Still Life With Shape-Shifter

by Sharon Shinn

  I manage the ghost of a laugh. “Maybe. I’d like to think so. She has a happy nature and a peculiar blindness to the existence of obstacles. I envy her. And I admire her. And I worry about her every single minute. I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do to keep her safe.”

  Brody draws me closer again, snuggling into the pillows. “Oh yes,” he murmurs. “That’s the kind of love I want.”

  * * *

  Well, of course Brody stays for the whole weekend. We don’t even get out of bed until almost noon on Saturday, and the rest of the day unfolds at a gloriously leisurely pace. I do the most minimal cleaning imaginable. Brody heads to the grocery store and comes back with meat and barbecue sauce and potatoes to roast in the fire.

  “Fabulous, but I don’t actually have a barbecue pit,” I inform him.

  “I know, so I picked up a cheap little charcoal grill at the store. It was, like, thirty bucks. Also some briquettes and some lighter fluid.”

  “My manly man,” I say, pretending to swoon. “My hunter-gatherer. Are you going to do the cooking, too?”

  “You betcha.”

  It’s a beautiful day, bumping up against seventy degrees, and the sun is a brassy blond as she dips toward late afternoon, so we’re perfectly content to spend the next few hours outdoors. Brody hasn’t seen my “backyard” till now, and he pauses to take it in once he lugs the grill around the side of the house. I own twelve acres and most of them spread out in three directions from the back patio as if it were the tassel on the base of a fan. The yard itself is small, maybe thirty feet by forty feet, with delineated patches where I sometimes bother to put in a vegetable garden but more often do not. It’s dotted with a couple of random shrubs, a line of butterfly bushes on the north edge, and patches of violets and lilies of the valley that I make no attempt to nurture or control. But just outside this relatively clear space, the woodland starts closing in.

  Like most Missouri foliage, it’s a tangled mess—oaks and hickories and black locusts and sycamores and cedars roped together with aerial vines, and rendered nearly impassable at ground level by whippy shrubbery in varieties I cannot begin to identify. In winter it all just looks like one big maze of thin brown limbs, dry and dead, but in spring it’s a study in green. You would not have believed there could be so many variations on the same basic color, from the regal emerald of the firs to the shy lime of the willows. And when the flowering trees are in bloom, as they are now, it’s like a Seurat painting, pointillist clusters of brilliant color stretching across the woven canvas of branch and sky.

  “Oh, this is amazing,” Brody says. “I wouldn’t sell this place even if I didn’t have a sister who was a shape-shifter.”

  “Yeah, I love it,” I say. “The house isn’t much, but the property is stellar.”

  He sets up the grill on the patio while I sweep off six months’ worth of brown leaves and dead bugs. I don’t really have outdoor furniture, so while Brody starts the fire, I wrestle a couple of kitchen chairs out the side door and around to the back, then bring out the beat-up folding card table. It’s April, which you’d like to think would be too early for mosquitoes, but apparently not. So I also fetch the buckets of citronella candles and a few tiki-style torches Debbie gave me a couple of years ago which I’d never bothered to use. I’ll save them for nightfall, but I light the citronella right away, and its smoky, smudgy scent immediately clogs the air.

  “This is the life,” Brody exclaims, as the flames writhe in the grill for a few moments before dying down. “I don’t care if we start fighting and eventually can’t stand each other. I’m not leaving this place.”

  “Buy yourself a Markham Manor,” I suggest. “You can barbecue in your backyard every night.”

  “Wouldn’t be the same. Not without the view.”

  We sit outside long after sunset, long after the meal is finished and we’ve taken the dishes inside and we’ve made and eaten s’mores, because it turns out Brody bought the ingredients for those as well. I’m chilly once the sun goes down, so I bring out a couple of old afghans and we wrap ourselves in those, then fold up the card table so we can scoot our chairs close together while we watch the moon rise. We talk—this is Brody; of course we talk—mostly telling more childhood stories, the majority of them funny, a few of them laced with pain or sadness.

  He wants me to tell him about Gwen’s disappearance and my father’s death, but those are the tales I like least, so I abbreviate them. “She started being gone more and more often, for longer and longer periods of time. When she got back, she’d be quiet and remorseful and very affectionate, especially with Ann. By the time I was twenty, she was gone almost all the time. I think that’s the year we saw her twice, for about a week each time. And then we saw her once the year after that—the year Ann was eleven. And that was it. She’s never come back.”

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  “I think her animal side became so powerful that she was almost never human anymore. I think she would have come back if she could have. I was so angry with her at the time, but I’ve thought about it a lot since then. I think she couldn’t do any better. I think she was at the mercy of her nature.”

  “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  I remember the conversation I had with Ann on this very topic, and I shake my head. “If she was,” I say, “she’d come back to see Ann. So she has to be dead.”

  “And your father died, when? Five years ago?”

  “Six. But he’d been pretty much out of it for two years before he died. Stopped recognizing us. Didn’t know who he was or where he was.” I make a fatalistic gesture. “Like Gwen, I think he held on for as long as he could. He’d been having these bouts for years. We didn’t know at first if he was just losing his memory or maybe getting Alzheimer’s, but he could tell he was slowly sliding down into madness. He used those exact words to me one time. But he was so afraid for Ann. By this time, it was clear Gwen was a lost cause, and I was just a teenager when he had the first episodes. He was afraid if something happened to him, Ann would be taken away and put in foster care, which would have been disastrous for so many reasons. So he fought it. He figured out ways to work from home, to get more time to finish his research, to pretend to be a functioning head of household. But shortly after I turned twenty-one, he just let go.

  “About a month later I was able to get him in a nursing home out in West County. Ann and I went to visit him every few days until he stopped recognizing us. And then we still went once a week. I have to be honest, it was a relief when he finally died. He wasn’t anybody I knew anymore. He had changed more than Ann ever could have.”

  “Pretty tough on you,” he comments.

  “Everybody has it tough one way or another,” I reply. “And as I say, things got easier once he was gone. I’d been going to school part-time at Maryville, and after he died, I had more time and energy to finish my degree. There was life-insurance money, which helped a lot, so I paid off the house and got a new car. Then Debbie opened her company and hired me. Life actually got better there for a while.”

  “You make it sound like it’s bad again.”

  I hesitate long enough to make him straighten up in his chair and try to get a good look at my face by the wavering light of the tiki torch. “Melanie? Is something wrong? You’re not still worried that I’m going to do something to hurt Ann, are you?”

  “You’re a complication,” I tell him honestly, “but no, I’m not afraid of that. Exactly.”

  “Then what’s bothering you?”

  “Just—as always. I’m anxious about Ann.”

  “Is it that you don’t like William? For which I could not really say I blame you.”

  “I’m starting to get on board with William. I think he loves her, and I think he watches out for her. It’s just—she seems frail to me lately. A little sickly, maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just borrowing trouble.”

  He doesn’t make some patronizing comment like, You worry too much, you know?
He doesn’t offer hearty reassurances that he has no way of knowing are true. He just squeezes my hand, and says, “I guess if something’s wrong, you’ll find out eventually. And deal with it then.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess you’re right.”

  * * *

  The chill finally chases us back inside. Brody lifts his blanket above his shoulders and throws it over my head, then draws me closer, so we’re embracing inside the world’s smallest tent. And that leads to kissing and that leads to lovemaking and that leads to another night of whispering in bed until we each fall into an exhausted but blissful slumber.

  I am sleeping so heavily, in fact, and dreaming so vividly, that I can hardly claw my way back to wakefulness when I hear and finally decode the sound that means someone is knocking furiously on the door. I struggle to open my eyes, to sit up and orient myself. I’m in my own bed in my own house. Brody is beside me, also fighting to wake up. By the faint color limning the square of the bedroom curtain, it’s daylight, but barely.

  “What’s going on?” he says, rubbing his eyes.

  Adrenaline is quickly clearing the fog from my mind, or maybe it’s fear; an urgent early-morning summons cannot be good. “Someone’s at the door,” I say briefly, and hop out of bed. I smell like smoke and sweat and sex, and of course I’m nude. I grab a robe and stuff my feet into slippers as I run for the living room. Brody’s right behind me, barefoot but wrapping a blanket around his waist like a sarong.

  When I fling the door open, all my terrors come to life on one sharp and alarming tableau. William is standing there, pale and disheveled, holding an unconscious white husky in his arms. He’s gripping her so tightly to his chest that I cannot make out anything of her face except that her eyes are closed; her paws are folded before her as if she is merely sleeping. But from William’s expression, I know that is not the case.

  I push the door wider, and he brushes past me, carrying his precious burden across the room to the sofa. Brody and I trail behind him, Brody silent and me uttering frantic questions. What happened? What’s wrong with her? Is she hurt? William doesn’t answer, and I think it’s because he doesn’t know, which frightens me even more.

  The three of us kneel on the floor in front of her, and I take hold of one of the slim white paws, feeling the bone and tendon through the fur. “Ann,” I say, pitching my voice in the tone I have always used to catch her wayward attention. “Ann. You’re home. You’re safe now. Come back to yourself. Come back to me. Come back.”

  And then it is as if she shimmers, or wavers, or pulses between dimensions at a rate too rapid to be visible to the human eye. The white fur ruffles, then smooths out, then darkens to ivory, to sand, to the rosy-pink beige of flesh. The pointed black nose shrinks down, tilts up, melts back into the re-formed face, and matted blond hair spills untidily across her cheek, down her back, over one slim shoulder.

  She is naked, she is still unconscious, and she is bleeding at the mouth.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JANET

  Unexpectedly, I loved college.

  I had let all the logistical challenges of relocation distract me from my real and growing fear about how badly the undergraduate experience would go. What if I hated my roommate, my courses, my teachers, the university environment? What if I wasn’t as smart as I believed I was, unable to maintain the grade point average I needed to keep my scholarship? What if here, as everywhere else, I had trouble making friends?

  What if Cooper could not adjust to a new routine, a new state park? What if neither of us could bear the days we would have to live apart, while he was in wolf shape and I was attending school? Except for those few miserable days we had stayed apart at the campgrounds, we had slept beside each other every day of the summer, no matter what form Cooper was in. How would both of us adjust to a life in which I had to follow a more normal routine?

  Only one way to find out.

  He was human for two weeks in the middle of August, so we packed our scant belongings and made our way to U of I about a week before classes were scheduled to start. Before my roommate had even showed up, we settled my stuff into my room and familiarized ourselves with the campus, then spent a couple of days trying to figure out where Cooper would spend his time. It was almost fifty miles to the nearest state park big enough for him to hide in, but about half the distance away was a private-estate-turned-nature-preserve that featured some prairie, some woodland, some statuary, and a whole lot of human activity like conferences and weddings. It seemed unlikely a true wild animal would be able to keep out of sight in such a place, but Cooper had a thinking man’s ability to exercise caution, and we both believed he could stay there safely, at least for short periods of time. A tent was out of the question, but a wolf wouldn’t need a tent.

  When he was human—well, we weren’t sure yet how that would go. Depending on my roommate’s attitude about overnight guests, he might be able to stay with me most of those nights. Just in case, we investigated local homeless shelters and other options, like the bus station that stayed open all night.

  “I’ll manage,” Cooper assured me. “I always do.”

  He was in town, attending a free church breakfast on the Sunday morning before classes started, when I first met my roommate.

  She came banging through the door, loaded down with four pieces of luggage in matching red leather, followed by two people I took to be her parents. They were all fair-haired and exceptionally good-looking in an almost offensively healthy way. The father was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and bespectacled, like an athlete who had decided to turn accountant. The mother was petite, precise, wearing heels and nylons and pearls even on this sticky late-summer day, and she talked incessantly.

  “Oh dear, the rooms aren’t very big, are they? Is that the closet? Is that the only closet? And where’s the bathroom? Down the hall? Are you sure? You’re going to have to do something about those curtains, they’ll look horrible with your new bedspread. I thought they said there would be a refrigerator in the room. That’s a refrigerator? I thought it was a safe. You won’t be able to keep much food in there, will you? Well, at least you won’t gain any weight.”

  Her daughter and husband ignored her with what seemed to be the ease of long practice. The tall man carefully dropped a heavy box at the foot of the bed I hadn’t claimed, and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.” The girl let all the straps and handles slide from her arms and took one long, critical look around.

  I took a long, critical look at her. She was neither as petite as her mother nor as strapping as her father, but she was built like the girls who’d been cheerleaders and tennis players back at my high school. Her wheat-colored hair hung straight to her shoulders, then made a slight upward flip; her eyes were a guileless blue. No doubt she had been cast as Cinderella and her direct descendants in every school play from kindergarten on. If I’d had to bet, I’d have said she was the high-school homecoming queen and she’d come to college to major in fashion merchandising and find a frat boy to marry.

  God knows what she thought when she first laid eyes on me, but I very much doubted she could have come anywhere close to guessing the truth.

  She gave me a careless, easy smile, and said, “Hey. What’s your name?”

  “Janet.”

  “I’m Crystal.”

  * * *

  Crystal turned out to be the best roommate in the world. First, she was hardly ever home. She had a boyfriend of her own, a junior who shared a rambling old house with three other guys, and she practically lived there with him. It was clear she had only taken up space in the dorm so her parents believed that was where she stayed. One of my primary tasks was to take calls from her mother, claim that Crystal was in class or in the shower or downstairs in the cafeteria, then phone the boyfriend’s house to tell her to call home. This was easy to do and an exceedingly small price to pay for the astonishing privilege of almost total privacy.

  Second, she was nice. Despite her gorgeous looks and her well-to
-do background—and the fact that she had, indeed, been homecoming queen—she was nothing like the bitch I was expecting. She wasn’t particularly effusive or extraordinarily warm, but she was friendly to everyone, never bad-tempered, and casually thoughtful. For instance, on the mornings she came back to the room to pick up new clothes or swap out some textbooks, she would always stop for coffee and donuts at a little stand down the street, and she’d invariably pick up a pastry for me. It was a small gesture, maybe, but I was not used to small kindnesses, and I appreciated them immensely.

  Third, she liked Cooper. Their very different schedules ensured that they almost never ran into each other, but when they did, she’d always sit and talk to him for a few minutes. It turned out she was majoring, not in fashion merchandising, but graphic design, and she was interested in all kinds of art. She and her boyfriend even took a weekend trip up to Chicago that fall so she could see some exhibit at the Art Institute.

  We had been living together for three weeks, and I’d seen her for all of five hours, when she happened to be home on a Friday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, trying to get all my homework done before the weekend, since I was pretty sure Cooper would be human again by the following morning. I’d done a little decorating since she’d been here last, and she wandered over to examine one of Cooper’s drawings that I had thumbtacked to the wall. It was larger than his typical work—maybe sixteen inches by twenty inches—carefully done on real artist’s paper instead of his usual discarded scraps. It was a view of one of my favorite scenes from the park where we’d lived all summer, a wooden bridge over a little stream that was so smooth throughout most of its run that you would swear it had no measurable current at all. But here under the bridge, it flowed over a tumble of rocks, and suddenly its surface went from glassy and still to ruffled and wrinkled. It was as if only the presence of those stones could force the water to show its true nature.