“Urn, can I help with the rowing at all?” he asked to cover his embarrassment.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Do you know how?”
“Well, theoretically. There was a rowboat at my grandparents’ cottage ....”
“They had a place on the Kickaha River, didn’t they? I remember we ...” She paused, then cleared her throat. “We all went up there one weekend ....”
Alan desperately wanted to talk about Kathy. It had been so long since he’d been with someone who had known her as well as he had. He was tired of talking about her work, of all that was entailed in getting the omnibus published, fighting Kathy’s parents, going to court, the book’s design, paperback rights. The Kathy that got discussed then wasn’t real. That Kathy was only one small facet of someone far more important to him. But he remembered Marisa’s warning, so he didn’t take up where Isabelle’s voice had trailed off.
“Of course, I was just a kid back then,” he said instead, “and all my parents would let me do was splash around with the oars along the shore.”
He seemed to have done the right thing, for he could see the tension ease in Isabelle’s shoulders. She gave him a small smile.
“Then just relax,” she told him. “I can always use the exercise.”
As Alan tried to get comfortable on the hard wooden seat under him, she dipped the oars into the water and gave a strong pull. The rowboat bobbed as it caught a swell, then shot forward. Alan put a hand on either gunwale and tried to take her advice, but he found it hard to relax.
“Did you bring a swimsuit?” she asked.
“Isn’t the water kind of cold?”
Isabelle shrugged. “Most years it’s still fairly comfortable right up until the end of September.”
Alan dipped a hand in. The water felt like ice and it was only the middle of the month.
“You’re kidding—right?”
Isabelle’s only response was the mischievous gleam that danced in her eyes. Alan was taken once again with how easily they had fallen into how things had been before the funeral, but he had the feeling that Isabelle was making just as much of an effort as he was to make it so. For all her friendliness, she still carried an air of distraction about her and he could sense a darkness haunting the smile that she so readily turned his way.
Stop analyzing her, he told himself. Stop looking for who she was and then comparing those memories to who she might be now. But it was hard. Without their even having to mention it, the past spilled out all around them. Most of all he could feel the presence of Kathy’s ghost, as though she were sitting on the wooden planks of the rowboat between them.
To shift his mind from the gloomy turn his thoughts had taken, he looked over Isabelle’s shoulder to Wren Island. Except for the old dock and the path leading away from it up into the forest, the wooded shoreline was wild and overgrown, a setting that seemed completely at odds with the bright primary colors and geometric shapes that made up so much of Isabelle’s more current work—or at least what Alan had seen of it in the Newford galleries.
“It just doesn’t seem to fit,” he said.
“What doesn’t?”
“You—living out here. What I’ve seen of your work over the last few years seems to owe so much of its inspiration to the city—all the squared lines like city blocks, the sharp angles and the loud lights.
Wren Island strikes me as a place that would inspire you to choose just the opposite for your subjects.”
Isabelle smiled. “And yet when I lived in Newford, I was doing mostly landscapes or portraits that included elements of landscape.”
“Go figure,” Alan said, returning her smile.
“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “I know why I live here. I like the wildness of it and I like my privacy.
I like knowing I’m safe, that I can step out of my front door in the middle of the night and walk around for as long as I like without ever once having to feel nervous about being mugged or bothered by one thing or another. I like the quiet—though, once you live in a place such as this, you realize that it’s never really quiet. Yet the sounds are natural—not sirens and traffic and street noisc and the sense of peace isn’t short-lived. It stays with you.”
“I always forget that you grew up here,” Alan said. “I met you in the city, so I can’t help but think of you as a city girl.”
“I’m hardly a girl anymore.”
“Sorry. Woman. You know what I mean.”
She nodded. “After the fire, I didn’t think I could ever come back again.” She had an expression in her eyes now that Alan couldn’t read at all. “It took time,” she said after a moment, “but I made it work.”
The fire. For a long time it had been one of those awful landmarks around which other less important events were considered and fit into the timeline of one’s life. Before the ... after the ... It was like a divorce, or a death ....
Alan wasn’t sure how to react. He felt he should say something, but was at a total loss as to what.
Happily, the boat drifted up against the island’s dock just then and the moment passed. Isabelle seemed to shake off whatever dark mood had gripped her and managed a vague smile.
“Here we are,” she said.
Shipping the oars, she stepped gracefully out of the boat, putting one hand on the bow to keep it from drifting away from the dock. She tied its line to an old iron docking ring, then steadied the boat so that Alan could get out. He managed to do it without mishap, if lacking her easy grace.
“Have you had lunch yet?” Isabelle asked.
He shook his head.
“Well, let’s go up to the house. I made us some sandwiches earlier. Nothing fancy: just feta cheese, Greek olives and tomatoes. It’s all I had on hand.”
“Sounds great,” Alan assured her as he followed her up the narrow path that led them off into the woods.
II
The house was a converted barn standing on a point of land overlooking the lake. While forest lay thick on the side of the island facing the mainland, here it was open fields, farmland only recently reclaimed by nature. The path came up out of the thick stands of spruce pine, cedar and birch to wind its way in between ivy-covered outbuildings that were mostly falling in upon themselves. Dense thickets of wild rosebushes grew in unordered profusion about the buildings, half hiding curious stone statuary and weathered fieldstone walls that seemed to both begin and end with no clear purpose.
The barn itself was enveloped with vegetation. Ivy grew thick on the south wall, framing the pair of large picture windows that looked out upon a riot of tall flowers: phlox, deep violet mallow and sunflowers, cosmos and purple coneflowers. The garden caught both the morning and afternoon light, but Isabelle’s studio was up on the second floor in the back where another large picture window flooded the loft with a strong northern light. The main body of the structure was shaded by three immense elm trees—two on the east side, one on the west—whose age could be counted in centuries, rather than decades. They seemed to have found a healthful sanctuary here while disease had taken most of their kindred on the mainland.
The island had been in Isabelle’s family for generations, but had only ceased to be a working farm at the end of the seventies, upon her father’s death. When her mother moved to Florida to live with her sister, she had left the island in Isabelle’s care. The farmhouse itself had burned down during the first year Isabelle had moved back to the island, and she had opted to convert the bam into a house and studio, rather than rebuild the original house. All that remained of her childhood home was a tall fieldstone fireplace rising out of a hill of sumac and raspberry bushes.