Still Life with Shape-shifter - Couverture rigide

Melanie

I’m sitting at one of the three stoplights in Dagmar on Monday morning when Kurt Markham strolls down the crosswalk in front of me so slowly that he’s only halfway across the street before the light turns green. It’s all I can do to keep from flooring the Cherokee and running over him, backing up, and running over him again. I can tell he recognizes my car because he gives me a grin and a thumbs up as he finally steps onto the sidewalk, into a zone of relative safety. It’s the grin that gets to me. I have to tighten my hands on the wheel to keep from swerving to the right, jumping the curb, and chasing him down anyway. What’s the point of having an SUV, after all, if you can’t take it off road?

My more civilized instincts keep me in my lane, however, and I don’t even blare the horn at Kurt as I drive on past. But I’m in a temper when I finally pull into the small parking lot outside of the office, and it’s not too much to say that I stalkinside. Chloe and Em take one look at my face and find something fascinating to read on their computer screens. Only Debbie has the nerve to step into my office as I’m throwing my purse to the desk and ignoring the shrill summons of the phone and cursing because I’ve spilled the last of my cheap McDonald’s coffee an inch away from the keyboard.

Bad morning?” she asks as she stands in my doorway. As always, her sleek black hair lies smoothly against her cheeks and she’s impeccably dressed, with a style more suited to a city of two million than two thousand. Well, she has to present a certain professional air; she’s the owner and public face of Public Relations by Zimmer, PRZ for short. I’m just the bookkeeper slash office manager. I can get away with nice pants and cute sweaters and the occasional bad hair day.

Not at all,” I say in a voice of exaggerated politeness. I like it when I wake up a half hour late because the power’s gone out at midnight, and I can’t dry my hair because the power’s gone out at midnight, and I can’t see to put on makeup because the power’s gone out, and I can’t make coffee because oh yeah, the power’s gone out and ”

Got it,” she interrupts. You can stay at our house tonight if you want.”

No, the electricity came back on just as I was walking out the door.”

She nods. And how was the weekend?”

Not too bad till the mail came Saturday with an offer from Kurt Markham. He’d give me two hundred thousand dollars for the house.”

She raises her eyebrows and sips her tea but doesn’t make any other reply. I am so tense and so angry that I think, at this point, if she’d said anything, no matter how insightful or sympathetic, I’d have wanted to slap her perfectly made up face. And Debbie is my best friend in the entire world.

So,” I say in a summing up kind of voice, it wasn’t so great. How was your weekend?”

Simon ended up in the ER because he fell off his bike, and he wasn’t wearing a helmet, so in addition to worrying that he had a concussion, we had to answer all sorts of searching questions about whether or not we’re bad parents. He’s fine, by the way,” she adds, almost as an aside. And Stevie flushed God knows what down the basement toilet, but at any rate it overflowed and sent some truly disgusting sewage over the bathroom floor and into the laundry room.”

And everyone says boys are easier than girls.” To my surprise, I find myself smiling just a tiny bit. How did Charles handle everything?” Charles reaction stories are often even funnier than Simon and Stevie stories.

He was totally calm and focused during the whole hospital adventure, but he kind of lost it when the toilet overflowed. Made the boys sit with him for an hour while he Googled the history of plumbing and talked about the first indoor toilets ever installed and traced the outbreak of some horrible cholera epidemic to a badly designed sewage system. I think Simon’s now afraid to even flush toilet paper, but I’m betting we won’t have any blockages for a while.”

I love Charles,” I say with a sigh.

Yeah, so do I, but it’s not like he’s perfect,” Debbie replies.

Oh, please. Tell me a Bad Charles story.”

Well, remember when I was out of town a couple of weeks ago? Apparently Charles kept forgetting to run the dishwasher. And he didn’t want to leave dirty dishes on the counter. So he started piling them up in the refrigerator because he figured they wouldn’t mold while they were in there. So of course when I got home, every plate, every bowl, every glass and every piece of silverware was dirty. And most of them were in the fridge.”

I actually think this is a creative solution to a challenging situation. He’s a prince among men,” I say. Charles is a big, gentle, brilliant man with a quirky streak, and I never let Debbie forget how lucky she is to have him. Though she doesn’t need reminding.

For about six months in high school, Debbie and Charles and Kurt and I double dated.

There are days I still can’t believe that’s true.

Debbie has clearly decided that her family drama stories have improved my mood enough that she can risk a question. So what are you going to do about Kurt’s offer?”

Write ’Only when I’m dead’ across it in red Magic Marker and mail it back.”

She nods, but I can tell she doesn’t agree with me. Still. Two hundred thousand dollars.”

I know what she means to imply. That’s a lot of money for such a modest property. There are only two tiny bedrooms, a bathroom scarcely bigger than the one you’d find on an airplane, a small kitchen just inside the front door, and one largish open space that contains some living room furniture and a scuffed old square wooden dining table and mismatched chairs. There’s no basement. The yard is extensive, more than twelve acres, but that’s not the real reason Kurt wants the place. It’s situated smack in the center of two growing housing developments, both of which he owns. He wants to buy the property, raze the house, improve the land, and make a fortune.

My voice is scornful. He’ll make ten times that much on Markham Family Estates or whatever he decides to call his subdivision.”

So tell him you want half a million dollars.”

I hunch my shoulders. My bad mood has come back. Except it’s not just situational irritability or a head swimming rage that even I realize is inappropriately proportioned. It’s flat out, ungovernable, all consuming fear, and for the last few weeks it has colored every aspect of my life. I feel it thicken my throat as I say in a surly tone, I can’t sell the house.”

Debbie’s voice is so soft she might be murmuring to one of her boys as she coaxes him to sleep at night after a harrowing dream. Ann will understand.”

My reply is immediate. No, she won’t.”

Have you asked her?”

I turn on her with another flare of anger. No, I haven’t asked her! I don’t want to sell! She wouldn’t want me to sell! It’s the house she grew up in I can’t just all of a sudden tell her to look for me somewhere else ”

And why can’t you?”

Now I gesture with short, sharp movements, my fingers spread as wide as they will go, as if I am trying to juggle something so large and so overheated that I constantly fear I will not be able to catch the next bounce. I’m not sure I can explain,” I say in a ragged voice. I just have this feeling. If I moved. No matter how many times I told her where my new house was. I’m not sure she’d be able to find me again.”

Debbie listens in silence, her face wearing an expression of complete understanding. Debbie is the only one who knows about Ann, is the only person, since my father, with whom I have ever been completely honest about my sister. There are many other reasons Debbie is my closest friend, but this single one would be enough. And when’s the last time you saw her?” she asks quietly.

I turn away to boot up the computer because I don’t want even Debbie to see the fear on my face. A month. Maybe five weeks.”

She waits a moment because she can always tell when I’m lying.

Almost exactly two months,” I say at last. She came home at Christmas and stayed for a while. She hasn’t been home since.”

For a long time, neither one of us speaks.

Is she hurt? Something happened to her last autumn, I know she got into a fight, or had a nasty fall because I saw the healed scars on her ribs when I brought her a fresh towel after her first bath. But she had laughed away my concern, and she hadn’t moved with any particular evidence of pain. Still, given her lifestyle, she could be prey to so many accidents! I have to shut my mind to the constant cascade of images of Ann lying hurt and bleeding in some lonely landscape, solitary, helpless, and afraid.

Is she dead? That’s my greatest fear, of course that she will pass on, and I will never know, thou...