The Shape of Desire (7 page)

“Because our kind is an abomination!”
he shouts.

For a moment, there is absolute silence in the room. I think all of us are shocked. I know I am; Dante has never voiced such self-loathing before,
not to me, anyway. I know he has always been adamantly against the notion of having children, but I thought he simply did not want to make a child suffer through the strange, difficult half-life of the shape-shifter. I had not realized he saw himself as grotesque, misshapen, atrocious.

He glances between us, looking a little shamefaced. I think he is sorry to have said the words—not because he doesn’t believe them, but because he wishes he had not revealed that dark secret. He tries to pull himself together. “I suppose it can’t be undone,” he says now in a quieter voice. “I suppose she’s here now, and there’s no more to say.”

The baby gives a funny little hiccupping cry and scrunches up all her limbs. Christina bounces a little in place, and the girl subsides again, scrubbing her pink face against Christina’s shirt. “You could ask me about her,” she suggests.

I decide it’s safe to speak up. “What’s her name?”

Christina smiles at me. “I thought about Jane, but I decided on Elizabeth. Lizzie.”

Dante snorts with what might almost be amusement. Even I get the reference. The poet Dante Rossetti had a long-suffering wife called Lizzie, and then a long-term mistress named Jane. Neither of them led particularly happy lives. Lizzie, in fact, died of a laudanum overdose not long after losing her own baby. I think, but do not say, that the name could hardly be less propitious.

“And the father?” Dante asks.

“Stevie was back in town for a few months at the New Year—you remember, I told you that.”

“Oh, right, right. Well, you could have done worse, I suppose. Does he know about the baby?”

I can only vaguely recall who Stevie is. Some childhood friend, I think. For some reason I associate him with Juneau. Maybe he lives in Alaska now and only returns to Rolla now and then to visit aging relatives? At any rate, I know I’ve never met him.

“Not yet. Though I told him I wanted to get pregnant and he didn’t seem bothered by the idea.”

“That’s because he doesn’t know what a bunch of freaks we are in this family,” Dante mutters.

“I don’t think we’re freaks,” Christina says. “And Lizzie isn’t, either.”

I step closer to her. “Could I hold her?” I ask. “Would that be all right?”

Christina’s smile is blinding. I wonder if she thought none of us would make even that small gesture of acceptance. “Of course you can!”

I take Lizzie in my arms, cradling her so that her head rests in the crook of my left elbow. She is awake, and her muddy blue-brown eyes study my face for an instant and then glance away. Her cheeks are a fat, healthy pink; her pursed lips glisten with tiny bubbles of saliva. The finest, faintest, silkiest streaks of black hair lie like cobwebs on her soft skull, and I see that Christina has managed to gather enough of them to Velcro in a yellow bow.

I am instantly and utterly smitten.

“Hey, Lizzie,” I croon, unconsciously beginning a slight, rhythmic swaying motion. “Aren’t you a beautiful little girl? I’m Maria, I’m so pleased to meet you. How do you like life here on Planet Earth so far?”

She responds with some inarticulate monosyllable, her little mouth briefly forming what looks like a smile, though I’ve been told babies this young don’t really smile. Still speaking nonsense sentences, still bouncing her gently in my arms, I turn away from Christina and Dante and start a slow circuit through the house. I don’t encounter William in the kitchen, the bedrooms, in the hallways; he must have slipped into the basement or out the kitchen door.

When I make it back to the living room, Dante and Christina are still talking, but their voices are quieter and Dante looks much less angry. He shows no inclination to hold the baby, though, so I sit on the worn chocolate-colored sofa and lay Lizzie in my lap. Her head is near
my knees and her little legs kick in the general direction of my stomach. Her arms work with a continuous flailing, as if she is a windup toy gaining all of her energy from this particular motion. I take hold of one of her tiny fists and gently pry it open, setting my index finger against her palm. Instantly, her fingers close over mine with a grip that is unexpectedly strong. It is as if they cannot relax from their natural inward curl unless they are forced flat by an external pressure.

The things I love most about babies are the minute fingernails on their littlest fingers. How can there be anything so small, so dainty, so perfect? For some reason, it is the detail that convinces me they are really human, truly miniature versions of the people they will grow up to be.

I know I should be asking all sorts of traditional questions.
Is she gaining weight fast enough? Will she take a bottle? How is she at sleeping through the night?
I should inquire into Christina’s own health.
Did you have any complications with the pregnancy or the birth? Are you eating right, getting enough sleep, suffering any postpartum depression?
But they seem like mundane and trivial inquiries for such a magical child, for this gift straight from the capricious universe.

I look up and find Christina smiling at me—pleased, perhaps, at the goofy, besotted look on my face. I burst out, “Do you just love her more than anything else in the world?”

“I really do,” Christina says. “I didn’t know it was possible to love anything this much.”

W
e stay for an odd and uncomfortable lunch. The baby is sleeping in the other room, so half of Christina’s attention is focused on the hallway through which any sounds of distress will issue. She’s made some kind of pasta dish and a simple salad. Dante is too annoyed to eat much, and William uses silverware as if it’s the first time he’s ever
attempted the feat. Christina has opened a bottle of champagne, but none of us drink very much of it. We are hardly a festive group.

“You know, if you need to, you can have me come out sometime and watch the baby for a weekend,” I say as the meal draws to a close. “Or you could leave her with me for an afternoon if you come into the city.”

Dante shoots me a look of supreme vexation, while Christina’s face lights with a smile. “That would be awfully kind of you,” she says. “But are you sure?”

“Yes, of course I’m sure. You have my phone number, don’t you? And my e-mail address?”

“I must have them somewhere, but why don’t you write them down for me? And I’ll give you mine—I changed my e-mail address last year, you might not have it—”

“Maria’s never spent much time with babies,” Dante says, his voice overloud. “You might need to give her a refresher course before you leave Lizzie with her for an entire weekend.”

“I used to babysit all the time when I was in high school,” I reply frostily. “And I kept my cousin Beth’s baby for an entire week when she was in the hospital with pneumonia.”

I don’t need to defend myself; Christina isn’t alarmed. “I’d never spent any time around babies, either, before Lizzie came along,” she says. “Everybody told me how hard it would be, but it’s been easy. She’s such a joy.”

William looks up from the ruins of his pasta, laying his fork aside as if he’s given up trying to feed himself this way. “Has she changed yet?” he asks.

“No,” Christina says, her voice ever so slightly defensive.

William gives me that wolfish smile again. “That’ll be a fun time for you,” he says. “Put a baby to bed in the bassinet, walk in a half hour later to find a kitten. Or worse.”

“I guess I’ll deal with that when it happens,” I say.

“
If
it happens,” Christina interjects. “I didn’t change shapes until I was three. Mother thought I might never do it.”

“Would to God that Mother had been right,” Dante growls.

William leans back in his chair and nods over at his brother. “It’s getting longer for you all the time, isn’t it?” he says. “Your stays in animal shape.”

Dante nods curtly, not looking at me. “Twenty or twenty-two days in a row sometimes,” he says.

“You ever think it will be permanent?”

“William!” Christina exclaims.

Dante shrugs. He still won’t look at me. “Hope not. Can’t do anything about it, so I don’t lose much sleep thinking about it.”

William jerks his chin at me. “You go to Maria’s house when you come back?”

“Usually.”

Usually?
I think.
Where else do you go? Is there some precious moment of your human time that you spend with someone else?
But I think I know why he gave that answer. He thinks it makes him look dependent and weak if he admits that he comes straight to my door. He thinks it makes him look as if he loves me more than he wants his siblings to know.

“What if she’s not there?” Now William’s restless eyes flick to Christina then back to Dante. “That’s what happened to me a few weeks ago. Christina was in the hospital having Lizzie. I had to break into the house. I was afraid one of the neighbors would see me, so I hid out by the old cemetery until midnight. Naked as a baby. If somebody would’ve seen me, they’d’ve thought the graveyard was haunted for sure.”

“Or they would have shot you,” Dante says flatly.

“Well, it didn’t happen,” Christina speaks up. “He knows I keep a spare key under the stone rabbit in the garden. He just forgot it was there.” I can supply the observation she’s left out:
William sometimes goes
so long without becoming a man that all sorts of human details slip away from him.
I wonder how long William generally goes between bouts of shape-shifting. I wonder how Christina managed to communicate with him and convince him to return here today so that both of her brothers could be present at the same time.

“You should carry a key with you everywhere you go,” Dante says, tugging the leather cord out over the neck of his black T-shirt. “That’s what I do.”

“That’s to Maria’s house?” William asks.

“It’s to a storage locker where I keep clothes and papers and things,” Dante says.

“I’ve
offered
him a key,” I feel compelled to say. It doesn’t bother
me
if his siblings know how much I love him. “Don’t think I haven’t.”

William has leaned forward a little to examine the sturdy strip of leather looped through the dangling brass and triple knotted at the back. “It’s a little long,” he says. “Does it ever catch on anything?”

I’m suddenly beset with a whole new class of worries as I imagine Dante strangling to death because the cord has tangled on a fallen branch and he can’t get free. He knows what images are in my head because his voice is hard and curt. “I’m taking bigger shapes,” he says briefly. “I need the extra room. If you’re always turning into something that’s the same size, you could make it shorter.”

William sits back, satisfied. “I think I’ll try it.”

“I’ve got two extra keys,” Christina says. “I’ll give one to each of you.”

William is nodding, but Dante is shaking his head. “I don’t need to confuse the issue,” he says. “I’ll stick with this one.”

And your buried cell phone
, I think, but do not say aloud.

“So who wants cake?” Christina says.

I’m the only one who has dessert, and then I’m the only one who helps Christina clear the table when we’re done eating. William has
disappeared again, and this time I think he might have shifted shapes and slipped back into the wild; the house suddenly feels empty of his presence. I would like to hold Lizzie again before we leave, but she’s still sleeping when we’re done in the kitchen and it’s clear Dante is growing restless.

“We better go,” I say to Christina, and she nods and escorts us out the door. On the front porch, I pause and hug her, something I cannot remember ever doing before.

“I’m serious,” I say. “Call me if you need help.”

“I will,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”

F
or the first twenty minutes of the drive home, Dante rants about Christina’s stupidity and selfishness and sheer wanton stubbornness. “She
knows
, we’ve
talked
about it, she realizes
none
of us should ever have children,” he says in that fast, angry voice.

I mostly don’t listen; I’ve heard this diatribe before. Dante and I had been lovers for a couple of years when I made some offhand comment about having a baby one day. He was very clear on that point: No children. Ever. Not if I wanted him as the father. I had hastily agreed (I was only twenty-three at the time, and not seriously interested in becoming a mother any time soon), but during the last ten years, I’ve grown more and more wistful at the notion of remaining childless my entire life.

I haven’t said so to Dante, but on this subject, he’s eerily sensitive, and he’s picked up on my unspoken longing for a baby of my own. Five years ago, when he was still human for more than half the month, he had a vasectomy, not telling me about it until afterward. He has no health insurance, of course, so he’d found a city clinic that performs operations for cash or for free, depending on the patient. Then he lay around the house for the next day making self-pitying jokes about being
neutered and complaining that the pain was worse than he’d anticipated.

Unexpectedly, I’d been sharply, bitterly disappointed when he told me what he had done. I would never have the chance to change his mind; I would never be able to hold in my arms a small, fragile, enchanted creature who was half me and half the man I loved. It was impossible to explain to him my sense of loss, so I had commiserated and teased him and made bright jokes in reply.

“You could have waited till you were in dog shape and let me take you to the vet,” I’d said. “I imagine that would have been even worse, don’t you?”

“Cut my balls right
off
,” he’d replied. “I don’t think
you’d
have liked it, either.”

What makes you think I like this?
“Well, you’ll be feeling better in a day or two. Let me get you more ice.”

I am so lost in memories that at first I don’t realize Dante has fallen silent. When I do, I assume that he’s simply brooding over Christina’s sins, maybe remembering all the times in her childhood she showed a similarly disastrous lack of judgment. I’m astonished when he abruptly says, “I’m sorry.”