Shadowshift Page 5

  “Isn’t that what people say on Jerry Springer? ‘It just happened.’”

  “Ugh, my ex liked shows like that. Don’t tell me you watch that shit.”

  “I’ve seen a few episodes, but I promise I didn’t enjoy them.”

  “Good!”

  “But how did you know I wasn’t crazy?”

  “No, I know crazy. You aren’t crazy, Kevin. You’re perfect.”

  Again, he looks down at his bulging midsection. “I’m hardly perfect.”

  She laughs. “Perfect for me, as long as I don’t catch you watching daytime talk shows.”

  Filled with warmth, he kisses her, and she kisses back. And soon they’re on the floor, making out like teenagers. His hands find passage beneath her silk pajamas, causing her to sit up and slap him on the chest. “Don’t,” she whispers, “Hannah will come down and catch us.”

  He caresses her face and says, “Okay, I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.”

  She puts her head on his chest, and he wraps his arm around her back. The chaos of Hannah’s organizing continues from upstairs. The air conditioner hums, and the sun peeks around the edge of the skylight above, noon fast approaching.

  Kevin skipped breakfast; he doesn’t feel like missing lunch.

  He means to ask where she wants to eat, but it comes out: “Do you think you’ll still be able to write?” He bites his lower lip the moment those words are airborne.

  “What do you mean?” Her voice sounds dry, hollow.

  “Well, I mean, if anger drove you to write, what will replace that old muse?”

  She lifts her head and glares at him. “Who says I’m not still angry?”

  “Come on,” he says, forcing a grin. He hopes she’s putting him on, but he can tell she isn’t. “Aren’t you happy now? You were happy in Chattanooga, all those times we met at the hotel. And you seemed happy the three times I came to see you and Hannah in Savannah, and when you came here. You’re happy now, aren’t you? You said you were.”

  She shrugs, her mouth turns down, and she closes her eyes. “I’m trying, Kevin. I swear I am. But no matter how good you are, no matter how much you love me, it doesn’t erase the past. You’re good medicine, don’t get me wrong, but even the best medicine doesn’t heal overnight.”

  As his body goes numb, he pushes himself up and sits back in his chair. Cross-legged on the floor, she stares up at him. And it becomes clear he isn’t the only one in this relationship who has been holding back.

  “Does that hurt you?” she asks.

  He looks away and nods.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s not my intent.”

  “Maybe this is why I don’t push,” he says. “I’m not afraid of breaking you. I’m afraid of you breaking me. I don’t know. Why does everything have to become complicated? It hasn’t been up to this point.”

  “I guess complications are inevitable, but you shouldn’t be afraid of honesty, Kev. The truth isn’t going to break either of us, unless we let it. Unless we’re weak. You don’t own my anger, I do. And none of it is directed at you. Please understand that.”

  “I know. I just want to be enough for you.”

  She stands and puts her arms around him, easing into his lap. “You are enough.”

  “I love you,” he says. “And that means I want to make all your pain go away.”

  “I love you, too,” she replies, “but it’s not that easy. It just isn’t, no matter how hard you try…but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep trying.”

  “Okay,” he says, “but can we please go to lunch. I’m fucking starving.”

  She pulls away slowly, smiling. “That sounds nice.”

  “I know the perfect place.”

  “Ah,” she says, “now there’s the take-charge man I love. So much for that indecisive sloth.”

  He holds her hand, and together they walk upstairs to get Hannah.

  CHAPTER 7

  On an unseasonably cool morning in late September, Tina sat at the kitchen table and typed on her laptop. The computer was a gift she’d given herself a week earlier, after snatching five hundred dollars from Chet’s stash. Knowing he would notice the missing money, she’d told him it was for things Hannah needed. He hadn’t questioned it.

  Although the task of keeping the laptop hidden from her husband grew increasingly difficult, the whole charade brought Tina intense gratification. Using the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks, she found other aspiring writers online. She discovered a life beyond the dank walls of her apartment, even if only a virtual one. A glimmer of hope was still hope, and hiding her actions made them all the more appealing. Forbidden fruit.

  The words flowed fast. Better than that, they were the right words. She’d done a lot of writing in college, had even edited the school newspaper for a year, but had ditched creative prose shortly after graduating at the age of twenty-three, when she married her school sweetheart, Pete Crowley.

  Her relationship with Pete hadn’t been rocky in the traditional sense. They never even fought. But the manic behavior that frequently made Pete the life of the party at Bowling Green State University had caught up with him, giving way to constant depression and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. It had been too much for a young woman to bear.

  And then Chet had waltzed into Tina’s life.

  It had happened one night at the Black Rose, a singles bar that a married woman had no right patronizing alone. He had purchased her third gin and tonic that night, which had led to many more, which had led to his apartment, then his bedroom.

  She’d loved the loose, carefree way he expressed himself. Nothing seemed off limits to Chet. And the affair had been easy business, because Pete had lost the strength to stay awake past nine, as well as the ability to convey original thoughts and genuine emotions. It had been all the shit the doctors prescribed. Hardly his fault. But with so much life in front of her, it had been hard to resist her selfish impulses.

  Although it soon became clear to Tina that Chet was broken—in many ways more broken than Pete—he had been different. Chet was alive, alluring…dangerous.

  She hadn’t been able to deny him what he wanted, which was her.

  Pete didn’t put up a fight, and the divorce was clean and quick.

  Now her life was dirty and slow.

  But she was gradually making it better. She channeled her anger onto the page. All of her regrets. Her self-loathing. Her bad decisions. She assigned these attributes to a cast of characters. She made their lives worse than hers and reveled in their pain. Her stories became virtual worlds that made her online exploits pale in comparison, because in these worlds, she was God. An angry god.

  She stopped composing for a moment and checked the morning word count. Satisfied with her progress, she opened the Web browser and logged into her email. A combination of dread and excitement took charge when she found, bolded at the top of her inbox, a publisher’s response to a story she’d submitted three weeks earlier.

  It must be a rejection, she thought, trying to let herself off the hook of high expectations. The reply had arrived far too fast for any other outcome.

  But things didn’t go down that way. Her very first short story, “Eulogizing Life,” pending signature of attached contract, would appear in a future issue of DarkSide, a nationally distributed magazine that actually appeared on the newsstands.

  She couldn’t believe it. She turned from the screen, took a few deep breaths while her heart hammered, then turned back to make sure the moment of validation wasn’t a delusion. Her eyes fixated on the first word of the unlikely answer.

  Congratulations…

  Someone of worth, an honest-to-goodness gatekeeper of the establishment, was congratulating her. Thousands were getting rejections, banging their fists against keyboards, but not her. What the fuck? She clutched her head and screamed. She stood and danced, and laughter gave way to cackling. She punched the refrigerator, and her giddiness intensified as magnets and pictures tumbled downward.

  She n
eeded to tell someone fast, but there was no one she could call. Her mother had stopped talking to her after the divorce from Pete. Dad was dead. College friends were scattered to distant points unknown. The only solution clear, she packed up her laptop and took it under her arm.

  Hannah would be at school until three, and Chet would be at work until five. She had plenty of time to sit at Starbucks, drink overpriced lattes with what little she had left of Chet’s ill-gotten gain, and gloat to strangers online about her good fortune.

  * * *

  While Tina walked to the coffee shop, Chet stood behind the counter of the convenience store and rubbed his temples, doing his best impression of someone in agony. Although he needed free of his confines, he felt fine, but Brenda, always a sucker for a sob story, was eating up his act. She stopped refilling the coffee machines and looked at him. Pretending not to notice, he moaned for effect.

  “Feeling okay?” she asked.

  He spun and feigned surprise. “Oh, didn’t know you were there, Brenda. Sorry.”

  “We’re not busy,” she said. “If you wanna take off—”

  “Nah, wouldn’t be right. I’ll be fine…” He let his voice trail off as he rubbed his temples again.

  “Headache, huh?”

  “What was your first hint?” he said, trying to make his resulting smile look tortured. Then he said, “Sorry, don’t mean to sound snarky. I was up all night with a sick kid.”

  “Oh, shit, I hope Hannah’s all right.”

  “Oh, she’ll be fine, but I must’ve caught the bug from her. You know how it is?” He knew she did. Brenda had three rugrats of her own, the cause of more than her share of sick days.

  “Damn germ monkeys,” she said, then released a howl of laughter that almost gave Chet a headache for real. “Get out of here, Chet. Really, we’ll be fine without you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Scat! Get! Don’t let the door hit’cha where the good Lord split’cha!”

  Minutes later, he sat behind the wheel of his Subaru on his way home. His work wasn’t the problem. The job was too easy to ditch under normal circumstances. More importantly, he never knew when a mark might walk into the store, and he was loath to miss an opportunity.

  The problem was Tina. Her behavior had bothered him lately, and today was as good as any to catch her in the act of betrayal. The signs were all present: she was distant, let things slide that’d normally send her into a bitch fit, and most importantly, something was making her anxious. Not just anxious…her mood was something approaching happy, and he could only speculate the reason for such a dramatic shift.

  Another man? Maybe.

  An escape plan? Probably.

  One thing was crystal clear. She had a secret, and that was unacceptable.

  In the parking lot, Chet swung the car into an empty space. As he stepped out, he was assaulted by the bombastic barking of a Chow on a leash. The fat elderly man who clutched the other end of the leash, a look of surprise on his wizened face, looked up at Chet and smiled nervously. “Sorry,” he said, “Maggie’s normally not like this. She loves people.”

  “Get your fucking dog under control,” Chet shouted, then stormed toward his apartment.

  “You don’t have to be so rude,” the man called out, and his dog kept barking feverishly.

  This wasn’t a rare reaction. All domestic animals hated Chet. Some growled. Others barked. Most of them just ran away as fast as their legs would carry them. He suspected they knew what he was, and that was fine with him. Wasn’t like Lassie could spill the beans to Timmy about the shifter living next door.

  Storming into the living room, Chet called Tina’s name, but no reply came. A quick search of the apartment told him she wasn’t home. But forgetful Tina had left a clue—a blue piece of plastic on the Formica table.

  He studied the foreign object, then slid its transparent shield back, revealing a USB plug. A jump drive. But that didn’t make sense. They didn’t have a computer. Unless…

  Then it hit him. The five c-notes she’d taken from him the previous week. The money Tina claimed was for Hannah’s school supplies and clothes and…it was all bullshit. But he’d known that all along.

  He’d let the money slide for good reason. Give the bitch enough rope and she’d hang herself. Give her a little hope before squashing it, and that’d go a long way toward keeping her in line.

  He wasn’t mad. Anger was for show, not for feeling, and he didn’t have an audience now. When the time was right, he’d show Tina who was boss. But first he had to discover the depth of her duplicity.

  The time had arrived for the Theater of Truth.

  At the age of eight, Chet discovered the ability to transform into small creatures. The scope of that particular skill never matured as he aged; bugs and rodents were all he could become. But shortly after his tenth birthday, he realized another trick up his sleeve: the ability to change into objects.

  On a cold day in 1982, an item in his father’s vast collection of sports memorabilia had captured his attention. A bobblehead statue of Pete Rose. This was a few years before scandal smashed Rose’s hall-of-fame aspirations; a time when the slugger, commonly known as Charlie Hustle by millions of adoring fans, was Ray Mitchell’s hero.

  Young Chet, who despised baseball for no other reason than his father’s love for the sport, plucked the keepsake from his father’s shrine in the garage. He rolled the doll in his hands, building up the courage to drop it on the hard floor below. He relished the thrill of watching the statue shatter. But on that day, it was another, more magical mischief that would come to pass.

  Chet felt a surge of electricity run up his arms, as if generated by the bobblehead. That made no sense. After all, the toy was neither AC nor DC—it was fucking porcelain. Then, faster than Rose cleared bases, Chet’s confusion became clarity, and Charlie Hustle taught him something important.

  Just as Chet could become a roach or a rat, he could become this thing that meant so much to dear old Dad. One of the rules, he would later learn, was the object had to carry special significance to its owner.

  But the first rule he learned was more pressing on that winter day. He couldn’t become the actual object; rather, an exact replica. This truth glowed from a movie screen that hung in front of a large, empty theater. The location of this grand place was a mystery. Nowhere? Everywhere? It didn’t matter. This is where transformation inexplicably carried Chet.

  He’d placed the statue on the floor before shifting. After the shift, the object of his father’s affection stood in the foreground of the theater’s screen. Beyond the toy, the garage came into focus. From Chet’s perspective, he occupied a seat in the middle of the theater, but in the real world, he’d become an exact copy of the bobblehead. He could see this thanks to a cracked mirror that’d been discarded beneath his father’s table of treasures. Side-by-side likenesses of Cincinnati’s big-headed finest. One, his father’s prized possession; the other, what he had been reduced to in the real world. On the screen, the projection, he reasoned, was granted through the replica’s ceramic eyes.

  In the ensuing years, he used this skill to watch his parents. Like a secret agent, he uncovered intelligence that was useful against them. He uncovered truth. He came to know the theater as a special place. A place completely unlike the theaters he’s been to, which showed dumb flicks to even dumber people. This wasn’t some lame movie house. This was the Theater of Truth. And it was his and his alone.

  Chet wouldn’t learn the most important rule of object shifting until it was too late. But that inconvenience didn’t yet loom.

  For now, it was time to apply the trick to Tina.

  * * *

  As Chet set up surveillance on his wife, he was oblivious to the real plot against him.

  Phillip Wise—who hated when people called him Phil—stood on a pier and watched waves crash upon the Tybee Island shore. Tired of waiting and ready to head home, he sucked his cigarette to the butt, then flicked it in the ocean an
d turned.

  And there Samantha stood.

  “I’d like to say you look good,” she squeaked.

  It was clear his little girl was still pissed at him. She had every right to be. But now wasn’t the time for old family grudges. Phillip sat on a bench and waved her forward. She approached and stood before him. She didn’t appear anxious to sit.

  “I know I look like shit,” he wheezed. “Feel like shit, too. But thanks for coming.”

  “What’s wrong, Dad? We could have just talked over the phone. Or do you still distrust phone lines?”

  “Look, is it wrong for a man to want to see his daughter every once in a while. It’s not like any of my other kids will still talk to me.”

  “Drop the sympathy plea, Dad. You damn near put Ralph in the hospital the last time you saw him, and Claudia’s still in Nova Scotia with her partner.”

  “Partner,” he said with disdain. “Is that what we’re calling lesbian lovers these days?”

  “You’ll never change.”

  “You’re right, I won’t, but…” He once more motioned for her to join him on the bench.

  “But what?” Her sad expression deepened as she sat. “Is it serious? Are you…are you dying?”

  “No,” he said, and wished things were as simple as that. Being alone in the world was a bitch, but getting kicked when he was down made life unbearable. He absently watched a seagull peck a tattered Arby’s bag.

  “Rats with fuckin’ wings,” he said.

  “I’m going to leave if you don’t cut to the chase,” Samantha said.

  There wasn’t much force in her voice. Never had been. And he could tell she’d been crying. At that moment, he almost let her leave. This was unfair to her. He always asked, never gave, and she never could say no to him. He knew she wouldn’t refuse him now. Of course, any decent father would call the whole thing off and find a different way to take care of the loser from the convenience store; a way that didn’t involve the last family member who’d still speak to him. But he couldn’t let things go. He wasn’t a decent father. And he needed her.