Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  There’s more along these lines as we all move in an untidy group toward the door. Once I’ve got my coat on, Debbie gives me a long hug. In my ear she whispers, “Kiss him good night for me,” then pulls back, laughing. She embraces Brody, too, but I can’t tell if she passes on any instructions.

  Finally, we’re outside in night air that has grown sharply cool, and I’m rubbing my hands and saying brrrrr! as we climb into the Honda. There’s a bad moment or two when the car won’t start. Brody’s cursing under his breath and gently pumping the accelerator, leaning over the steering wheel as if he can will the ignition to catch. I’ve already imagined borrowing the boys’ sleeping bags and bunking down in the basement when the motor turns over, and Brody leans back with a sigh of relief.

  “Well, that would be a total bummer of a way to end an utterly delightful evening,” he says as he backs out. I wait for him to ask me for directions, but he seems to have remembered the way back to the highway. It’s sort of annoying; I got lost in Debbie’s labyrinth of a neighborhood for the first year she lived here.

  “You seemed to be having a good time. Or was that just good manners?”

  “No, I thought they were great. All of them.”

  “Did you let Stevie win?”

  “I would have, but I didn’t need to. He beat me all on his own.”

  “What did Debbie tell you about me when I was busy talking to Charles?”

  He glances over at me, amused. “What makes you think we were talking about you? Narcissistic, are we?”

  “Fine,” I say, and reach out to turn on the radio. Sports talk, unutterably boring. Not asking permission, I start punching buttons until I find a station playing music. It’s soft rock, so I’m sure Brody hates it, but he makes no comment, and we finish the rest of the drive without speaking.

  The tires crunch on the gravel as he pulls onto my lawn. I’ve grown a little tense during the last quarter mile. This nighttime outing bears so many trappings of a date that I can’t picture how it’s going to end, and the possibilities are making me nervous. Brody’s probably been thinking along the same lines. At any rate, without cutting the motor or turning off the headlights, he looks over with a smile.

  “Walk you to the door?” he offers.

  My laugh sounds shaky. “I could make you some coffee if you like.”

  “That’d be great, but I don’t want to push you.”

  “Too late for that,” I say, and step out of the car. I hear him chuckle as he catches up and steps inside the house just a beat behind me.

  I’ve left on only one light, the stained-glass lamp in the living room, so the main part of the house is shrouded in a semidarkness that seems weighted with romance. Even so, I can’t bear to hit the wall switches and send brightness arcing through the rooms. I make coffee by the dim cooking light over the stove while Brody drops to the couch and relaxes so completely he appears to be sprawling. When I approach with the two steaming mugs, he only sits up enough to be able to drink without spilling hot liquid all over his shirt.

  I sit cross-legged and sideways on the couch, so I’m facing him. Partly to see him better, partly to keep him from putting his arm around me. If he was so inclined. “I have a commission for you,” I say.

  “Really?” he murmurs, slurping at his coffee. “Ow, that’s hot. What kind of commission?”

  “I want you to find a key for me.”

  His eyes are alight with deviltry. “The key to your heart?”

  I make a face at him. “No. The key to this—” I lean back and reach behind me, because the little ceramic bank is on the end table next to the couch. The coins rattle as I settle it on the cushions between us. “This cute little artifact. Something Ann and I had when we were kids.”

  He rests his coffee cup on his stomach and picks up the house with his free hand. “Oooh, you’ll be rich.”

  “Hey, there are a lot of silver coins in there. Some of them might be worth something. And there might be other stuff in there. Stuff with sentimental value. So I want you to find the key.”

  “All right.” He picks up his coffee again and takes a few meditative sips. Maybe he’s imagining the nooks and crannies of my house where small keys might have gotten lost. Maybe he’s just savoring his coffee. “As long as we’re talking about superpowers, I have a question about yours.”

  “All right,” I echo, but I’m wary.

  “Debbie says you know when to let go. Do you also know when to hold on?”

  I meet his eyes. I know my expression is a little fierce. “When something’s worth keeping,” I say, “I hold on forever.”

  “I guess that’s the trick,” he says. “Knowing what’s worth it and what isn’t.”

  “I guess that’s something we all have to figure out for ourselves.”

  He blows on his coffee. “While we’re on the subject,” he says, “how can you really believe we’re not dating?”

  There’s absolute silence for a moment. “That’s not the same subject,” I reply at last.

  He gives me that teasing half-smile. “Yeah, kind of it is.”

  I lean forward so that my posture underscores the intensity of my expression. “We’re. Not. Dating,” I say.

  He pulls himself to a more upright position, bends over to set his mug on the floor, then half turns to face me more directly. “Then what do you think we’re doing? I’m hanging out at your house, I’m meeting your friends and family, we have lunch, we have dinner, we have coffee—”

  “We’re just—” I flounder. “I mean, you’re working on that book and I’m just—I guess we’re getting to know each other—”

  He leans over and kisses me. He doesn’t pull me into his arms, he doesn’t scoot closer, he just lays his mouth against mine with a warm and definite pressure. For a moment I’m flushed with such complex emotions that I can’t even sort them out—shock, pleasure, dread, longing, worry, hope, elation—and then I jerk back and stare at him.

  He smiles. “We’re dating,” he says, and hops up from the couch. I gaze after him as he heads to the kitchen and flips on the overhead light. I can hear him as he begins tossing through the mortifyingly messy junk drawer right next to the passably well organized silverware drawer.

  “I saw an old key ring in here the other day when I was looking for a pen,” he calls. “Five or six keys on it, one of them really small, like a luggage key. But I’m wondering—”

  I shake my head, as if to shake away the kiss, but I don’t rub it off my mouth. I don’t say anything, but he doesn’t expect me to. Anyway, not more than another minute elapses before he mutters ha! and I hear the tiny jangle of metal. He saunters back into the living room, whistling, brandishing something in his hand. As he said, it’s an old key ring, a round loop hung with an insurance company’s plastic logo and an assortment of keys. I’ve seen them any number of times these past ten years as I’ve gone rooting through the junk drawer, looking for something, and I’ve always thought, I should really figure out if any of them still work. But I’ve never bothered to take them out and try to fit them into any locks in the house.

  He drops down next to me, flicking through the options. “This one might go to the front door—this one’s a key to an old Buick, and you can probably throw it away—and this one is so rusty I can’t imagine it goes to anything that’s still functional. But here. This little one. I bet it’s the one you want—”

  He inserts the tiny key into the miniature lock, and I hear it snap open. He grins at me, absurdly proud. “Is that a great superpower or what?”

  I make a crooning sound and take the bank from his hands, gently slipping the padlock free and removing the ceramic door that guards the treasure. I stick a couple of fingers through the narrow opening, but that doesn’t dislodge more than a coin or two, so I flip the bank over and start shaking it until items come bouncing onto the couch.

  “Hey—hey—you’re going to lose half of them between the cushions,” Brody admonishes. He fetches a dish towel from the kit
chen, and I start shaking the bank again, a little more carefully. Dimes and quarters and half-dollars drop like silver manna onto the unfolded linen.

  “Oh, these are cool—look at these old Mercury Head dimes,” he says, picking up some of the smallest pieces and squinting at them in the semidarkness. “This one’s pretty worn, but this one’s practically mint condition. Wonder if it’s worth anything?”

  “I think there’s at least one silver dollar that was a collectible back in the day,” I tell him. “I mean, it probably wasn’t worth more than ten dollars at the time, but maybe that’s gone up a little.”

  “And look at these old Liberty half-dollars. I’d forgotten about them.”

  The bank’s almost empty, but I can hear a few pieces still rolling around inside, stubbornly resisting my efforts to shake them loose. At least one coin appears to be trapped in the folds of a piece of paper that’s also still stuck inside. I poke my fingers awkwardly through the door again, trying to pry free the last items.

  A penny falls to the dish towel with a copper clatter as I scrape the paper through the door. “What’s that doing in here?” Brody asks, picking it up. “Oh, wow. It’s from 1934. Look, it’s got the old wheat sheaves and everything.”

  I’ve found myself with two sheets of paper, both folded as small as they will go. Mystified, I drop one and smooth out the other. “I have no idea what these could . . . be . . .”

  My voice trails off when I see what I’m holding.

  It’s a pencil sketch of two girls standing side by side, badly done by my sixteen-year-old self. You can tell one figure is supposed to be older than the other because she’s significantly taller, but not much else distinguishes them. I’ve clearly spent a lot of effort drawing unrealistically lush, cascading hair and long-lashed eyes that are way too big for the wobbly oval faces. Not so much time on arms and legs and torsos, though there’s so much detail in the necklace of the taller girl that I can instantly call to mind which piece of jewelry it’s supposed to represent. And I’ve obviously given up completely before I even attempted to portray our shoes, so our feet are hidden by a convenient patch of grass.

  “What is it?” Brody says, craning his neck to see.

  “One summer. I was babysitting and Ann was bored. I got out paper and pencils so we could draw, but she was crabby and said that didn’t sound like fun. So I said we’d make special pictures. We’d each draw a picture of the two of us together, but we wouldn’t show them to each other. We’d put them in the bank and not take them out for ten years. And then, before we even looked at the first ones, we’d draw another set of pictures and see how much we’d changed.”

  “That was creative,” he says. “Did she go for it?”

  “Yeah. We spent the next hour, each of us in our own corner, working on our drawings. Then we folded them small and put them in the bank.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t do the anniversary set, though.”

  I shake my head. “Forgot the whole thing until this very moment.”

  As I’ve been speaking, he’s picked up the second piece of paper and started to unfold it. “So that’s yours? And this one’s Ann’s?”

  I nod. I’m still studying my sketch, thinking that I probably wouldn’t have done a much better job at twenty-six even if I’d remembered the plan. I notice that I’ve given Ann a prominent piece of jewelry, too—a fake-gold bangle bracelet that she used to love beyond reason. There had been a stretch of time when she wouldn’t leave the house unless she had it on. I smile, wondering if she’ll remember that detail when I show her the pictures.

  I flip the page so Brody can get a better look. “See this?” I start to say, but then I realize he’s staring at Ann’s drawing, the expression on his face halfway between astonishment and triumph. My stomach balls into a hard knot and I snatch the paper from his hand.

  Oh, but I know before I look at it what the image will be.

  Six-year-old Ann has drawn me with great looping balloon arms, stick legs, and a tiny head covered with dandelion-puff hair. Clown shoes and a triangle-shaped skirt represent my ensemble. But that’s not what Brody’s been staring at.

  Next to me, the only other figure on the page, is a small dog with huge pointed ears and a long whippy tail. The significance of the creature is impossible to overlook. It’s a self-portrait. This is how Ann sees herself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JANET

  The last fight I ever had with my parents happened the day after I graduated from high school. I’d already been accepted at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and offered a decent scholarship package. I hadn’t decided what my major would be, but I was attracted to careers like marine biology and archeology, so I was planning to load up my schedule with science classes. I’d been assigned a dorm and a roommate. It says a lot about me when I admit that the part of the college experience I was most worried about was living with another person. I had always been good at my classes and never any good at making friends. I had no reason to expect that college would be any different.

  My dad waited until the Sunday after graduation to tell me that he’d accepted a transfer to Los Angeles. I stared at him in disbelief.

  “How long have you known this?” I demanded.

  “Couple of months.”

  “We didn’t want you to be distracted from school during finals,” my mother added. “So we waited to tell you.”

  “But it’s time to start packing,” my father said. “We’re moving at the end of June.”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m not. I’m going to college.”

  “Plenty of good schools in California,” my dad said. “If you’re a resident of the state, education is practically free.”

  “I’m not going to California,” I said. “I have a perfectly good scholarship to go to school in Illinois. You’ll just have to go to Los Angeles without me.”

  Maybe if I’d taken a more reasonable tone, my father would have been reasonable in turn. He would have agreed that it would make sense for me to attend the school to which I already had the scholarship; he would have conceded that telephones and interstates and airlines made it simple for far-flung family members to stay in touch. He would not have ignited into a rage and screamed that I had always been contrary and difficult, impossible to please, and that if I would not move with them to California, I could consider myself officially on my own for the rest of my life. Don’t bother calling, don’t bother coming to visit. If you don’t want to live with us as our daughter now, then we don’t want you as our daughter ever. My mother alternated between begging him to make sense and pleading with me not to be stupid, until she, too, grew angry and began berating me for my stubbornness and my hatefulness and my disastrously willful nature.

  “No wonder you never have any friends!” she screamed. “You’re a sociopath, that’s what you are! You don’t have any human emotions!”

  We’d been standing in the kitchen—well, that makes it sound too calm. We’d been pacing through the kitchen, each of us pausing now and then to slam a hand against the countertop or shake a fist in someone’s face; my father had already swept his arm across the cluttered table and sent half a dozen dishes crashing to the floor. Now I pivoted on my heel and stalked through the door, heading to the living room, where I’d left my purse on the sofa. My father followed me, still yelling. When he saw that I was planning to dash out the front door, he grabbed my arm and jerked me back.

  “Don’t you walk away from me, you little bitch!” he roared. “Don’t you dare leave this house unless you never want to be allowed back in!”

  I swung my purse so hard at his face that it knocked him backward. He stumbled and released me, cursing. I knew the minute he caught his balance, he’d grab me again, and that’s when the hitting would start. “What makes you think I’d ever want to come back?” I snarled, and I ran out the door.

  * * *

  Probably everything would have been okay eventually. It wasn’t the first time I’d had
a screaming match with my parents, not the first time I’d walked out, or been kicked out, or been told I should never come back. I wouldn’t even have to say I was sorry—no one in my family ever did. I could just reappear at the dinner table the following night, and no one would mention the threats and the insults from the day before. The argument would have continued, but in calmer tones, maybe; it’s possible we could have worked something out.

  But I didn’t go back. I didn’t want to be forgiven. I didn’t want to be their daughter anymore.

  And I certainly wasn’t moving to California.

  I suppose it’s a lie to say I didn’t go back. After spending the night uneasily moving between the parking lot of the train station and a booth at an all-night Denny’s, I returned to the house around noon the next day when my parents were both at work. They hadn’t bothered to change the locks—though that was a promise my father had made more than once during such fights in the past—so it was easy enough for me to get inside and gather what I needed. Clothes, mostly, plus some towels and toiletries, enough to fill two big wheeled suitcases. I only had a couple of pieces of jewelry worth any money—a pearl necklace my parents had given me when I turned sixteen, and diamond earrings they’d given me two years later—and I picked these up, too. Not because they had any sentimental value but because I thought I might be able to pawn them if I ever needed the money. I was tempted to toss through my mother’s jewelry box and pick out the few pieces she owned that might net me a few hundred bucks, but I decided against it. I didn’t want to give them any reason to come looking for me.

  I made a quick detour out back to leave a message for Cooper. A red ribbon tied to one of the patio posts meant I had dropped a note in the rusted old coffee can I’d placed at the back of the property line. For the past year, anytime I knew he would be in human shape and looking for me, but I’d be unavailable, I’d communicated with him in this way. From time to time, he’d also left messages—or drawings—behind in the same manner. I had seen him just two nights ago, and I knew he’d only been human for five days. He would find the note soon enough. In the past year, during the weeks he was in a man’s shape, we had never gone more than three nights without seeing each other. Sometimes we would even meet in daylight at a shop or a restaurant so I could buy him food or an item he needed. I had to admit, those outings—the ones that to most girls would seem like the most relaxed and normal interactions with a guy—to me seemed the most surreal.