Memory and Dream

but Izzy didn’t mind. Nor did she really register Kathy’s muttered complaints. Her head was full of the canvas waiting for her at Rushkin’s studio, planning brush strokes and the details of the painting’s background, until they reached the hospital. But then the harsh reality of what Rochelle had suffered cut through her daydreams.

The pretty girl who had agreed to pose for Izzy a few weeks ago didn’t seem to exist anymore.

Instead a stranger looked up from the bed when they came into Rochelle’s room. Her face was swollen and discolored with ugly bruises. She had a broken arm, cracked ribs, a fractured pelvis. But worst of all was the lost and hurt look in her eyes. Izzy remembered a sweet, trusting gaze and had the sick feeling now that it would never return.

After giving Rochelle the get-well card she’d made the night before, Izzy sat quietly on the end of the bed while Kathy ancliilly talked to Rochelle, trying to cheer her up. Izzy wanted to join in, but all she could do was sit there and look at the pitiable figure their friend cut, lying in that bed, swathed in bandages, her only sustenance coming to her through an IV tube. It made Izzy feel more determined than ever to continue her studies under Rushkin. If what he taught her could help counteract such terrible injustices as Rochelle had been forced to suffer, then Izzy would do everything in her power to learn what he had to show her. She didn’t fully understand Rushkin’s explanation as to how their art could be of any help. She wasn’t sure she even believed in the idea of angelic manifestations. But so far he’d made good on all of what he’d promised to teach her and she was willing to trust him that everything else would become clear in time.

Looking at Rochelle, she desperately wished it were all true. She wished she really could learn to call up angels. Joyful spirits, protective spirits, guardian spirits. She wished she already knew how, so that she could have prevented what had happened to Rochelle last night. Like Kathy’s growing plans for helping underprivileged children, Izzy was determined to do more than simply rail against the injustices of the world. She couldn’t pinpoint the source of the evils that plagued the world any more than Kathy could.

Like Rushkin’s alchemical secret, they could have their original source from outside a person—be it one’s environment or Kathy’s cosmic evils—or they could originate in the darkness that everyone carried inside them, that most people rightfully refused to allow into the light of day. It didn’t matter where they came from. All that mattered to Izzy was that they were real and confronting them was more than simply tilting at windmills.

X

Izzy finished The Spirit Is Strong the next day, but she had no time to admire her portrait of the Kickaha brave in his urban setting. She had to rush to another class that afternoon and then, when it was done, she spent what was left of the day at the university library, working on a paper that was due the next Monday. When she finally stepped outside, she blinked in surprise. She’d lost all track of time and night had fallen while she was cloistered away in the study cubicle with a stack of art-history books.

Her stomach rumbled and she realized that she’d not only missed lunch, but supper now as well. She felt so tired she could have lain down right there on the library steps and gone straight to sleep except she had just enough common sense left, in the fuzzy space between her ears that was passing for her mind at the moment, to know that she should get herself home first.

“You look beat,” a stranger’s voice said from behind her. “What’re you doing—burning the paintbrush at both ends?”

“You mean candle,” Izzy corrected absently as she turned to see who’d spoken.

A figure stood leaning in the shadows beside the stone lion statue on the left side of the library’s doors. She could see he wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and his long hair was dark, but his face was just a daub of shadowed skin color in the bad light and she couldn’t make out his features. There was enough of a nip in the air that she found herself wondering how he could stand being outside in only those short sleeves.

“But you’re an artist,” he said, “so I thought paintbrush would be more appropriate.”

“Do I know you?” Izzy asked. There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“Does it matter?”

Izzy had been about to take a step closer to get a better look at him, but she paused as the memory of Rochelle’s bruised features rose in her mind. Oh shit, she thought, taking a quick look around herself, but they were alone on the library steps. Through the leaded panes of the doors, she could see people moving around inside the building, but she knew they were too far away to do her any good if she had to yell for help.

She wanted to turn and run, but the idea of crossing the dark common with this guy chasing her held no appeal whatsoever. But she couldn’t get by him to go back inside either. All he had to do was grab her and drag her away into the bushes and nobody’d know. Nobody’d know at all.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“I’m not here to hurt you,” the figure in the shadows told her. “Then what do you want from me?”

“Nothing, really. I was just making conversation. Go ahead and leave. I won’t stop you.”

Right, Izzy thought. I’ll just walk off onto the common and make it easy for you. Then something else struck her.

“How’d you know I’m an artist?” she asked.

“You’ve got paint under your nails and you were reading up on art history.”

“So you saw me inside,” Izzy said.

“Probably.”

Izzy shivered. What kind of an answer was that? It was so creepily vague. “Look,” she said. “You’re starting to freak me out a little.”

“Sorry. I just wanted to meet you, hear what your voice sounded like—that’s all. I didn’t mean to upset you. You can go back inside or wherever you were going. I won’t bother you.”

Izzy started to relax then. Now she thought she knew what he was doing out here, waiting for her.

He’d seen her inside and was trying to work his way around to asking for a date.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Mizaun.”

“I’m sorry,” Izzy said, leaning forward a little. “What did you say?”

“Call me John.”

Izzy frowned. The first thing he’d said hadn’t sound at all like “call me John.”

“Well, John,” she said. “Being mysterious and everything’s kind of interesting—I’ll give you that—but considering what happened a couple of nights ago, it’s not exactly all that endearing at the moment, if you know what I mean.” The figure in the shadows shook his head. “What happened two nights ago?”

“You don’t know? What planet did you beam down from tonight anyway— Mars?”

He hesitated for the length of a few heartbeats, then said, “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

Oh boy, Izzy thought. Maybe it was time to reevaluate the idea that he wanted a date.

“This is getting a little too weird for me,” she began. “Maybe we should just forget about—”

Before she could finish, the door to the library opened and two girls came out, a brunette and a blonde, chatting to each other, books bundled up against their chests. Izzy stepped aside to let them pass by, but when she turned back to where her mysterious companion had been standing in the shadows, he wasn’t there anymore. Alarm bells went off in her mind.

“Hey!” she called to the departing girls. When they paused to look back at her, she added, “Are you going as far as Lee Street?”

“Just as far as the bus stop at the Green,” the blonde said.

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“Not at all.”

“Great. I’m kind of nervous of walking over the common by myself tonight.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” the brunette confided when Izzy joined them. “Everything feels a little weird after what happened the other night.”

Izzy looked back at the library steps, but they were still empty. Where had he gone? Hopped over the wall into the vegetation that grew on either side of the steps? But then why hadn’t she heard him moving in the bushes?