Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  I force myself to look at him fleetingly. He still appears a little annoyed, but mostly resigned. This is someone who long ago stopped being surprised by the unfathomable decision-making processes of the general public. “But there were a bunch of other people there when it—supposedly—happened, weren’t there?” I say.

  He nods. “Sure. The cops and the animal-control guys were there on the ground, and my cameraman and I saw the same thing from the air. And you can bet all of them were interviewed at one time or another. But, you know, three of the cops said they were too far back to see clearly enough to make a statement in court, and one of the animal-control guys explained how there’s a long history of bears being mistaken for humans or vice versa. Such a bunch of bullshit. They were just too unnerved by reality to speak the truth. They didn’t want it to be true. It seemed too impossible. So they convinced themselves they were mistaken.”

  He shakes his head.

  Despite myself—despite my own worries, which at the moment revolve around what Brody Westerbrook plans to do to destroy my world—I am a little intrigued by this story and how it affected his life. “Did anyone believe what happened?”

  “Sure. My cameraman, my producer, the station manager—I mean, it was a live feed, and they knew we weren’t sitting in the studio doctoring footage. But as soon as they saw how the rest of the world was reacting, they pulled the plug. I wanted to do a long series on the topic of shape-changers and how they’ve been portrayed throughout history and how they live among us today, but they wouldn’t go for it. Too self-serving, they said—make us look like we were trying to legitimize a hoax. I brought it up every day for about three weeks, and they always said no.” He shrugs. “So I quit.”

  “To write your book. About shape-shifters?”

  “That’s right.”

  I snap a few pretzels between my fingers. “And what have you learned so far?”

  He doesn’t answer at first, so I glance up at him again. He’s watching me, a faint smile on his face. “Not so sure I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned,” he says. “I need to protect my sources.”

  “You haven’t learned anything,” I say bluntly. “You haven’t met a single shape-shifter.”

  He waggles his head from side to side in a maybe-yes-maybe-no motion. “I’ve seen some things. I’ve talked to people who know shape-shifters. A lot of my evidence is anecdotal so far, but the anecdotes are pretty compelling.”

  “Sure. Alien-abduction anecdotes are pretty compelling, too, but they still don’t make me think there are spaceships hovering over the planet and scooping up random people to run biological tests on them in the middle of the night.”

  His grin intensifies. “See, you just did it,” he says.

  I feel immediately hostile. “Did what?”

  “You linked my shape-shifting premise to an even more preposterous one so that you could discredit my theory just by association. That was a common tactic used by the media and the bloggers back when my story was first aired.”

  “Sorry,” I say tartly. “I’ll try to be more original next time I mock you.”

  “And you’re only mocking me because you’re trying to keep me at a distance,” he adds. “You don’t want me to win you over. You don’t want to feel comfortable enough to confide in me. You’ve set yourself against me. And here I thought you were going to be a friendly girl, offering me pretzels and soda. I was even starting to hope for dinner.”

  I can’t help it; I laugh, as he surely intends me to. I suppose journalists must have a knack for making people like them, or they’d never secure any interviews, but Brody Westerbrook has certainly developed the skill to a high degree. “I’ve dropped cyanide in the Coke and sprinkled arsenic on the pretzels,” I say. “I know how to get rid of pushy reporters.”

  He smiles again, and says casually, “Tell me about your sister Ann.”

  My laugh turns to dust in my throat. I just stare at him and don’t answer.

  “I know a little bit about her,” he goes on. “She was born twenty years ago at St. John’s in Creve Coeur. Nothing particularly unusual about the birth. She lived with you and your father and her mother—your stepmother—in a house in Kirkwood until she was five. Then your family abruptly sold the house and moved down here.” He glances around the room again. “Back when here was a much less developed part of the world. You probably didn’t have neighbors for two miles on either side of you when you first bought this house.”

  I don’t say anything, but he’s exactly right. We hadn’t even been on the school-bus route at that time; Gwen or my father had to drive me to school until I got my license a year later.

  “When Ann was old enough to go to kindergarten, she didn’t. Your stepmother elected to homeschool her. That might have been considered a little odd in this neck of the woods, but your father put out the story that she had frail health, and people tended to accept that. Your dad let it be known that the damn doctors could never figure out exactly what was wrong with his little girl. People tried to be sympathetic without appearing to pry.”

  Well, that depended on the person, of course. Kurt Markham’s mother used to grill me endlessly whenever he would bring me by his house or, in later years, when I’d run into her on some ill-fated shopping expedition. “So what exactly is it that’s wrong with your sister, dear? My niece died of leukemia when she was four years old. The saddest thing. And George’s nephew, he has lupus—although I never understand exactly what lupus is. But his doctor is at Barnes in St. Louis if you ever want his phone number. I do hope Ann’s feeling better. And how about your father? He was always such an interesting man.”

  I never gave her any details. “They’re fine, thank you.”

  Though, by the time I graduated from college, my father was in the dementia wing of a West County retirement center, and Ann was . . . Ann.

  “Then your father got sick,” Brody says, employing the most euphemistic term, “and your stepmother had already left town for good. You were a legal adult by this time. You kept the house, worked part-time, put yourself through school, got a job, and here you are.” He leans forward over the table. “But Ann hasn’t been seen around these parts much since she was about sixteen. You tell people she went to California to try to become an actress. People believe it because she was always such a pretty girl. But she’s never gotten a job in any commercial or TV show they’ve ever heard of. Too bad. They’d like to brag about the local girl who made good.”

  About halfway through his recitation, I’d dropped my eyes again, but now I lift them to give him another unfriendly stare. “Sounds like you’ve learned a lot about my family,” I say. “I’m just curious to know which of my friends and neighbors you’ve been talking to. And don’t tell me you’re protecting your sources. I’d like to know who gossips that much with total strangers.”

  “Well, my primary informant wanted me to tell you hello from her, so I know she won’t mind,” he says. “Ella Dartmouth—remember her?”

  I nod. She’d worked as a secretary at Maryville for a hundred years, or thereabouts, and was one of the few people my father kept in touch with even after he left the university. She could have supplied virtually all the information Brody has just recited—and would have done so without having the slightest idea that her words had the potential to do any harm.

  “Who else?” I ask.

  “Your high-school principal.”

  I’m a little bewildered. “Mrs. McAvoy?” She’d been famous for knowing the name and family tree of every student at Dagmar High, but I wouldn’t have said she was intimately acquainted with my situation.

  “That’s right. But we only talked about you in a general way. I told her I was doing an article about rural schools that turn out superstars—writers, actors, politicians, that sort of thing—and did she have any examples for me? I had a few yearbooks with me, to prompt her memory, and I’d point to a few random faces as we went through the pages. Yours was one of them.” He shrugs, as if to sa
y, It was subterfuge, but it worked. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone else in Dagmar. Thought I’d come to you next and see what you might tell me.”

  To myself, I’m thinking, It could be worse. Aloud I say, “It doesn’t sound to me like anything they told you would have made you come to such a—such a preposterous conclusion. I can’t imagine why you started looking for us in the first place.”

  He nods, as if he was expecting that response. “When your family was living in Kirkwood, there were—incidents,” he says. “Neighbors would see Ann playing in the backyard. And then they’d look again, and there’d be a little white puppy racing around. A husky. And they’d look five minutes later, and the little girl would be back, but the dog was gone.”

  This is a little more damning, and I feel my heartbeat accelerate, but I keep my face impassive and only shrug.

  “One of your next-door neighbors was a girl a year or two younger than you. Named Caitlyn. She was crazy about dogs, but her brother was allergic, so her parents wouldn’t let her get one. She’d come over to your house and ask to play with the puppy, but your dad and your stepmother would always say no. They’d say it wasn’t really their dog, it just came to their house sometimes, and they’d leave food out so it wouldn’t starve.

  “One day, Caitlyn sees the husky in the backyard, so she sneaks over and lets it out. The two of them take off for some park a few blocks away, where they play for a couple of hours. The puppy is really smart, Caitlyn says—understands every word she utters. Like, after they’d been running around for a while, Caitlyn announces, ‘I’m really thirsty,’ and the dog heads straight for the drinking fountain.”

  I roll my eyes, but under the table, where he can’t see them, my hands are clenched together so tightly I think I might crack the bones. “Oh, that’s impressive,” I say.

  He just keeps going. “Finally, Caitlyn and the puppy return home, to find the whole neighborhood in an uproar. Your family is searching everywhere for the dog—your stepmother is hysterical—your father has taken the car and is driving slowly up and down the surrounding streets, looking for a little white husky. Mind you, this is a dog they claim doesn’t belong to them. When Caitlyn shows up with the puppy in tow, your stepmother falls to the ground and grabs the dog in her arms and just starts sobbing. Caitlyn’s in trouble herself, her dad yelling at her for leaving the house without telling anyone where she was going, but she can’t stop staring at the crazy neighbor lady making such a fuss over a dog that isn’t hers. At one point, your stepmother looks up and demands, ‘What happened to her foot?’ There’s a gash on the inside of the puppy’s right foreleg, and it’s bleeding a little though it doesn’t seem to have slowed the dog down any. Caitlyn says she doesn’t know.

  “Her parents are hauling her into the house, but right before she’s yanked inside the door, she sees your dad drive up. He’s still cruising slowly down the street, calling out for the little dog. ‘Ann! Ann! Come home, girl!’” Brody gives me a limpid look. “Ann? They’ve named the dog that isn’t really theirs after their own little girl? But before she can think too much about it, she’s hustled inside and has to deal with her own problems.”

  Brody takes a swallow of his Coke. I am attempting to sit there in stony silence, but the truth is I am remembering that terrible day in vivid detail. Caitlyn’s recitation, via Brody, doesn’t include the fact that I flung myself on my bicycle and pedaled as hard as I could to the places I happened to know were Ann’s favorites. There was a farmer’s market in downtown Kirkwood on Saturdays, and she loved to run between the stalls and snatch up fallen bits of fruit and baked goods. There was a jungle gym in a nearby schoolyard where she was especially fond of the rounded green climbing rock shaped like a turtle. Worse, there was a fountain outside one of the pizza shops on Kirkwood Road, and she was fascinated by the splash and play of water. She always wanted someone to pick her up and hold her so she could bat at the thin jets of water spraying out, until she and anyone in her vicinity were liberally drenched. The fountain’s basin was curved and shallow, but deep enough for a child to drown in.

  I raced to each location, one by one, but there was no sign of Ann.

  I remember how my lungs had burned with the effort of those manic bike rides, how my legs felt simultaneously stretched and heavy, quivering with exhaustion. But those discomforts had been negligible compared to the sense of panic that had choked my throat, the feeling of dread that had cramped down on my stomach. My thoughts were desperate and circular. Where could she be? Is she all right? Has something happened to Ann?

  Good thing I didn’t know then how often I would lie awake over the next fifteen years, asking myself those same questions. No more frantic bike rides to likely hiding places, but equal amounts of worry and misery.

  And these days, Ann is gone for longer than an afternoon.

  Brody resumes his story. “Caitlyn is grounded for the next two weeks, and none of her friends can come over, and she can’t watch TV. So she spends a lot of time in the backyard, playing by herself. One afternoon, little Ann Landon is out back, too, digging in her sandbox. There’s nothing else to do, so, even though Caitlyn is eleven years old and not that interested in small children, she tosses a ball back and forth over the fence with Ann for a little while. Pretty soon she notices that Ann has a Band-Aid on her right wrist. A big one. ‘Hey, what happened to you?’ she asks. Ann says, ‘I hurt myself when we were at the park.’”

  Brody repeats that, as surely Caitlyn must have when she told him this overwrought tale. I don’t remember our former neighbor all that clearly—I never paid much attention to her—but I think of her as a small, whiny girl who was always asking if she could borrow something. A toy, video, a black windbreaker that I wore everywhere because I thought it made me look sleek and mysterious.

  “‘When we were at the park,’” he says with heavy emphasis. “Caitlyn couldn’t quite figure that out. Did Ann mean ‘we’ as in ‘my family and me’—or did she mean ‘we’ as in ‘Caitlyn and Ann’? But Caitlyn had never been to the park with the little girl named Ann. Only with the puppy that might have been named Ann, too. A puppy that had been injured in the exact same place that the little girl had a bandage.”

  I slap my hands to my cheeks in feigned astonishment. “What could this strange, mad coincidence possibly mean?”

  “So Caitlyn gets the ball back from Ann and doesn’t throw it over the fence again right away. ‘Hey, Ann,’ she says in a friendly voice, ‘where’s that little white puppy who lives at your house sometimes?’ And Ann replies, clear as you please, ‘I’m the dog. The dog is me.’”

  He says these last words with the solemn portentousness you might reserve for announcing the location of the Holy Grail. There’s a charged silence between us for a moment though I’ve molded my face into an expression of slightly bored politeness, as if I’m waiting for the rest of a tale that has not fully engaged my attention. He just keeps watching me, his brown eyes steady, serious, unflinching.

  Finally, I permit myself a little smile. “Oh—that’s it? That’s the whole story?”

  “It’s a pretty good one, don’t you think?”

  “Some woman tells you that, fifteen or eighteen years ago when she was eleven years old, my sister told her that she was a little white dog? And you believed her? I mean, what kind of evidence is that? What kind of reporter are you? If those are the best sources you can turn up as a general rule, I’m not surprised you gave up journalism.”

  His eyes narrow, and he sits back in his seat, regarding me with a measuring expression. “Interesting,” he says. “I don’t make you for the kind of person who’s usually cruel, so the mockery must be a defensive maneuver. Am I getting too close to the truth?”

  I take a deep breath, make an exaggerated expression that shows how hard I am trying to hold on to my patience. “Mr. Westerbrook—”

  “Brody.”

  “I’ve had a long day. An emotional day. I’m tired. I’m in a bad mood. You’re a
stranger who’s come to my door to make wild accusations about my family, and I think I’ve been pretty tolerant up to this point. But I find my civility is on the verge of giving way. I don’t mean to be cruel when I say, could you just leave? Right now? Thank you.”

  He pushes his chair away from the table but doesn’t stand up. “Sure. Fine. Thanks for talking to me. But just answer one more question for me. Will you?”

  Again I make the God-give-me-strength face and say, in carefully neutral tones, “Of course. What is it?”

  “Is your sister Ann a shape-shifter?”

  I open my mouth but for a moment am unable to speak. I have lied about Ann for so long, to so many people, that you’d think it would be easy to lie now. Oh, Ann’s sick with the stomach flu. No, Ann’s out of town visiting her mom’s sister. Hey, sorry, Ann can’t come over and play because Gwen took her into the city to go shopping. Excuses roll off my tongue in such a facile manner that I’m scarcely aware of making them up anymore.

  But I’ve never had to tell this particular lie. Never had to deal with the outright accusation, because no one had ever thought to level it before. Why would they? Why would it even occur to them to ask the question?

  If I try to speak the lie, will my lips even form the words? Will that be like denying Ann’s very essence? Will that, in some fashion, make her disappear? She has been gone so long—she is lost, perhaps, in danger, afraid—and maybe all that keeps her going, all that she has to hold on to, is the knowledge that I will never abandon or betray her. Will I cut off her sole hope of survival if I claim that she does not exist?

  It’s a bad time to become superstitious, but I find that I cannot give the answer I should. Instead, as if I am goaded beyond endurance, I snap out, “Don’t be ridiculous.”