Kismet
—Attributed to Andrew Wyeth
It would be winter soon, Isabelle thought. She’d paused in her packing to sit in the wing-backed chair by the bedroom window. She could see the island’s autumned fields from her vantage point, running off to the cliffs before they dropped into the lake. In the aftermath of last night’s storm, the sky was a perfect blue, untouched by cloud. She watched a crow glide across that cerulean expanse, then swoop down toward the fields. When it was lost to sight, her gaze moved back toward the house, where the forest encroached a little closer every year. The rich cloak of leaves was already beginning to thin, the colors losing their vibrancy. Movement caught her gaze again and she saw that the raggedy stand of mountain ash by one of the nearer outbuildings was filled with cedar waxwings, the sleek yellow-and-brown birds gorging on this year’s crop of the trees’ orange berries. Putting her face closer to the glass, she could hear their thin lisping cries of
Autumn was her favorite time of year. It bared the landscape, it was true, heralding the lonely desolation of the long months of winter to come, but it made her heart sing all the same with a joy not so dissimilar to what she felt when she saw the first crocuses in the spring. It was easy to forget—when the trees were bare, the fields turned brown and the north winds brought the first snows—that the world went on, that it wasn’t coming to an end. She agreed with what Andrew Wyeth was supposed to have said about the season: something did wait, underneath the drab masquerade that autumn eventually came to wear. The whole story didn’t show. But that was the way it was with everything. There were always other stories going on under what you could see—in people as much as landscapes.
Isabelle smiled at herself and rose from her chair. She knew what she was doing. Procrastinating.
She was going to miss the island—that was a given. Especially now. This was when she normally laid in a few months’ worth of supplies against that time when the channel between the island and the mainland became impassable. For anywhere from two to six weeks she would be cut off from all contact with the outside world, except by phone. She savored that forced hermitage. It was a time when she collected herself after the summer and its inevitable influx of visitors, and often got her best work done. As things were going now, she probably wouldn’t be able to return to the island until the channel froze over in early December. But it was too late to go back on the promise she’d made to Alan. Whether she liked it or not, she would be living in the city for at least a few months. Which reminded her: she should give Jilly another try.
Rubens was moping about in her studio when she went in to use the phone.
“You know what’s up, don’t you?” Isabelle said.
She punched in Jilly’s phone number. Cradling the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she hoisted the orange tom onto her lap and scratched the fur up and down his spine until he began to purr.
She was half expecting her call to go unanswered again, but after the third ring she heard the sound of the phone being picked up on the other end of the line, quickly followed by Jilly’s cheerful hello.
“Hello, yourself,” Isabelle said. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”
“Were you? I was over at Amos & Cook’s picking up some paints and I kind of got distracted on the way home. I ended up down by the Pier, watching these kids showing off on their Rollerblades. You should have seen them. They were just amazing. I could’ve watched them all day.”
Isabelle smiled. A rarer occasion would be a time when Jilly wasn’t distracted by one thing or another.
“Tell me something new,” she said.
“Ah ... the Pope’s staying with me for the weekend?”
“Rats. And here I was hoping that I could hit you up for a place to stay.”
“You’re coming to town? When? How long are you staying?”
Rather than taking the questions on an individual basis, Isabelle backtracked, explaining how Alan had come out to the island with his proposal for the omnibus of Kathy’s stories that Isabelle had agreed to illustrate.
“You mean in your old style?” Jilly asked.
“That’s the plan.”
“How do you feel about it?”
Isabelle hesitated. “Excited, actually,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And what was it like seeing Alan again?” Jilly wanted to know.
“Sort of weird,” Isabelle said. “In some ways, it was like I’d only just seen him last week.”
“I’ve always liked him,” Jilly said. “There’s something intrinsically good about him—an inborn compassion that you don’t find in many people these days.”
“You could be talking about yourself,” Isabelle pointed out.
Jilly laughed. “Not a chance. I had to learn how to be a good person.”
Before Isabelle could add her own comment to that, Jilly steered the conversation back to Isabelle’s current concern. “You’re welcome to stay with me,” she said, “although it sounds like you’re going to be in town for a while, so it could get a little cramped.”
“I was hoping to stay just for a couple of nights while I find myself something.”
“Are you bringing Rubens?”
“I couldn’t leave him behind on his own.”
“Of course not,” Jilly said. “But having a pet’ll make it a little harder to find a place unless—hey, do you remember the old shoe factory on Church Street?”
“The one by the river?”
“That’s the place. Well, some people bought it at the beginning of the summer and have turned it into a kind of miniature version of Waterhouse Street.”
Isabelle remembered having read about it in the features section of one of the papers. The ground floor was taken up by boutiques, cafes and galleries, while the two upstairs floors consisted of small apartments, offices, studio spaces and rented rooms.
“They call the place Joli Coeur,” Jilly went on, “after that Rossetti painting. They’ve even got a reproduction of it—a giant mural in the central courtyard on the ground floor.”
“I saw a picture of it in the paper,” Isabelle said. “Have you been in at all?”
“A couple of times. Nora has a studio in there. She says it’s all sort of communey, with everybody running in and out of everybody else’s place, but I’m sure no one would bother you if you made it plain that you didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. “I think I could use a bit of chaotic bohemia about now—just to get me back into the mood of what it was like when Kathy was writing those stories.”
Jilly laughed. “Well, I’d call this place more baroque than boho, but I suppose there’s really not that much difference between the two. At least there never was in the Waterhouse Street days. Do you want me to give them a call to see if they have any studio spaces free?”
“Do you mind?”
“Of course not. I think you’ll like staying there. You wouldn’t believe the old faces I’ve run into. I even saw that old boyfriend of yours the other day—what was his name? John Sweetgrass.”
Everything went still inside Isabelle. A cold silence rose up inside her, tightening in her chest, and she found it hard to take a breath. In her mind’s eye, she saw a painting, consumed by flames.
“But that ... that’s—”
Impossible, she’d been about to say, but she caught herself in time. “That’s so ... odd,” she said instead. “I haven’t thought of him in years.” Until yesterday. Until Alan came with his proposal and woke up all the old ghosts inside her. John and the others had been on her mind ever since.
“He doesn’t go by the name John anymore,” Jilly went on. “He calls himself Mizaun Kinnikinnik now.”
