Still Life with Shape-shifter (31 page)

Kurt shakes his head admiringly, and his bad-boy grin slowly reappears. “You always were a ballbuster, Mel. I never should have let you break up with me.”

“That’s the mistake you made, Kurt. Thinking you could let me or not let me do anything. Do we have a deal? Or do I go?”

Even though he’s standing all the way across the room, he holds his hand out, ready to shake mine. “We have a deal.”

*   *   *

O
ne week later, the house has been reduced to splinter and brick. Ann will never be able to come home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

JANET

B
y the time he was thirty-five, Cooper had the body of a sixty-year-old. A well-kept, well-fed, energetic sixty-year-old, it’s true, but a man in decline nonetheless. It didn’t take much basic math to figure out that he would be lucky to have another ten years of quality life.

For a while, I thought I had found a way to slow the aging process, though it was counterintuitive and cost me dearly. If I injected Cooper with a serum made of his own blood, he would stay in wolf shape three weeks instead of two. Although I would have expected him to deteriorate
more
rapidly as he spent extended time in animal form, the reverse appeared to be true. In fact, the deterioration seemed to halt altogether if I gave him enough injections to keep him in animal shape for more than a month at a time. If he was a wolf for six weeks and human for two, his systems seemed to stabilize. No doubt he still aged, but at a more reasonable rate. From this I concluded that it was the transformation process itself—not just the effort required to live as a wolf—that took such a toll on his body.

But, oh God, six weeks without Cooper beside me—Cooper, the man, the artist, the lover, the gentle soul—I had such a difficult time enduring those lengthy separations. It was not as if I could not see him every day, of course. Even as a wolf, he stayed on the property. Winter or summer, we would spend evenings quietly together outside on the back porch, as we had done so many times on the deck at my parents’ house so long ago. I could talk to his dark, intelligent face; I could know that he understood me; I could be convinced, literally be without a wisp of doubt, that he loved me. But it was not the same. I missed him. I craved him. I wanted him, and I could see him slipping away.

And then everything got worse.

*   *   *

F
or the past three years, I had been assisted in my lab work by Evan’s daughter, a shy, brilliant girl named Karadel. When she first joined me, she was an awkward and uncertain seventeen, a homeschooled girl who would have been instantly admitted into any med school in the country except for the fact that she shape-shifted on a random basis into a truly astonishing variety of creatures. She had been an eagle, a fox, a brown mouse, a doe, a butterfly, an elephant. I sometimes thought that finding a refuge for Karadel had been Evan’s primary purpose in buying property for me and setting me up with my own practice. He had kept her for a long time on his estate in Barrington, a far western suburb of Chicago with lots of open land, but the transformation to the pachyderm had alarmed him. And so she came to stay with me.

As far as I was concerned, she was a gift straight from heaven. I had hoped she might become my assistant—fill a sort of vet-tech role—but it was quickly clear that with intensive training, she could be a full-fledged veterinarian every bit as good as I was. So I approached her education as if I would one day send her out into the world to open her own clinic. I taught her everything. By the time she was twenty, she could treat and diagnose any creature who came to my office, whether true animal or shape-shifter. She had also had a little success in learning how to control her own bewildering transformations, and she worked alongside me in the lab, trying to unlock the mysteries of her personal chemistry.

Cooper adored her, and she treated him like a favorite uncle. Sometimes, when he was a wolf and she was in some compatible form, they would romp through the grassland of the property like adolescent cubs learning to play and fight. I would watch them from the windows and blink back tears, reminding myself that it was foolish to be jealous. Oh, I didn’t think they harbored romantic feelings for each other, but Karadel could share with Cooper something I never could. Half of his life had always been mine—less than half now; perhaps one-quarter. And I had always wanted all of him to belong to me.

It was Karadel who first realized that the wolf serum was no longer halting Cooper’s deterioration. She had spent four days as a lively little Yorkie, and she and Cooper had chased each other through the snow-covered meadow that comprised the biggest section of my land. It was mid-January, not too early to think about spring, the time the world would redeem all the promises it made every fall.
This is not the end. This is only a time for rest and renewal.

“I’m worried about Cooper,” Karadel said. They were almost the first words she spoke aloud once she was back in human shape.

“What? Why?” I asked sharply. My heart, always braced for tragedy, seized up for a moment; I felt a spasm of pain pulse through my chest.

“He seemed so much slower today. He couldn’t run very far or very fast, and a couple of times he just stopped and sort of panted for breath.”

“Maybe he’s picked up a lung infection,” I said. “I’ll bring him in and do an X-ray.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” she said gently. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but his muzzle. It’s gone almost completely white. I think—I think it’s caught up with him. All the extra time you bought him with the serum—it’s all kind of evaporated. I think he’s old.”

I stared at her—a dark, slim girl with her mother’s build and her father’s uncanny eyes—and felt the edges of my world begin to disintegrate. It was as if I were standing on a sandbar in the middle of a low, sluggish river, and upstream about a mile or so I could hear floodwaters rumbling. The level of the river was already beginning to rise, nibbling away at the crumbling boundaries of my safe island. It wouldn’t be long before the toxic, tumbling water would come roaring through, obliterating my life and drowning me in despair.

“How old?” I whispered.

“I’m only guessing,” she said. “I’d have to examine him. But I’d say—in wolf years—eighteen. Maybe nineteen.” Wolves in the wild rarely lived past ten; those in captivity might live to be twenty. Karadel’s voice became even softer. “And once he’s human—”

“He’ll be about ninety or more,” I breathed. “Close to the end.”

“He’s probably got a year, at least,” she said.

“In wolf form,” I answered.

She just looked at me and didn’t answer.

“I think whenever he changes to human shape, he loses time,” I added. “If he has a year, but he changes shape three times—maybe he has six months.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” she said.

“It’s not long enough.”

“I don’t think we ever get enough time with the people we care about,” she said sadly, and I knew she spoke from experience. Her mother had died when Karadel was a child, and her father, who was now in his late forties, was growing weaker by the day. And, of course, she had lost any number of shape-shifter friends to disease, accident, and those too-early deaths. “My father says grief is the price of love,” she added.

I shook my head. “I can’t pay that price. I can’t live without him,” I said.

“You’d be amazed at what you can do,” she replied.

That I knew to be true; my whole life had been a series of surprises. But even if I discovered I
could
live without Cooper, I knew I wouldn’t want to.

“I want that year,” I said. “I want every minute of it.”

“You want to keep him in wolf shape that whole time?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem fair to him. He misses you, too, when you’re human and he’s animal. If he doesn’t have much time left, he deserves to share it with you.”

“He does,” I said. “And he will. But you’re going to have to help me.”

Her eyes went wide with shock. She had worked beside me in the lab; she knew at once what I intended.

“You don’t even know if it will work,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “It might kill you—it really might.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Without Cooper, I’d rather be dead.”

*   *   *

I
n the end, and only because Karadel insisted, I put off the injections; I allowed Cooper to become human one more time. She had been right, of course. He was a very old man now, decidedly frail, but still marked by that eternal sweetness and that hard-won peace. He knew at once that he could no longer cheat his implacable internal clock. He understood right away that his choice was to go back to wolf form and stay there for a year or more, or bounce between states of existence and be dead in a few months.

“I choose human,” he said. Despite the cold, we were outside, sitting side by side on the back porch, watching sunset sigh and release its golden grip on the ice-covered trees, the shorn grasses, the yawning acres of land. “I choose you.”

I had my arms around his waist and my head against his shoulder, but now I snuggled closer, inhaling him like the fresh scent of a summer day. “I choose you, too,” I whispered into his chest. “But I choose wolf. And I will be a wolf alongside you.”

I felt him lean back, angle his head down, try to see my face. “You want to test your serum on yourself?” he demanded. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“I think it will.”

Now he did pull back far enough that he could put one hand under my chin and tilt my head up. “And if it doesn’t?”

I met his eyes squarely. “Then you will get a chance to mourn me the way I have always expected to mourn you.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“No,” I said, “neither do I.”

He leaned in to give me a gentle kiss. “I would love to be a wolf alongside you,” he whispered. “We would have a year?”

“I think so. Close enough.”

“And we could stay here?”

“Of course.”

“What about your practice? All the shape-shifters who have come to rely on you?”

“Karadel is as good as I am. She can take care of them.” I kissed him. “You can’t possibly have any more objections.”

“Only the big one. The only one that matters. That I am afraid for you. That I don’t want you to give up your life for mine.”

“My life has always been yours,” I said. “And I’m not giving anything up. I am simply joining our lives together at the end.”

He leaned his cheek against the top of my head. “Then I say yes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MELANIE

T
he year that follows is one of my best and one of my worst.

Brody and I rent a house in south St. Louis and settle in to married life. For the most part, I love it, and the easy companionship we enjoyed during our courtship just becomes easier and more companionable. Of course, there are adjustments. He’s still something of a slob, he doesn’t always remember that two people sharing one bathroom have to display a great deal of sensitivity to both individuals’ schedules, and his sense of time rarely synchs up with that of the general population. He’s as likely to want a serious in-depth conversation at 3 a.m. as high noon, and it rarely occurs to him that there might be an hour when it’s too late to call. But those are minor irritations, and the benefits outweigh them a hundred times over. In many ways, I am happier than I have ever been.

On the other hand, I don’t really like living in the city, in a little row house that’s one of a series of row houses all marching down the street like redbrick soldiers. I like being able to walk to a neighborhood Italian restaurant, but I don’t like the fact that I have to close every shade in my house at night or my neighbors will make comments on the following day about what TV shows I’ve been watching. I’m not used to this many people being this close, all the time. I miss my house. I miss my twelve acres. I miss my sister.

Can’t think about that.

I don’t mind the commute down to PRZ every morning because the rented house is only a few blocks from Highway 55. I’ve started listening to audiobooks to make the trip pass more quickly, and I find I like this way of consuming a novel. When the book—or the narrator—is particularly good, I even become a calmer driver, less inclined to curse at red lights and people traveling slowly in the fast lane. Yet another benefit of my new life.

Brody takes Highway 55 in the opposite direction, back into the city, on
his
morning drive. He’s been rehired at Channel 5—not as an on-air reporter, but as a behind-the-scenes producer. When I ask him if he likes that better, he merely shrugs.

He has, at least for the time being, given up the notion of writing a book about shape-shifters. I’m deeply relieved, but I hate the thought that he’s had to put aside even a small dream. When I ask him about it one night, he says, “I’m too close to the story now. It would be a memoir, not a work of nonfiction. And I don’t want to write a memoir.” The distinctions aren’t clear to me, but he seems adamant.
Maybe later,
I think.
After everything’s settled.

We both have the sense that we’re just marking time. The sense that our
real
lives will start in a year, maybe two, that we’re in a very pleasant but still extremely nerve-wracking state of limbo, and nothing important will be launched or decided until it ends. Until something happens to Ann.

Maria Romano calls me every few weeks with updates, and I
live
for the sound of her voice on the phone. I admire the way she handles these calls, telling me every single detail she can call to mind, knowing how important each one will be to me, without sounding maudlin or depressing.

Ann looked thin, but she had a good appetite. She rested most of the first day, but then she was up and playing with Lizzie the next day. She yelped once when Lizzie pulled her ear too hard, but she didn’t bite or scratch, just kind of backed up and watched her for a while, as if waiting to see if Lizzie was going to do anything else inappropriate . . .

William usually takes human shape at least once during these visits and fills her in on anything major that’s happened while they’ve been gone. It’s William who describes what happened only three weeks after the wedding when, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t keep Ann from following the back roads that would lead to the house she’d grown up in. They arrived on Bonhomme Highway at dusk and traveled cautiously along the shoulder to avoid being hit by cars, though Ann, as always, became increasingly reckless as they approached the most familiar curves of the road.

And then they got to the point where he knew your house should be, but it wasn’t there—just an empty field with a couple of Bobcats digging up dirt—and it was like Ann didn’t know what to do, William said. At first she slowed down, like she knew something was missing, she just didn’t know what, then she picked up speed again, racing up the hill and around the next curve, as if what she was looking for was just around the corner. And she kept going for another mile or so, then she stopped, and turned around, and retraced her steps. And the same thing happened—she’d slow down, she’d speed up, she’d keep looking for something. He says he’s not even sure she knew what she was trying to find. And after a couple of hours of this, she turned away, and they headed to a park to spend the night.

My heart breaks to think of Ann lost, confused, frantically seeking something she can’t even articulate to herself.

And rejoices—in a stern and bitter way—to think that I have, with my staggeringly expensive purchase, bought her another year or two of life. If I had ever doubted it, I know for certain now that she
would
have reneged on her promise. She
would
have come to see me, turned human again, and died in my arms. I have outwitted her, and I am fiercely glad.

And irredeemably sad.

I carry those two contradictory, equally powerful emotions in my heart for the rest of that year. Through a sparkling white winter and my first Christmas as a bride. Through spring’s shy, flirtatious arrival, one day warm and beckoning, one day haughty and cold. Through summer’s expansive, self-satisfied, slow and sluggish reign. And back toward autumn’s temper tantrums, stormy and beautiful.

Debbie has her twins, both of them girls—named Sasha and Sarah, not Zoe and Zelda. Immediately, she descends into a life of sleepless chaos from which she occasionally sends bulletins that roughly translate into
This is even harder than I thought it would be, but God are they beautiful.
After a three-month maternity leave and a long search for the perfect nanny, she’s back at PRZ, vowing that Charles won’t touch her again until he’s “cut off the jewels and buried them in the yard.”

Brody wins a regional Emmy award for a program he produced, which prompts his boss to offer him a raise and an extended contract. But I sense a restlessness in him that more money and increased responsibilities won’t appease. His friends Carolyn and Joe have left Doctors Without Borders to begin volunteering at a place in Tasmania that treats and educates children with handicaps. He keeps reading books about mountaineers who found schools in Asia and economics professors who start microfinance banks in Bangladesh.

“I don’t want to be the guy who builds the school or starts the banks,” he tells me. “I want to be the guy who
writes
about the guy who goes out to change the world.”

“I have half a million dollars,” I say. “We could take a year off and go to Africa.”

“Maybe,” he says. “Not quite yet.”

Not quite yet. Not while Ann is still alive.

*   *   *

T
he call from Maria comes on a Wednesday afternoon in late October. “Ann’s here,” she says without preamble. “But she’s struggling. Lying on her side and panting. She took some water, but I couldn’t get her to eat anything. I think it’s time.”

For a moment, I can’t think. “Okay—I’ll—thanks for calling. Let me get some stuff together and—I’ll leave as soon as I can.”

Brody’s at work, and I know he can’t always answer his phone, so I text him.
Going to Maria’s.
He’ll know what that means. I stop in Debbie’s office, and say baldly, “I’ve got to go. Don’t know when I’ll be back.”

She’s sitting behind her desk, looking weary and hot, but on the instant I have every scrap of her attention. “Ann?” When I nod, she says, “Do you want me to come with you?”

“Thank you, but no. I just want to be with my sister.”

Against this very eventuality I have, for the past couple of months, kept a packed overnight bag in my car. I don’t know how the next couple of days will go, but if Ann’s too weak to travel, I might be staying at Maria’s for a while. Part of my brain acknowledges that as a horrible imposition, and part of me doesn’t care. All that matters is that I get to Ann’s side as quickly as I can.

An overcast sky ushers twilight in an hour or two early; I accomplish the whole drive in a gray half-light that reinforces my sense of dread. All the lights are on at Maria’s, and I push the door open without even bothering to knock.

All the people who live in the house full- or part-time are gathered in the living room. Maria’s reading a book to Lizzie, and the little girl—more than two years old by now, and
so big
—is repeating words back to her. Dante and William are seated on the couch, both of them turned to gaze at me. Dante looks sober and sorry; he knows what it’s like to lose a sister. And William—he looks dreadful. Pale, scraggly, rail-thin, and miserable.

He knows what it’s like to lose a sister, too. And now he’s learning what it’s like to lose a lover.

“She’s back in Lizzie’s room,” Maria tells me. “Dante and I thought we’d go away for the night. Give you a little privacy. You can sleep in our room—I changed the sheets this morning.”

“Thank you,” I say. I’m already edging toward the hall, but I meet William’s eyes. “Are you staying?”

He relaxes a little, as if maybe he’d thought I wouldn’t want him to be here. “If you don’t mind.”

“She belongs to you, too,” I say.

And then I can’t wait another moment, and I run straight to Lizzie’s room. It’s decorated in a zoo motif—perfect for a shape-shifter, I suppose—but most of the furniture has been pushed back against the walls. There’s a hooked rug on the floor, shaped like a plump giraffe, and Ann’s lying on top of it.

The only illumination comes from a polar-bear night-light, but that’s plenty. I can see that Ann is still in husky shape, and Maria was right. She’s definitely struggling. Her eyes are closed, her breath is shallow and troubled, and her legs are held out stiffly from her body. But she hears me come in and she stirs, seeming to make a great effort to lift her head from the floor. When the blue eyes open, they look whitened, half-blind, and as they stare at me for a long moment, they show no flicker of recognition.

“Annie,” I whisper and drop to my knees. “Annie, it’s Mel.”

Maybe she remembers my voice, or my name, or my scent, but suddenly she knows me. I see her face change and her body ripple as she tries to push herself upright. The heavy tail beats the floor a few times in joyful welcome. I put my hands to her face and her tongue flashes out to lick my wrist. Her nose is hot and dry, and her fur feels gritty and sparse beneath my fingers. She doesn’t have the strength to sit up.

So I lie on the floor next to her, my hands still on her face, her paws scratching gently at my shoulders. “How’ve you been, baby?” I ask in a soft voice. “You’re looking pretty tired. I guess you’ve had a tough few months, huh? But I hope you’ve had some fun, too. I’ve missed you. I’ve thought about you every day.”

She makes a little whine deep in her throat and paws at my shoulder again, like she’s asking me a question. “Yeah, baby, you can change now,” I say, my voice even softer. “You can come back to me. It’s okay if you’re not strong enough. I’ll just lie here with you a while, just like you are now. But if you want to change, you can do it. You can come back.”

She whines again, and I move one hand from her face to her neck to her shoulder. Under the brittle fur, I can feel her muscles straining, almost unraveling and reknitting; she closes her eyes again as if the effort of transformation is almost too much for her. I’m afraid to speak, afraid to distract her and somehow strand her in a half-life between one form and another. Then all at once I feel the tension leave her body. Her head falls back, her legs splay—and all that bristly white fur melts away.

Lying beside me on the giraffe rug is my painfully thin, fearfully weak, radiantly smiling sister. Blond, naked, shivering, and dying.

“Annie,” I breathe, and crush her in my arms.

She’s laughing and crying into my neck. I feel the bones of her arms as if they are not softened at all by muscle or flesh. Her skin is chilled to the touch, so I shake free and sit up just enough to twitch a quilt off the nearby rocker, and I tuck this around her so she’s covered from her chin to her toes. Then I snuggle up against her again.

“It is so good to see you,” I say.

“It’s been a lot more than three months,” she answers. Her voice sounds a little froggy, as if she’s been battling bronchitis, but I know she just hasn’t used it in a very long time.

I’m surprised into a breath of a laugh. “Yeah. More like a year.”

“You tricked me,” she replies, but she doesn’t sound angry.

“I did. I’m sorry.”

“You tore the house down!”

“Sold it to Kurt.”

“No! Did you get a lot of money?”

“Half a million dollars.”

“But why? Why did you sell it?”

I stroke the blond hair that falls around her face. It’s matted with dirt and frayed with split ends. Not so much unkempt as uncared-for. “Because I didn’t want you to come back and turn human and die.”

She gives a long, shuddering sigh, a sound that could belong to a dog as much as a human. “Yeah, and I would have. I wanted to. But I still can’t believe you’d sell the
house
!”

“So now I have a lot of money. How should I spend it?”

“Buy a red sports car and drive it really fast.”

“Yeah, and get a speeding ticket every day.”

“Travel around the world. Spend a year in Europe. You’d like that.”

“I’ve been thinking about traveling. That’s a good idea.”

“How’s Brody?” she asks.

“Working at the TV station again. Just won some award. I like being married to him.”

“That’s nice,” she says with another sigh, this one happier.

“So what about you? And William? How’ve you been?”

“Good. Really good, until a few weeks ago. We spent the winter down in the bootheel on a farm William learned about from a friend. Lots of cows and barns and warm places to sleep. I felt so good. Really strong. When it snowed, we’d just go
racing
across these open fields. We wouldn’t see a human footprint for miles—just this gorgeous white expanse of snow. William said whenever I stood perfectly still, I’d just disappear.”