Shadows (5 page)

Bugsuck.
Iya. Iya na
creepo.

“I’m just taking Mongo out,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes on the floor—they were in the living room, and I had the feeling Mom had been sitting in Val’s lap—“And then we’ll go on to the shelter.” I put the lead on my overexcited dog and pretty much ran out the door. We didn’t get back till it was dark, and even Mongo was (relatively) tired. But we’d been practicing herding both with and without sheep (or alpacas, which are majorly evil from a herding point of view) and he had been absolutely dropping in his tracks when I yelled
stop
or held my hand up. My brilliant dog. So I had something to be happy about.

It was a good thing I had Mongo and the shelter. Because it was pretty much keeping my eyes on the floor and running away for the next six weeks. It was too easy to hate Val once he and his horrible shadows were around all the time, even with how unhappy the way I was behaving made Mom. But it didn’t make her as unhappy as being married to Val made her happy, so I hated him for that too. At the time I didn’t think Val gave a bucket of battery acid whether his new wife’s daughter hated him or not. Ran thought he was great, so he and Mom outnumbered me, right? I had to live in the house, but the garden had become a no-go area because of the way the shadows hung out around the shed. The slugs could just eat that end of the garden because I wasn’t going near it. I got desperate enough I even once asked Ran if he’d ever seen anything like what I saw—what Jill had seen—Val’s dreeping shadows. But it got obvious fast that Ran thought either my wiring was coming loose or I was playing some kind of joke on him, so I stopped.

One day when the shadows were particularly bad and I was totally absolutely sure one of them was following me around and trying to climb up chair legs to get at me so I couldn’t even sit at the kitchen table to do my origami (Val was in the shed), I blurted out that Val had only married Mom so he could stay in Newworld instead of being deported back to Orzi-whatsit, and Mom went
rigid
with fury and sent me to my room. I was too old to be sent to my room, but I went anyway. I’d never seen her so angry. She didn’t come around later and try to make it up either. So I hated Val for that too.

I tried to look up Val’s shadows on the webnet, but what was I supposed to look them up under? I half-tried a couple of times to talk to Jill about them—she’d seen full-current weird about the shed, after all—but she wasn’t having a good summer herself. It was like breaking up with Eddie had jerked her off her sprockets and she couldn’t find her own rhythm again. She told me once, trying to laugh, that she had this sort of permanent half headache of approaching doom. “It’s probably just knowing we’ve got Mrs. Andover for homeroom our senior year. How unfair is that?”

If it hadn’t been for Clare and the shelter I don’t know what I would have done. Run away from home for real and joined the army. (I’d be more likely to jump down one of the silverbug checkerboard pinholes.) Clare had lost a couple of workers over the summer (kids who looooove animals often find they don’t looooove cleaning up after them so much) so she could even pay me for a few extra hours. I was there so much I was totally tight with the Family, which are the mostly reject animals that live at what used to be reception, but Clare’s put a half wall across most of that room so you can sidle along this little aisle from the front door to Clare’s office, although Bella (the wolfhound) can still reach you if she wants to. You can tell a lot about a potential critter adopter by how they react to ten or twelve dogs enthusiastically bouncing off a three-and-a-half-foot barrier in welcome. (There are usually also a few cats in the bay window ignoring the fuss, Suri the parrot screaming, and Sherry the chameleon silently turning blue.)

Mongo became an honorary member, since I usually brought him along, and he was good at enthusiasm. (He never learned to love the bus ride, but he learned to put up with it.) And by the end of the summer he could bring the ponies or the wethers to the top gate, or Clare’s chickens back to the henhouse. (We were still working on the alpacas. Alpacas have minds of their own.)

The best times, that summer, were when Jill came to the shelter with me (mostly she was working too: she was a waitress at Peta’s Café and put in a few hours a week at Porter’s) and we took as many of the long-term residents for walks as possible. Clare tried to get all the dogs out of their kennels at least every other day, but her volunteer walkers didn’t always show up. Mostly you could only walk one or two dogs at a time—no more than you had hands
and
the dogs had to get along—but Jill and I took the Family out in bulk. I’d have Mongo and Bella and Jonesie plus Athena and Eld and maybe Mugwump, and she’d have Camilla and Twinkle or Angela and Dov and Doodad, who usually wore herself out early on and came home in a pocket.

But the day we got home from a triumph about a missing chicken, Mom wanted to go to Pineapple and Pepperoni for dinner.

Once Mom was working for Tennel & Zeet and we weren’t
utterly
broke all the time, she used to take Ran and me out for dinner at Pineapple and Pepperoni occasionally. P&P was the local pizza place that advertised
EVERYTHING for your pizza
and so every family in town with kids would go there and the kids would try to think up stuff they didn’t have. They were pretty high wattage, and people didn’t really want to waste their money on something they wouldn’t eat just to give a pizza place a hard time. (Yes, they had chocolate sprinkles but Mom wouldn’t let us order them.) Although Ran went through a period of
liking
peanut butter on his pizza. Tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni and
peanut butter.
They only put it on his third but it was hard even to watch somebody eating peanut butter pizza.

The thing about P&P was that it had started up after Dad died, so when Mom and Ran and I started going there it was our new family ritual, a ritual that said we could still be a family and do silly stuff like order pizza with peanut butter or raisins or potato chips (Mom only let us order that once, unfortunately, it was pretty good), or zombie fingers (breakfast link sausages) or witches’ eyes (green olives) or demon brains (red peppers. Green peppers were toxic sludge and yellow peppers were chicken toes). I think we may have started laughing again when we started going to P&P.

And then Mom married Val and she wanted to take him along when we went out for our pizza evenings. Which meant not only Val, but coming home after dark with Val, even though I wasn’t alone with him. First time I said I had a headache and stayed home—and was tactful enough to be in bed when they got back, although I’d been reading by flashlight, and only turned it out when I heard the car in the driveway. Second time Mom phoned me at the shelter, and I said, more or less truthfully, that Clare had asked me to stay late. She had, but I could have made it home if I’d hustled.

Third time . . . I’d come through the door relatively cheerful and ready to tell everyone about how clever Mongo was. It would give me something to
say,
you know? It wasn’t like I was having a good time being a sullen teenager not adjusting to her mom’s second husband. It took me a minute to realize that all three of them were standing around like they were expecting to go somewhere. And then Mom said we were going to P&P. After a pause, while I could feel myself deflating like Mongo having been told to stop being a
bakayaro
and Go Lie Down, I said I wasn’t hungry.

“Maggie,” said my mother with an edge to her voice, “you have never not wanted to eat pizza in your entire life. Except when you have a headache,” she added grimly, “or have decided to stay later at the shelter than Clare asked you to.”

I flinched. I’d tried to keep Clare out of my problems. I stared at my hands, hoping that my stomach wouldn’t choose that moment to growl. I
was
hungry. I was enormously,
takusan
hungry, and I hoped they’d leave soon so I could get to the refrigerator before I fainted or something. I’d had lunch but it seemed like several years ago. I would
love
a pizza. I even started to think about going and making my mother happy. Or less angry anyway. But I raised my eyes and involuntarily met Val’s. He was looking at me with that cautious, wary expression he usually had when he looked at me. His shirt looked like something out of one of the dog beds at the shelter.

He was standing in front of the wall between the kitchen and the front hall, where usually Mom’s grandmother’s quilt hung on a long rail. But she’d taken it down for mending—it was so old it kept trying to disintegrate, but Mom would sew it up again and put it back on the rail. If the quilt had been there I wouldn’t have seen much.

But tonight as I met Val’s eyes this great
writhe
of shadows erupted up the empty white wall behind him. It was so startling I gasped and stepped back.

“Maggie . . .”
began my mother, and she was really angry, because she thought I was faking it. But she must have seen how shocked I really was when I turned to her, and she stopped, and her face changed, and she almost looked like my old, pre-Val mom again. She put one hand on my arm and the other one on my forehead. “Sweetie, are you ill?” she said. “Do we need to get you to a doctor?”

“No,” I said, or mumbled, because the fear spike on top of the too-long-ago lunch was making me feel kind of weird. “I’m fine. It’s just—” And then I couldn’t think of what to say instead of “your new husband is
hitodenashi—
some kind of monster.” What is the polite alternative? “I’ll be fine. I’ll make myself some scrambled eggs.”

Mom wavered. She’d moved the looking-for-a-fever hand to my other arm. “Maybe we should all stay home,” she said.

“Oh
Mom,
” said Ran. “She
said
she’ll be fine.”

My little brother, the soul of unselfishness. But in this case I was totally with him. “I make great scrambled eggs,” I said. “I don’t need help. Or looking after. You should go.”

Mom smiled. “I know you make great scrambled eggs. Right after—before Tennel & Zeet, when I was working all hours, we lived on your scrambled eggs.”

“Hey,” I said. “I learned to cook.”

“You did,” said Mom. “But at first it was scrambled eggs. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“I’m sure,” I said firmly. Mom put her hand on my forehead one last time. It’s a mom thing. You come home covered in blood from beating up (and being beaten up by) the playground bully, or wet, muddy and hysterical because you dropped your knapsack with all your schoolbooks in it in the river and it got dragged downstream a ways before you managed to get it out again, and the first thing your mom does is feel your forehead for fever. “Mongo will take care of me.”

“I’ll leave my phone on,” said Mom. “Call me if you need to.”

“Okay,” I said, and she hugged me, and I almost cried. Before Val, we used to hug each other a lot. . . . I risked a look at Val. There was only one shadow left on the wall behind him and it was kind of saggy and . . . almost like it was sad. Margaret Alastrina, I said to myself, Hit the circuit breaker. Then Val moved . . . and the shadow on the wall was just the shadow of a short hairy guy in a really awful shirt.

I was in bed when they got back again, but this time I was reading by my ordinary table lamp. Mom came in to check on me. She sat on the end of my bed and we talked a little. But there wasn’t really much to say. She was married to Val. And I couldn’t bear to be around him.

• • •

Val spent most of the days in his shed. He’d already been tutoring before he met Mom, so now his students came here. Fortunately there was a back gate so we didn’t have a constant stream of losers and dreeps through the house. Mostly he tutored math and science, not philosophy. I knew that Takahiro was going to be doing some kind of hot-wired super-science project with him starting in the fall semester. I was trying not to think about it because Taks was my friend.

It was something, I guess, that Mom hadn’t found a way to cram an office for Val into the house. Our house was way too full already, even after Dad and Mom turned the garage into a dining room. Mom’s cubby at the end of the dining room was pretty well impassable. It was known as the Lair, and Ran always roared or snarled when he mentioned it. There wasn’t room in the living room even for a desk. If Ran and I wanted to do our homework downstairs (the better to torture each other) we did it on the kitchen table. So having Val in the shed was relatively great, as great as anything was about Val.

Except that every now and then Mom sent me out there with some kind of message. How lame is that? It would cost money to connect the groundline so that never happened and Val wouldn’t have a pocket phone out there. When he went to the shed he left his phone in the house. Even Mom thought this was kind of weird, and kept asking him why. Eventually, one night at dinner the subject came up again, and Mom asked why again, and he got a funny little smile on his face and said, “I don’t like the energy.”

“You—what?” said Mom.

“I do not like the energy,” repeated Val. “I would be without electricity and my ’top also, but that is too difficult, and I am lazy.” He had an old-fashioned fold-up ’top that lived on a shelf in the kitchen with its power cord tucked behind the refrigerator where Mongo couldn’t get at it. It was so old that when you unfolded it not only did you have to tell it to turn on, you had to tell it to plug into the webnet. And almost all the letters on the keyboard had worn off.

There was a creepo silence. Finally Mom said, “Oh, you philosophers,” and changed the subject.

Philosophers.
What Val had said sounded like the sort of thing the loopheads who studied the physics of the worlds might say, not that I knew any of them personally. How to Go Crazy in One Easy PhD: get it in physwiz and then get hired by one of the brain bureaus. There was one in Steelgate, called The Intellectual Trust, in a big grey building that was so ugly it looked like squashy purple methane-breathing aliens must have built it.
Trust.
Not likely. Mom’s mysterious missing sister was supposed to have worked for a brain bureau before she disappeared—or maybe she disappeared because she worked for a brain bureau. There was a rumor that the one in Steelgate had a whole floor sealed off against stuff like electricity and groundlines and the webnet, and you had to work with paper and pencil by oil lamps. Doing
what
?