numena seemed to just drift out of her life. Most of them she saw about as often as she did John, and she had yet to meet Paddyjack.
Her art took a new direction when she was finally settled in enough to begin work. Inspired by the paintings that Rushkin had done on his travels—taken mostly by how, as Tom Downs had put it, Rushkin saw things, rather than simply his technique she embarked on an ambitious series depicting the architecture of Lower Crowsea, juxtapositioning the vanishing older buildings with those that were replacing them, or had been renovated. What she found particularly intriguing in working on the series was giving a sense of entire buildings while concentrating only on a few details in each painting: a doorway and its surrounding vine-draped brickwork and windows; an alleyway with an old grocery on one side, a new lawyer’s office on the other; the cornice of the old fire hall showing two of its gargoyles, behind which rose a refurbished office block with all new stonework and an additional two stories.
Figures appeared, where appropriate, in a few pieces, but only one had a new numena. She was a kind of Paddyjill, since she looked to be a twig-girl cousin of sorts to Paddyjack, standing half-hidden in the vines that covered the riverside wall of the old shoe factory on Church Street. The painting was an immense work called
Albina was excited about the show and all of Izzy’s friends loved the series, but the person whose opinion she really craved was Rushkin, so that was how their weekly visits to each other’s studios began.
She dropped by his studio at the beginning of May and, after a pleasant hour or so of conversation, invited him to come by her studio the next day to have a look at some of her new work.
Every time Izzy saw him, Rushkin couldn’t have been nicer. By the end of June, the faint niggle of anxiety she’d associated with him had entirely vanished. They never spoke of numena—nothing odd or strange or out of the normal world ever came up in their conversations at all. Instead they talked about art; Rushkin criticized, gently, and praised, lavishly. Izzy forgot John’s warnings, forgot Rushkin’s temper, forgot everything but the joy of creating and sharing that joy with an artist that she admired so much it was almost an infatuation.
She didn’t mean to hide the fact that she had renewed her relationship with Rushkin, it just never came up whenever she was around Kathy. Her roommate might have heard it from someone else except that, having finally received her share of the advance for the paperback sale of her book, all her time was caught up in the work of establishing her children’s foundation—everything from finding suitable staff and applying for charitable status to renting a small building in which to house the operation.
As she’d predicted to Izzy back in January, the money from her advance wasn’t nearly enough—not even starting at the modest scale at which she planned. Late in June she organized a combination benefit concert and art auction that, when added to her fundraising efforts once her charitable status came through, raised another seventy-two thousand dollars. Eleven thousand of that came from the sale of one of Izzy’s paintings.
“The doors open July twelfth,” she told Izzy a few days after the benefit. “Are you going to have a party to celebrate it?” Izzy asked.
“Of course. But it’s going to be a potluck affair. I don’t want any of the Foundation’s money to be used for anything except for the kids. The thing that really worries me is that we’re going to get swamped and I don’t want to turn anybody away.”
“So organize another benefit,” Izzy suggested.
“I don’t think it would be as successful. People only have so much money and there are a lot of other worthwhile causes. It’ll work better on a yearly basis, I think.”
Izzy smiled. “You better get writing then.”
“I am. I have—whenever I can spare the time. Alan says there’s already a lot of interest in a second book and the first paperback’s not even out yet.”
“Will you take it to the same publisher that’s doing the paperback edition?” Izzy asked.
Kathy shook her head. “I’m letting Alan publish it first and then he’ll offer it to them. It’s a chance for his press to really establish itself and after all he’s done for me, I figure it’s the least I can do to repay him.”
“But if he gets fifty percent of the next paperback sale as well,” Izzy began. “He won’t. He didn’t even take that for
“What do you mean?”
“He’s earmarked forty percent of what would go to him as an ongoing donation to the Foundation.”
“Wow. I can’t believe he’s giving up all that money.”
“Some people would say the same thing about the painting you gave us to auction.”
“That’s different,” Izzy began, but then she shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not.”
“I couldn’t ask for better friends,” Kathy told her. She tried to stifle a huge yawn, but wasn’t successful. “I have to go to bed,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
Kathy’d been losing weight, Izzy realized, taking a good look at her roommate. It wasn’t something you noticed right away, because of the baggy clothes she usually wore. But she was thinner, and there were rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.
“Don’t overdo things,” Izzy warned.
“I won’t,” Kathy said as she stumbled off to bed. “I’m just so happy that everything’s actually going to happen.” She paused at the doorway to her bedroom to look back at Izzy. “You know, that maybe I can save some kids having to go through the shit I had to.”
But you don’t look happy, Izzy thought as Kathy continued on into the bedroom. You look dead on your feet.
It seemed as though everybody that Kathy and Izzy knew showed up for the open-house party to celebrate the opening of the Newford Children’s Foundation. The only exceptions were Rushkin and John, both of whom had been invited—Rushkin by Izzy and John by Kathy, who’d run into him in the Walker Street subway station the week of the benefit. The house had been furnished in what Jilly called Contemporary Scrounge, because everything had been acquired from flea markets and yard sales.
“The furniture just has to do its job,” Kathy had said, resenting any money spent that didn’t go directly to the kids. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.”
To offset the battered desks and filing cabinets, Izzy and Kathy, along with a number of their other artist friends, had spent a few weeks repainting all the rooms, making curtains, wallpapering, painting wall murals in the kitchen and offices and generally giving the rooms a more homey feel. The centerpieces of the waiting room, which also housed the reception desk, were the two paintings that Izzy had based on Kathy’s stories:
“I’m so glad you hung them here,” Izzy said, as she and Kathy finally got a break from greeting the guests and were leaning up against a wall in the waiting room, sipping glasses of wine.
Kathy smiled. “I love the way they look in here. I know you based them on stories in
In fact, they’re part of the Foundation’s assets now and I’ve written in a stipulation in our charter that says they’re always to hang in the Foundation’s waiting room, no matter where we eventually move, no matter what happens to me personally.”
“I like that,” Izzy said. “I think that’s my favorite thing about any of the arts, that we each get to put our own interpretation upon the message that’s being conveyed. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate, there’s only honest or dishonest.”
“I see her from time to time, you know,” Kathy said. “Rosalind.”
Izzy looked at her, feeling a little confused. Considering what she knew of Rosalind’s feelings about meeting Kathy, she was surprised to discover that the numena had managed to overcome her shyness in the matter.
“Really?” she said finally.
“Oh, I’ve never talked to her or anything,” Kathy explained, “but I catch glimpses of her from time to time—
