“Of course,” Davis agreed.
The two men smiled at each other. Davis tipped a finger against his brow and headed out to his car.
Isabelle recovered first. While Cosette still wept quietly against Marisa’s shoulder, Isabelle finally stepped out of Alan’s embrace. She didn’t look any better, Alan thought. All that had changed was that the tears had stopped. Lodged in her eyes was a wild and desperate grief. She started to speak, then dropped her gaze and swallowed thickly. Turning away, she picked up a clean rag from the work-table and first wiped her eyes with it, then blew her nose. With her back to them, she squared her shoulders and stared at the unfinished painting on her easel.
“How ... how much do you know?” she asked.
She spoke with the same empty voice she had earlier. Alan glanced at Marisa, but Marisa only shrugged as if to say, Play it however you think is best. Alan sighed. It was probably the wrong thing to do, considering how Isabelle was feeling at the moment, but he knew the time had come to put aside all the bullshit.
“I think we’ve pretty well figured it all out except for a couple of things,” he said.
“Even the numena?”
Alan glanced at Cosette. “Maybe especially the numena.”
Isabelle let the silence hang between them for a moment. Alan shifted from one foot to another, but before he could speak, Isabelle asked, “So what do you need to know?”
“Why did you keep Kathy’s letter from me?” Alan asked. “Why did you pretend that
He wasn’t trying to rekindle old arguments or make her feel bad. He asked because he had to understand. Before they could go on from here, before he could be of any help, he had to have something more than old ghosts and memories to work with. There was a solution to their current situation, and he was sure they could find it. But the trouble was, he also knew it was tangled up somewhere in the middle of all the lies and evasions that had grown up between them over the years. Not just since Kathy’s death, but from before that. It dated back to the fire on Wren Island, when all of her artwork had supposedly gone up in flames along with the farmhouse.
Isabelle turned to look at him, but her gaze could only hold his for a moment. It shifted to the worktable, where she picked up a yellow-handled utility knife with a retractable blade from in among the brushes and tubes of paint. Turning it over and over in her hands, she walked over to the nearest wall.
With her back to the wall, she slid down until she was sitting on the floor, legs drawn up to her chest. She put the knife down on the floor beside her and hugged her knees.
“I ... I’ve got a problem with negative situations,” she said.
She still wouldn’t look at him. Her voice was so soft that he had to walk over to where she was and sit down across from her. Marisa followed suit with Cosette in tow, settling down beside Alan. Isabelle took a deep breath and slowly let it out.
“When something ... bad happens,” she went on, “I ..” She broke off again, but this time she looked at Alan. “Remember how Kathy used to say that all we had to do was reinvent the world when we didn’t like it the way it was? If we believed it was different, then it would become different?”
Alan nodded.
“You and I, we always argued with her about that. We’d try to tell her that the world was a far more complicated place and just because one person decided to see things different, it didn’t mean that things would actually change.”
“I remember,” Alan said. “And then she’d say, if it changed for you, then that was enough.”
“Except I could never do it—at least that’s what I’d say—but I learned the trick too well and the irony is that Kathy couldn’t do it at all.”
“You’re losing me.”
“I found her journal. She didn’t lead a very happy life, Alan. She couldn’t reinvent the world at all.
But I did. I just didn’t know I was doing it. Something bad would happen to me and I’d simply shift the facts around until it was something I could deal with. It’s like when I’ve talked about my parents in interviews, I’m always going on about how supportive they were, how they were so proud of me, right from the first.”
Alan remembered the first time he’d read that in an issue of
“It was such bullshit,” Isabelle said, “but I wanted to believe it. I didn’t want to remember how I was a disappointment to my father from the time I wasn’t born a boy right up until the day he died. I never did one right thing in my life, so far as he was concerned, and he was always ready to tell me about it. And my mother wouldn’t say a thing. She’d just keep on doing her chores, as though it was normal for a parent to batter down their child’s self-esteem the way he did.”
She picked up the utility knife and began to play with it again, rolling it back and forth on her palm.
“I got tired of being the person who came out of that environment,” she said, “so somewhere along the line I reinvented how it happened, and you know, Kathy was right. Once you do it, once you really believe it, the world is different. All of a sudden you have that much less baggage to drag around with you.
“So at Kathy’s funeral—”
“I really believed that she’d died in the hospital of cancer. I I ... I convinced myself that that was the truth because I couldn’t live with what had really happened. Kathy just couldn’t have killed herself. Not the Kathy I knew.”
“It was a shock to everybody,” Alan said.
“Only because we didn’t know her at all. If she’d shared with us what she wrote in her journal, we’d have known.” She gave Alan a sharp look. “Do you know why she killed herself?”
He shook his head. That question was one of the ghosts haunting him. He’d wrestled with it for years and still couldn’t understand.
“She wanted amnesia,” Isabelle said. “She didn’t want to have to carry around the baggage any longer and killing herself was the only way she could see to accomplish that. I remember she told me that the reason she believed we had to reinvent the world for ourselves was that if we didn’t change the world to suit us, then it would change us to suit it, and she couldn’t bear to be who she thought the world would change her into.”
“I don’t understand,” Marisa said. “Even though she came from such a terrible background, she rose above it. She’s helped so many kids through the
Foundation and touched so many others through her writing. If there’s anyone who left the world a better place than it was when she came into it, it was her.”
Isabelle nodded. “But she was never happy. Her writing and the kids at the Foundation were all she had and I guess one day she realized it wasn’t enough. She gave of herself, she gave until there was nothing left for herself. If you stop letting water into the well, but you keep drawing from it, eventually it’s going to run dry.”
“Jesus,” Alan said softly.
“It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?” Isabelle said. “And there we were, her best friends in all the world, and we didn’t even see it happening.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” Alan asked.
“I only just found out this morning myself “
She told them then about the letter arriving at her house, the locker key, the security guard who’d held on to the locker’s contents for her for all those years, the journal.
“I didn’t know about Paddyjack and John,” she finished. “Kathy rescued Paddyjack’s painting from the fire, but she kept it instead of giving it back to me. The painting was just sitting there waiting for me with Kathy’s journal. I hadn’t known that John’s painting sur-survived ....” Her eyes welled up with tears again, but this time she kept them in check. “Jilly mentioned seeing—” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “—seeing John when I was asking her about a place to stay in the city, and then he came to see me at my new studio ....”
“Why would Kathy not have told you about Paddyjack’s painting?” Alan wondered aloud.
Isabelle gave him an anguished look. “I think ... I think she thought I might destroy it.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember the rumors that went around for a while—that I’d set the fire myself? Kathy didn’t believe them, but according to her journal, she wasn’t ready to entrust Paddyjack’s painting to that belief “
