Still Life with Shape-shifter (20 page)

I’ve now turned over in his arms as if to hear the story better. “How old was she?”

“Fourteen.”

“And she knew to make a
tourniquet
?”

He nods. The bedroom is dark, but we left a hall light on, and it’s just bright enough that I can see the outline of his face. “She did it right, too, or so the paramedics said later. Anyway, so once Brandy and Beth have taken off my clothes, she takes off
her
coat and has them move me onto it—so I’m not lying on the cold ground—and then she tells them to lie down on either side of me and try to keep me warm with their own body heat. Bailey takes off her sweater and wraps it around my legs and feet to keep them from freezing. The whole time, she’s talking to me, telling me everything’s going to be fine, the ambulance will be there in a minute. Beth’s crying, and Brandy keeps telling her to shut up, which means Brandy’s terrified, but everybody does what Bailey says. And pretty soon the ambulance comes and they take me to the hospital and I have frostbite and a big-ass wound, which is now a big-ass scar, but otherwise everything’s just fine.”

“Wow,” I say again, snuggling closer. “I hope Bailey got recognized by the hometown paper or something for saving your life.”

“Yeah, you know, there was an item about it on the local news the next day, and I think her Girl Scout troop actually did a recognition ceremony for her, but that’s not the point of the story.”

“There’s a point to this story? Because, you know, a lot of times, with your stories, there isn’t.”

He puts a hand under my chin and tilts my face up, leaning back enough that he can look me in the eyes. For someone who can be so silly, he looks deadly serious. “To me, that’s what love looks like,” he says. “Most of the time it’s just in the background, but in extraordinary circumstances, it’s extraordinary. Creative, unstinting, tenacious, and drastic. The day I met you, I knew you would have reacted just like Bailey did—you would have done whatever you had to do to save Ann.”

“Oh, God, please don’t tell me I remind you of your sisters.”

He doesn’t quite smile. “Not in the way you look or talk. In the way you love whatever you have chosen to adopt as your own. I realized that’s what I’ve been looking for my whole life. I realized nothing else would ever be good enough for me.”

I’m silent a long moment, but I don’t squirm free, and I don’t look away. “
Love.
That’s a pretty big word for people who’ve only known each other a few weeks.”

“It’s what I want for the long term,” he says—adding, as if he can’t quite help himself, “though I’ll take sex for now.”

I poke him in the ribs hard enough to make him yelp. “Lucky for you, the sex is good enough to carry us through for a while.”

“I’ll say.” His fervent voice makes me giggle, but I quickly sober up.

“It’s too soon to know anything for sure,” I say, and now I lean my head forward again to rest it on his chest. “I have a hard time letting my guard down enough to love someone.”

He strokes my hair with one hand. “What do you think my chances are?”

“I’m thinking you like love so much that you make it easy for people to give it to you.”

“So my chances are good.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“If it helps any,” he says, “I think I fell in love with you that first day. When you cried in my arms and then—suited back up in all your armor and pretended it didn’t happen. So strong. So defiant. And so wounded, all at once. I wanted to kiss you then.” As if to make up for this omission, he kisses the top of my head. “Everything I’ve seen since has just intensified the feeling.”

“That’s sweet,” I say. “But I think you just know how to deal with women.”

He laughs, then tugs on a fistful of my hair. “So tell me a story. I told you one.”

“What kind of story?”

“Anything you want me to know.”

I lie there a few moments in silence, while he continues to brush his hand across my hair and down my back. I hardly want to tell any heroic-older-sister tale after the one he’s just recited; I can’t think of anything I’ve done that’s quite so dramatic, anyway. And that’s not the point of this little exercise, I think. The stories are stand-ins for emotions. His gift to me was love. I think what he needs from me is trust.

I have never yet admitted to him in so many words that Ann is the creature he believes her to be. But if I trust him, that’s exactly what I’ll do now.

“When I was sixteen or so, and we’d been living here for about a year, Debbie and I went on a hike with our Girl Scout troop. Ann wanted to come along, and the Scout leader didn’t mind, so I brought her. I can’t even remember where we went—Pere Marquette, maybe, over in Illinois. There were probably thirty girls along that day, a whole busload of us, and a handful of parents. Naturally, people got separated on the trails, and eventually Ann and I got lost. We’d even lost track of Debbie along the way.”

I wriggle closer to him to absorb heat from his skin; I still get chills thinking about that day. “I had no idea where we were. I couldn’t hear voices from the other girls. I didn’t have a compass. I knew you were supposed to be able to tell north by which side of the trees the moss was growing on, but since I didn’t know which direction I was supposed to go, north didn’t help me much. This was in the days before everyone on the planet had a cell phone, so I couldn’t call for help. And we had about two hours of daylight left.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t want to panic Ann, but I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that if you were lost, you should stay put, so search parties had a better chance of finding you. So when we came to a sort of clearing where I thought we might be visible from overhead—in case someone sent a helicopter for us—I said, ‘Let’s sit here for a while and play a game.’ So we counted the different kinds of trees we could see and the birds we could identify and the bugs we saw—plenty of bugs. And after about twenty minutes, Ann said she was hungry and wanted to go back. And I said, trying to sound cheerful, ‘Well, honey, I think we should wait here till someone comes to get us.’ Of course she asked why, and I said, ‘I’m not sure I can find the way back.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I can.’ Cool as you please.”

I’m silent a moment, but he, for a wonder, doesn’t speak, just waits. “So I said, ‘Really? You’re just a little girl. How can you know the way back?’ And she said, ‘When I’m a puppy, I can always find my way home.’”

I resettle myself in Brody’s arms, but he’s still quiet, letting me tell the story at my own pace. “Well, it was a dilemma for me,” I say slowly. “I was the big sister. I was the one who was supposed to do the rescuing. And Ann was six years old. Could I possibly believe a child of that age could lead us out of the woods? Wasn’t she likely to get us more lost? But it was true—she’d always found her way home before. And I really didn’t want to spend the night in the park, cold and hungry. So I said, still casual, ‘That would be great if you think you won’t get lost. But as soon as we catch sight of the rest of the troop, you’ll have to turn back into a little girl. They don’t know your secret.’ And she just said, ‘Okay,’ and she turned herself into her other shape.”

I detour from the main story for a moment. “She takes the form of a white husky with pale blue eyes. Most beautiful creature you ever saw. At this stage, still a puppy, all big paws and playful energy. But with an expression—I can’t describe it. You could have lined up a dozen white huskies in front of me, and I’d have been able to pick Ann out in a heartbeat. This dog just
looked
like her. Still does.”

Brody risks a comment. “I’d like to see her that way sometime.”

“Stick around. You will.”

He kisses my head. “Another incentive.”

I resume the tale. “So Ann starts sniffing at the ground—picking up our scent, I suppose. Of course, whenever she changes shape, she sheds her clothes, so
that
presents me a bit of problem. I take her little sundress and knot it real loosely around her neck, so she can slip into it when she changes back. I carry her sandals, and I just leave her underwear behind.

“Pretty soon she takes off, still sniffing the ground, and I follow her as fast as I can. I actually have to call her back a couple of times because she gets so far ahead of me. I was lost, so I don’t know for sure, but she never seems to lose the trail even for a moment. And about fifteen minutes later, I hear voices ahead of us, calling for us. The Scout leaders had realized we were missing, and a hunt was already on.

“On the one hand, I’m hugely relieved, but on the other—where’s Ann? I don’t want us to make it safely out of the wilderness just to have her exposed as a shape-shifter. I can’t call for her without everyone else hearing me, so I stay back where I am and start whistling. And then whispering. ‘
Ann. Ann.
Where are you? It’s time for you to come back to yourself.’ That’s what I always used to say whenever I wanted her to take her human shape again. ‘Come back to yourself.’ But she doesn’t hear me or she’s off in the woods playing or—I don’t know. So I stand there, a few yards away from the rest of the troop, hearing people calling our names, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Pretty scary.”

“And then I hear one of the Scout leaders cry out, ‘There she is! Ann, we’ve been looking all over for you! Where’s your sister?’ And I hear Ann’s voice, totally human, totally calm, saying, ‘She was right behind me. Look—there she is.’ And I step out of the woods and everyone runs up to hug me, and then the Scout leader starts yelling at me that I have to be more careful, don’t I realize how dangerous the woods are? What was I thinking, going off alone like that? And how could I have let my little sister walk
barefoot
along the trails? And I tell everyone I’m sorry, and Debbie brings me some water, and pretty soon we’re all back on the bus again going home.

“And never, not for a minute, did Ann act like it was a big deal. Then, or later, when I tried to get her to talk about it. She wasn’t lost, she wasn’t afraid, it didn’t bother her to switch between shapes. It was just as easy to be a dog as to be a human—and more useful, at least some of the time. To her it was like—like choosing to stand up or sit down. Whatever felt right at the moment. It was the first time I truly understood that shape-shifting wasn’t something that just happened to Ann. It wasn’t like getting the flu or the measles. It was part of her. Like hair. Like hands and feet.” I shrug. “Or like paws and a tail.”

“Although from what I’ve seen of Ann,” Brody says, “that’s how she would have accepted anything in her life that could be considered outside the norm. If she’d been born deaf, or with only one arm. She wouldn’t have been fazed at all.”

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.”

*   *   *

W
ell, 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.