Names, Izzy had realized a long time ago, before she even moved from the island to attend Butler U., had potency. They pulled their owners in their wakes, the way that dreams can, the way you can wake up from sleep and believe that what you dreamed actually occurred. And even later, even when you realized the mistake, it was difficult to readjust your thinking. You knew your boyfriend didn’t cheat on you, but you looked at him with suspicion all the same. You understood that you hadn’t really done the painting, but you found yourself looking for it all the same.
But if dreams were potent, names were more so, especially the ones people chose for themselves.
They might grow into the ones that were given to them, through the familiarity of use, if nothing else, but the ones they chose defined who they were like an immediate descriptive shorthand.
When she first moved to Newford from Wren Island seven years ago, she had put Isabelle behind.
Isabelle of the quiet moods and even temperament. Who avoided confrontations and was more comfortable with her sketchbook in the forest than with people. Who had inherited her father’s stubborn streak but never acquired the meanness it had manifested in him. Who didn’t argue, but merely agreed and went ahead and did what she felt she had to do anyway, dealing with the repercussions only if she had to.
Kathy was the first to call her Izzy, making a play on Isabelle with her
But Izzy hadn’t been all strength and chutzpah. Names were potent, but changing your name couldn’t entirely discard the baggage you had to carry along from the past to where you were now. Izzy still had her insecurities. Izzy was still capable of being browbeaten by the Rushkins of the world, abandoned by the Johns, mugged by a gang of street punks who didn’t know what her name was and certainly didn’t care. Izzy still preferred to avoid confrontations and to hide her pains deep in the shadowy recesses of her mind, where they wouldn’t be easily stumbled upon.
Names were potent, Izzy understood, but in the end they were still only labels, easy tags that could never hope to entirely encompass the complex individuals they were supposed to describe. All they could ever do was reflect some aspect of the face you wanted to turn to the world, not define it. But they helped—in the same way that labels made it easier to choose between one thing and another. Coffee or tea? Smoking or nonsmoking section? Expressionism or Impressionism?
Returning to the island, she realized that Izzy had been left behind by the roadside, somewhere in between Newford and the turnoff to the island, and she was ready to embrace Isabelle once more. Was ready to define herself as Isabelle—at least insofar as she needed a label for herself. The differences between the younger Isabelle and who she was now were few. She was twenty-four now, not seventeen.
She was a moderately successful artist. Her father was dead. She was on the island by choice, not because she had to be.
She spent her first few weeks on the island feeling very much at loose ends. Organizing her living space swallowed some time. She set up a studio in the back bedroom and made a storage space for her numena paintings in the attic. It took her a little while to get used to sleeping in her parents’ bedroom, but once she’d repainted and moved her own furniture in, it seemed more her own. Her old bedroom she converted into the guest room— although privately she already thought of it as Kathy’s room.
Her mother had auctioned off all the farm animals and equipment, including the barge that had been used to transport livestock and crops to the mainland, but left her the old rowboat. A hired boat from one of the marinas down the coast had been all she’d needed to transport her belongings to the island, and the rowboat was enough to get her back and forth from the mainland, where she parked the used VW that she’d bought from Alan.
She found she missed the sound of the city at first—the traffic, the sirens, the constant hubbub of noise that she’d entirely tuned out after a while. But the quiet nights and open skies of the country had been bred into her at an early age and she was soon seduced by them all over again. Initially, it had been hard to work because it was so quiet; within three weeks the difficulty in getting started was because she tended to have her morning coffee out on the porch and then found herself puttering in the garden or going for a long ramble out along the shore or in the forest and the next thing she’d know, the whole morning and half the afternoon was gone.
Still, she was painting, at first more in the evenings than during the day, and was surprised to realize that, by the fall, she’d have enough pieces to hang for a new show without having to give up working on her new series of numena.
The numena. She could feel their presence on the island, but they still re-fused contact with her. All of them—even Rosalind and Cosette. Even Annie Nin, who’d been the one that had really convinced her that she should sell the numena paintings in her show. But if they kept their distance from her, they still went into her studio. Many times she came into it to find that things had been rifled through, and small items were missing. Some pencils and paper, a paint-brush, a tube of paint. Cosette, she’d think, and then feel sad all over again.
But she even grew used to that and where at first she’d looked forward to her trips into the city, by the time June was rolling up on July, it was all she could do to get into her car and make the drive in. She missed Kathy, though, and it was because of her that she nude sure that she went to town at least once every couple of weeks.
Isabelle was completely disoriented the first time she visited Kathy in her new apartment on Gracie Street. All the familiar furnishings were there, but they were all in the wrong place. The old floor lamp with its marble stand that they’d picked up at a flea market still provided illumination for Kathy’s favorite reading chair, but both of them stood in an unfamiliar corner by a bay window they’d never had on Waterhouse Street, overlooking a view that belonged to a stranger. Kathy’s collection of antique photos was in the hall, along with some of Isabelle’s own sketches that Kathy’d had framed, but they were all in a different order. Isabelle knew the bookcases, the carpets, the sofa, the drapes, the various knick-knacks, but their new configurations kept surprising her, no matter how often she came to visit.
She’d tried to explain it to Kathy once, but her friend had only laughed. “You’re far too set in your ways,” she told Isabelle. “In fact, I almost had a heart attack myself the first time you came back from the island wearing that red-checked flannel shirt of yours. I don’t think I’d ever seen you wear anything but black before that.”
By the time the summer ended, Isabelle was only coming into town when she had to.
“I guess the real news is that I’ve fmally finished my second collection,” Kathy said when Isabelle dropped by the Gracie Street apartment on her latest trip into town. “Alan’s going to publish it in the spring.”
“What’s it called?” Isabelle asked.
Though they still talked on the phone at least once a week, Isabelle was feeling more and more out of touch lately. Her afternoons were spent far from her phone, wandering the island, reacquainting herself with all the haunts of her past; mornings and evenings found her in the studio, working, more often than not ignoring the phone when it did ring. She had yet to buy an answering machine, so when she did speak on the phone it was usually when she made the call.
“I’m calling it
“Will it have that story about the whistling man in it?”
Kathy smiled. “That and everything I’ve written since
“Do I have to wait?”
Kathy reached over with her foot and used her big toe to tap a fat manila envelope lying on the coffee table. “I’ve got copies for you to take home right here.”
“With all your work at the Foundation, I’m surprised you found the time.”
