Secondhand Shadow

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  “So when you leave,” Naomi said, “will I be divorced again?”

  Leave? That’s right, I was leaving, eventually. The thought was alien. “No, not as such.”

  “Okay,” she mumbled, her voice trailing off into dreamland.

  I was shaking again, for new and even more alarming reasons, and it was a long time before I followed her into sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Courtesy

  DAMON

  When I woke, she was gone. My first, unconcerned thought was that she’d gone to the bathroom. But the bathroom doorway was open and dark. I realized what had woken me; the deep cold gut-wrench that said my Lumi needed me.

  I left the bedroom so fast that half the covers came with me, but before I could work myself into a proper panic, I found her in the kitchen, nightgown tucked into a pair of jeans, up to the elbows in a sink of suds.

  “Naomi!”

  “Ack!” She flung her hands up, spattering me with suds, then clapped a soapy hand to her chest, gasping. “Don’t do that! Oh, crap, my nightgown.” She turned away to grab a paper towel, but it was too late. I had seen her face; damp, red, puffy. So I hadn’t imagined the Call.

  “I’ve got to teach you how to control that,” I muttered.

  “Control what?” Her attempt to dab discreetly at her cheeks was failing miserably.

  “You Called me.”

  She frowned. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Not on purpose. But you were upset. You wanted… someone to comfort you.”

  “Oh.” She flushed. “I’m sorry. How do I…?”

  “There’s a… reaching-out feeling…” I had some memories of this, from Claire’s point of view. Oh. Ah. I thought I had locked those up for good. I tried not to audibly gasp, fighting to resurrect the proper barriers. Better. That’s better.

  Naomi had not noticed; her brow was wrinkled, gaze gone inward, concentrating. I was snatched off balance again by the hard yank of a Call.

  “Ah! Right. That. Don’t do it.”

  “Okay,” she said meekly.

  I rubbed my forehead. “It takes time to learn to control it. That and the Compass.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You may have noticed that you can tell where I am even when you can’t see me? That’s your Compass.”

  She smiled. “Like Jack Sparrow’s compass. It doesn’t point north—”

  “Right. It’s erratic at first. You’ll get the hang — um.” We wouldn’t be together long enough for her to get the hang of it. “Anyway, you Called, I came, like a good boy. What’s the problem?” My voice came out rather more bitter than I meant it to.

  She turned back to the dishes. “There’s no problem. I didn’t mean to Call you. I’m fine.”

  “Of course you are. Everyone washes dishes at,” I glanced at the clock, “one thirty in the morning.”

  “Oh. Well, see, that’s actually the best time for it, I think. No distractions, you know, and you can go back to bed afterward, like a little prize for getting it done, see?”

  “Uh-huh.” I crossed my arms.

  Her cheeks reddened a little. “I dreamed that Carmen came home and I still hadn’t done the dishes and she had a cat o’nine tails, okay? So I’m doing the dishes.”

  I blinked. “Oh. Well, I’ll help you.”

  “I’m fine. You can go back to bed.”

  “I’ve already had all the sleep I need. I might as well help you.”

  “Well, you could dry these and put them away, I guess. Glasses go up there.” As she turned to point to a cabinet, something moved by her knees — a pair of earbuds, swinging from her pocket, in which I guessed she had tucked an mP3 player. She’d been listening to music while she washed dishes. Reasonable enough. Until something made her snatch the buds from her ears and let them fall.

  I took the towel she handed me and began drying glasses. As I turned to put the first of them away, I said casually, “So I’m guessing you getting upset had something to do with the earbuds you dropped in such a hurry.”

  The sound of her hands swishing in the water ceased for a moment. “Had my player on shuffle. Went to a song I didn’t like. That’s all.”

  “If you don’t like it, why is it on your player?”

  “Because I used to like it.”

  I remained silent through another two dishes before she added, her voice small, “It was me and Tyler’s song.”

  “Ah.” I breathed carefully in and out. “As someone who can’t hear Madonna without committing property damage, I believe I can sympathize.”

  “Madonna?”

  “Claire’s favorite.”

  “Oh.”

  “So this Tyler,” I said after a long pause. “He left you and Junior in the lurch?” Her last three months’ memories had included a variety of intense images, but little in the way of explanation. Memories were like that; few people bothered to explain to themselves what they already knew.

  “I left. Junior hadn’t made his presence known yet. At the time, I thought the straitjacket-caliber mood swings and soul-sucking fatigue were just further proof that my life had gone down the toilet. Which is stupid, since…” She cleared her throat. “Since I’d stopped taking my birth control.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You got pregnant on purpose?”

  “Sort of. Me and Tyler had been fighting about having kids. He said it was way too soon, which it was. But I thought… I’m not even sure what I thought. That it would be romantic to have a baby right away. Or maybe I was just trying to tie him down. I knew he’d never run out on his own child.”

  “But he would run out on his wife.”

  “Or at least run around on his wife.” She glanced down at her belly and sighed. “How did we both manage to lose that argument?”

  “You could have aborted.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “‘Hey, God, send me a baby. Yeah, one of those precious little ones the Bible goes on and on about. Wait, never mind, I don’t want it anymore. Let me just have it suctioned out of me in little chunks.’” She sighed. “I can’t help it. I can’t not think of it as a baby. Even when it’s just a little clumpy, ugly thing — it’s still a clumpy ugly baby, and it’s helpless and tiny and the idea of hurting it makes me sick.

  “See, Mom took me to a debate when I was twelve,” she added, with a wry, defiant sort of smile. “Educating me about my womanly rights. It was… a little too educational, and it totally backfired. Halfway through, I let go of her hand and went to stand on the pro-life side of the room. She’s never forgiven me for it.”

  “Is that why haven’t you told your parents about the baby? You thought they’d want you to abort?”

  “Partly. I could already hear Mom’s voice in my head, I didn’t need to hear it in person.”

  “But it’s far too late in your pregnancy for that, now. And you still haven’t told them.”

  “I know. I could go home. I could throw myself on their mercy. And that’s exactly what they want!” An anger I did not expect flashed through her, brief but hot. “It’s exactly what they’ve been trying to make me do all this time — why they’ve cut me off, stopped talking to me, all of it. They want me to come crawling home to beg their forgiveness and tell them they were right all along, that Tyler was worthless and I was an idiot not to do as they said from the start. Then they’d forgive me, sure, and wrap me up in a warm smothering blanket of affectionate contempt, and exchange knowing glances because hopeless little Naomi can’t take care of herself. Well, guess what, I can, and Junior, too.” She let out a shaky breath. “I love my parents. My parents love me. I just… I can’t crawl. I won’t.” She turned her attention back to the dishes with savage intensity.

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I think you’ll be a good mother.”

  “Maybe if it’s a girl. I won’t know what to do with a boy.”

  “For the first year or two, at least, I’d say it’s the same thing you do with a girl. Feed, bathe, change diapers. You can do that.
”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, maybe by then things will… be different.”

  “I’ll get married again, you mean.”

  I can’t imagine a girl like you staying on the market for long. The thought nearly made me gag. Tyler was bad enough, gone and done with before I came along. The idea of Naomi falling in love with someone else — kissing him, walking down the aisle to him, going to bed with him… I set down the glass I was drying before I broke it.

  “Is it true that Shadows don’t have babies easily?” Naomi asked.

  “I have two Shadow cousins. That’s a big family.”

  “Why is that?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t exactly get scientific studies done. Mostly we figure that, since we’re not technically the same species, we should count ourselves blessed that we can cross-procreate at all.”

  “It just seems… anti-Darwinian. How does a species survive with such a low reproductive rate?”

  “It’s probably one reason Shadows have such strong… um…” Why did I start this sentence? “…drives,” I finished in a mumble, and turned away to put up a dish. Naomi was suppressing giggles, and I had the uncomfortable suspicion that my face was turning red. “Anyway, we seem to be doing okay. There’s twenty or so bond-pairs here in Ilium.”

  Naomi fumbled the pot in her hands, and a fount of soapy water slopped across her arms. “That’s, um. More than I expected.”

  “Quarter of a percent of the population. About average.”

  “Wow. You do seem to manage. Oof!”

  “What? What?”

  “Baby’s kicking, that’s all. He likes to get real active at about,” she glanced at the clock, “yep, two in the morning. Old Faithful, that’s my baby.”

  “Can I…? If it doesn’t bother you?”

  She hesitated. “Okay. Right over here.”

  She guided my hand until I felt a thud beneath my fingers, like a more-than-usually-aggressive heartbeat. Bump. Bump bump.

  “If you kind of poke back, that really gets a reaction,” she said.

  I pressed back at the next kick, and felt a startled-seeming flutter of movement, followed by a frenzy of emphatic kicks.

  One of Naomi’s memories bubbled to the top — the very first time she felt the baby move. She’d been trying to make a casserole and it spilled all inside the oven, and the smoke alarm was going off, and she was crying and shouting and had just burned her hand and then — she felt him move, a little fluttery ripple inside her. The whole world just froze, and she burst into tears, her mind finally accepting that, for good or ill, she was having a baby.

  “Okay, enough!” Naomi was saying. “Sheesh, let’s not break Mommy’s ribs!”

  “I’ve made contact with an alien life form.” I was dimly aware of a rather silly grin on my face.

  “Yeah, he has his ways of communicating.”

  “If you want a girl, why do you say ‘he’?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, I just feel like it’s a boy. Of course, my mom was so sure I was a boy that she’d already decorated my room in blue. Which, as it turns out, is okay with me, blue’s my favorite color. What’s your favorite color?”

  I shrugged.

  “Come on, you have to have a favorite color.”

  “Black, I guess.”

  “A vampire whose favorite color is black? That is so cliché. Can’t you do better than that?”

  I grinned. “Would red be better?”

  “Um, no, that’s worse. What about green, how do you feel about green?”

  “I have no objection to green.”

  “Excellent. Your new favorite color is green.”

  In the following silence, I realized I could hear a tinny thread of sound from the earbuds dangling from her hip.

  “Oh, I never turned it off.” Naomi grimaced, glancing at her wet, sudsy hands.

  “I’ll get it.” I stepped forward and reached into her hip pocket.

  Oh. Mistake.

  I was befasted, I was healed; I felt no need to bite her now. I wished I did. I knew how to resist that.

  Step back. Now. You will step back now.

  I didn’t. I swayed forward.

  Mistake mistake I don’t care I don’t care—

  She shifted, whether toward or away I did not wait to see. It broke my paralysis, and I snatched the mP3 player from her pocket, hit “shutdown,” and dropped it onto the counter as if burned. I tried not to let my hands shake.

  “I’ve made a mistake, and it’s not your fault,” I said hoarsely. “But this can’t continue.”

  “What mistake, exactly?” She had not looked up from the dishes.

  “I’ve been acting like your Shadow. Stopped resisting. Almost. And I can’t do that. It’s too hard to go back. I don’t want to hurt you — which is one of the things that upsets me — but I just can’t, I can’t. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, still looking down, and I was glad because the right glance from her could have turned everything I’d just said into a lie.

  “Are you going to put those away or what?” she said.

  We finished the dishes in silence, and when she went back to bed, I stayed on the couch.

  NAOMI

  I hit snooze twice without ever waking up. I know this because I dreamed twice about a frog honking at me that only shut up when I smacked it on the head.

  The third time, I woke up. Because whatever I had just smacked said “ow.”

  “Huh?” I opened my eyes.

  “Morning,” Damon said.

  “Can’t be. Still tired.” I reached past him, smacked the clock, and dove back under the covers.

  “My dad’s class starts in half an hour.”

  “Aaagh!” I threw back the covers and began trying to heave the Wonder Tummy out of bed.

  Damon did not offer to help. “When you’re dressed, there’s some oatmeal and pancakes to go with your Easter eggs.”

  “Really? You didn’t have to—”

  “I was hungry. And I can’t eat until you do, so hurry up.”

  “Oh. Fine, Mr. Creepy Von Lurkabout. Get out of here.” I tried to throw a pillow at him as he left, but my brain and hands weren’t communicating yet. The pillow flopped off the edge of the bed, and I felt sure it was mocking me.

  I considered a shower, but I could smell the pancakes now, and between hygiene and food, there was really no contest. I reached for Carmen’s bathrobe, remembered it was bloodstained in a landfill somewhere, and wrapped myself in her navy-blue comforter instead. Last night it hadn’t seemed to matter that my top half, at least, was only in a nightgown. But it wasn’t last night anymore.

  ‘I’ve made a mistake. This can’t continue.’

  As I passed the mirror, I stopped to thread a hand out of the comforter and finger-comb my hair. Hopeless, I thought, and almost went back to bed because suddenly everything seemed hopeless. My schoolwork, my job, my baby, my parents, my life… and Damon. Where would I be a year from now? It wasn’t that I could only see a bad future. I couldn’t see any future at all.

  Pancakes. Focus on pancakes.

  Feeling like the Big Blue Fluffy Thing of Doom, I hobbled to the card table — restored to its usual place between the kitchen and living room — and managed to trap a chair beneath the fluff. Damon sat across from me. The gulf of steaming oatmeal and flapjacks between us seemed very wide.

  Heaven knew I had seen him angry. I had seen him half-crazy with rage and pain and despair. I had also seen him… not happy, perhaps, but something resembling it, something calm and quiet.

  He was calm and quiet now. But he wasn’t happy. Not even something resembling it. I could look at his eyes and they didn’t burn. They didn’t do anything. They looked like blown lightbulbs.

  I looked away and started forking pancakes onto my plate.

  Damon cleared his throat.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I handed the plate to him.

  “You have to touch them. Just a fingertip will do.�
�

  I patted his pancakes into submission, then swirled a finger through the bowl of oatmeal and poked at the eggs. Would that work, touching only the shell? He wasn’t eating the shell. “What’s with this, anyway?”

  “Reigning theory is that there has to be some trace of the Lumi’s DNA on the food before a Shadow’s system can digest it.”

  “So you’re, um… eating me.”

  “Essentially.” He blew on a spoonful of oatmeal.

  “And your dad has to do this for your mom?”

  “Every meal. It becomes second nature. You learn to do it discreetly, in restaurants and such.”

  “What if the two of them get separated somehow?”

  “Then the Shadow gets very hungry.”

  “Can they starve? Can a Shadow die before his Lumi?”

  “It’s very nearly impossible.”

  “Very nearly isn’t impossible.”

  He drizzled syrup over his pancakes; mine were already swimming in it. “These days, I’m hesitant to call anything impossible.”

  Before I could reply, I heard a key struggling in the door.

  “Oh, crap, it’s Carmen!” I hissed. “Damon!”

  “Yes?”

  “Hide! Shade! Become one with the furniture! Something!”

  “There would still be an extra plate to explain.” He popped a wedge of pancake in his mouth.

  “Just go!”

  Too late. The door swung open, and a duffel bag heaved through, with Carmen not far behind.

  Things must have gone well with her mom, I figured, because she looked terrible — frizzy hair, minimal make-up, baggy jeans. After a fight with her mom, Carmen was generally dressed to the nines, strapping on an armor of lipstick and stilettos.

  “Happy Monday, Na… omi.” She surveyed the tableau before her for a moment, from the Fluffy Blue Monster quivering in her comforter to Damon, calmly forking a pancake. She turned to me and spoke with enviable nonchalance. “So, you did change my sheets, right?”