Still Life with Shape-shifter (11 page)

“I used to hear about shape-shifters all the time,” I told him. “My grandmother was part Navajo, and when she lived with us in Arizona, she’d tell me stories about the skinwalkers. Of course, they were pretty scary! They’d steal your soul if they could. So I always believed that people could take the shapes of animals.” Now I was the one to shrug. “I don’t know why I wasn’t frightened, though. Maybe because I always wished
I
was the one who could change shapes.”

He lifted his heavy eyebrows. “What animal would you want to be?”

“Any animal. A bird, maybe, so I could fly away, anywhere I wanted to go.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the house, shadowed and sleepy except for the gold light in the kitchen windows. “You’d leave your family?”

I made a rude noise. “In a heartbeat.”

“Why?”

“My dad’s crazy, and my mom’s a loser.” It was more complicated than that, of course, but I figured that was what it all boiled down to.

“Still, if they love you—” he protested.

“I don’t know that they do,” I interrupted. “Your parents don’t have to kick you out of the house to be terrible people.”

“I suppose not,” he said. He gave a little laugh. “I used to prowl past houses at night—not just my mom’s, but homes in the neighborhood where I used to live, and other little towns I happened to be in. And I would look in the windows, and I’d see moms in the kitchen making dinner, and dads outside mowing the lawns, and kids running up and down the stairs or watching television or playing some game. And I’d think, ‘
I
want that house.
I
want that life.’ From the outside, they always looked so perfect.”

“And from the inside, a lot of them probably sucked,” I answered. “You can never tell from looking how good or how bad someone else has it.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

A short silence fell between us. I knew there were hundreds more questions I ought to ask, but my mind had gone completely blank, and I was, all of a sudden, so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. Too many late hours and nights of little sleep. I found myself unable to stifle a yawn.

“I should go,” Cooper said, coming abruptly to his feet.

I jumped up beside him. “Wait. Not yet. Tell me—you’ll come back, won’t you?”

He gazed gravely down at me. When we stood side by side, he was so much taller than I was that I had to tilt my head way back to meet his eyes. “I will if you want me to.”

“I do! Isn’t that obvious? I want to be your friend.”

“It would be good to have a friend.”

“And you’ll have to let me know what I can do for you. Like—should I buy you clothes? Is there anything you need?”

That swift smile, just as swiftly disappearing. “I can always use food.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Meat’s pretty easy to come by, at least in the summer,” he said. “I miss fruit the most. And bread. And potato chips. And cookies.”

“But you probably don’t have anywhere to keep perishables for long,” I said, thinking out loud. “What about—do you have a can opener?”

He looked surprised. “No.”

“I mean, obviously the wolf can’t use a can opener, but if you’ve got some soup and chili and peaches on hand, you could eat all that as soon as you turned human.”

“That would be great,” he said. “But you’ve done so much for me already—”

I smiled up at him. “I’m just getting started.”

*   *   *

O
ver the next two weeks, Cooper came to my house every night. I had developed a rhythm for my days that allowed me to accommodate these strange nocturnal assignations and still manage to do everything else I was committed to. I slept late in the mornings, ran errands before my shift at McDonald’s, took a nap in the afternoon before my parents came home, and made sure they saw me diligently doing my chores before they went upstairs to bed.

Then I waited outside for Cooper to come.

I spent every cent I earned over those two weeks on stuff for Cooper. Not only did I buy him the junk food he craved, and the canned goods that would sustain him during lean times, but I picked up camping gear that would improve his life: an insulated cooler, an LED lantern, a radio and batteries, matches, a Swiss Army knife, and a first-aid kit. That made me think of other toiletries that might come in handy, so I bought him soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. And a toothbrush. He didn’t look like he needed to shave yet, but I made a mental note to think about razors in the future. I even secured a bicycle for Cooper when the teenage boy down the street got his driver’s license and hung a sign saying
FREE
from the handlebars of his old road racer.

“Tell me what size jeans you wear, and I’ll pick up some new clothes for you when I get my next paycheck,” I told him at the end of that second week.

“I don’t know what size jeans I wear,” he said.

“Hmmm. I guess I should take your measurements.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “Janet, you should stop buying me things. You can’t spend all your money on me.”

“Why not? I don’t need any more clothes. I have as much food as I want. I’m not making a car payment. Why can’t I spend my money on you?”

“Because it doesn’t seem right.”

I patted him on the arm. Usually, at least once every evening, I found a reason to touch him, briefly, just in passing. Just to reassure myself that he was real. “You’re not used to generosity,” I said. “But I never knew how to be generous before. I like it. It makes me happy. You have to let me give you things, so I can keep on being happy.”

He made a small sound of helplessness and frustration. It had become obvious during the past two weeks that I could argue circles around him even when I was wrong. He hadn’t figured out yet that the only way he could win a quarrel with me was to simply fail to show up one night. He didn’t have a clue about the power dynamics between two people.

“I just don’t want to take more than you have to give,” he said finally.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m surprised to find out I know how to give anybody anything at all.”

He nodded, glanced away, looked back at me. “This is the last day,” he said in a quiet voice. “I can feel the change coming over me.”

Something made a sharp stab in my chest—excitement or disappointment or both. “So you’ll be a wolf tomorrow,” I said. “Come back anyway.”

“It’s more dangerous.”

“For you or for me?”

“For me.”

Maybe he did know how to win an argument, after all. I couldn’t possibly beg him to put himself at risk for my sake. “I’ll worry about you,” I said. “The whole time you’re gone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“And you’ll come back? The first night you’re human?”

He nodded. “If you want me to.”

“Of course I want you to! Two weeks from now. Here. In this very spot. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“It might not be two weeks exactly.”

“Well, I’ll be here anyway.”

He nodded again, and, after a moment of silence, we both came to our feet. And then we stood there a moment, awkward and indecisive. Good-byes were hard even for people with well-rehearsed social skills, and neither one of us qualified. “Let me give you a hug,” I said softly, “then you can go.”

He stepped forward willingly enough, but put his arms around me uncertainly, as if he couldn’t tell how close to pull me, how much pressure to exert. I wrapped my own arms around his waist and hugged him hard, laying my cheek against his lean chest. He smelled like sweat and dirty boy and grass and woods and summer. His heartbeat was stronger and wilder than my own.

“Be careful,” I said, letting him go with reluctance.

“I will.”

“Don’t forget me.”

“I won’t.”

Another moment of silence so full of unspoken thoughts that it did not seem silent at all, then he was gone.

I went to bed and cried for half an hour before exhaustion shoved me down the crooked stairwell into sleep. Over breakfast I was monosyllabic, at work I was sullen, and in the afternoon, I was too inconsolable to nap. Instead, I wandered out to the deck to flop down on the lawn chair and stare moodily over the yard to the border of trees that marked the beginning of public land. Somewhere past that boundary, Cooper had slipped into his alternate existence. I was beyond curious to know what the other half of his life looked like. I wanted to jump off the deck, break through the tree line, track him to his lair, and gaze around. I wanted to know what the wolf saw. I wanted to know how the wolf lived. Someday, perhaps, I could convince him to take me to his camp in the woods.

But part of me was afraid that, despite his promise, he might never come back at all.

I had been sitting there maybe half an hour when my eyes fell on a white plastic bag that had blown onto the lawn and come to rest against the lower edge of the deck. It was the kind of bag you’d use to line a kitchen trash can, and after a moment’s inspection, I realized it had not drifted into the yard by accident. For one thing, it appeared to have been wrapped around some short, cylindrical object; for another, it had been carefully weighted down with a couple of ornamental rocks from my mother’s garden. This was something someone had deliberately left behind.

I jumped up and knelt in the grass to unwrap the package. Out slipped a stiff piece of paper, maybe twelve by fourteen inches, that had been rolled into a tube. I flattened it over my thighs, then simply stared.

It was a pencil sketch on the back of an advertising flyer, an intricately rendered woodland scene as viewed from about the height of a toddler. Every inch was crammed with detail—summer bushes dense with leaves; fat tree trunks alive with squirrels and birds and butterflies; fallen logs covered with lichen and mushrooms and busy ants. The perspective was imperfect, and the artist’s hand had smudged the graphite in more than one place, and there were a number of places where dirt had marred the purity of the paper. But the drawing was exquisite.

A gift from Cooper. A glimpse into the wolf’s world. A thank-you. And a promise of a return.

CHAPTER NINE

MELANIE

I
’m at PRZ about an hour early Wednesday morning so I can clear out the e-mail, voice mail, and snail mail that’s accumulated in the past thirty-six hours. I know most people hate spam, but there’s something about it that I find calming. A few clicks of the mouse,
delete forever
, and you never have to think about it again. A single problem, a quick solution, move on. If only all of life’s challenges could be dealt with so cleanly.

I hear high-heeled shoes clicking across the tiled squares of the reception area, so I know Debbie’s on the premises long before I see her. The other women in the office wear clogs or slides or soft-soled loafers, but Debbie is incapable of dressing down in a professional environment; she hates the very notion of “business casual.” I admire her standards even as I make no effort to adhere to them myself.

She doesn’t even bother stopping at her office before she comes to mine. She’s still wearing her trench coat and carrying her briefcase as she steps in, closes the door, and drops to the comfortable chair pulled up close to my desk. “Okay, tell me everything about this guy, and I mean everything,” she says.

I swivel in my chair and just look at her. Instantly, her demeanor changes. “What’s wrong?”

“I think something’s the matter with Ann.”

“What? She’s sick? She’s hurt?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. She’s—tired. Maybe that’s all it is. But after she went to bed last night, her boyfriend wanted to tell me—”

“Wait—she has a boyfriend? Start from the beginning.”

I take a deep breath. “She got here Monday night, told me she’s fallen in love with a guy named William—”

“Does he know about her? About what she is?”

“Yeah. He’s one, too. And so is everyone in his family.”

“Wow, that’ll be interesting.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, Ann and I went to lunch and when we came back, there he was. She’d told him where I hide the key and so he was sitting inside the house. We all talked a while, then she went to bed.”

“Did you like him?”

I shrug. “I thought he was odd. I mean, he kind of looks like a homeless person—of course, he kind of
is
a homeless person—he’s scruffy, and his hair’s long and scraggly, and he was wearing these beat-up old clothes. You know. Not quite the upstanding citizen that you would want your sister to end up with.”

Something I’ve said has diverted her. She scrunches up her pretty features as she pursues a new thought. “Huh. Wouldn’t it be interesting if—maybe homeless people are
all
shape-shifters. And one of the reasons they don’t want houses or cars is because they don’t
need
stuff like that most of the time.”

“I think we as a society would be lucky if that were the case, but unfortunately I think they only represent a small minority,” I say in a tired voice.

She snaps back to attention. “But we digress. So William’s this weirdo—”

“No, no, I didn’t say that. He’s just odd. And almost—ill at ease. Like this isn’t a shape he’s very comfortable in. Like he hasn’t been human very long or very often.”

“So I guess that most of the time when they’re together, they’re not.”

“That’s what I gather. Anyway, everyone tried hard to be polite and get along, and as I say, Ann went to bed. And then William came to find me and told me he was worried about her.”

“Worried in what sense? What’s bothering him?”

“That’s the thing. He couldn’t be very specific. He just said she seemed to tire easily, her energy level was low, and she seemed to be forgetting things.”

“What sorts of things?”

I’m silent for a moment. “Well, she almost forgot how to find her way home, apparently.”

Debbie just stares at me.

I shrug. “She said she got lost because of all the new construction.”

“A valid point.”

“And she
did
find the house eventually. But William seemed to consider that another bad sign.”

“What does he suggest you do about it? Can you take her to a doctor?”

I give her an
are-you-crazy
look. “I’m not sure she’s ever been to a doctor. I mean, I guess when she was a baby she got all her vaccinations. And last time she was home, I took her to an urgent-care center to get a tetanus shot because I just shudder to think of all the rusty nails and bad water she’s exposed to. But I honestly don’t remember a time she’s seen a doctor for the flu, or an ear infection, or a broken bone, or anything.”

She’s surprised. “I never realized that. She must be incredibly healthy.”

I sigh. “Or she
used
to be incredibly healthy. Now—I don’t know.”

“Maybe William is just being overprotective. Maybe he’s creating a crisis out of nothing.”

“Maybe. Although he doesn’t seem like the type who panics easily.”

“Well, what did
you
think? Does she look sick to you?”

I consider. “I thought she looked thin. And like she’s aging faster than she should. You know, she was always so radiant. And now her skin looks a little dull, and there are more lines around her eyes than there should be on a twenty-year-old. But I attributed that to—well, it must be a hard life. It would age anyone.”

Debbie nods. “So maybe she’s just exhibiting normal wear and tear for someone of her type, and William is simply concerned because he loves her. And if she doesn’t appear to be in imminent danger and you’re not going to take her to a doctor for a physical in any case, I’m not sure there’s anything you can do.”

“Except worry.”

“Except worry,” she echoes. “And you’d do that regardless.” She wriggles in the chair to resettle herself and unbuttons her coat. It’s a dark purple microfiber that most people wouldn’t have the nerve to wear, but of course it looks fabulous on Debbie. Everything does. “So now that we’ve settled
that
, let’s get to the good stuff. Tell me about this guy! This reporter. He’s writing a book about—”

She doesn’t finish the sentence. Both of us have caught the sounds of voices in the anteroom as the other two employees drift in more or less on time. In fact, a second later Chloe knocks on the door and sticks her head in. She’s braided her brown hair and wrapped it around her head so she somewhat resembles a homesteading farmwife, but the look sits well with her general air of competence and serenity.

“Hey, Mel. Everything all right?”

“Sure. Did I miss anything important yesterday?”

“Just a couple of phone calls. I left messages on your desk.”

“Go away,” Debbie says. “I’m trying to worm top secret information out of her, and she’s being difficult.”

Chloe grins and withdraws, shutting the door with a deliberate
click
. Debbie faces me again. “So? This guy?”

“Used to be a reporter. Now writing a book. Yes, on that topic. He had a lot of information on my family from when we used to live in Kirkwood. He had stories from some of our neighbors at the time, talking about how they would see a little white dog in our yard.” I glance at the door. Chloe is not the type to listen at keyholes—Em is, but she usually spends the first hour of the day on the phone with her mother—but even so, I speak in code. Debbie knows how to translate. “And he had some basic information on our lives once we moved down here. He knows, for instance, that Ann was homeschooled and generally considered sickly. I’m not too worried about the people he’s already talked to—they’d only have the most general information about us—but I think he’s going to keep talking to people. Keep digging. And then—I don’t know what he’ll learn.”

Debbie lets out her breath in a long, gusty puff. “Well, I can totally see why you’d be alarmed, but I’m not sure you have anything to worry about. I mean, no one knows the truth, do they? Except me. And you know
I’m
not going to say a word.”

“I keep going over it in my head. Who would know anything? Who would suspect anything? She had friends, but as far as I know, none of them ever saw her—” I glance at the door again. “Like that. Kurt’s mom was always curious, but I don’t think she was smart enough to figure it out. I mean, she probably thought Ann had a mental disorder and we were keeping her at home so no one saw her throwing fits or foaming at the mouth.”

“You never told Kurt, did you?”

I give her a look of scorn. “We barely
talked
, let alone about important things.”

She giggles, momentarily the high-school girl again. “You didn’t talk because you were too busy making out.”

“Oh, like you were sitting there with your legs crossed like a good little virgin.”

She laughs even harder but returns to the main point quickly enough. “So no one knows. So you’re safe. And you didn’t tell him anything—”

“And I’m not
going
to tell him anything. I don’t trust him.”

“So why did you have dinner with him the other night?”

I give her a lopsided grin. “And lunch with him yesterday.”

“
What?
How’d
that
happen? Wait—was Ann there? Did he actually meet her?”

“Oh, yeah. She invited him.”

“Seriously. You are so bad at telling stories. Start from the beginning.”

I fill her in on every detail of my two encounters with Brody Westerbrook. It seems to take a long time; I seem to have spent more hours in his company, or filled those hours with more meaningful conversation, than you would normally expect from a new acquaintance. She listens intently, asking for clarification now and then, but at the end it’s clear that, not intending to, I’ve drawn a portrait of someone that she is prepared to endorse wholeheartedly.

“The more you say, the more I like him,” she decides after I recount the conversation at Slices when he passes up the opportunity to talk about his book.

“Ann thinks he likes me.”

She laughs in disbelief. “Well, duh!”

I make an exasperated sound and sink back against my chair. “He doesn’t like me. He’s being nice to me so he can trick me and trip me up and make me tell him stuff about my sister.”

“Maybe,” she says. “But he sounds more genuine than that. And let’s just look at all the things we’ve learned about him.” She enumerates on her fingers. “He’s cute. He’s curious. He’s comfortable. He’s kind. Change
kind
to
caring
, and they’re all C words. Good ones. The combination just doesn’t get better than that,
chica
.”

I sigh again. I didn’t get much sleep, and I am, this early in the morning, already exhausted. Maybe William should start worrying about me, too. I say, “You’ve forgotten one C word. He’s catastrophic.”

She ignores that, as if it’s not the most important of all Brody Westerbrook’s attributes. “So are you going to see him again?”

“I’m guessing it’s going to be impossible to avoid it, since I’m guessing he’s pretty tenacious when he’s working on a story and one of his sources is recalcitrant.”

She taps her lip with her index finger. Her lipstick and her nail polish are a perfect match. “I’d like to meet him. Can we arrange that?”

“Sure, he’ll ask me which of my friends he can interview, and I’ll point him right in your direction.”

“I thought maybe a more lighthearted, fun, social occasion? We could have the two of you over for dinner one night.”

“Debbie, we’re not in
high school
. Brody and I are not
double-dating
with you.”

She grins, unrepentant. “Well, it was fun then. It ought to be even more fun now if Kurt’s not the fourth person in the car.”

“
Everything’s
more fun if Kurt’s not around.”

“I think you should bring him to our house for dinner one night. That has the added advantage of letting you see how well he interacts with my sons so you can decide whether or not you’d want to have children with him.”

“Debbie!”
I wail, but she’s gone off in peals of laughter. I start pelting her with all the unfortunately not-very-deadly objects on my desk—a windup plastic cow, a stress ball, a mostly empty box of Kleenex. Still laughing, she fends them off with one hand and pushes herself to her feet.

“I’ve got to make some calls,” she says when she’s able to speak again. “Think about dinner.”

“I’m not making plans with anybody while Ann’s in town.”

“Bring her along,” Debbie invites. “Bring the boyfriend—what’s his name? William. I’m dying to meet him, too.”

I am momentarily diverted by the image of
that
dinner table. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” I say. “Let me get some work done. See you at lunch.”

I slog through the day without much enthusiasm, resisting the impulse, every half hour or so, to call the house and check on Ann. I don’t want to wake her if she’s repairing bones or tissue with restorative sleep; I don’t want to disturb her if she’s talking or—whatever—with William. Just in case she’s forgotten them, I’ve left my office and cell-phone numbers on a piece of paper in the kitchen. She’ll call me when she has time.

But she doesn’t call.

I’m fighting back a sense of unease when I leave work about fifteen minutes early and speed down Bonhomme Highway toward home. Clouds are threatening to turn the chilly March air into disagreeably cold March rain, but the streets are still dry as I take the hilly road to my house a little too fast for optimum visibility around blind curves. There’s one scary moment when I top a rise from one direction as an eighteen-wheeler barrels over it from the other. He blares his horn and I wrench the Jeep to the shoulder as we charge past each other, my tires churning up rocks at the edge of the road.
Okay, okay, slow down,
I tell myself. I won’t be much use to Ann if I’m dead.

Still, I’m traveling way too fast and have to stomp on the brakes as I skid onto my front lawn. Against the dreary pewter of the sky, any light from the house would make a bright contrast, but I can tell before I’m even out of the car that no lamps are on. “Ann?” I call as soon as I’ve unlocked the door and stepped inside. “Ann? Are you here?”

The house is silent in that eerie, echoing way that a building only has when it’s been unexpectedly abandoned. It’s as if the bricks and the flooring and the furniture and the walls are still waiting to be stepped on and leaned against. They haven’t quite accustomed themselves to solitude yet; they’re holding themselves in readiness.