Still Life with Shape-shifter (3 page)

“One day, Caitlyn sees the husky in the backyard, so she sneaks over and lets it out. The two of them take off for some park a few blocks away, where they play for a couple of hours. The puppy is really smart, Caitlyn says—understands every word she utters. Like, after they’d been running around for a while, Caitlyn announces, ‘I’m really thirsty,’ and the dog heads straight for the drinking fountain.”

I roll my eyes, but under the table, where he can’t see them, my hands are clenched together so tightly I think I might crack the bones. “Oh, that’s impressive,” I say.

He just keeps going. “Finally, Caitlyn and the puppy return home, to find the whole neighborhood in an uproar. Your family is searching everywhere for the dog—your stepmother is hysterical—your father has taken the car and is driving slowly up and down the surrounding streets, looking for a little white husky. Mind you, this is a dog they claim doesn’t belong to them. When Caitlyn shows up with the puppy in tow, your stepmother falls to the ground and grabs the dog in her arms and just starts sobbing. Caitlyn’s in trouble herself, her dad yelling at her for leaving the house without telling anyone where she was going, but she can’t stop staring at the crazy neighbor lady making such a fuss over a dog that isn’t hers. At one point, your stepmother looks up and demands, ‘What happened to her foot?’ There’s a gash on the inside of the puppy’s right foreleg, and it’s bleeding a little though it doesn’t seem to have slowed the dog down any. Caitlyn says she doesn’t know.

“Her parents are hauling her into the house, but right before she’s yanked inside the door, she sees your dad drive up. He’s still cruising slowly down the street, calling out for the little dog. ‘Ann! Ann! Come home, girl!’” Brody gives me a limpid look. “Ann? They’ve named the dog that isn’t really theirs after their own little girl? But before she can think too much about it, she’s hustled inside and has to deal with her own problems.”

Brody takes a swallow of his Coke. I am attempting to sit there in stony silence, but the truth is I am remembering that terrible day in vivid detail. Caitlyn’s recitation, via Brody, doesn’t include the fact that I flung myself on my bicycle and pedaled as hard as I could to the places I happened to know were Ann’s favorites. There was a farmer’s market in downtown Kirkwood on Saturdays, and she loved to run between the stalls and snatch up fallen bits of fruit and baked goods. There was a jungle gym in a nearby schoolyard where she was especially fond of the rounded green climbing rock shaped like a turtle. Worse, there was a fountain outside one of the pizza shops on Kirkwood Road, and she was fascinated by the splash and play of water. She always wanted someone to pick her up and hold her so she could bat at the thin jets of water spraying out, until she and anyone in her vicinity were liberally drenched. The fountain’s basin was curved and shallow, but deep enough for a child to drown in.

I raced to each location, one by one, but there was no sign of Ann.

I remember how my lungs had burned with the effort of those manic bike rides, how my legs felt simultaneously stretched and heavy, quivering with exhaustion. But those discomforts had been negligible compared to the sense of panic that had choked my throat, the feeling of dread that had cramped down on my stomach. My thoughts were desperate and circular.
Where could she be? Is she all right? Has something happened to Ann?

Good thing I didn’t know then how often I would lie awake over the next fifteen years, asking myself those same questions. No more frantic bike rides to likely hiding places, but equal amounts of worry and misery.

And these days, Ann is gone for longer than an afternoon.

Brody resumes his story. “Caitlyn is grounded for the next two weeks, and none of her friends can come over, and she can’t watch TV. So she spends a lot of time in the backyard, playing by herself. One afternoon, little Ann Landon is out back, too, digging in her sandbox. There’s nothing else to do, so, even though Caitlyn is eleven years old and not that interested in small children, she tosses a ball back and forth over the fence with Ann for a little while. Pretty soon she notices that Ann has a Band-Aid on her right wrist. A big one. ‘Hey, what happened to you?’ she asks. Ann says, ‘I hurt myself when we were at the park.’”

Brody repeats that, as surely Caitlyn must have when she told him this overwrought tale. I don’t remember our former neighbor all that clearly—I never paid much attention to her—but I think of her as a small, whiny girl who was always asking if she could borrow something. A toy, video, a black windbreaker that I wore everywhere because I thought it made me look sleek and mysterious.

“‘When
we
were at the park,’” he says with heavy emphasis. “Caitlyn couldn’t quite figure that out. Did Ann mean ‘we’ as in ‘my family and me’—or did she mean ‘we’ as in ‘Caitlyn and Ann’? But Caitlyn had never been to the park with the little girl named Ann. Only with the puppy that might have been named Ann, too. A puppy that had been injured in the exact same place that the little girl had a bandage.”

I slap my hands to my cheeks in feigned astonishment. “What could this strange, mad coincidence possibly mean?”

“So Caitlyn gets the ball back from Ann and doesn’t throw it over the fence again right away. ‘Hey, Ann,’ she says in a friendly voice, ‘where’s that little white puppy who lives at your house sometimes?’ And Ann replies, clear as you please, ‘I’m the dog. The dog is me.’”

He says these last words with the solemn portentousness you might reserve for announcing the location of the Holy Grail. There’s a charged silence between us for a moment though I’ve molded my face into an expression of slightly bored politeness, as if I’m waiting for the rest of a tale that has not fully engaged my attention. He just keeps watching me, his brown eyes steady, serious, unflinching.

Finally, I permit myself a little smile. “Oh—that’s it? That’s the whole story?”

“It’s a pretty good one, don’t you think?”

“Some woman tells you that, fifteen or eighteen years ago when she was eleven years old, my sister told
her
that she was a little white dog? And you
believed
her? I mean, what kind of evidence is that? What kind of reporter
are
you? If those are the best sources you can turn up as a general rule, I’m not surprised you gave up journalism.”

His eyes narrow, and he sits back in his seat, regarding me with a measuring expression. “Interesting,” he says. “I don’t make you for the kind of person who’s usually cruel, so the mockery must be a defensive maneuver. Am I getting too close to the truth?”

I take a deep breath, make an exaggerated expression that shows how hard I am trying to hold on to my patience. “Mr. Westerbrook—”

“Brody.”

“I’ve had a long day. An emotional day. I’m tired. I’m in a bad mood. You’re a stranger who’s come to my door to make wild accusations about my family, and I think I’ve been pretty tolerant up to this point. But I find my civility is on the verge of giving way. I don’t mean to be
cruel
when I say, could you just leave? Right now? Thank you.”

He pushes his chair away from the table but doesn’t stand up. “Sure. Fine. Thanks for talking to me. But just answer one more question for me. Will you?”

Again I make the God-give-me-strength face and say, in carefully neutral tones, “Of course. What is it?”

“Is your sister Ann a shape-shifter?”

I open my mouth but for a moment am unable to speak. I have lied about Ann for so long, to so many people, that you’d think it would be easy to lie now.
Oh, Ann’s sick with the stomach flu. No, Ann’s out of town visiting her mom’s sister. Hey, sorry, Ann can’t come over and play because Gwen took her into the city to go shopping.
Excuses roll off my tongue in such a facile manner that I’m scarcely aware of making them up anymore.

But I’ve never had to tell this particular lie. Never had to deal with the outright accusation, because no one had ever thought to level it before. Why would they? Why would it even occur to them to ask the question?

If I try to speak the lie, will my lips even form the words? Will that be like denying Ann’s very essence? Will that, in some fashion, make her disappear? She has been gone so long—she is lost, perhaps, in danger, afraid—and maybe all that keeps her going, all that she has to hold on to, is the knowledge that I will never abandon or betray her. Will I cut off her sole hope of survival if I claim that she does not exist?

It’s a bad time to become superstitious, but I find that I cannot give the answer I should. Instead, as if I am goaded beyond endurance, I snap out, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He tilts his head to one side. “That’s not exactly a no.”

I come to my feet abruptly, almost angrily. “I can’t take the question seriously enough to give you a yes-or-no answer.”

More slowly, he stands up. I can’t quite read his expression, but I think there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in it. He believes that someone who can’t say no is trying hard not to say yes. I think that’s a bad rule to live by, but I suppose I can’t blame a reporter for subscribing to it.

“Can I come back another time and talk about this some more?”

I allow my stupefaction to show. “Mr. Westerbrook—”

“Brody.”

“I hardly think we have anything left to discuss. I’ll wish you good luck on your—your book project, but I obviously don’t have anything helpful to tell you—”

“Well, I think you do,” he interrupted. “I’d like to come back in a couple of days and see if you have something else to share.”

I’m shaking my head. “I just don’t see the point. I think we’re done here.” I glance around, as if perhaps he’s left a hat or umbrella somewhere, and I want to hand these items over to him before escorting him to the door. “So—”

“So then will you have dinner with me?” he asks.

This stops me cold. “What? No. Why would I?”

He grins. It’s really criminal how attractive this man is, in a sort of friendly, unalarming, sure-I’ll-invite-you-in way. “Because I’ve had a lousy day. I’m in a bad mood. The sink stopped up in my bathroom, the ‘check engine light’ is on in my car, and the person I drove two hours to see, getting lost three times on the way, won’t give me the interview I need. I thought maybe having dinner with a pretty woman would rescue the day from being a total loss.”

I laugh in disbelief. “So now you think that flattery—”

“And shared suffering. We’ve
both
had bad days,” he interjects.

“Will be enough to make me forget my distrust of you—”

“Hey. I promise. No talk about shape-shifters over dinner. I won’t ask questions—
any
questions. I’ll just sit there and eat in silence, or make observations about the other people in the restaurant. You can talk or not talk as you like. We’ll eat, I’ll go home, that’ll be the end of it. Whaddya say?”

I
should
say no, but it’s a word I seem unable to muster in Brody Westerbrook’s smiling presence. I feel so battered by the intense emotions of the day that I’m pretty sure I’ll fall apart the minute Brody walks out the door and I can relax my hypervigilance. That’s going to feel like hell, but there’s no logical reason to think that extending my time in his company will ease me through the crash to come.

But the house will seem so small and still when I’m the only one inside it, my head constantly cocked toward the door, awaiting the sound of light footsteps. And I know if I don’t go out with Brody, I won’t have the energy to make a meal; I’ll just dine on potato chips and yogurt and whatever else is closest to hand. If I don’t just collapse on the sofa and dissolve into tears that leave me so limp and dispirited that I don’t bother to eat at all.

I can’t tell if I’m trying to find excuses to leave the house or excuses to spend another hour with Brody. Every rational sense I have is warning me to snarl at him, shove him out the door, and make sure every lock, both physical and imaginary, is secured against him. But my heart has set up a faint, exhausted mewling. My heart is craving kindness and conversation, and Brody has already demonstrated that he’s adept at both.

He can tell I’m wavering. He smiles and holds out his hand. “C’mon,” he coaxes. “It’ll be fun.”

“No questions?” I say. “You promise?”

His right hand still extended, he puts his left hand on his chest. “Cross my heart.”

“There are only a few restaurants in Dagmar, and none of them are very gourmet,” I warn.

“I’m not very picky.”

“Then let me get a jacket, and we can go.”

CHAPTER THREE

W
e take my Jeep because he wasn’t kidding about the “check engine” light in his little Honda. It’s just light enough outside that I can read the bumper sticker on his back fender.
I’M PROUD OF MY CUB SCOUT.
I give him a sideways look and decide to be blunt. “You’ve got kids? You’re not wearing a wedding ring.”

“Nieces and nephews,” he says amiably. “I bought this one from my oldest sister last year. Didn’t seem worth the trouble to try to scrape off the sticker and, anyway, I
am
proud of my little Scout.”

“So you’re not married?”

“No, are you?”

I can’t help but laugh as I unlock the car door. “Oh, I have to believe you’ve already done your research on me, so you know the answer to that.”

“Right again,” he says, and climbs in beside me. He settles himself on the seat and looks around. “Huh. SUV.”

I give him an annoyed look and start the engine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, it’s just—you know. Gas guzzler. Oil crisis. Earth Day Every Day. You just seem like the type who’d be driving a hybrid and using cotton grocery bags.”

“Yeah, well, I got stuck four times in the snow last year trying to come down that last hill, and I decided I needed a car that would get me through the winter. But I
do
use cotton grocery bags,” I feel compelled to add. “And recycle.”

“There you go. Knew I couldn’t be wrong about you.”

The parking lot at Corinna’s is about half-full. Monday is the best night to come here if you don’t like a crowd, which I usually don’t, though the food selections are usually sparser. As everyone in Dagmar knows, Corinna does her shopping on Wednesday mornings, so when you drop by earlier in the week, you’re likely to find that some of the more popular items are out of stock.

We step inside, and Brody quickly takes stock of the décor. It’s a quirky place, part diner, part bar, with dark wood paneling, low light, red vinyl booths lining three walls and sturdy wooden tables in the center. The back wall features a mural painted by some long-since-graduated high-school student who’d won an art scholarship, and it depicts local landmarks and smiling faces in broad, cartoonish strokes. A small, low stage juts out below the mural, and here mediocre country bands are usually playing on weekends. There’s a wooden dance floor butting up against the stage, big enough for eight or ten couples to do the two-step if they don’t mind bumping into each other. On Thursday nights, when more people come to eat than to listen to music, Corinna sets up tables on the dance floor.

But those are the least desirable seats in the house. Everyone wants to be in one of the booths right against the front wall, pressed up against the windows, so they can sit there and watch anything interesting that happens to be going on in the street. It’s rare, of course, that there
is
anything interesting happening in Dagmar—but you never know.

We’re in luck. One of the waitresses is clearing a front booth just as we step in the door, and no one else is ahead of us. As everyone else does, I ignore the sign that says
PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU
and pull Brody directly over to the booth. The waitress, one of Corinna’s daughters, gives the table a final wipe, and says, “Do you need menus?”

“I don’t, but he does,” I say, and she nods and departs.

Brody is still getting his bearings. “Cozy,” he says. “In that land-that-time-forgot sort of way.”

I grin. “I spent a lot of afternoons here when I was a teenager. Drinking root beer floats and eating French fries and talking about boys.”

“Doesn’t really seem like a teen hangout.”

“It does when there’s nowhere else to go.” I tick off items on my fingers. “Teenagers come here in the afternoons between three and five. Families come between five and seven. Couples and groups of adults from seven to ten. I mean, those aren’t strict rules, and anybody can show up whenever they like, but you feel out of place if you walk in and it’s not the right time for you.”

Brody looks around again. Sure enough, there’s only one table featuring anyone under the age of twenty-five, a young couple with two squirmy boys, and they’re already standing up and putting on coats and getting ready to leave.

Corinna’s daughter drops off two laminated menus that are a bit the worse for wear. “We’re out of pizza and sloppy joes,” she says. “And there’s only vanilla shakes left.”

“What about the meat loaf?” I ask.

“Plenty.”

“That’s what I’ll have,” I say. I glance at Brody. “I recommend it.”

He shakes his head. “I gotta see what my options are first.”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” the waitress says, and disappears.

Brody studies his menu as if he’s never been given a chance to order his own food before. “This is great,” he says. “Look at these prices. A hamburger is three dollars and seventeen cents. Why
seventeen
cents? Why not twenty-five cents? And fish sticks. Four dollars and sixty-three cents. That’s just silly. I love it.”

I’m smiling. The precisely calculated prices are one of the things I have always found most endearing about Corinna’s. The owner is a big woman with massive forearms and untidy brown hair, and I always picture her sitting in the kitchen, studying inventory lists and pricing sheets, and punching in numbers on a calculator as she determines to the penny how much she must make on every menu item to turn a profit.

“So what appeals to you?” I ask him.

“I’m a sucker for chicken pot pie. Is it any good?”

“Well. It’s not very fancy. But going by down-home standards, and if you’re in the mood for a hearty meal, it’s great.”

“Then that’s what I’m getting.”

The instant he lays his menu on the table, Corinna’s daughter is back to take our orders. I ask for iced tea with my meat loaf, but Brody is seriously tempted by the vanilla shake.

“I’ll save it for dessert,” he decides. “Or maybe we can split a root beer float,” he says after the waitress departs. “Then I can really feel like I’ve slipped back in time.”

“I have a scünci in my purse, I think,” I say. “I can put my hair in a ponytail.”

“Too bad I left my letter sweater at home.”

“Do you really have one?”

He nods. “I ran track in high school.”

“Were you any good?”

“Won a few races but didn’t qualify for State, so I’d say I was about average.”

I slump against the worn vinyl of the booth and study him a moment. “So, okay,” I say. “You know everything about me. What’s there to know about you?”

He already looks as relaxed as a man can be, half-sprawling on his bench, one elbow up on the back of the seat, no tension that I can read in his body or his hands. He gives a little shrug as if to say,
Not much to tell
. “Grew up in Cape Girardeau. Pretty standard suburban Midwestern life. My dad worked for an insurance company, my mom had part-time jobs but spent most of her time running the family. I have three older sisters who don’t think their days are complete unless they’ve called to boss me around about something.”

“So you’re the youngest and the only boy. Spoiled rotten, I suppose.”

He grins. “Some people might say so. But I always kind of thought I was like the poor stupid dog that the crazy pet lady likes to dress up in Halloween costumes, you know? And you see the pictures of that dachshund or that beagle wearing the hat and the cape and the boots, and you think, ‘That poor son of a bitch.’ You know he’s just got no say in his life at all. That’s how I felt growing up. ‘Brody, come here. Brody, go there. Brody, wear this. Brody, you can’t do that.’ And they always ganged up on me, so even if I didn’t want to do whatever it was, I always had to.”

I regard him through narrowed eyes as I consider this. “Yeah, okay, maybe, but somehow I’m not getting a meek-and-mild vibe off you. You don’t seem worn down and docile. So I guess you figured out how to outsmart them.”

He laughs. “I learned a couple of tricks that have served me well over the years. I learned to be compliant when I had to be—to give in with grace when it was clear I couldn’t win. I also learned a certain—I hesitate to call it deviousness—”

“Oh, I think that’s exactly the right word.”

“I like to think of it more as a combination of charm and manipulation. A basic skill set that allowed me to get my own way on things that were really important to me without setting the whole household against me. And finally I learned—” He pauses a moment, trying to put it into words. Then he shrugs. “I learned to just walk away. I learned how to not care if I made people mad or hurt their feelings when I did something they didn’t want me to do. I learned that I
could
ignore what they said, and the world wouldn’t end, as long as I didn’t mind if they were upset. My sisters call this my stubborn streak. I call it a survival skill.”

“And how have these various survival skills carried over into the other areas of your life?”

He looks thoughtful. “Well, obviously, I chose a field where it’s practically a job requirement to be good at getting along with people. People usually are willing to talk to you if you seem like you’re attentive and accommodating. If you really seem like you’re listening, if you really seem like you care.”

Not me,
I want to reply, but in fact I can already tell that’s not true. He
is
easy to confide in. He
does
seem like he wants to hear what I have to say. It’s seductive. Which is annoying. My voice is a little crisp as I say, “That’s not what I meant. How do you treat your friends? Your girlfriends? Are you patient? Do you compromise? Or do you just shrug things off and walk away?”

It’s a moment before he answers, and I think maybe it’s because I’ve offended him. I don’t really care. He’s pushed a lot of my buttons in the short time since I met him; seems only fair that I push a few of his. But when he answers, he doesn’t sound irritated, exactly.

“You keep asking me questions like this, I’m going to start asking a few of my own,” he says.

“You don’t get to ask me questions,” I reply. “Those were the conditions under which I agreed to have dinner with you.”

“I don’t get to ask you questions on a certain topic,” he agrees. “But all bets are off when we start delving into personal relationships and how we handle them.”

Now I’m smiling. “So? How do you break up with a girl? Do you buy her roses and apologize and explain that it’s all your fault, you just misunderstood your feelings? Or do you move all your stuff out one day while she’s at work and send her a text message to let her know it’s over?”

“So far I’ve been more dumpee than dumper, so I have a hard time answering that question.”

I know my expression is incredulous. “Yeah, I don’t believe that for a minute.”

He looks genuinely surprised. “Don’t believe what? That someone would break up with me?” Now he looks astonished. “And is that a
compliment
?”

I’m grinning widely. “Come on. You’re a good-looking guy. You have to know that—you can’t be ugly and be a TV reporter.”

“Wait, so, are you insulting me now? Like the
only
reason someone would stay with me is because I’m good-looking?”

“You’re cute. You’ve got a great job, or at least you used to. You’re fun to talk to. You don’t seem—at least as far as I can tell after knowing you for two hours—like you have some dreadful social defect. I mean, on the surface, you’d seem like a great catch. Not the kind of guy women generally break up with. So either you’re a real jerk when it comes to relationship stuff, or you’re lying when you say girls break up with you.”

He’s laughing and shaking his head. “You’re funny,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

Our food arrives before I have a chance to decide how I feel about that assessment. The platters are massive—mounds of green beans and mashed potatoes almost obscuring my meat loaf, a humongous salad and three dinner rolls accompanying Brody’s chicken pot pie. Sometimes I leave with half the meal in a to-go box, the sensible thing to do. Sometimes I eat every bite. Screw it.

We suspend conversation for a few moments while we both make serious inroads into our dinners. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, but then I remember that my flat tire ensured that I didn’t make it out for lunch. I think I had breakfast, but it’s a pretty distant memory. And I love Corinna’s meat loaf platter. The beans come straight from a can, but the mashed potatoes are made from scratch, and the ground beef is smothered in ketchup and some unidentifiable sauce, maybe canned gravy. Who cares? It tastes wonderful.

“This is the best pot pie I’ve had in ten years,” Brody says when he finally stops eating long enough to make an observation. “I’m coming back every night and ordering the same thing.”

“Every night?” I repeat, looking up from my food. “How often do you plan to be in Dagmar?”

He smiles. “Hey, I haven’t given up on getting you to talk to me sometime. Not tonight, of course, but maybe in a few days. Or a few weeks. You never know.”

“Yeah, don’t waste your time. After tonight, I’m not going to answer the door if you drop by or pick up the phone if you call. We’re having a little truce right now over dinner, but once we’ve paid the check, that’s over.”

“Well, that seems harsh. So is that your style ending relationships? You make up your mind, and boom, it’s all over? No room for explanations or apologies or renegotiation?”

“You and I are not
in
a relationship, so the question doesn’t apply.”

“Hey, you asked me questions on this topic, so I get to have my turn.” He wipes his mouth with his napkin and studies me. “That
is
how you do it, isn’t it? Come to a decision, then slam the door.”

I shrug. Except for Kurt, I’ve only had two serious boyfriends, and neither of them lasted more than a couple of years. They were both nice guys but, I don’t know. They weren’t strong enough. That was how I explained it to Debbie. They couldn’t have taken the weight of all the anger and worry and fear that constantly pull down my heart. So I could never be completely honest with them, could never share myself with them. I held back, and eventually I didn’t feel like holding on.