The Shape of Desire (25 page)

It is past nine by the time I shower and get home and force myself to eat some soup and crackers.
Sick food.
I feel mentally and physically depleted, so unable to concentrate that I could believe I’m drunk, but I swallow some Benadryl, anyway, before I go to bed. I don’t want to take any chances.

Still, it’s close to an hour before the drug kicks in, and I spend that whole time lying flat on my back, eyes wide open, staring at the patterns of light that chase each other across my ceiling whenever a car drives by. My thoughts are circular, hopeless, endlessly repetitive.

Dante couldn’t have killed Ritchie. Not the Dante I know. He would fight Ritchie, he might hurt him, but he would never kill him. Dante would never kill
anybody. I would know if he was a killer. I wouldn’t love him. But I love him. But I can’t love him if he killed Ritchie. But he didn’t kill Ritchie…

Over and over again, I find myself astonished that Kathleen didn’t turn to me yesterday and howl accusingly, “Your boyfriend killed my husband! This is all your fault!” Over and over again, I have to remind myself that Kathleen knows an animal killed Ritchie, but she doesn’t know that Dante can become an animal. Exhausted, depressed, and hardly able to form a coherent thought, I think,
Thank God we didn’t have to call the police that day Ritchie came here and started a fight. Or Dante would be the first one they’d suspect now that Ritchie has been murdered.

Then I remember.
Of course they wouldn’t suspect Dante. They think an animal killed Ritchie.

Then I realize what I have just revealed, silently, to myself: I am glad the police will not connect Dante to this crime. Though I suspect him, I am not willing to turn him over to the authorities; even if I had proof of his guilt, I would not show it to anyone. I will not betray him, no matter what he has done. If he has killed a man—or several people—I will shield him, I will protect him, I will keep him safe.

After all, I shielded a murderer once before, and Dante knows it.

That’s why he picked me.

I
was twenty when I fell in love with Dante.

I was in my junior year at the University of Missouri-Columbia, a school I had chosen because a good friend from high school wanted to major in journalism and I wanted to be just far enough from Springfield that I couldn’t commute but I could get home quickly if I had to. My friend and I almost instantly drifted apart as we settled in different dorms, made new friends, and realized we didn’t have that much in common after all, but I loved Mizzou.

Dante and I lived in the same dorm, and during the past couple of years, we had occasionally run into each other in the hallway or on the front walk. I thought he was flat-out gorgeous, in a dark and dangerous way, but it never occurred to me that he would ever ask me out. I didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would catch his attention, and he wasn’t really my type. Up to that point I had dated guys who were nerdy and smart and disarmingly goofy—engineering students, math geniuses, guys who collected comic books. I was comfortable around them. Dante
Romano didn’t seem like the kind of man I would ever be at ease around. It didn’t seem worth the effort to develop a crush.

Now and then I would spot him with some girl or another—beautiful and bitchy-looking, mostly blond—exactly the type I would have expected a broodingly handsome guy like him to hook up with. His roommate was a pre-med student named Gary who fell exactly into my category—intelligent, dorky, funny, and wry—but he had a girlfriend back home whom he eventually married, so we were never more than friends.

Other girls in the dorm would pester Gary with questions about Dante. “Is he still dating Nadia? Is he into sports? What kind of music does he like? How can I get him to talk to me?” But Gary always laughed and put them off.

“He’s kind of an odd dude. He keeps to himself and he’s gone a lot. I mean, I think he’s gone home for the weekend at least once a month since freshman year. But he’s a great roommate, man. He never makes a mess and he never complains about anything.”

“Does he have girls over very often?” We lived in a co-ed dorm and there was plenty of mingling between the sexes. My own roommate and I had come up with a complicated unspoken communication system for asking and granting permission to host an overnight guest. The study lounge on the ground floor was where dispossessed individuals usually spent the night when their roommates were entertaining company. I’d encountered Gary there a few times, but never Dante.

“Oh, you know, he sees girls now and then, but I don’t think he’s too serious about any of them,” Gary would say diplomatically.

“Let me know if he’s ever looking for someone new. Let me know if you think he’d like me.”

Whether or not Gary ever passed these messages along, I don’t know. He and Dante were roommates for three of the four years we were all in school. By senior year, Gary’s girlfriend had moved up from Cape
Girardeau and they were sharing a house. I’d moved into an apartment about six blocks from campus—and Dante was there as often as he was anywhere else.

By then I had known for more than a year that Dante claimed to be a shape-shifter. I had already convinced myself that he was telling the truth.

I first heard him say the words one winter day so filled with snow that the university canceled classes—an occurrence so rare that no one could remember it actually happening before. The blizzard didn’t keep the students inside; in fact, about half my dorm joined in an epic snowball fight that involved hours of planning and building forts, and another hour of actual combat. Another contingent fashioned an articulated sled from trash can lids and bathrobe ties and dragged this through the drifts to the nearest liquor store. When these adventurers returned, they sold beer and assorted other spirits for about twice their retail value, and by nightfall pretty much everyone in the dorm had scattered to attend one party or another.

Gary invited me to a small get-together in the dorm room of two girls who lived next door to him and Dante. The cafeteria had never opened that day, so we were all subsisting on the snacks we had squirreled away in our rooms, and we made a dinner by combining our resources—bagel chips and peanut butter and trail mix and Oreos. Needless to say, on such an insubstantial meal, the alcohol went to work on us even more quickly, and I, at least, was drunk within the hour. I declined to take a toke when the joints were passed around, but everyone in the room was pretty mellow by the time one of the other girls proposed a truth-or-dare sort of game.

“Everyone has to tell a story that they’ve never told to anyone else—ever,” said Janine. She was a bossy brunette with a great figure. I always assumed she’d been an eldest child and was used to ordering people around
and
getting lots of attention because of her looks. A heady combination. “And it has to be true.”

Her roommate, Rochelle, demurred. Rochelle was Janine’s opposite, small and delicate and fair, but she was stacked, too. Between the two of them, they always had guys hanging around. “I don’t want to tell secrets.”

“You have to. Everyone has to,” Janine said.

“You go first,” Gary said.

Janine pouted at him, obviously not used to following other people’s instructions, and then she smiled. “All right. When I was twelve I stole a hundred dollars from my dad’s wallet. He was so mad. He thought one of the workers in the mailroom had taken it, and he got the guy fired. I hid it in an old pair of shoes and every once in a while when I really,
really
wanted something, I’d sneak out a twenty and go buy it. Like games and clothes and makeup. It lasted me almost a year. No one ever caught me.”

“What happened to the guy who got fired?” Rochelle asked.

Janine shrugged. “I don’t know.”

There was a short silence, and then Gary said, “All right, I’ll go next.” He blew out a puff of breath. “I cheated on my SAT tests.”

“Wow, how’d you even do that?” Janine asked. “Security was tight when I took mine.”

“I knew someone who knew someone who had copies of the tests and I paid, like, fifty bucks to get them.”

“I thought those were always scams,” I said.

“Nope. These were good. About half the questions and answers that were actually on the test were things I’d seen on these copies.”

“So what were your scores?” Janine demanded.

“Over seven hundred in everything. The funny thing is, I probably would have done just as well even without cheating. I didn’t learn that much that I didn’t already know.”

“Do you feel bad about it?” Rochelle asked in her soft voice.

“That’s the worst part,” he said. “I should, but I don’t.”

“Well, don’t cheat on your boards after you get out of med school,” I said.

Gary laughed. “Okay. For you, I’ll be honest.”

Now Janine was looking pointedly at me. “Maria? What’s your secret?”

“When I was in high school, my best friend, Karen, killed her father,” I said. That riveted everyone’s attention; every other story suddenly turned trivial by comparison. “He was always beating her up—her and her sister. And one day she grabbed a baseball bat and just
slammed
him over the head. He dropped to the floor and didn’t move again and she was pretty sure he was dead. No one else was home. She didn’t know what do to, so she came running over to my house and we figured out a plan. We decided she could hide in the women’s bathroom of the gas station by our high school, because it had an outside entrance and it was never locked. I’d bring her food and money until the police stopped looking for her.”

I paused a moment, remembering those terrifying, chaotic days. The police had come to my house three times looking for Karen, and my mother and father had asked me searching questions when the cops weren’t around, but I never told anyone anything. I had a bank account with a few thousand dollars in it—money I’d saved from summer jobs—and I used my debit card to take out small sums and smuggle them to her when no one else was around.

“Well, of course, the police
didn’t
stop looking for her, so one day she just decided to split. I gave her as much money as I could scrape up, and I took her to the train station, and she bought a ticket to Chicago. They never caught her.”

There was a moment’s stunned silence. “What happened to her?” Rochelle asked. Practically the same question she had asked Janine.

I gave the same answer: “I don’t know. She was seventeen when she left. We were afraid that if she wrote or called, the cops would find her.
She did send me a postcard once to say she was all right, but, of course, she didn’t include an address and I didn’t know how to get in touch with her. I keep thinking maybe one day I’ll figure out how to track her down.”

“So I guess her father really was dead,” Gary said.

I nodded. “Oh yeah. Blunt force trauma. She left the bat beside the body so everyone knew she did it, too.”

“Didn’t you feel bad about hiding a
murderess
?” Janine asked in such a judgmental tone that I was sure she’d been a hall monitor and all-purpose snitch from grade school on.

I gave her a fierce look that was only slightly blunted by the smudging effects of alcohol and secondhand marijuana. “No. I’d seen her bruises. We were in gym class together, and when we’d change clothes, I’d see the marks on her back. He broke her arm once—took it between his hands and
broke
it. He was a
terrible
man.”

“My stepfather raped me when I was fifteen,” Rochelle said.

Her soft voice cut across my outraged tone, silenced me and sucked all the air out of the room. The rest of us stared at her, having no idea what to say.

“I wish someone would have killed
him
,” she added.

Gary was the one who managed a response—not Janine or me, the two women, the ones you might have expected to speak up. “What happened after that? Did he—did he try to do it again?”

Rochelle shook her head. “I was never alone in the house with him after that. If he was the only one there, I wouldn’t go in. I’d go wait at the library or at a friend’s house until my mother got home.”

“Did you tell her?” Janine asked.

Rochelle gave her a scornful look. “I thought these were supposed to be secrets we’d never told anyone before?”

“Yeah, but—I mean—”

“I never told her. I didn’t think she’d believe me. It doesn’t matter, they’re divorced now.”

“Well, it still
matters
,” Janine said. “Have you—”

Rochelle kind of scrunched her shoulders together. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

She looked like she might start crying. I cast about desperately for something neutral to say, and I could tell by his expression that Gary was doing the same thing. That was when, in a rich and idle voice, Dante began talking. Up until this point he had scarcely said a word, though he’d swallowed his share of booze and taken more than a few hits off the joints that were passed around.

“I was born to a family of shape-shifters,” he said. “The past ten generations in my mom’s family have been able to turn into animals. At least that’s what my mom always told us. She could take any shape she wanted to, whenever she wanted to. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times.”