Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  “My stories aren’t boring!”

  “Some of them are.”

  By this time, we’re at the door. “Well, I just want to thank you for being circumspect in the stories you chose to tell—but first I want to yell at you for asking him about his book. What were you thinking?”

  She bubbles over. “I was thinking how much fun it would be to ask him questions about shape-shifters, and find out what he’s learned, and act like I was trying to believe him but secretly thought he was crazy.”

  I unlock the door and push it open, balancing the empty dog bowls in my free hand. “You’re the most troublesome girl,” I inform her. “I don’t know why I miss you so much when you’re gone.”

  She doesn’t bother to answer. She gives a little squeak of pleasure and pushes past me to run into the living room. I manage not to drop the dishes as I realize, with a start of fright, that there’s a strange man standing in my house. Strange to me, anyway, not to Ann, and I try to quiet my pounding heart by telling myself this must be William. The shape-changer that Ann has fallen in love with.

  He’s taken her into an embrace, so at first I can’t collect many details about his physical appearance, but he’s definitely as thin and rangy-looking as the underfed setter. His coloring is different, though—he’s got brown hair, just now pulled back into a ponytail, and the permanent-tan skin that I associate with a Mediterranean heritage. Spanish, maybe, or Italian. He’s wearing baggy nondescript clothes that he might have scrounged from a Goodwill office’s throwaway pile, and he’s not wearing any shoes.

  He gives Ann a final squeeze, then they fall away from each other and she urges him over to me. My first thought is that he’s too old for her. His face is attractive in a sort of starved-Christian-Bale manner, but it’s weathered enough to make him appear forty years old or more. A bad match for twenty, I think.

  And then I wonder. A shape-shifter’s life is a hard one; even Ann is starting to look older than her age. I promise myself I will make no assumptions, and I manage to smile at him as they halt in front of me.

  “Melanie, this is William. William, my sister. Mel, I told him where he could find the spare key. I hope it’s okay that he just let himself in?”

  “Of course. It’s your house as much as it’s mine.” I’m not sure if I should offer to shake hands—William just doesn’t seem like the traditional sort—but then I think it would be rude if I don’t. I extend my hand and he instantly takes it; I can’t help but notice how rough and callused his palms are. “I’m happy to meet you.”

  “Yeah, Ann talks about you all the time.” He lets me go and looks around. “And the house. Growing up here. I wanted to see it.”

  Ann still has her arm looped through his, and she’s leaning against his shoulder. You’d think she was a high-school girl with her prom date, she looks so happy to be with this guy. “I wasn’t expecting him,” she says. “I was going to stay with you a few days, then meet him again, but—” She squeezes his arm. “He missed me.”

  “Well, I’m delighted to have a chance to get to know him,” I say, though in truth I’m a bit unnerved. And a tiny bit put out. This William gets to spend weeks—months—with Ann, while I only have a few days, and now he’s intruding on the brief time we have? It seems so unfair.

  One time Debbie told me that whenever Charles’s mother comes to visit, Debbie can feel the old woman’s resentment emanating from every bone and hair follicle. If mother and son happen to be having a quiet conversation in the kitchen, and Debbie walks in, the older woman gives her a look of such burning reproach that Debbie quickly mumbles an apology and backs out of the room. She hates me because I get to spend all this time with him, and she doesn’t. But if Charles isn’t around, she actually likes me a lot. It’s so weird.

  I have turned into Charles’s bitter, possessive mother. It is, indeed, so weird.

  I gesture toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry? We just had lunch, but I could make you a sandwich or something.”

  The arrangement of his features doesn’t change much, but I can tell he’s amused. “No, thanks. Ann fed me right before you left.”

  Which is when I remember why I’m holding the empty dishes. “Oh! Right! Well, take a seat, let me put my things away, and we can hang out and chat for a while.”

  A few minutes later, we’re all sitting in the living room, making what feels to me like awkward conversation. I might be the only one who notices. William’s settled onto the couch in a position so deliberate that he might be posing for an 1880s-era photograph—one where he would have to sit absolutely still for the eternity it would take for the image to form in the plate. He doesn’t seem nervous; I don’t think he’s worried about making a good impression on me. I think he’s just not used to sitting on furniture so he doesn’t know how to relax into the cushions. Ann is curled up next to him, shoulder to shoulder, her hand laced with his. She’s still beaming. In a more fanciful mood, I might say her blond hair is glowing.

  “So! Tell me about yourself,” I invite him.

  He shrugs so minimally he might not have moved his shoulders at all. “Not much to tell. Born down near Rolla. Have a brother and sister, but my sister’s dead. My brother and his wife are raising my niece.”

  “Yes, Ann mentioned that. I’m sorry to hear about your sister.”

  He shrugs again and doesn’t answer.

  Small talk is clearly pointless, so I go straight for the big stuff. What the hell. “So tell me about your shape-shifting. I don’t know how it works for anyone except Ann.”

  Now he nods infinitesimally, as if this is a question he was expecting. “I’m usually not human more than three or four days a month. If that. Used to be I’d go months without shifting, but I like to check in with Lizzie often enough so she won’t forget me.”

  “Lizzie?”

  “My niece. So I head on over to Maria’s about once a month.”

  Maria? Oh, I remember. The brother’s wife. “Ann told me you don’t know yet if the baby is a shape-shifter.”

  That almost invisible smile again. “Right. But probably. The rest of us all are.”

  “When do you—is there a typical time for someone to first display signs—I mean—”

  “Usually by the time you’re three you’ll have changed. Sometimes the first week of your life. It varies.”

  This is surely the oddest conversation I’ve ever had with anyone. “And Ann said you’re usually the shape we saw earlier today? The setter?”

  He nods. “Sometimes a wolf. Sometimes other things. I can usually direct it—I can say what and when. Dante’s never been good at that, though he’s learning.”

  “Dante?”

  “My brother. He can’t control what shape he’ll become or when he’ll turn. He just feels it coming over him, and he can’t stave it off.” William glances down at Ann. “But I’ve showed him some techniques I use to control it, and he’s been able to shift between shapes a little more easily. It’s helped a lot.”

  “Ann can control it,” I say, feeling absurdly proud. Hey, it sounds like that’s a hard thing to do, and yet she mastered the skill when she was just a child.

  Ann stirs and sits more upright though she still doesn’t release William’s hand. “So why aren’t you at Maria’s right now?” she asks. “I thought that’s where you were going to spend the week.”

  “They were headed over to Illinois to spend some time with Maria’s mom, so no one was going to be at the house. Figured I might as well come here.”

  “How’d you find the place?” she asks. She looks over at me with a grimace. “Everything’s changed so much! All that new construction! I swear, Mel, I wandered around for an hour in dog shape before I could figure out where I was.”

  I try not to show how much this alarms me. This has always been my greatest fear, of course—that Ann will forget the way home. I force myself to take a casual, even irritated tone. “That damn Kurt Markham,” I say, shaking my head. “He’s buying up every tract of lan
d between here and Highway 55 and turning it into some megasuburb. I’m surprised anyone can find their way. All the developments look the same, and they all have practically the same name—Markham Manors, Markham Estates, Markham Big-Dick Bungalows—”

  Ann giggles and William laughs out loud. I continue on, even more aggrieved. “He keeps offering to buy this place, but I tell him I won’t sell.”

  “That’s right,” Ann says with zest. “Anything to thwart his plans of world domination.”

  “So I think he’s just going to keep building stuff around me,” I end with a sigh. “Next time you come here, there will be Markham Mansions on both sides of the house and across the street.”

  Ann has lost interest; she’s turned back to William. “So how did you find our house? I never brought you here.”

  He offers that faint smile again. “Looked it up online when I was at Maria’s. Google will draw you a map to any address in the country.”

  “Terrific,” I say. “Nice to know there’s no such thing as privacy anymore.”

  His grin widens. “Shows you a satellite map, too. Picture of your house, right there on the computer screen. Great stuff.”

  I don’t know why I find it odd, incongruous, that William is adept at online data retrieval. It’s not like shape-shifting is an old-fashioned, courtly pastime incompatible with twenty-first-century technology. And yet I find it natural to picture him bemused by televisions and cell phones, maybe even afraid of horseless carriages when they rattle by. “Well, I’m glad you were able to locate the place,” I say. “How long were you planning to stay?” I glance at Ann to include her in the question.

  They exchange looks, communicating silently. “A few days,” William answers. “Unless you’d rather not have me underfoot.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad you’re here,” I say. “Just let me know if there’s anything you need, and I’ll be happy to get it.”

  Ann is smothering a yawn. “I think what I need is a nap,” she says. “Humans stay awake too long. I always forget that until I’m back in this body.”

  She comes to her feet, pulling William up beside her, and they head to her room. I stand up, too, just for something to do, then move indecisively around the house for a few minutes. I rinse the breakfast dishes and load the dishwasher and think about moving the photo boxes back to my room and think about calling Debbie and try to decide if I like William and try not to think about Brody Westerbrook and how attractive he is even though he wants to write that terrible book. I decide that I really ought to go to work tomorrow, even though Ann’s only going to be home for a few days, since William’s presence changes the dynamic, and I’m not sure I can get through too many more conversations with him; best, perhaps, to limit the attempts to dinner. And that makes me start wondering what I should prepare for dinner tonight since I assume everyone eventually will be hungry again, despite our various lunchtime meals of leftovers and pie. I don’t know what William likes to eat, but he doesn’t strike me as being too particular. Maybe I’ll just order a pizza. The biggest benefit I’ve been able to identify in the construction of Markham Manors is that the Papa John’s folks are now willing to deliver in my neighborhood, something that was unheard of five years ago.

  I hear the soft sound of a door closing and even softer footsteps coming up behind me. Ann always runs through the house, so even before I turn around, I know it’s William. I summon a smile as I face him.

  “What can I get you?” I ask. “Something to read? Something to drink? I can turn on the laptop if you want to find a map to someone else’s house.”

  He doesn’t bother to smile at this sally. “I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one.”

  “A beer sounds really good.”

  We stand in the kitchen for the next few moments, sipping a couple of Schlafly Pale Ales in what I am able to persuade myself is companionable silence. Then William sets his bottle on the counter and gives me a look that’s so serious I feel a shiver slalom down my spine.

  “Maria and Dante aren’t out of town,” he says. “I just wanted to come here because I’m worried about Ann.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JANET

  His name was Cooper, and he was sixteen. And he was like no boy I’d ever met before. Soft-voiced and preternaturally calm, he was imbued with an inexplicable gentleness that sat oddly against the wildness that marked his face and loaded his every gesture. He was ungainly and thin, too tall for his weight, with ragged black hair that he’d clearly cut himself, probably using a knife and not having access to a mirror. He had a poet’s face, the lips too full, the nose too bony, the cheekbones famished. His eyes were huge and striking, a complex brown instead of the wolf’s distinctive amber, but it was clear they remembered everything the wolf had seen.

  He was wearing a pair of jeans so ragged they were scarcely better than scraps, and a Cardinals T-shirt that looked brand-new. The shirt, he confessed, was stolen; the jeans were part of a cache he kept in a hideaway about ten miles up the road. Sometimes the items were still there when he came back to his human shape, and sometimes they weren’t. He’d learned to adapt.

  We sat side by side on the edge of the deck, our feet in the grass, and talked the whole night through.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Everything. I guess you should start at the beginning.”

  He spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. His fingers were extraordinarily long, eerily graceful. They looked as if they should belong to a concert pianist. “I don’t remember the beginning anymore. It seems like I was always living with my mom, and always turning into a wolf. I don’t remember the first time it happened.”

  “Have you always changed into a wolf?”

  He nodded.

  “And how long do you stay in that shape?”

  “It varies a little bit, but it’s usually a couple of weeks as an animal, a couple of weeks as a human.”

  “And—does it happen all at once? What does it feel like? Does it hurt?”

  His eyebrows drew together as he tried to figure out how to reply. “It’s not painful,” he said at last. “But it feels like—stretching too far. Like one person is pulling on my shoulders and someone else is pulling on my feet, and my ribs are splitting open, and at the same time I’m yawning so wide my jaw’s about to crack. And then everything snaps into place, and I’m the wolf again.” He glanced at me. The kitchen’s yellow light painted squares and other patterns on his cheek. “It’s the other way around when I’m becoming human again. Like someone’s squishing me together into one big ball, making my bones fit into places that are too small. So there’s all this pressure, then—suddenly—it’s fine.”

  “Do you get any warning? Can you tell you’re about to change?”

  “I can now. When I was a kid, it was harder. But these days I can feel—something. My hands start tingling, and it’s like my blood starts itching. Usually about a day before it happens, one direction or the other. So I know to be someplace where people aren’t likely to see me.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Can you read and write and do math and all that stuff?”

  “Sure. I’m not very good at it, though.”

  “How’d you get hurt?”

  “A fight with a wild dog. I had a bite on my shoulder, too, but it healed faster.”

  “Why didn’t you go to your mom’s place so she could take care of you?”

  He turned his head away and was silent for a long moment.

  “Cooper?” I asked. “Why didn’t you go to your mom’s? Does she live in a big city, somewhere you can’t get to her when you’re in animal shape?”

  “She doesn’t see me anymore,” he said at last.

  I’d touched him every night when he was in wolf shape, and far more danger to me than he was now, but I hesitated before laying my hand gently on his forearm. “Why doesn’t she see you?” I asked in a soft voice.

  “A few
years ago, she met a guy. Davey,” he said. “She didn’t want him to know about me, so she told him she and my dad shared custody. Every time I was turning into a wolf, she’d get me out of the house and tell Davey I was with my dad. So she’d drive me somewhere—like Boy Scout campgrounds or a state park—and set me free. Then she’d come get me in a couple of weeks. She always left behind a backpack of food and clothes, so I would be all right if I changed shapes before she came back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Davey followed her once. Thought maybe she was seeing my dad on the side or something, I don’t know.” He made another one of those uncertain gestures with his expressive hands. “They had a big fight, they broke up, he came back. Told her I was a freak, I should be turned over to a zoo. Stuff like that.”

  I was filled with indignation. “So she kicked you out? For a guy?”

  “Not at first. Not until the baby was born.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could instantly see how that would change the whole situation. “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah. The minute Davey found out she was pregnant, he was after her to turn me out of the house. And she kept saying, ‘No, no, no, Cooper’s a good boy, he’d never hurt me or you or a baby or anyone.’ But once the baby came home—” He shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if he looked at me or she looked at me or if I looked at the baby, but something changed. One night she came into my room and gave me five hundred dollars and told me I had to leave by morning. Said Davey would kill me if he ever found me at the house again. So I took the money and left.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  I just stared at him. I was seventeen and fully human, and I couldn’t imagine trying to feed myself, clothe myself, take care of myself all on my own—with only five hundred dollars in hand. “What did you do? I mean, the wolf could survive on his own, I guess, but the boy—”

  “I had a rough few months,” he admitted. “I already knew how to live in the wild—I could build a fire, and catch fish, and you’d be surprised at how much food and other stuff campers leave behind in the parks. But it was February when she made me leave, and winter was hard. I think I almost froze to death a couple of times. I found myself wishing I could just be a wolf all the time. At least I’d be warm.” He shrugged. “But I made it through, and summer was easier. And then I made some friends.”