Shapeshifted (2 page)

“The Shadows will come out of the ground and erase your memory of everything I said. Maybe even of me.” I nudged the carpet with my toe.

“Edie, how long have you been having these delusions?”

I didn’t answer her.

“I know you’re a nurse, and no one wants to put you on meds less than I do, but my co-worker next door—he’s a psychiatrist. We can go together and check in with him. He could get you in as an emergency visit, and then you can go fill your prescription. Risperdal does wonders for people.”

“Risperdal?” I startled and looked up. I was crazy … but I wasn’t
crazy
. “No.”

“Edie—” Her voice went low. I grabbed my bag and started walking toward the door. “You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”

“Not if I don’t stay here,” I said as I shut the door behind me.

*   *   *

In nursing school I’d done a psych rotation. The nurse I was following and I ate Risperdal-endorsed microwave popcorn out of a brand-new plastic bedpan. It was incongruous at the time, participating in even a small part of the pharmaceutical promotion machine, and eating out of bedpans like they were bowls for food. After that, I’d always made sure to bring my own Tupperware, and limited my brand endorsement to using whatever med-of-the-month-themed pens were lying around.

I didn’t want to be on the med of the month, though. Even though I knew meds were helpful—vital, in some cases—for depression. It was just that … well, my problems felt situational. You would have thought that it was the stress of working with vampires and werecreatures that did me in, but no, my depression had come after that, with the onset of spring.

I drove home with the windows down, hoping that the fresh air flowing over my face would make me feel more alive. It did—until I thought about the fact that I had to work tonight. My stomach curdled, and I finally put two and two together. Working at the sleep clinic was killing my soul.

There’re only so many nights you can watch someone sleep on a video monitor and stay sane. I had two years of intensive-care-level experience, and yet I’d spent the last six months watching people sleep, listening to them snore. It was like going from being a fighter pilot to a model-airplane captain—the joyless kind glued to the ceiling at a Toys “R” Us.

My phone rang. I saw the picture of my mom, and picked it up like you’re not supposed to in the car. “Hey, Momma—”

“Hey, Edie! Can you come over?”

A lifetime of being my mother’s child meant I could tell from her voice that something was wrong. “Um, sure. Why?”

She attempted to deflect me. “You’re not on the phone in your car, are you?”

“No,” I completely lied. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing—I just—” She hesitated. My mother was good at many things, but lying was not among them.

As I waited her out, my brain itemized every bad thing it could be. The list was shorter than it’d been six months ago, since the supernatural community was now shunning me—back then, if she’d called me up like this, I might have panicked and hung up to call the cops, for whatever good they could do.

Thank goodness she’d never known where I’d been working, who I’d been hanging out with, or what I’d been up to.

Now the first spot on my reasons-my-mother-could-call-me-in-the-middle-of-the-day list was occupied squarely by my brother. Jake had had a brief reprieve from his heroin addiction when I’d been working at the hospital. As long as I was employed there, the Shadows worked their weird magic to keep him immune to heroin’s effects, no matter how much he shot up.

He’d been clean up until I’d gotten shunned, when his protection abruptly ended. And sure enough, Jake had been hooked again soon after. I tried not to think about him most times now. Thinking about him only made me sad.

I stopped at a red light as the awkward lull on the phone continued. “I just got some bad news is all,” my mother finally went on. “You’re pulled over, right?”

“Of course I am,” I totally lied again. Whatever it was, it must be bad. I prepared myself for the worst. Jake, found facedown in some gutter. The image came too readily to mind, followed by sadness and shameful relief.

“Good. Well. I have cancer,” she went on, matter-of-factly.

“What?” The car behind me started honking. I looked up. The light had changed. “What—where?”

“I was thinking maybe you could come over and join Peter and me for dinner? And then we could talk about things.” The car behind me honked louder.

Talk about things. Sure. Wait until dinner? Oh, hell no. “I’m coming right over, Mom.”

At least she didn’t fight me. “Sounds good, honey. See you soon.”

Throughout my entire life, my mother had been my rock. My childhood had been crazy, and while as a teen I’d resented that, now that I’d grown up I realized she was human, and she’d done the best she could. Knowing she was frail and sometimes fallible made me love her all the more. I couldn’t lose her now. My heart was racing in my chest, and I felt like I’d been punched. I drove through the light and pulled to a stop on the next side street to gather myself.

I looked down, and my mom’s picture was still up on my phone’s screen. It was blurry—I smudged it with my thumb, then realized it wasn’t sunscreen transferred from my face; I was crying. I inhaled deeply and swallowed it down. No. Not yet.

I needed to figure out how bad things were first. There were tons of different kinds of cancer. Thousands, really. There were all the chances in the world that this was an easy one, right? Tons of things that doctors could do. Chemo, radiation, or surgery. My mom was tough, she could get through it. She had a great support system: her church, her husband, me.

But that might not be enough,
a small terrified voice whispered inside me. No one knows better than a nurse that sometimes, despite the best interventions and intentions, good people die.

I turned the screen off on my phone and carefully set it down on my passenger seat so I wouldn’t be tempted to throw it out the window.

Up until recently, I’d known creatures that lived—barring holy water showers or tripping into wooden stakes—forever.

If I had to, I’d make them make my mom live forever too.

CHAPTER TWO

I drove over to my mother’s house on the side streets, avoiding the highway, where I’d only be tempted to speed dangerously and cut people off.

Still, each lurching stop seemed like a personal affront—as though everyone who was trying to get home during rush hour was intentionally blocking me. I rolled up my windows so people wouldn’t hear me yelling obscenities.

By the time I got to my mother’s house I was hoarse, but exhausted in a good way. I took a moment to compose myself in the car, picked up my phone and put it into my purse, and walked up to the front door.

Which was locked.

“For crying out loud—” I knocked on the door. They knew I was coming, Jesus—

Peter opened up the door. “Sorry. We called Jake too.”

“Yeah, well, the bus system takes a lot longer to get here.” If my brother even had bus fare. But I could understand Peter, my stepfather, wanting to assess Jake’s condition before letting him in.

“Edie—dinner’s not done yet,” my mother apologized from the kitchen of her house. I dropped my purse on the floor, took off my shoes, and joined her.

“I’m not even hungry, Mom. Tell me about everything. Now.”

“Well—” Her eyes darted to Peter first. It was so unlike anything I’d ever do, that look to him for permission, and it made me want to shake her. But that was who she was—she wasn’t going to change now. “It’s breast cancer. Stage four. I’ve known for a while now—”

“Are you kidding me?” I said, my voice rising in anger. Peter took a step forward, waving his hands at me to calm down. I’d seen her two or three times since Christmas—talked to her about once a week on the phone. She’d seemed down, but not sick. Or sick, but not cancer-sick. I’d assumed she was just depressed about Jake. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“You just seemed so depressed, Edie. I thought you were like me. Upset about Jake.”

No, I’d written Jake off. It was an entirely different feeling than upset. “Mom—how bad is it?”

“Well, you know, the doctors have been trying very hard to get ahead of things. But it seems like they can’t. We didn’t find it early enough. The chemo’s not working, it’s on my liver too, and it’s inoperable—I’ve got a couple of months, maybe a year, but—”

“You’re wrong,” I interrupted, and looked to Peter for confirmation of her words. He looked away. “Oh, no—no way. They’re wrong.” I ran back out to my purse, and returned with a notepad and a pen. “Okay, tell me what their names are. I’ll ask around about them, find out if they’re any good—which I can already tell you that they’re not—and we’ll find new doctors for you. Better ones. The best ones. Best ones ever.”

“Edie—” My mother looked so harmless from behind the island of her kitchen, the light shining down from above, haloing what I now suspected was a very good wig. “It’s not going to be like that.”

“You’re wrong.” If there was a way I could go into her body myself and individually strangle cancer cells, I would do it.

“There’s quality of life to be considered too, Edie—” she began.

“You’re a nurse. You should know how that is,” Peter said from the side. I turned on him. I didn’t care what he had to say about things. For all I knew, it was sleeping with him that had given my mother cancer. Like HPV. Or all those winter trips to Florida he’d made them go on—maybe it’d gotten in through her skin.

I knew I was getting a little irrational, but it was better than the alternative.

“I want you to be on my side in this, Edie.” She came out from behind the island, and I could see her fully now, the way her clothes didn’t hang right. When had that happened? How had I been so blind? I was a nurse, for crying out loud. But she wasn’t a patient. She was my mom.

“I want to be on the fighting side!” I pounded my chest with a fist.

“That was always your problem, dear.” My mother smiled at me, sadly. “You never knew how not to fight.”

*   *   *

I spent the rest of dinner determined to prove her wrong—as if somehow making it through until dessert without blowing up again would show her that she needed to change her damn mind. I ate with a vengeance, swallowing underchewed bites of food, feeling overcooked chicken scratch at my throat on its way down—all the while realizing that Mom wasn’t eating as much as she ought to.

If it was any consolation—which it wasn’t—at least I’d be here when Jake got his effing act together enough to arrive. Maybe he would be on my side in this, and we could talk her out of giving up together. And maybe there were little green men living on the moon.

He’d probably hope she’d die, so he could get his inheritance, and then shoot it all up his arm. I stabbed another bite of chicken with a knife.

After dinner, we sat in the living room to talk. Turns out when cancer is the elephant in the room, there’s not very much to talk about. Mom told me about her church’s mission project, down in Mexico, and I listened without actually paying attention.

I didn’t even feel like I could cry. Crying would be an admission that things were irredeemable. If I kept being strong, I could somehow force her to be strong too.

So at the end of the night, after Jake didn’t show up, I took my dry-eyed leave.

“Really, Edie, we should hang out more,” she said gently as I hugged her on her spot on the couch so she wouldn’t have to stand. Trying not to notice how weak she was when she hugged me back.

“I’ll come by tomorrow,” I told her, as Peter escorted me to the door.

“She needs some rest, Edie,” he said when we turned the corner to the front hall. I bent over to push on my shoes and grab my purse. “She’s very tired these days.”

He blocked the door with his hand, and looked pointedly at me. I knew what he was saying with his eyes.

I could think whatever I wanted to think, but he wanted me to keep it to myself.

Peter and I didn’t always agree—but I had always thought I’d known, up until today at least, that he had my mother’s best interests at heart. If he thought I was just going to take this lying down—

The shadows in my mother’s face were mirrored in his too. I’d been busy pretending they weren’t there so I could be mad at him. Now I wondered how many nights he’d spent up, kneeling beside her at the toilet, how many pillowcases he’d found beside him in the morning covered in her hair. I shoved my three-year-old self down into a box and found the grown-up nurse in me again. I stood a little straighter, and let her take charge.

“I’ll visit every other day, so I don’t wear her out. Let me know if you need to take a break too.” I took a step forward, staring at him. “And this time, tell me if anything changes—or I’ll never forgive myself, or you.”

He grimly nodded, and then opened the door to let me out.

*   *   *

I drove off like a sane person. I didn’t take out any mailboxes or lampposts on their street. But two streets over I almost hit a garbage can, so I pulled over again.

Now it was safe to cry. Huge sobs welled up, and I had no Kleenex in my car, so I was forced to daub at my teary-snotty face with the bottom of my shirt. I’m sure I looked charming, asphyxiating with sorrow and baring my pale stomach in turns. When I reached the end of my crying jag fifteen minutes later, exhausted, I knew I could safely drive.

A part of me that wasn’t dissolving in pain started doing calculations. Things would be easier if I hadn’t destroyed all the extra stored vampire blood in the county last December—the thing that had gotten me shun-fired. If I hadn’t done that, and I were in this situation now, I could steal some vampire blood from work … or I could just stand outside the transfusion lab and waylay someone, karate chop them in the neck or some shit, and make them give me all their keys.

But I didn’t know if the lab was still being used, since I’d ruined things so successfully seven months ago, over the holidays.

While I wasn’t paying attention—or while that distant part of me was plotting—I took the exit to County Hospital again. I didn’t fight myself, even as I pulled into the parking lot.