Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  “Oh, good,” she says. “Maybe someone wants to rent them for the weekend.”

  Five seconds later, Simon tears into the room, the cordless handset still in his grip. “Mom, can I go over to Marty’s?”

  Marty is a kid across the street who, according to Debbie, owns every electronic and digital device ever invented to lure a child into ignoring his homework. He has his own laptop. His family was the first to buy a Wii. He was born with a Game Boy in his hand.

  “It’s your father’s birthday,” she says.

  Simon is aggrieved. “I sang ‘Happy Birthday’! What more do you want?”

  “Blood,” Charles says. “I want your blood. And maybe a little respect directed at your mother.”

  Simon rolls his eyes. “Can I go?”

  Charles makes sweeping motions with his hand. “Go. Leave. Take your sleeping bag and spend the night.”

  Simon’s eyes light up, but Debbie puts her foot down. “You’re not spending the night, but yes, you can go. Be back by ten, okay?”

  “Okay. Bye. Happy birthday, Dad.”

  “Thank you, ungrateful child.”

  He dashes out of the kitchen, talking excitedly on the phone, and a few moments later, we hear the slam of the front door. “Never have children,” Debbie says to Brody.

  He grins. “Jury’s still out on that one,” he replies. He nods at Charles. “So, do you always play that little game? Guess who’s on the phone before you answer it?”

  “He’s better than Caller ID,” Debbie says.

  “He doesn’t guess,” I inform Brody. “He knows. It’s his superpower.”

  Charles is nodding serenely. “It’s true. Ninety percent of the time, I know who’s calling as soon as the phone rings.”

  Brody leans his elbows on the table and appears both intrigued and skeptical. “Really. How do you do that?”

  Charles makes an indeterminate gesture. “Some of it’s process of elimination. My mother and my sister have already called to wish me a happy birthday. Debbie and the boys are all home. I’m not expecting a crisis at work. We’re on the do-not-call list, so we don’t get many junk calls. Marty tends to call right at seven o’clock, because that’s when his family finishes dinner.” He shrugs. “My brain snaps through all the possibilities and lands on the most likely one.”

  “It’s his superpower,” I repeat. “It can’t be explained away rationally.”

  Now Brody is grinning at me. “Superpower,” he echoes. “Really.”

  “Everyone has one,” Debbie says. “Even you.”

  “What’s yours?” he challenges her.

  “I can make people talk to me.”

  “All people,” Charles confirms. “The mean-looking lady at the DMV who won’t make eye contact or give you a civil answer? She talks to Debbie. Shows her pictures of her grandkids. Smiles, for God’s sake.”

  “And don’t go shopping with her,” I say. “Every salesclerk will tell you his or her life story. I mean, one day we were buying shoes. The salesman is kneeling there at her feet, and I make some joke, I don’t remember what, and he says, ‘Are you two sisters?’ I say, ‘No, we’ve just known each other fifteen years.’ And he says—swear to God, like it was the most natural segue in the world—‘I’ve been married to my wife for fifteen years. But we’re not very happy. I’d leave her, but we have five children together.’ And before you know it, we learn about how he was born in Jamaica, but he grew up in France, and his father was a doctor until he lost his leg in a car accident—”

  “And his mother won some international lottery, which is how they got the money to move to America—” Debbie chimes in.

  “So he went to college in Little Rock, which is where he met the wife that he now wishes he could get rid of,” I finish up. “I thought we would never get away from him.”

  “That one was a little extreme,” she says.

  “All your conversations with strangers are like that.”

  “I can’t help it,” she says. “People confide in me.”

  I am living proof of that. Until I met Debbie, I had told no one, no one, the truth about Ann. In fact, I had gone to elaborate lengths to conceal, from relatives and friends and neighbors down the street, what exactly she was. I had evaded questions, lied outright, constructed detailed scenarios that explained where Ann had been or why she had behaved a certain way. I had assumed I would go to my grave sharing this secret with only my father, Gwen, and Ann herself.

  But I had told Debbie before I had known her a month. “That explains a lot,” she’d said. That was it. No exclamations of horror or astonishment, no accusations of lying or hysteria. Just calm acceptance. And the burden I had carried for so long, that I had thought would bow me to the ground, became in an instant something manageable, something ordinary, something that I could bear as long as I had to and still not break.

  “So what’s your superpower?” Charles asks Brody. “Everybody has one. It’s not super, obviously, it’s just—something you can always do. That other people can’t.”

  Brody is looking thoughtful. “Well, going by those rules—I can find keys.”

  “Oohh, that’s a good one,” Debbie says.

  I’m not convinced. “What, like your car keys? Your house keys?”

  Brody nods. “I never lose them.”

  “That’s not the same as finding them.”

  “Right, but I can do that, too. My sister Bethany loses her keys about once a month. She’ll call and have me drive down to Cape just to look for them. And I’ve found them in the weirdest places. Under the refrigerator. In the washing machine. In a pair of shoes at the back of her closet. I’ve never not been able to track them down.”

  “Can you find other stuff, too?” Charles asks. “Like gloves and math books and jackets? Because we’ve lost a lot of those.”

  “Nope, just keys.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s useful,” I concede grudgingly.

  “The first time it happened, I was maybe eight or nine,” Brody says. His face has gotten that faraway expression that settles over people as they’re revisiting a memory. “And the whole family was locked out of the house. We were on our way back from church or something, maybe there was a turkey cooking in the oven. I don’t remember, but I do know that my mom and dad were really upset, and Bethany was crying, and everyone was really agitated. And I remembered that, like, two years before, my sister Bailey had dropped her house key in the garden and she’d never found it. So I started poking through the weeds and scratching in the dirt, trying to see if I could find that old key now that we needed it. And sure enough, about five minutes later, I dug it up out of the mud at the base of a rosebush. Opened the door like a charm. Everybody was happy. And I,” he concluded, “had discovered my superpower.”

  Charles nods approvingly. “That’s a good origin story,” he says before glancing in my direction. “So what’s your special ability?”

  It’s been clear for the past five minutes that someone is going to ask this question, but I don’t have a good answer. So I say, “Dating the wrong men.”

  Brody looks affronted. “Hey.”

  “That’s not having a superpower, that’s just being a woman,” Debbie says.

  “Hey,” Charles says, using Brody’s exact inflection.

  She scoots her chair over so she’s close enough to kiss him on the cheek. “But I married you, darling, so the description doesn’t apply to you,” she says in a sugary voice.

  I glance at Brody. “It doesn’t apply to you either since we’re not dating.”

  The look he gives me then is hard to read—half-smiling, half-speculative—as if he’s trying to figure out how and when to prove me wrong. But he doesn’t say anything.

  “So?” Charles says. “What’s your power?”

  I shrug. “I don’t have one.”

  “Yes, you do,” Debbie says. She’s still pressed up next to Charles, and his arm has draped itself over her shoulder. What I’ve always liked, and envied, ab
out them is that they’re comfortable showing affection for each other in public, but they don’t overdo it. A kiss, a touch, a hand laid on a forearm, a pat on the back. If there’s a group of people crowded into a room, they don’t have to sit side by side to be happy, but if they’re in a movie theatre in the dark, they’re always holding hands. “You know when to let go.”

  I turn a frown in her direction. “Say what?”

  She waves at the remains of the cake. “Like when we were lighting candles. You always dropped the match before it burned you. I wasn’t smart enough to do that.”

  “That’s a pretty pathetic superpower,” I say.

  She sits up so she can speak more energetically. “No, but it manifests in a lot of different forms. Remember Girl Scouts? The roller-skating badge?”

  Charles directs his question at Brody. “Who gets a badge in roller-skating? Seriously?”

  Brody shakes his head in sorrow. “We had to build fires and put up tents and rescue old ladies from submerged cars if we wanted to earn badges in Boy Scouts.”

  Debbie ignores this byplay. “And they had us do that stupid routine where you’d line up and hold on to the waist of the person in front of you, and then you’d skate around the rink all connected together until someone tripped or something and everyone would fall down—”

  “Crack the whip. That’s what it’s called,” Brody says. “It’s supposed to be fun, the person at the end goes really fast—”

  “Well, it wasn’t fun. Everyone ended up bruised and scraped up—”

  “Katie Malone broke her arm,” I remember.

  “Right! But you never got hurt. You always let go before the pileup.”

  “That’s not a superpower, that’s a highly developed sense of self-preservation,” I tell her.

  “And in high school. When you were going out with Kurt—”

  Brody straightens up so fast he almost knocks his chair over. “Kurt Markham? You went out with him?”

  “Oh, God, he was so cute back then,” Debbie says.

  “He was always an asshole,” Charles informs the table. “Even when he was seventeen.”

  “You went out with him?” Brody repeats.

  Debbie points at me. “Homecoming King and Queen. Melanie and Kurt.”

  “This really changes how I think of you,” Brody tells me.

  “Well, since I don’t care how you think of me—”

  “But here’s my point,” Debbie says. “Everyone thought you were the luckiest girl in the school. And you broke up with him, and no one could understand why.”

  “Because he was an asshole,” Charles mutters.

  “And then a month later he had that horrible car accident when his new girlfriend was in the car, and she almost got killed. Remember? You let go of him just in time.”

  I roll my eyes. “I think you’re stretching an unlikely premise a little too far.”

  Debbie shrugs. “It’s your superpower. You don’t get to ask for it. You just take what you get.”

  Stevie has slunk into the dining room, gloom hanging on him so heavily his little head is bent toward the floor. “What’s wrong, devil child?” Debbie asks cheerfully.

  “We didn’t get to finish our game,” he says. “And now Simon’s at Marty’s and I’ll have to go to bed before he gets back and it’ll be tomorrow before we get to finish it.”

  “Oh my God, the world will end,” Charles says.

  Stevie fixes Brody with an accusing stare. “You said you’d come play with us later.”

  Debbie snaps her fingers and points toward the door. “No harassing the guests! Out! Downstairs. Read a book or something. Improve your mind. You can play games tomorrow.”

  But I’m not surprised to see Brody smile and come to his feet. “I said it, and I meant it,” he agrees. “Let’s go.”

  The three of us watch in silence as Brody and Stevie head back toward the basement, Stevie already chattering. As soon as it seems likely they’re out of earshot, Debbie turns to me with her eyes big and her mouth widening in a smile.

  “He. Is. Adorable!” she exclaims in an excited undervoice. “Good-looking and funny and scrumptious! How are you resisting him?”

  “He does seem like a nice fellow,” Charles says in a more temperate voice. “Why are you resisting him? Is he a felon or something?”

  Debbie waves a hand. “Long story,” she says. She swears she’s never told Charles the truth about Ann, and I believe her, but I have to think she’s dropped some kind of hints. Enough to let him know he shouldn’t question me about her, in any case. Because Charles will ask thoughtful and detailed questions about every other area of my life, but all he ever says about my sister is, “How’s Ann?”

  “Yeah, he’s been pretty nice the past few weeks,” I admit. “I like him more than I should. But he’s still—” I glance at Charles. “Dangerous to my peace of mind.”

  He lifts his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Tell secrets if you must. I’ll clear the table.”

  So for the next ten minutes Charles putters in the kitchen while Debbie and I huddle together so I can whisper a transcript of the afternoon’s edgy conversations. She responds with the appropriate gasps and sounds of dismay at the right places, but it’s clear she’s still wholly in the Brody’s-a-good-guy camp.

  “Okay, so he saw Ann and William dash out the door without so much as a flashlight between them, but he still didn’t learn anything absolutely damning,” she says when I’m done. “He just thinks they’re quirky.”

  “He thinks they are exactly what they are, and the more they hang around while he’s hanging around, the sooner he’s going to know for sure.”

  “Well, then, you have only two choices,” Debbie says. “Tell him to go away. Or tell Ann to go away. Nothing else you can do.”

  I stare at her because, put in those stark terms, I realize I am not prepared to do either. Well, obviously, I would choose Ann over Brody if I had to designate one person that I was never going to see again. But I am far more reluctant than I realized to say out loud that I want Brody gone from my life forever.

  Debbie sits back in her chair, a look of satisfaction on her face. “Thought so,” she says.

  Now I’m annoyed. “Thought what?”

  But she doesn’t get a chance to answer because Brody’s climbed back up from the basement and come to join us at the table again. Like Debbie, he’s decided to change seats; he lowers himself into the one next to me.

  “That kid has the hands of a brain surgeon,” he says. “A ten for dexterity.”

  “Did he beat you?” I inquire.

  He nods, but defends himself. “I inherited Simon’s score. I could have won if I’d played the game from the beginning.”

  “Yeah, you lost to a seven-year-old,” I razz him. “Maybe if you’re really nice, he’ll offer you a rematch.”

  He opens his mouth to answer, but the phone shrills again with its many voices. Automatically, we all look toward Charles, who strolls over from the kitchen.

  “Who is it?” Debbie asks.

  He points at Brody. “Someone calling for him.”

  Debbie and I both show him expressions of bewilderment, but Brody has started laughing. “Who even knows you’re here?” I ask him.

  Stevie comes racing into the room with the cordless in his hand. “Mom, it’s some woman and she wants to talk to some guy who doesn’t live here.” Apparently, despite bonding with Brody over Mario Party, he’s forgotten his guest’s identity.

  Brody takes the phone from him. “It’s my sister,” he says, and then speaks into the receiver. “Hey, Beth. Good job . . . Yep. He didn’t know your name, of course, but he knew you were calling for me. Weird, huh?” He listens for a moment. “That’s kind of a lame superpower,” he says. “I’d work on that if I were you. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

  He hits the OFF button and grins at the rest of us. “I did not think Charles would get that one.”

  “You told Bethany you were coming to Debbie’s hou
se?” I ask. I’m still confused.

  But Charles, obviously, is not. “He was testing me,” he explains. “He must have called his sister from his cell phone when he was in the basement with Stevie and given her this number. He thought he could trick me, but I—I am gifted enough to see beyond his feeble machinations.”

  “I never would have thought of that,” Debbie says. Her voice is admiring.

  I poke Brody in the shoulder. “So what’s Bethany’s superpower?”

  He looks pained. “She can disentangle jewelry. What the hell?”

  But Debbie and I are instantly covetous. “Oh, man, I want that magic!” Debbie exclaims. “I’ve got a necklace I haven’t been able to wear for three years because I can’t get the knot out of the chain. Does she take commissions?”

  “Knowing Bethany,” he says, “she probably does.”

  Debbie turns to me with an expression so sincere it has to be fake. “Don’t mess this up,” she says. “You have to keep this guy around for a while. At least until I get that necklace fixed.”

  If she were close enough, I’d hit her. I can’t even figure out how to answer, but fortunately Charles says, “You know, I think I want just another little sliver of cake. Anyone else?”

  And between the cake and the coffee and the conversation, the next hour goes by in about five minutes. I don’t even realize how late it is until Simon tramps through the front door, calling out a good-bye to someone who has accompanied him home.

  “Crap, is it ten o’clock already?” Debbie exclaims, jumping out of her chair. “Stevie should have been in bed a half hour ago. No, no, you guys don’t have to leave,” she adds, as Brody and I instantly come to our feet. “I’ll just throw him in the shower for a few minutes and run back downstairs.”

  “Clearly, it’s time for us to go,” I say firmly. “But thanks for having us over. It was a wonderful meal. A fun time.”

  Charles has stood up, too, and he and Brody shake hands. “Good to meet you, sir,” he says to Brody. “We look forward to more chances to get to know you.”

  “I had a great time,” he says. “I’ll come back anytime you invite me.”