Still Life with Shape-shifter Read Free

father, usually so placid, was wild with anxiety. I remember him shouting on the phone to the police, who apparently were not as concerned as he was that his wife had gone missing. These days I can reconstruct part of the conversation I did not understand when I was a child. They were probably telling him that they wait forty-eight hours before opening missing-persons cases on adults, especially adults who vanish from their own homes in the middle of the night. They were probably asking him questions he could not answer.
Could she be visiting with a friend or a relative? Is an old boyfriend in town? Could she be meeting a contact somewhere and buying drugs?
    I remember my father yelling, “Of course not!” into the phone, but surely the questions made him uneasy. The truth was, as I realized when I was a teenager, he had married Gwen without knowing very much about her. He’d never met any of her family members, even at the wedding; she only had one or two friends, and those she practically left behind once she became his wife. She was a deep mystery in a charming package, and the police were right to believe there were secrets in her life that would explain her disappearance and that she would come back on her own.
    I have no idea what she told my father about those early absences, how she explained her actions and convinced him to trust her again. I’m certain she continued lying about her motivations until finally, left with no other options, she unwillingly told him the truth. But for a while, her strangeness, her erratic behavior didn’t matter. Because eighteen months after she married my father, when I was ten, Ann was born. And she became the center, the heart, the lodestone of everyone in the house.
    I had never been around babies before and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew from TV shows that they cried all the time and from commercials that they smiled when you put them in fresh diapers. And Ann did indeed wail whenever she was unhappy, and she did indeed go through an astonishing number of Huggies. Gwen had had an uncomplicated delivery but she recovered slowly, so I quickly learned how to change the baby, how to calm her, how to feed her. From the beginning, I considered Ann my responsibility at least as much as she was my father’s or Gwen’s.
    And I loved her more than I loved anyone else in the world.
    I was probably eleven or twelve the night I lay awake thinking fairly deep existential thoughts. I had heard noises downstairs—which turned out to be my father and Gwen talking in the kitchen—but I had initially worried that the sounds were caused by burglars. My first thought was that I would hide in my closet so they wouldn’t find me. My second thought was that I must get Ann and hide her in the closet with me. Otherwise, I knew, they would steal her; there could hardly be a greater treasure in the house.
    From imagining criminals breaking in to rob us, I went to thinking up other disasters. Fires, tornadoes, unspecified apocalypses that leveled the house and rendered the whole neighborhood a smoking ruin. In every scenario, I was the one to grab Ann and flee with her to some compromised haven. Gwen and my father were left behind to blow away or burn.
    In the years since then, I’ve heard other people talk about their own complex childhood fantasies, in which they run away from home or find themselves tossed out without a penny. They describe elaborate story lines of camping in the woods, living on ants and mushrooms, building huts, finding water, carrying on their lives unencumbered by parental supervision. I’m sure it’s some kind of ritual of passage; I’m sure it’s the child’s way of testing out the ways he or she will behave as an adult.
    But mine feels different to me. It is not so much a wishful fantasy as willing acceptance of a clear-cut duty. Ann needed someone to take care of her, watch over her, protect her, guide her, love her. I was obviously the only one qualified for