Memory and Dream

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