Memory and Dream

Isabelle remembered a long-ago conversation in a Newford diner, John telling her about the Kickaha, about names. The tightness in her chest was easing, but the chill hadn’t gone away. How could Jilly have seen him? She looked out the window of her studio. The view was different from here, the fields choked with rosebushes, the woods looming dark behind them. It was easy to imagine hidden stories when she looked at their dark tangle.

“Are you still there, Isabelle?” Jilly asked.

Isabelle nodded, then realized that her friend couldn’t see the gesture. “How did he look?” she asked.

“Great. Like he hasn’t aged a year. But I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him. I was on my way out and he was on his way in and I haven’t seen him since. I did ask Nora about him and she says a friend of his runs the little boutique that sells Kickaha crafts and arts on the ground floor. You’ll have to look him up when you get to town.”

“Maybe I will,” Isabelle said.

As if she’d have a choice. As if he wouldn’t come to her first.

“I should finish my packing,” she told Jilly. “I’ll probably be leaving in another hour or so.”

“I’ll set an extra plate for dinner. And I should have some news about Joli Coeur by the time you get here.”

“Thanks, Jilly. You’re a real sweetheart.”

But Isabelle didn’t get back to her packing right away. She hung up the receiver and then sat there, stroking Rubens, trying to gain some measure of calm from the touch of his fur, his weight on her lap. But all she could think of was John, of the presences that she felt sometimes in the woods around her home—itinerant remnants of a lost time, cut adrift from their own pasts, but no longer a part of her present. And so they waited in the woods. For what, she’d never been quite sure. For her to take up that part of her art once more? To take a few pigments, some oil, a piece of canvas and an old brush and add others to their ranks?

She’d never been entirely sure if she’d made them real with her art, or if they were real first, if a part of her had recognized them from some mysterious else-where so that she was able to render their likenesses and bring them across. The only thing of which she was entirely certain was that she believed in them. For all these years she’d believed in them and in the part she’d played to bring them forth. But ifJohn was still alive, that changed everything. It created new riddles to unravel and made a lie of what Rushkin had taught her was real.

Rushkin, she thought. Considering all he’d done to her, why should she ever have believed anything he’d told her?

But she knew the reason before she even asked herself the question. No matter what Rushkin had done, she’d always believed that there were some things he held sacred. Some things he would never soil with a lie. If she couldn’t believe that, she didn’t know what to believe anymore.

She was bound to those errant spirits that had come across from their otherwhere. That much was real. Their lives still touched hers as though she were the center of a spider’s web and each fine outgoing strand was connected to one of them. She could close her eyes and see them. But if it wasn’t her art that made the connection, then what was?

II

The two red-haired women sat on a rococo burgundy chesterfield in the middle of a small glade surrounded by old birch trees. The glade had all the appearance of a living room, with the birches for walls, the sky for ceiling and the forest floor, mostly covered with an Oriental rug, underfoot. Though a breeze blew across the fields beyond the glade, inside the air was still. Inclement weather never intruded.

Lanterns hung from the white boughs above, unlit now since sunlight streamed into the glade, providing ample illumination. Standing across from the chesterfield were a pair of mismatched club chairs with a cedar chest set in between them to serve as a table. Beside the older woman was an empty bookcase with leaded glass panes, its one book presently lying open on her lap.

The older woman carried herself with a stately grace. She appeared to be in her early thirties, a striking figure in her long grey gown, rust underskirt and her thick red hair. She might have stepped from a Waterhouse painting, the Lady of Shalott, trailing her hand in a lilied river; Miranda watching a ship sink off her father’s island.

Her companion had half her years, was gangly where she was all slender curves, scruffy where she was so neatly groomed, but the resemblance between the two was such that they might easily have been sisters, or mother and daughter. If the younger girl’s hair was a bird’s nest of tangles, her choice of clothing torn blue jeans and an oversized woolen sweater spotted with burrs and prickly seeds, it was simply because she was endlessly active. She had no time to comb her hair or mend her clothes when there was so much to do.

But she was quiet now, sitting beside the older woman, the two of them unable to look away from the indistinct figures that gamboled about in the field just beyond the birch walls of their curiously situated room. The red-brown shapes romping about in the grass caught the bright sunlight and pulled it deep into their coloring until they appeared to glow from within.

“Look at them, Rosalind,” the younger woman said. “They’re so new. They must still remember what it was like in the before.”

Rosalind shook her head. “There’s not enough of them here to allow them memory. They’ll be gone in another hour.”

Cosette nodded glumly. She could see that one or two of them already were becoming less distinct.

The distant hills could be seen through an arm or a torso, flashes of lake appeared through hair that was turning to a soft, red-brown mist.

“What do you remember of before?” she asked, turning her head from the meadow to her companion.

It was an old question, but one she never grew tired of asking.

“There was story,” Rosalind said. Her voice was thoughtful, full of remembering. Of trying to remember. “Stories. And one of them was mine.”

Cosette was never sure if she actually remembered that there’d been stories, or if it was only from Rosalind having told her of them so often. What she did know was that she carried an ache inside her, that she’d lost something coming from before to here.

“We miss our dreams,” Rosalind had explained once. “We have no blood, so we cannot dream.”

“But Isabelle dreams,” Cosette had protested.

“Isabelle has the red crow inside her.”

Sometimes Cosette would run madly across the fields, dangerously close to the cliffs, run and run until finally she fell exhausted to the turfy ground. Then she’d lie with her hair tangled in grass and roots and weeds and stare up into the sky, looking for a russet speck against the blue, red wings beating like the drumming of a pulse.

Red crow, red crow, fly inside me, she’d sing in her husky voice.

But she could still prick her finger with a thorn and the red crow wouldn’t fly from the cut. She couldn’t bleed—not red blood, not green fairy-tale blood, not any blood at all.

And she couldn’t dream.

Sleep wasn’t necessary for her kind, but when she did close her eyes to seek it, there was only the vast darkness lying there in her mind until she woke again. When she slept, she went into an empty place and came back neither refreshed nor touched by the mythic threads of story that the red crow brought to others when they slept.

“It’s because we’re not real,” she’d whispered once, shaken with the enormity of the thought that they were only loaned their lives, that their existence depended on the capriciousness of another’s will, rather than how every other person lived, following the red crow’s wheel as it slowly turned from birth to death.

But Rosalind had quickly shaken her head in reply. Taking Cosette in her arms, she’d rocked the younger woman against her breast.

“We are real,” she’d said, a fierceness in her voice that Cosette had never heard before. “Don’t ever believe differently.”

It had to be true.

We are real.

She took Rosalind’s hand now and repeated it to herself like a charm. Her gaze was held and trapped by the