was when he sat up that he realized he wasn’t alone. Sharply delineated against the growing light outside the window was the profiled silhouette of a figure sitting in the window seat, legs drawn up against her chest, arms wrapped around her knees. Alan’s dream involving his hostess had made a tent out of the sheets between his legs and he quickly drew his own knees up to his chest to hide the fact.

“Isabelle?” he asked, pitching his voice low.

The figure turned toward him. She seemed to be wearing little more than a man’s white shirt, which hung oversized on her slender frame. But whoever his night visitor was, he realized she wasn’t Isabelle as soon as she spoke.

“You seem rather nice,” she said, “and you’ve certainly got her working. It’s almost time for the dawn chorus and she’s still up there, filling sheet after sheet with sketches.”

Her voice was huskier than Isabelle’s, for all its youthfulness, and touched with a faint mockery.

From her silhouette, he noted that she was smaller than Isabelle as well, and far more slender. Almost boyish.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The girl spoke over the question, ignoring him. “I’d suggest that you simply use monochrome studies to illustrate the book—that would certainly make it easier on Isabelle, you know—but I have to admit I’m too selfish and lonely. It’ll be so nice to see a few new faces around here.”

Alan wasn’t really listening to what she was saying.

“I thought Isabelle lived here by herself,” he said.

“She does. All on her own, just herself and her art.”

“Then who are you? What are you doing here in my room?”

His desire for Isabelle had fled. Now all he wanted to know was what an adolescent girl was doing in his room in the middle of the night. His visitor put an elbow on her knee, cupped her chin with her hand, and cocked her head. The pose rang in Alan’s memory, but he couldn’t place it.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why she had such an extreme change of style in her art?” the girl asked.

“All I’m wondering is who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“Oh, don’t be so tedious,” she told him, that trace of mockery caressing her words with silent laughter.

Naked under his covers, Alan felt trapped by the situation.

“Don’t you find Isabelle far more fascinating?” she added.

“Yes. That is ...”

“No need to be shy about it. You’re not the first to be taken by her charms, and you probably won’t be the last. But they all back away from the mystery of her.”

“Mystery,” Alan repeated.

Well, Isabelle was certainly mysterious—she always had been—though he would probably have chosen the word puzzling to describe her instead. Mystery seemed to better suit this half-naked girl who was in his bedroom. As the light grew stronger outside, he could see that indeed the man’s shirt was all she had on. And it wasn’t buttoned closed.

“If you’re at all serious, ask her about Rushkin,” the girl said.

“Serious about what?”

The girl swung her feet down and leaned forward, chin cupped by both palms now.

“I’m not a child,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend. I know you were dreaming about her tonight. I know all about what grows between a man’s legs and where he wants to put it.”

Alan flushed. “Who are you?” he demanded.

The girl stood up and pushed open the window behind her, which appeared to have been unlatched.

Alan hadn’t noticed that last night.

“Just remember,” she said. “What you don’t know or don’t understand—it doesn’t have to be bad.”

“All I want to understand is—”

“And it’s okay to be scared.”

Alan could feel his temper giving out on him, so he forbore answering for a moment. He took a steadying breath, then let it out. The air coming in from the window made his breath cloud briefly, but the girl didn’t appear to feel the cold at all.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” he asked.

The girl smiled. “Now that’s the first intelligent question you’ve asked all morning.”

Alan waited, but she didn’t go on.

“You’re not going to tell me?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Instead, you’re just going to stand there and catch your death of cold?”

“It’s not cold.”

She stepped down from the window onto the wet grass outside. Alan started to rise, but then remembered his nakedness again.

“Remember to ask her about Rushkin—you know who he was, don’t you?”

Alan nodded. Isabelle had named her studio “Adjani Farm” after him.

He tugged on the sheet until it came loose from the foot end of the bed and wrapped it around himself like a long trailing skirt as he swung his feet to the floor. But by the time he reached the window, the girl was already out on the lawn, dancing about in the wet grass with her bare feet, her loose white shirt flapping about her.

“But I don’t know who you are!” he called after her.

She turned and gave him a quick grin.

“Why, I’m Cosette,” she said. “Isabelle’s wild girl.”

And then she was off, racing across the lawn, legs flashing like those of a young colt, red hair tossed back and catching the first pink rays of the sun. In moments, all that remained was a trail of footprints in the grass.

“Cosette,” Alan repeated.

Now he remembered why that pose of hers had seemed so familiar. The girl could have been a twin for whoever had sat for Isabelle’s painting The Wild Girl, which hung in the Newford Children’s Foundation. Cosette would be too young to have been the model for it, of course, but the resemblance was so strong that she might easily be related to the original model—perhaps her daughter? That was a reasonable enough assumption, except it didn’t even begin to explain her presence this morning. It seemed such an elaborate charade to play on a stranger: making herself up like the model from the painting, all this mysterious talk about himself and Isabelle and Isabelle’s old mentor.

There’d been something about Rushkin—a scandal, a mystery. It was while he was trying to remember what it had been that he realized something else: the story of Kathy’s that Isabelle had used as a basis for the painting ... Cosette had been the name of the wild girl who had followed the wolves into the junkyard, followed them and never returned.

So even the name had been made up. But why? What was the point of it all?

Alan stared across the lawn for long moments until the cold made him shiver. He shut the window and returned to bed. He meant to stay there just long enough to warm up before he got dressed, but for all the questions that spun through his mind in the wake of his odd early-morning encounter, he ended up falling asleep again.

V

Isabelle sat back from her drawing table and rubbed her face, leaving streaks of red chalk on her brow and cheeks. Her fingers were stained a dark brownish red from the sanguine with which she’d been sketching—both from holding the drawing chalks and using her fingers to smudge the pigment she’d laid down on the paper into graduated tones. The desk was littered with the dozens of studies and sketches she’d been working on since fleeing Alan’s company after dinner.

She wasn’t sure what exactly had sent her upstairs. It was partly the memories he’d woken in her, not just of Kathy, but of when they’d all lived on Waterhouse Street. They’d shared so many good times then, to be sure, but those were also the years when Rushkin had been so much a part of her life.

She was always reminded of A Tale of Two Cities when she thought back to that time. Dickens had summed up her feelings for the Waterhouse Street days perfectly with the novel’s opening line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ....”

Rushkin. Kathy. Alan, here in her house. The funeral. The memories had risen up, swirling and spinning through her, until she’d got a feeling of claustrophobia—too many people in too confined a place, never mind that it had just been Alan and herself in the rambling sprawl of the barn’s main downstairs room. Alan and herself, yes, and the ghosts. She would have gone for a walk outside, if it hadn’t been for the rain. As it was, she couldn’t even remember what she’d told Alan. She’d just mumbled some excuse about having to work and bolted.

But once she was upstairs all she’d done was pace back and forth across the scratched hardwood floor of her studio until her restlessness began to irritate her as much as it already had Rubens, who was trying to sleep on the windowsill by her drawing table. So she’d sat down, pulled out a sheaf of loose paper and the old Players cigarettes tin that held her sanguine and charcoal, and decided to see if she could actually still draw a human figure, a fairy face.

It had been so long.

This is safe, she told herself as she first touched the red chalk to the paper. The result of the initial study she attempted was fairly pitiful—not so much because of her being out of practice, though Lord knew she was desperately out of practice, as that she was being too tentative with her lines. Frightened by what the images on paper could wake.

She placed a new sheet of paper in front of her, but was unable to put the chalk to it.

After she’d been staring at the paper for a good twenty minutes, Rubens stood up from the windowsill and walked across her drawing table. He gave her a look that she, so used to anthropomorphizing because he was usually her only companion in her studio, read as exasperation. Then he hopped down from the table and left the room.

Isabelle watched him go before slowly returning her attention to what lay in front of her. The corner of the sketch that was peeking up from under the blank sheet of paper she’d laid on top of it seemed to chide her as well.

Nothing would come of a sketch, she reminded herself. The sanguine images were harmless. It was when she built on the sketch, set the stretched canvas on her easel and began to squeeze the paint onto her palette. It was when she drew on the knowledge Rushkin had given her and began to lay the paint onto the canvas ....

Which a dozen or so studies later, she found herself longing to do. With a deep steadying breath, she’d finally managed to close her mind to all extraneous thoughts and simply let her hand speak for her, red chalk on the off-white paper, drawing the inspiration for what appeared on the paper from her mind, from years of having suppressed just such work. When the power went and she lost her electric lights, she simply lit candles and continued to work. The expectant surface soon filled with figures—sitting, walking, lounging, smiling, laughing, dancing, pensive ... the entire gamut of human movement and expression. The joy of rendering returned with such an intensity that it was all she could do to stop herself from beginning a painting that moment.

But it was too soon. She’d want to find some models first—Jilly could help her there. Isabelle was so out of touch with Newford’s art scene herself that she wouldn’t begin to know where to look. And then there were the backgrounds—another reason she’d have to go to the city. She should probably rent a studio there for the winter.

Still sketching, hand moving almost automatically now, she began to plan it all out in her mind. She would insist to Alan that she keep the originals at all times. She would provide him with the color transparencies he required, but the paintings themselves wouldn’t leave her possession. That would keep them safe—at least so long as she was alive. But what would happen to them when she died? Who would know how to

No, she told herself. Don’t complicate things. Don’t even think, or you’ll close yourself up before you even put down the first background tones.

With her fingers limbered, the lines were appearing on the paper as they were supposed to: firm, assured, with no hesitation. She found herself sketching Kathy’s features—not as they’d been later in life, but when Isabelle had first met her, when they were both still in their late teens, hungry for every experience that the Lower Crowsea art scene could impart to them.

She tried to think of which stories she would illustrate and realized that if she was going to take on the project, she’d want to do all of them. What would be really hard was deciding on simply one image for each piece. There was enough imagery in just one of Kathy’s stories to provide for dozens of illustrations.

She’d have to read the books again. And then there were the new stories Alan had told her about.

She’d

Isabelle laid the sanguine down and stared at Kathy’s image looking back up at her from the paper, regretting now that she had never been able to find the courage to do this when Kathy was still alive, that she’d let the broken promise lie between herself and her friend’s memory for so long. But she knew what the difference was, she knew why she’d make the attempt now.

“It’s for your dream,” she told the image. “To make that arts court real. That’s what’s giving me courage.”

Though if she was truly honest with herself, it was also to set to rest her ghosts, once and for all. They came to her in her dreams, both Kathy and Rushkin, never with recrimination in their eyes, or voices, but they left her feeling guilty all the same for the choice she had made after the fire to bury all that Rushkin had taught her.

Except for Kathy, no one had really understood why she had to put that part of her life behind her, had to find a new way to express the wordless turmoil that had always been a part of her, the confusion that could only be explained and relieved through her art. Certainly not Rushkin. And he should have.

Only he and Kathy knew the true story. She’d never told anyone else, not even Jilly, who, with her penchant for the odd and the unusual, might have seemed the most obvious choice. Jilly who saw wonder and magic where anyone else would only rub their eyes and look again, carefully editing what they saw until it fit within the realm of what they’d been taught was possible.

Isabelle couldn’t have said why she hadn’t confided in Jilly; over all those long phone conversations they’d had since Isabelle moved back to the island, they certainly shared everything else in their lives. But it seemed too ... secret. Kathy had known, because she’d been there from the beginning, and Rushkin—if it hadn’t been for Rushkin, none of it would have happened in the first place.

Initially, Rushkin’s teachings had seemed so amazing, like stepping into an enchantment, or receiving a gift from faerie. Then after the fire, she just couldn’t speak of it. The secret didn’t die, but it locked itself away inside her—just as she locked away the impulses to render realistically.

The abrupt change into the abstract had garnered her the worst reviews she’d ever received, before or since. The only one in Newford’s art community who had simply accepted the new paintings for their own worth, rather than judging them against the work Isabelle had done earlier in her career, had been July.

She’d dropped by Isabelle’s studio—half of a loft she was sharing with Sophie Etoile in the Old Market—one afternoon a few weeks before the show. Wandering about Isabelle’s side of the small loft, she’d viewed the works-in-progress and finished canvases with an unprejudiced eye.

Jilly had been surprised, certainly, but also moved by the power of some of the work. Granted, there were paintings that were noble attempts, and nothing more, but there were also some that conveyed everything she’d ever said before, only now in primal, throbbing colors and abstract designs.

After Jilly had complimented her on the new work, Isabelle had admitted her nervousness concerning how the new paintings would be accepted.

“But are you happy with this direction your work’s taken?” Jilly had asked.

“Oh, yes,” Isabelle had lied. “Very much so.” It would be years before the lie would come true.

“Then that’s all that counts,” Jilly had told her.

Isabelle had had cause to remember and be comforted by those few simple words many times as she worked to reestablish her earlier position in the Newford art community. What had dismayed her earlier admirers, she slowly came to understand, was not the new work itself, but what they perceived as the frivolity of her turning her back so abruptly on the old. Once they saw her seriousness, she began to win them back, one by one.

All except for Rushkin. He hadn’t expressed approval or disapproval. Long before the show opened, Rushkin was gone. Out of her life, out of Newford; for all she knew, out of the world itself, for no one had ever heard of or from him since.

Speculation ran rampant in the Newford art circles as to where and why he’d gone, but it never went beyond rumor. Isabelle suspected that the fire had killed something inside him, just as it had inside her.

She’d lost innocence, her sense of wonder. She didn’t know what he had lost, but she suspected its absence had put as deep an ache inside him as her own loss had put in her. For all his unsociability and sudden rages, he had understood, better than anyone Isabelle had met before or since, the intrinsic worth that lay at the heart of all things, the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was the prefect example of what it was. It was the artist’s sacred task to illuminate that beauty, Rushkin had told her, to create a bridge between subject and viewer; to craft a truthful vision that left both the artist and the audience wiser, allowing them to wield the weapon of knowledge in their daily confrontations with an increasingly hostile world.

Isabelle sighed. Sometimes she missed her old mentor so much that it hurt. But then she’d remember the other side of him, the part that swallowed the good memories with hateful shadows: his elitism and his towering rages. His small cruelties and his hunger to control. His hunger ...

As inevitably happened when she thought of Rushkin, she couldn’t understand why it had taken her so long to extricate herself from his influence. It hadn’t simply been her greed to learn all she could from him. But what exactly had been the hold he’d had on her? How could one man be responsible for so much that was good in her life and so much of the misery and pain?

She sighed again, staring out the window. Morning twilight was growing lighter by the moment. As she watched, the long shadow cast by the barn withdrew toward its foundations. The dawn chorus sounded—more muted every day as, species by species, its choristers migrated south. But at least the day was dawning sunny, the storm was gone and the power was back on. It looked to be the morning of a perfect autumn day.

She didn’t feel nearly as tired as she thought she should after spending a sleepless night. Her eyes were a little itchy and her back was stiff from being hunched over the drawing table for so many hours, but that was about it. She rubbed at her eyes, then looked down at her hands and realized what she was smearing all over her face.

“Lovely,” she muttered.

Standing up, she stretched and went into the washroom to take a shower before going downstairs to wake Alan. She’d make him breakfast before rowing him back to the mainland. But first they’d have to talk some more. She hoped he’d be able to meet her demands—she wasn’t asking for much—but even if he didn’t, she knew she’d take on the project because it was long past time to fulfill that broken promise.

She would do it.

For Kathy and her dream of the lost children’s arts court.

And for herself, so that she could try to regain defunct courage and so be brave enough to accept the responsibility of a gift she’d once been given.

Alan woke groggily to the sound of tapping on the guest-room door. He struggled upright in a tangle of bedclothes, disoriented, body and mind still thick with sleep.

“Breakfast’s almost ready,” Isabelle called through the door.

“I ... I’ll be right out,” Alan managed to mumble in response.

He listened to her footsteps recede before he slowly swung his feet to the floor. His gaze traveled to the window, but all it found was sunshine streaming in through the panes, giving the room the air of an early Impressionist’s painting, all bright yellow light with deep mauve shadows pooling where the sunbeams didn’t reach. There was no wild girl with her red hair and oversized man’s shirt.

Rising from the bed, he crossed the room to look out on the lawn outside the window. The sun had already burned off the dew, so the faint path of footprints he remembered from his dawn visitor was gone as well.

If he’d even had a dawn visitor, he thought, turning from the window.

The whole encounter lay like a dream in his memory now. It seemed far more reasonable to believe that he had simply imagined Cosette and her odd conversation. His sleeping mind had conjured a patchwork individual out of Kathy’s story and Isabelle’s painting to visit him in his sleep and voice the curious mix of desire and bafflement he felt whenever he thought of Isabelle.

He felt better after he’d had a shower—more alert, if a bit scruffy from being unable to shave. When he joined Isabelle in the kitchen, it was to find she’d prepared him a huge country breakfast: pancakes, eggs and bacon, muffins, coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice.

“You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” he said.

“It wasn’t any trouble,” Isabelle assured him. “I enjoy cooking.”

“I just thought that after working all night, the last thing you’d feel like doing was putting together a spread like this.”

Isabelle turned from the stove, the surprise obvious in her features. “Now how did you know I’d been up all night?” she asked.

Alan heard the wild girl’s voice in his mind. It’s almost time for the dawn chorus and she’s still up there, filling sheet after sheet with sketches.

Except he’d decided that he had dreamed her—hadn’t he?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I heard you walking around or something.” When she raised her eyebrows quizzically, he added, “You did tell me yesterday that you’re the only person living here on the island, didn’t you?”

Isabelle nodded, but Alan thought he could detect a guarded expression slip into her eyes.

“Why?” she asked, her voice mild. “Did you see somebody?”

A half-naked adolescent girl, that’s all, Alan thought. You know, the one from your painting. She came to me in the middle of the night, dispensing her own version of advice for the lovelorn.

“Not really,” he said. “I just had a very vivid dream—you know the kind that seems so real it’s more like a memory?”

Isabelle smiled, making Alan forget that her eyes had ever held a hint of circumspection.

“Sometimes it seems as if all this island holds are dreams and memories,” she said.

“Good ones, I hope.”

Isabelle hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “All kinds.”

She seemed to have to work a little harder at it, but she gave him another smile before returning her attention to the stove where she was frying the last of the eggs. Sliding it from the spatula onto a plate, she joined him at the table.

“Dig in,” she said.

“Thanks. It looks great.”

She surprised him while they were eating by telling him that she’d illustrate Kathy’s book.

“I don’t see any problem with you holding on to the originals,” he told her after she’d explained the terms under which she would take on the project. “I can call you with the specs when we’re further along in production—unless you’d like to be involved with the design as well?”

Isabelle shook her head. “That’s not my field of expertise. I’d rather you just let me know what sizes the pieces have to be reduced down to, if you want headings for the stories, incidental art—that sort of thing.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll be moving to town for a while to do some research,” she told him, surprising him further. “I might even rent a studio if I can find something affordable. I’ll let you know where you can reach me as soon as it’s more settled.”

Alan was about to offer her the use of his own spare room, but stopped himself just in time. Let’s not get too pushy, he told himself. He might have fantasies about her, including visits from advice-dispensing gamines, and they certainly seemed to have resolved their differences, by avoiding them if nothing else, but that didn’t mean his own feelings were reciprocated. At this point he’d be far better off taking it slowly, one step at a time.

“If I’m not in, you can leave a message on my answering machine,” he said. “And maybe I could repay your hospitality by taking you out to dinner one night.”

“That would be nice.”

Be still, my heart, Alan thought. He felt like a schoolboy fumbling through his first awkward attempt at making a date.

“Now, about the payment schedule,” he said, trying to make his way back to firmer emotional ground. “As I told you yesterday, until we get a firm commitment from New York on the distribution deal, we can only—”

Isabelle held up a hand, forestalling him. “I want my fees to go to the arts court as well,” she said.

“That’s awfully generous of you.”

Isabelle smiled. “It just feels like the right thing to do. But please, don’t let it get around how cheap I am.”

“And you’re okay working in color?”

The guarded expression returned to her features and he berated himself for the question he’d just blurted out. But he’d been thinking—of Isabelle’s curious demands concerning the originals, and then his dawn visitor’s cryptic comments. I’d suggest that you simply use monochrome studies to illustrate the book—that would certainly make it easier on Isabelle, you know.

Easier how? What was the difference between finished oils and monochrome work—beyond the obvious, of course. How did the difference between the two affect Isabelle?

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Isabelle asked.

Because someone he was fairly certain existed only in a dream had told him so. And hadn’t Cosette then added, But I have to admit I’m too selfish and lonely. It’ll be so nice to see a few new faces around here.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought maybe monochrome illustrations would be—”

For no good reason, the word safer popped into his mind.

“Would be what?”

“Easier?” he tried.

“Would you prefer monochrome? Black-and-white line drawings and wash? Or perhaps sepia?”

“Well, no. It’s just that—” Think quick, he told himself. “I thought, what with your having been away from this style for so long, you might find it more comfortable to ease back into illustrative work with something simpler.”

“I’d like to provide paintings,” Isabelle said. “I think the stories require a full palette.”

“Oh, I agree.”

“And I’m just doing this one project.”

“Of course.”

The mood in the room had become rapidly strained. The tension wasn’t quite the same as it had been last night, but it still lay between them like a thickening in the air. Alan knew he had caused the sudden coolness he could feel coming from Isabelle, but he had no idea what he’d done to cause it. He just hoped that he hadn’t blown the deal for Kathy’s book. But more importantly, he hoped he hadn’t completely estranged Isabelle again. Seeing her now, being with her after all those years of separation, he couldn’t bear the thought of being shut out of her life once more.

But as suddenly as the coolness had come, Isabelle appeared to shake it off. She smiled that winning smile of hers, the one that lit her entire face and had won his heart so long ago. Casually, she started up the conversation again, steering it back onto safer ground.

Alan was happy to follow her lead, but by the time he finally left the island, he was feeling more confused than ever.

Isabelle maintained her masquerade of casual good-naturedness until she’d seen Alan back to his car. Once he drove off, the mask dropped. She kicked at a pinecone that was lying on the dock and sent it flying into the water.

She was angry, but she didn’t know why.

Certainly it wasn’t Alan’s fault. He’d simply been talking about possibilities for the project, showing his concern for her having been out of touch with the illustrative field for as long as she had—not so much for the sake of the book itself, she had been able to realize, but for her own sake. For the sake of kindness.

But if it wasn’t Alan, then what was it?

Except, perhaps that same kindness that was to blame. It reminded her too much of how, after the fire, everyone had seemed to walk on eggshells around her. She’d understood—she’d appreciated—their compassion, but it had been misdirected. The loss they’d perceived had nothing to do with what had actually died in those flames. They could never have known, but it hadn’t made it any easier to deal with them.

It had proved simpler to retreat. She’d worked on the new show at the loft she’d shared with Sophie while she had the barn renovated into what was now her home and studio. Then, when the show was done, she’d left Sophie’s loft, the city, the art scene, everyone she knew—this time, she’d thought, for good. She’d known it would be easier, when someone came to visit, to deal with one small piece of her old life at a time than all of it at once, the way it would always be in Newford.

Last night’s joy at the thought of bringing Kathy’s visions to life in a new set of paintings leaked away at the thought of moving back. But she had no choice now that she’d accepted Alan’s commission. She would have to spend time in Newford, sketching and photographing locations, dealing with models, seeing too many familiar streets, meeting people she no longer knew but who would think they knew her.

It would be stepping back into the past, with all that had been left undone and unsaid and unfinished still waiting there for her; stepping back into that whole untidy tangle of memories and dreams that she had simply set aside because she couldn’t seem to find the wherewithal to deal with them.

Unable to do so then, and with nothing changed inside her, what made her think she could deal with it now? She’d found no new reservoirs of courage. She’d acquired no new abilities during her self-imposed exile.

It wasn’t anger she felt at all, she realized, except perhaps that old anger at herself and the weaknesses that drove her. It was fear.

She rowed back to the island, putting far more force than was necessary into the task. Her back ached from the fierceness she put into the effort and she had the beginning of a headache by the time she reached her dock and had moored the rowboat.

Massaging her temples, she walked slowly across the wooden planking until she stood in the forest’s shadow. There she paused. She realized that the decision she’d made last night had brought her to a demarcation of all that had gone before. She had stood in one of those rare border crossings between the past and the future where one is aware—so aware—that the decision about to be made will change everything.

She looked back across the water to the mainland. The red of her Jeep leapt out from among the surrounding evergreens. The maples in the hills beyond carried variations on that red off into the horizon.

Alan was gone, back to Newford, but she could no longer pretend she was alone. She turned back to the forest, realizing that she had to acknowledge them now.

“Which of you spoke to him?” she asked the dark spaces between the trees. There was no reply.

But she hadn’t really been expecting one. Still she knew they were there, watching, listening.

Meddling.

As she followed the path back home, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this was all Rushkin’s doing. That Alan Grant hadn’t thought of her as the artist for Kathy’s book—not on his own; that she hadn’t made the decision to take on the project—not on her own.

There was no logical reason for her to see Rushkin’s hand in this, although, from the very first time she’d met him, he’d proved to be a master at manipulation. But then nothing about Rushkin had ever followed any sort of logic. Not his charismatic appeal. Not the impossible wonder he had taught her to wake from a canvas. Not the bewildering way he could shift from being arrogant to obsequious, compassionate to brutal, amiable to rude beyond compare.

And certainly there was no logic at all for why he did so many of the things he had done.

When she reached the barn, she went inside and shut the door firmly behind her. Her fingers hesitated on the interior bolt before she pulled them away. Stuffing her hands in her pockets, she slouched on a chair by the kitchen table and stared out the window. The familiar, happy view, brown and green fields dappled with sunshine, the bright blue beyond, had lost its ability to soothe her.

After a while she took out her letter from Kathy and reread it, turning the locker key slowly over and over in her hands as she did. Long after she’d set the letter aside, she still sat there, staring out the window again, still turning the key in her hands. Two things waited for her in Newford and she was frightened of them both. There was what was in the locker that this key would open. That was bad enough. But also waiting for her, she knew, was Rushkin.

She’d named her studio after him, but she’d never been sure if it was out of respect for what he’d taught her or relief for having been able to escape from him. A bit of both, she supposed. It had been over ten years since he’d vanished without a word. He was dead. Everyone said so and she wanted to believe it herself. But then how many people had thought he was dead when she’d been studying under him? No, implausible though it might appear, she knew that he was still out there, somewhere, waiting for her.

If he was still alive, if he did return when she began to paint once more, utilizing what he’d taught her

... what would happen to her, to her art? Would she be strong enough to resist him? She’d failed before.

What would make this time any different?

She realized that she just didn’t know and that was what scared her most of all.