Still Life with Shape-shifter Read Online Free PDF Page B

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