Still Life with Shape-shifter (8 page)

“Oh, yeah,” she says drowsily. “Everything’s easier when I’m a dog. I have more energy—I can get around more quickly—I don’t really notice the heat or the cold. I don’t know that I’d ever be human again if it wasn’t for you.”

And now my heart freezes so fast the next time it attempts to beat it cracks right in half. “Oh dear,” I answer, still struggling to keep my voice light. “Now I’ll feel selfish and whiny if I say, ‘But pleeeeease remember to be human every few months, Ann, because I miss you so much!’ I hate to be a bother.”

She gives a sleepy chuckle and lifts one leg to prod me with her foot. “Silly. Of course I want to see you. I’ll always come home to visit, no matter how long I’m gone. Don’t you worry about that.”

I’ll always worry. No matter what you say. Whether you’re gone a day or a decade, I will spend every minute of that time worrying. Worrying about you is exactly what makes me human.
“All right, then,” I say, trying to sound brisk and cheerful. “I’ll keep that in mind. Now it looks to me like you’re about to fall asleep right where you’re sitting. Go to bed. I’ll let Debbie know I won’t be in the office tomorrow, and we can hang out together and talk about sister stuff.”

She yawns and pushes herself to a more upright position. “Sounds good. See you in the morning.”

She ambles off to the second bedroom, the one the two of us shared when Gwen and our father still lived in the house. I send a text message to Debbie, then lock up the house. I’m so tired I do believe I might dissolve into a pile of quivering atoms the minute I stop concentrating on my various tasks. Still, after I’ve brushed my teeth and changed into my pajamas, I can’t resist creeping into Ann’s room and proving to myself one more time that she’s alive and she’s here.

She’s fallen asleep with the night-light on, and I can just make out her features. Without her sunny personality to animate her face, she looks even more gaunt; her body is a bag of bones under the thin cover. I try to use cold reason to argue away my new spike of fear.
She seemed perfectly healthy when you were talking. She didn’t seem to be lethargic or in pain. She’s been eating raw squirrels and other people’s trash! No wonder she’s thin. She’s just fine.

But I can’t seem to get out of the habit of looking at Ann and imagining her surrounded by perils. She’s a grown woman now—a woman with a lover who sounds far better equipped to watch over her than I’ve ever been—so I know it is time for me to resign my post as her chief caretaker and guardian. But still I stand there, another five minutes, another ten, trying to guess the content of her dreams by the fleeting expressions on her face, and wondering how in the world I’ll get by if anything ever happens to Ann.

CHAPTER SIX

I
’m making breakfast the next morning, still in my pajamas, when the phone rings. I’m not surprised to hear Debbie’s voice.

“Oh no you will
not
,” she says in her hopelessly bad approximation of ghetto speak. “You will not be sending me texts at midnight saying you’ll talk to me in a few days when there is
so much
to talk about
right now
.”

I cradle the phone between my ear and my shoulder so I can open the microwave and check on the bacon. Still not done. “Yeah, I thought that wouldn’t appease you.”

“So who was that guy? At Corinna’s last night? Were you on a date that you didn’t tell me about? How could there be
anything
in your life you don’t tell me about? We have no secrets, remember? Since we were fifteen? So tell me.”

“He’s a reporter. He wants to write a book about shape-shifters. He thinks Ann’s one.”

Her voice instantly drops to a register of dread and awe. “Holy Mother of God.” See? Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe anyone with any sense would realize just how terrifying this development could be. “What did you tell him?”

“That he shouldn’t be ridiculous, there’s no such thing as shape-shifters.”

“So why did you have dinner with him?”

Ann wanders into the kitchen just then, barefoot, her hair wet from the shower. She’s wearing the nightgown I gave her for Christmas last year, and it hangs on her body as if she has the contours of a plank of lumber. The damp hair throws her jaw and cheekbones into sharp relief. She could model for an anatomy class that was too squeamish to examine actual skeletons.

I feel my throat close up with concern, but I try to focus on the conversation. “That’s kind of a long story. Part of what I’ll tell you next time I see you.”

“Is part of the story the fact that he’s really cute?”

That makes me laugh. “I guess so. Look, I’ll talk to you later. Ann’s eating pancake batter out of the bowl, and I need to take a shower and figure out how to spend the day.”

“Are you coming to work tomorrow?”

“Depends. I’ll let you know in the morning.”

I hang up and swat Ann’s hand away from the mixing bowl, though in truth I’m glad to see she has an appetite. “Here. I know you’re used to eating your meals raw, but here’s a whole
stack
of pancakes already cooked that I’ve kept warm in the oven.”

“It smells wonderful. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had bacon.”

We eat breakfast and talk about what we want to do today. Well, mostly I make suggestions and she nods agreeably; clearly she doesn’t have any preferences. I think if I’d been isolated from society and culture for two months, I’d have a whole list of activities I’d be eager to engage in, from seeing movies to shopping for clothes. But it’s obviously pointless to upgrade a wardrobe she rarely uses—equally pointless to go out for a pedicure when she’ll be running barefoot through the wild in a few days—and I can’t imagine that a picnic in the park would hold much allure for someone who eats
all
her meals outdoors.

We’re scraping off the plates and loading up the dishwasher when she has an inspiration. “Let’s look through the photo boxes,” she says. “We always say we’re going to sort them and put them into albums. So let’s do it.”

“Ooooh, excellent idea,” I reply, drying my hands on a dish towel. “They’re all in three plastic bins in the closet in my room—the ones with red lids. You want to get them out while I take a shower? Just set them on the living-room floor so we can take up as much space as we need.”

Within the hour, we’ve spread pictures and report cards and letters and other random mementos all over the central rug and the hardwood border of the living room, and we’re trying to create piles of photos that represent a rough time line of our lives. In one stack go all the images of our father and me before Gwen and Ann showed up. In another are the photographs snapped after Ann had been born but we still had a house in Kirkwood. There are three groupings for our lives since we moved to Dagmar—early ones that include Gwen and our father, later ones in which she is mostly absent and he is clearly fading, and the most recent ones, in which both of them, for different reasons, are missing altogether.

Ann picks up a photo from that first Dagmar stack, a picture of the four of us in front of a Christmas tree when she was six and I was sixteen. Ann, as always, looks like she’s just run inside after some joyful event that she can’t wait to tell us about; she’s bursting with health and excitement. Gwen has one hand on Ann’s head, one arm wrapped around my shoulders. She’s smiling, too, and she exudes a warmth and affectionate cheer that, by this time, I had come to realize was false—or, if not false, wholly unreliable. My father and I wear matching expressions of tension and desperate hope. We’d been in Dagmar about a year when this shot was taken (though I have no idea who operated the camera; so few outsiders ever set foot inside the house). We still believed that it might be possible to live a functional, if not entirely ordinary, existence in our new home—that we could control Gwen’s increasingly erratic behavior, conceal Ann’s bizarre condition, hold down jobs, finish school, carry on like normal people—but we were starting to fear that we could be wrong. Not that we ever discussed our situation out loud. We couldn’t. We didn’t have the words.

Ann is quiet for such a long time, as she studies our faces, that I finally have to prompt her. “What are you thinking?”

“Wondering about my mom. Do you think she’s still alive?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s been nine years since we’ve seen her, hasn’t it?”

Ann nods slowly, still staring at the photo. “You can’t tell, just by looking at her face.”

“Can’t tell what? That she’s a shape-shifter?”

“That she’s the kind of person who’d leave. She looks like she’d hold on forever if she loved you.”

“I think she did love you,” I say softly. “I think she loved you, and Daddy, and even me.”

Ann lays the picture down. Her face is stern. “Not enough, obviously.”

“Not as much as we wanted,” I correct her gently. “I think she gave us as much as she could, and when it was all gone—” I shrug. “So was she.”

“When did you find out about her? When did you know she was a shape-shifter?”

“After you were born. After
you
changed for the first time. She used to sneak off for a week at a time, every few months—just be gone, not tell us where. It made Daddy crazy, at least the first couple of times. She never told him where she went or why. I think he must have just assumed she was going on benders or something. He stopped asking her about them, but he would get this—dark look every time she disappeared. Each time she came back, he was a little more remote. Like he’d realized he couldn’t trust her anymore, but he still loved her, so he had to figure out how to accept her absences.

“Then you came along, and everyone in the household adored you, and at first we thought it would be okay. I mean, Gwen was
crazy
about you. Some days she carried you around, even when you were sleeping, because she just wanted to look at your face. And Daddy never said it out loud, but I’m sure he was thinking that, now that you were here, Gwen wouldn’t abandon us again. You’d keep her home. But you were about three months old when we got up one morning, and she was gone.”

I’m quiet a moment, and Ann doesn’t say a word. She’s picked up another photo, this one showing the two of us in matching Christmas outfits. I think our grandmother had selected them and mailed them from Texas because
I
was too old to want to dress like my little sister, and neither my father nor Gwen managed that kind of organizational planning. I’m scowling, probably because I hate the dress; Ann, of course, is smiling.

“You were six months old the first time you changed shapes,” I say. She’s heard this part of the story a million times, but she doesn’t stop me as I launch into it again. “I’d put you down for a nap and you fell right asleep. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out I checked to make sure you hadn’t woken up. And there in the crib was a little white puppy, curled up asleep, right where you’d been.”

“What did you
think
?”

“I spent a couple of minutes not thinking at all. Just staring. But, you know, I was only ten years old. I think kids tend to see the world as it is, not how they expect it to be—they’re more open to magic. I knew I had put you in the bed. I knew that no one had had time to come in and steal you and leave a puppy in your place. So I knew it was you. I just didn’t know what to do about it.”

“So you ran downstairs to tell Daddy and my mom—”

“And Daddy said, ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous.’ And Gwen started crying.” Wailing and sobbing and carrying on in a way I had never seen a grown person behave. I was actually more afraid of Gwen’s histrionics than I was of the transformed little sister sleeping peacefully in the upstairs bed. “She started moaning, ‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault, I was afraid this would happen.’”

“And what did you think
then
?”

“I don’t know what Daddy was thinking, but I remember very distinctly what was going through my head. I’d read too many fairy tales, maybe, with evil witches and jealous women trying to poison their stepdaughters. I thought Gwen had mixed up some kind of terrible potion, and she’d meant to give it to
me
, but somehow you had gotten it by mistake. It was so weird—I had that thought with such clarity—even though I really liked Gwen and she’d always been very good to me. It was just the old archetypes exerting their power, I guess.”

“So then she finally calmed down enough to speak—”

“And she told us what she really was. Said that whenever she left the house for extended periods, she would go somewhere and become an animal—usually a bird, an eagle or a hawk. Said that she came from a whole family of shape-shifters, though she never saw her brothers or sisters anymore. That she knew she might pass on the genes if she ever had children of her own, but she’d taken the risk anyway because she loved us so much, she wanted to make a family with us.”

“What did Daddy say?”

“He was watching her like he thought she should be committed to an asylum. I mean, it was obvious he thought she was either insane or she was making the whole thing up. He started talking in this calm, reasonable voice. ‘Now, Guinevere, you know that transmutation of people into animals is physically impossible—’”

“Transmutation,” Ann repeats, savoring the word like a piece of chocolate.

“That’s what he said. You know the way he would talk. ‘I’m afraid this must be some elaborate fantasy you’ve concocted. Maybe you’ve been under too much stress.’ And she yelled, ‘Stress! I’ll tell you about stress! Living a lie like this for so long, afraid you’d find out, afraid you’d stop loving me—’ And a lot more like that. I’d always hated being in the room when adults were arguing, so I just went back upstairs and sat on the floor in your room. I thought maybe you’d be a baby again but, no, still a dog. I got a book and sat there and read for the next half hour, while they kept fighting downstairs.”

“Why didn’t he just ask her to change shapes and prove she was telling the truth?”

“Oh, I think he did. But Gwen didn’t have that ability—at least she said she didn’t—at least, I never saw her change shapes. Neither of us did. I think the only reason Daddy ever came to believe her was because of you.” I pause for a beat. “I believed her right away. I don’t know why.”

“So then what happened?”

“So finally they both came to your room. Gwen was still crying, but in a quieter way, and Daddy had developed this sort of stony calm. I could hear him talking as they came up the stairs. ‘You’ll see—Ann will be in her crib and she’ll be perfectly normal, and then maybe you can stop spouting this nonsense.’ And they walked in the room, and there was a puppy in the bed, and Daddy stopped as if he’d been shot by a bullet. Then he started shouting at me. ‘Where’s the baby? What happened to the baby?’ And I said, ‘I think that
is
the baby.’ And he actually jerked me to my feet and slapped me. He’d never done that before. Never did it again. But he was so afraid—he really thought you’d been kidnapped or that I’d thrown you out the window or something. And he shook me and just started roaring at the top of his lungs.
‘Where is the baby?’
And then—”

“Then my mom pointed at the crib, and said, ‘Look! Look!’”

“And there you were, transforming right before our eyes.”

Since then, I’ve seen Ann alter shapes a hundred times, maybe more. It’s a strange, beautiful, unearthly sight that never fails to leave me both awestruck and greatly unnerved. But that first time . . . it was almost impossible for us to believe the evidence of our eyes. The husky’s white fur seemed to glow, then take on the faintest pink tint, then smooth itself into skin. It was like watching a Saturday morning cartoon, or a really good CGI movie. You know someone’s manipulating the special effects, but it looks pretty damn real to the naked eye. It took about a minute for the sleeping dog to become a sleeping baby, wholly oblivious to our shock and disbelief. She was naked; the diaper I’d put on her just an hour ago made a small, discarded shape beside her on the bed.

Gwen started crying even harder, and ran over to the crib to scoop Ann up in her arms. My father just stood there, shaking his head, and whispering “No” over and over. I do believe that’s the moment his brain started misfiring as overloaded circuits tried and failed to process what he had just witnessed. He was a man of science, but he had always considered science a rock, not a frontier; he could not believe it would present him with unexplored and impossible options.

I was young enough to accept miracles as commonplace. “I told you so,” I said. “You should apologize for hitting me.”

But he only gave me one long, agonized look and blundered from the room.

“How long did it take before Daddy just got over it and went on like everything was normal?” Ann asks.

“I’m not sure he ever really did get over it. I think part of him never entirely believed it was true—even though he saw the evidence, at least in you, over and over again. I think part of him had this thought at the back of his head that he was crazy, that this wasn’t really happening. That he’d lost touch with reality.” Which made it easier for him to slip into dementia, not even putting up a token fight. Why bother? He was already delirious.