Still Life with Shape-shifter (24 page)

I put my arms around him and rest my head against his chest. Just for a moment. Just long enough to feel a little of my strength come back. Then I’ll stand on my own again without assistance. “Anyway. No. Not tired of you. Kind of afraid it’s going to go the other way.”

“What, that I’ll become bored with you?”

“Or just get sick of all the angst and drama.”

“Not even close,” he says. “Just can’t picture that day ever coming.”

“Still. There must be things you need to do. Appointments to keep. Deadlines to make.”

“I’ve been making those deadlines. Conducting interviews by cell phone, filing articles by e-mail. I have the world’s most portable job.”

“I mean, I’d understand. If you needed to leave for a while. Or longer.”

He sets his hands on my shoulders and pushes me far enough away so he can see my face. “Do you
want
me to leave?”

I move my head from side to side in slow motion, like a windup doll that’s almost entirely run down. “No. Not ever.”

He draws me back into his embrace. “Well, then, that’s settled,” he says.

I’m sure it’s not. Clearly you need more words to ratify major life decisions—and Brody needs more words in almost any situation you can imagine. But I think it’s settled for
now
. I think he won’t be leaving anytime soon. And once I have pulled myself together again, once I have figured out how to concentrate on something in my life other than Ann, I think I can convince him not to leave at all.

*   *   *

O
n Friday, William returns, but he keeps his setter shape. He’s a better-natured dog than he is a human, more playful, easier to have around. He rarely leaves Ann’s side, sleeping on her bed at night and sitting at her feet whenever we’re in the house. She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel her yearning toward him on a primitive level; I can feel her desire to join him as he races around the newly green yard, chasing after birds and squirrels. She resists because she does not want to abandon
me
. Because, although she has not promised it in so many words, it is clear she is going to try to maintain her canine state for a sustained period the next time she shifts between bodies. Because, if she is not going to speak to me for a very long time, she wants to make sure she has left nothing important unsaid.

“It’s supposed to be a beautiful weekend,” I say to her that night as she helps me dry and put away the dinner dishes. Brody is sprawled on the couch, watching a baseball game, and the noise from the stadium covers the sound of our conversation.

“Yeah, I heard that on the radio. Almost eighty degrees.”

“Good time to be outside. Gardening. Playing softball. Camping.” She hands me a glass, and I set it in the cabinet. “Good time to be living in the park.”

“It’s too soon,” she says.

I shake my head. “It’s not. You’re ready to go. I can tell.”

“I’m not ready to leave you.”

I lay my dish towel over my shoulder and turn to face her, putting my hands on her cheeks. I’m smiling and crying at the same time. “You’re ready to go with William. You’re ready to get on with your life. It’s okay. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to grow up and leave home.”

She summons fake indignation. “You’re kicking me out? You want me to leave?”

“I want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy.”

I shake my head, then hug her. Now my tears have started in earnest, and I think she’s crying, too. “You’re not,” I whisper. “You’re supposed to be some glorious magical creature running free through the world, not a sad girl chained by love in a small dark house. Go. Go with him. Leave tonight. Come back and visit from time to time, but do not, do
not
, take human shape until I tell you that you can.”

“I love you,” she says, her voice muffled against my neck. “How many more times am I going to have a chance to say it? I love you. Best sister ever.”

“It doesn’t matter if you never say it again,” I reply. “I’ll remember this one time forever.”

We cling for another minute, for five, then she tears herself away. She’s sobbing so hard she won’t look at me, and she falls to her knees in a small ball of misery. But I know what she’s doing. She did it all the time when she was a little girl, when she was hurt or sad or angry, when complex emotions were too much for her to bear. She pulls herself in, she tucks her head down, and she lets go of everything that makes her human. Still crying, I drop down beside her, my hand on her blond hair, so I can feel it change textures as I watch her rapid transformation. The hair under my palm grows thicker, rougher, springier as it wavers from yellow to silver to white. Her hunched shoulders grow pointier and more powerful; the curved back straightens and rises as a furred tail unrolls like a coiled belt.

She scrambles up on all four feet, her nails scratching the ceramic tile, and utters a short bark. It’s a happy sound; it always has been. I cannot keep from flinging my arms around that brushy white neck, hugging her one last time, and her paws scrabble against my jeans as she licks my nose and barks once more, right in my face. The sound makes me giggle, as it’s meant to, and that’s the last thing she sees before she scampers out the kitchen and through the open front door. Me laughing.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

JANET

T
he four years of undergraduate school sped by like a missile on a constantly accelerating trajectory. By the time I was a junior, I’d learned enough about getting loans and scholarships that I could afford the move off campus into a small apartment that I didn’t have to share with anybody but Cooper. Just in time, too—winter that year was bone-chillingly cold. Cows were freezing in fields, families were dying in cars that had run out of gas on the interstate. Maybe a wolf could withstand those subzero temperatures, but this one didn’t have to. He could curl up in our bedroom and sleep away his animal weeks, warm, safe, and well fed.

I had turned our second bedroom into a laboratory of sorts though I hadn’t made much progress in devising a serum that would keep Cooper from shape-shifting. I was sure it would take me years to find the cure, if there was one. But the fact that I was thinking about it, working on it, gave Cooper a level of peace he had never experienced before. From the moment he had met me, he had known he was not alone, but now he grew familiar with hope as well as love. It changed him almost as much as his own internal imperatives did.

By the middle of my senior year, I’d been admitted into grad school, and I’d believed that receiving that acceptance letter was the single event that would most shape my next few years. But two other events had just as much impact on my life, if not more.

The first one was meeting Cooper’s mother.

It had occurred to me that I might have more success with my scientific experiments if I could study the blood of another shape-shifter—preferably one related to Cooper. Since he almost never talked about his family, I wasn’t sure how he would feel about me trying to locate any of them, and I broached the subject hesitantly one night as we sat watching old movies in the apartment. He listened carefully as I explained my thesis, then shrugged.

“You can talk to them if you want, if you can find them,” he said. “But I don’t think either of us is ever going to get much satisfaction from our parents.”

I nodded. My mother had actually gone to the trouble of tracking me down through the university system, and we’d exchanged a few letters. But I didn’t feel any fugitive affection for her, any bittersweet fondness. And I never thought about my father at all.

Cooper’s family was a different story; Cooper’s family held a key I was desperately eager to discover. So I spent the next two months looking for his mother. During the days before the Internet had changed the whole process, the very
verb
of searching, the hunt was a frustrating and difficult exercise. She’d moved from the house he grew up in, and he couldn’t remember her second husband’s last name, though I found one of his old neighbors, who filled in some of the blanks. Nonetheless, when I reached too many dead ends, I hired a private investigator, and he was luckier than I was: He came up with an address a week later.

“And I think it’s good,” he told me. “I called the house, pretended to be a salesperson, asked for Cassandra Blair. She said, ‘This is Cassandra
Alvarez
, what do you want?’ so I think it’s her.”

I didn’t tell Cooper I’d found her. I waited until a week he was in wolf shape, then I rented a car and drove to a little town in southern Illinois to look for a woman who had thrown a child away.

I found the house with no trouble, a small, slightly battered clapboard bungalow with a cracked front porch, a neglected front yard, and a big backyard delineated by a chain-link fence. A boy and a dog chased each other across the back lawn, playing keep-away with an old stuffed animal that was no longer very stuffed. The boy must be Cooper’s half brother, I thought; he looked about the right age. He was scrawny and dark-haired, but from this distance I couldn’t see if he resembled the man I knew. The dog was a beagle, a much less alarming pet for a child than a wolf.

When I knocked on the door, it was answered by a woman whom I would have recognized anywhere as Cooper’s mother. She had the same full lips and poet’s cheekbones, the same dramatic coloring. She was smaller and more heavyset, but the curves and angles of her face were just as arresting as Cooper’s.

As soon as she saw a stranger at the door, she said, “I’m not buying.”

“I’m not selling,” I replied. “Are you Cassandra Alvarez?”

The fact that I knew her name scared her just a bit. This was someone who’d had some experience with cops or debt collectors showing up at her door, I thought. “Yeah? So?”

“I want to talk to you about your son.”

Involuntarily, she glanced over her shoulder, though I didn’t think she could see through the entire house to make sure the boy was still playing in the back. “Carter? What about him?”

“Your other son,” I said. “Cooper.”

She took one swift, hard breath, her hand clutching the doorframe as if she needed some support. I saw her scanning my face, trying to figure out if I could be a social worker, someone with the child-protection agencies, and deciding I was too young. “What about him?”

“I want you to tell me about his father.”

*   *   *

I
n the end, she allowed me inside, but only because I wouldn’t go away, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to slam the door in my face. She didn’t offer me anything to drink, just gestured at a worn country-print love seat, and said, “I’ll be right back.” I listened to her footsteps hurry into the other room and pause before she strode back. My guess was that she’d gone to check on Carter before returning to confront me. While she was gone, I glanced around the room. A little untidy from daily living, a little too crammed with secondhand furniture that didn’t all go together, but a perfectly respectable working-class house. Better than some of the ones I’d grown up in.

The wall that seemed to separate the living room from the kitchen had been decorated with about a dozen small and inexpensively framed family photographs. There were three of Cassandra with two women about her age—sisters, probably—and two of Cassandra with a good-looking dark-skinned man that I supposed was Davey Alvarez. By his last name, I had expected him to be Hispanic, but in the photos he appeared to be part African-American as well. The rest of the pictures all showed Carter at various stages. He had his father’s rich skin and his mother’s wide features, and in a few smiles and surprised expressions, I caught a strong resemblance to his half brother.

There were no pictures of Cooper on the wall.

Cassandra came back and dropped onto a nearby chair, gazing at me with definite animosity. “Who are you, and what do you know about Cooper?” she asked.

“I’m a student at U of I and I met your son”—I stressed the words—“about five years ago. He told me his story. Recently, we decided it might be useful for him to know a little about his heritage, so we thought we’d try to find his dad. Which meant first we had to find you.”

Cassandra shook her head. She had laid her wrists along the armrests in what was clearly meant to be a relaxed pose, but I could see her fingers spasming against the wood. “I don’t know where he is if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Maybe not, but you could tell me what you do know about him. His name. What he looked like. Where he came from.”

She snorted in disgust. “Well, I know what he
told
me, but I don’t know if it’s
true
,” she answered. “His name was Loren DeAngelo. Most of his family lived in Michigan, but he and his mom had moved south—first Chicago, then St. Louis, then Memphis, and back up to St. Louis. Following Highway 55, he said. I always figured he’d probably ended up in New Orleans.”

My heart grew tighter and smaller as she spoke. It would be hard enough to find a shape-shifter who lurked around the same general vicinity for ten or twenty years, but one who was always on the move would be almost impossible to track down.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

This time her response was almost a laugh. “He was fucking gorgeous, what do you think? I’m not the type to sleep with guys a day or two after I meet them, but he was—I mean, this long dark hair, these eyes so black you honestly couldn’t see the iris. These muscles on his arms—” She shook her head. “I couldn’t keep my hands off him.”

“How long were you together?”

“Two months, maybe three.”

“Did he ever shape-shift while he was with you?”

“Uh,
no
, because beautiful as he was, I think something like that would have sent me screaming from the room. He’d be gone for a while—like a week at a time. Told me he was traveling for work.” She turned her head to one side as if to look away from the bitterness. “Fucking liar. Fucking lying prick.”

“So then, what did he tell you about—”

She suddenly leaned forward on the edge of the chair, intense and furious. “He didn’t tell me anything. When he found out I was pregnant, he acted like it was the worst thing ever, like no girl had ever gotten herself knocked up before. He tried to convince me to get an abortion, and I said, ‘Are you
kidding
me? You can be an asshole and walk away from this child, but I am
not
killing an unborn baby.’ So then he said, well, he had this condition, he’d need to tell me about it, because the baby would probably be born with it, too.”

She laughed again, still incredulous. “He said he turned into an animal a few days every month. And I said, ‘Is that right? Then show me.’ And he said, no, he couldn’t do it on command, and anyway, he wouldn’t bother because he could tell I didn’t believe him. And I said, ‘Damn right I don’t believe you, you ignorant lying bastard!’ And pretty soon he slammed out of the door, and I never saw him again.”

“And then you had Cooper, and he started turning into a wolf—”

She nodded slowly. Her eyes had lost a little focus, as if she was looking backward at a memory. “Yeah. He wasn’t even a year old the first time it happened. By that time I’d almost forgotten what a weird-ass thing Loren had claimed he could do, and Cooper, he was the sweetest little baby—” Her voice trailed off. For a moment longer, her eyes gazed at that misty memory, then her expression hardened, and she gave me another cold stare. “He was a baby who could turn into a
beast
. You have no idea how hard I had to work to make sure no one ever saw him do it. I had to live in these crappy little towns, and take crappy little jobs, and never leave him alone with babysitters on certain days, and keep him home from school so much that one principal thought I had some disease where I’d make my kid sick on purpose. It was horrible. It was impossible. But I did it.”

“Well—until you stopped doing it,” I said. I could be just as chilly as she was. “Until you kicked him out.

Her chin came up, and her expression became even more unfriendly. “I had a
baby
,” she said. “I couldn’t leave the baby alone in the house with a
wolf
. A wild animal.”

“Had you ever seen Cooper offer harm to anyone before—to you, a neighbor kid, a dog,
anything
?”

“Well, he was eating
something
when he was foraging out in the woods, and I don’t think it was cupcakes and peanut butter sandwiches,” Cassandra shot back at me. “I think it was squirrels and rabbits and other little critters that couldn’t get away fast enough, and you’re damn right I thought he might hurt Carter. I couldn’t take a chance, don’t you see that? Carter was a
baby
. He couldn’t protect himself.”

I was on my feet, unable to sit still a moment longer. “And Cooper was thirteen!” I cried. “He could hardly protect himself
either
! And you
dumped
him on the side of the road like a bag of trash—”

She had jumped up, too, and now she grabbed my arm with one hand. The other one was balled up like she was ready to punch me. “Don’t you dare judge me!” she exclaimed. “I did what I had to do to take care of the people who depended on me! I made some hard choices—I’m a good mother.”

I wrenched away from her. “You’re a terrible mother,” I whispered. “You’re a terrible person.” I turned toward the door, finding it difficult to see because my eyes had suddenly filled with tears.

She clutched my arm again and I swung back to face her, absolutely ready to slap her if she made one more protestation of her virtue. But her face had changed; her grip had changed. She looked, suddenly, like a woman haunted by even more mistakes than the ones I knew about. “How is he?” she asked in a soft voice. “I’ve wondered so often—is he all right? Does he remember me? Does he hate me?”

I was tempted to be as cruel as she’d been, simply to walk out the door and not allow her the smallest balm of reassurance. What stopped me was knowing that Cooper would never have been so vindictive. “He’s good. Tall—over six feet now. Skinny.” I nodded at her. “He looks like you. He doesn’t read too well, so he doesn’t really like books, but he’s an artist. He draws and sketches, and he’s really talented.”

An expression that was almost a smile crossed her face. She loosed her fingers and slowly dropped her hand. “He used to love to draw, when he was little. I was always buying him paper and crayons and paints.” She looked down at the floor, but I’d seen the look her face showed—a devastating sadness that, for a moment, almost made me feel sorry for her. “Does he hate me?” she asked again.

“It would make more sense to me if he did, but he doesn’t,” I said. “I don’t think Cooper knows how to hate.”

She nodded and did not answer. For a moment, I expected her to ask if she could see him, if I would set up a meeting for her, and I already knew what I would say.
No. Never. I will never give you another chance to break his heart.
But she didn’t ask. “So did you learn what you came here to find out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You can’t help me find Cooper’s dad. That’s all I wanted to know.”

She looked up again, her face once again a hostile mask. “He’s probably dead,” she said flatly. “That’s something else Loren told me. Shape-shifters don’t live that long. If they live to be fifty, it’s like a miracle.”

Now I was the one to be swamped by devastation and despair; I was the one to sustain a near-mortal blow. Dead? Cooper could be dead soon? He was in his early twenties now, but did that mean half his life was over—
more
than half his life, if he did not attain the normal span for a creature of his kind? Oh, no, no, no, no. I was not going to live years and years, decades and decades, centuries and eons, without Cooper beside me. There would be no enduring the emptiness of those days. I would kill myself if Cooper died; melodramatic though it sounded, as soon as I had the thought, I knew it was a true one.