Shaper Page 10

  That surprised an angry little laugh out of Louise. “I’d love to know what kind of sense you think it made!”

  “It was—Well, look! I told him I didn’t want to train Queenie. He knew, and there I was doing it anyway! I got suckered into it. ‘I’ll just demonstrate this point, I’ll just demonstrate that point,’ and look at her!”

  Queenie had turned her face up at his rising voice. Her eyes looked concerned. He gave her a quick pat.

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” Louise said, more quietly. “But I know why he did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—” She paused to think. She was forgetting to be mad. Chad felt a bit angry himself now, as if her cloud of emotion had drifted sideways onto him. “Number one, he thought you’d be better off if you liked her.”

  “That was none of his business.”

  “Maybe. But if you can help people—”

  “You should wait till they want help!” Chad said.

  Louise’s eyebrows knitted again. “All right! The other reason is that you could help him. You and Queenie were perfect. Neither of you knew a thing about training. You were just what he needed.”

  Chad felt his face go hot. He walked along looking at his feet. Valuable because he didn’t know anything. Well, he’d known that. But he’d thought there was something special about him, too. Those sharp, surprised looks David and Louise used to give him, as if he’d just said something brilliant …

  “He likes you,” Louise said, more gently. “He’s going to be so alone after I go.”

  Chad’s spirits sank deeper. That was how he mattered to Louise. He could fill the gap in David’s life. Why didn’t she get her father a dog? It would be a lot easier!

  His voice came huskily, saying something he didn’t want to say, but why not? How much worse could things get? “I thought you were going to be there. At least sometimes.”

  Louise’s white sneakers stopped walking. Chad made himself look up, and up, till he met her eyes.

  They were bright and challenging, and she was smiling, too, in a way that made him feel every month and week and hour of the year’s difference in their ages. At the same time a trickle of excitement started to run deep in his body.

  “Are you telling me?” she said. “Are you … telling me—”

  Chad felt like Tarzan, swinging on a vine out over an abyss. What was down there? It didn’t matter. He let go. “I’m telling you.”

  Louise’s eyes sparkled. She swung around to start walking again, and the corner of her mouth made a small, secret movement. “Interesting,” she said. “In-ter-est-ing. Now let me tell you a few things! Number one, I’m older than you!”

  “And taller!”

  “Number two, I’m going away.”

  The fizz in Chad’s blood couldn’t be flattened out, even by this. “You’ll be back,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  “Number three,” Louise said, “Daddy made me leave, so you wouldn’t be embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed! I wouldn’t have been embarrassed!”

  “Well, you were! Anytime I was around, you were too embarrassed even to think!”

  That wasn’t embarrassment, Chad wanted to say. But that might not be a good idea.

  “Anyway, I knew you were with Daddy, and it was my chance to get out for a while. I don’t like him to be alone right now. And I did see you, every day. Sometimes twice!” She waited for Chad to acknowledge that, and he nodded. “Besides, I like your little brother.”

  “He’s a pain.”

  “He’s a pain because you’re trying to ignore him, just the way you were trying to ignore Queenie. And that’s none of my business! Just like the door was none of my business. Gonna take your marbles and go home?”

  Chad felt his heart beat in his chest, high and thin and giddy. He said, “Don’t have enough left to make it worthwhile.”

  Louise laughed out loud and took his arm for a second, just a little squeeze. It left Chad completely disorganized, unable to listen to what she was saying. She was a dancer. She touched people all the time. It didn’t mean—

  “You have to talk to Daddy,” she was saying. “If you just walk back in and don’t say anything, he won’t either. Daddy doesn’t really believe in words.”

  Over his head again—what a beautiful feeling! Go ahead, confuse me more! She’d dropped her hand, but she walked so close his arm hairs prickled straight out toward her.

  “I keep telling him,” she said. “Words are behavior! Human behavior. That doesn’t mean they aren’t valid.”

  “I never know what you’re talking about!” Chad said, and a loopy-feeling grin spread across his face. Louise smiled, too, and right then Chad decided he would become a painter. If there were things in the world as beautiful as Louise’s smile, he had to do something about them.

  CHAPTER

  21

  NOW WHAT? EVERYTHING was changed yet not changed. It was the same but carbonated. The same but painted over with a golden glaze. A few more yards down the road, laughing without anything to laugh at …

  In David’s driveway stood a gleaming blue VW Beetle.

  Louise stopped short. “What?”

  She looked at Chad, looked down at him. Okay, I can live with that, Chad was thinking. I’ll grow.

  “No,” Louise said. “No.” Swiftly she went ahead of Chad, into the house.

  “… telephone,” V was saying, in the kitchen. “People call and tell me the animal’s name, describe the problem, and I get in touch with the animal and call them back.”

  “Really?” David’s voice sounded so neutral it was almost a joke. Louise walked into the kitchen. Chad followed, and David’s face lit up.

  “Chad! I was afraid—” He broke off and just smiled, looking intensely relieved.

  “Hello, Chad, Louise.” V wasn’t enchanted to see them. A plastic container rested on the table. Through the translucent sides Chad saw her justly famous macadamia-nut cookies. David opened the container and offered it around.

  “These are the best,” Chad said.

  Louise took a bite, and her eyebrows shot up. “Wow!”

  Queenie sat at Chad and then lay down as if for extra emphasis. She knew these cookies, too.

  Chad broke her off a corner and felt a reaction from V. He looked up, his face heating.

  V’s mouth opened, as if to speak. Then she met his eyes and smiled, a tiny, scrunched-up smile that wrinkled her nose. Her freckles stood out for a moment, and she looked like a farm girl, not a psychic beauty. Oh! I like V! Chad thought.

  She looked away from him quickly and said to David, “You must have work to do. I’ll go. I need to phone a client, anyway.”

  David had half risen to see her to the door, but this seemed to catch him. He frowned at V. “What makes you believe you actually contact these animals?”

  “Results,” V said. “I hear remarkable stories—”

  “I’ll bet! But what I mean is … don’t you think you’re making it up? You can say anything you want! The animal can’t contradict you. It’s like a child playing with a doll, making up a story. Anyway, that’s what it seems like to me. Do you understand that?”

  For some reason this speech, which should have made Louise glad and V angry, had the opposite effect on both. Louise flushed and frowned, and V kept smiling. “I give myself permission to believe what I see. I give myself permission to learn and improve.”

  When she said things like that, Chad always wondered: What if it was true? What if V could read minds, and contact spirits, and understand dreams?

  He remembered his dream about Shep, the one so real he woke up happy, though he knew Shep was dead. The strong nudge of the dog’s nose under his hand; he was sure he’d really felt that. Then Shep had bounded off joyously, never looking back. Movin’ on, was the message Chad had gotten. No regrets …

  V said, “We manifest what we concentrate on. There are rules; there’s a science. You need to ask the universe questions it can answer yes t
o.”

  David’s head jerked slightly. “Go on!”

  “Classic example: A mother prays for her sick child. ‘Don’t die, don’t let her die.’ But the universe doesn’t hear negatives. It doesn’t hear ‘don’t.’ The universe hears ‘Die. Let her die.’”

  David sat up straight. “By universe I take you to mean God, and I wholeheartedly reject a God who would be that small-minded. But there is evidence that the unconcious mind works the way you’ve described, and I’d like to discuss that with you. Not now, because Chad and I have work to do, but sometime. Will you leave me your phone number?”

  V’s cheeks were very pink, her eyes bright. She pulled the pad of paper on the table toward her and scribbled her number.

  “You’re on to something,” David said. “What you’ve made of it is unmitigated crap, but the underlying idea interests me.”

  V just smiled, a peculiar, tense smile, head tilted a little. David had been pretty insulting, but V was pleased, as if everything up till then had been insulation and they’d finally touched the live wire.

  Politely David followed her to the door, and Louise reached for another cookie. “These were a big mistake. Daddy hates sweet things.”

  “I’ll tell her that,” Chad said.

  Louise frowned. “I’m not letting Daddy get scooped up on the rebound! Especially by somebody like your aunt!”

  “Taste her pot roast before you make up your mind!”

  Louise’s mouth dropped open. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you? You little twerp!” Chad didn’t care so much for the “little,” but he liked the smile.

  Then David was back. “Chad! I’m so sorry!” He took Chad’s hand in a quick shake.

  “So you know?” Louise said. “You know what you did?”

  “Oh, I know,” David said. “Chad, you told me you didn’t want to train Queenie and I … interfered. I had no right.”

  Chad opened his mouth and didn’t know what to say. Was he supposed to agree?

  “She’s a great dog,” David said, “and at first I just wanted to get her into better hands. Then I saw that you could be those hands—but no excuses. It’s an old temptation with me, one I thought I’d gotten over, but I’m a little off-balance right—”

  “Daddy? Shh. Let Chad say something now.”

  Chad said, “Uh,” and took a deep breath. “It’s all right, I guess. I mean, can I have my job back?”

  “Yes! God, yes! We can get a goat, a goat would be ideal—”

  “Queenie’s fine,” Chad said. Queenie, sniffing at the base of the sink for crumbs, lifted her head, and looked across the room at him. “I mean, it worked. I like her now.”

  David sat down with something of a thump and closed his eyes. After a moment he said quietly, “Good.”

  “She’s a great dog,” Louise said. “Chad was always going to like her someday.”

  Chad didn’t think that was true. The hardness in him might never have changed. He’d held out against Queenie for months; he might have held out forever. David had reshaped him into someone who could no longer do that.

  “Can you change anything?” he asked David. “I mean—”

  David looked at him for a long moment. “You mean, do I use this often on my fellow human beings?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the time,” David said. “Not on purpose mostly. It’s who I am now. The way I look at people has changed at a basic level; the way I respond has changed. I … look for what I like. I try to make it happen again. Sometimes … I get carried away.”

  “You said once this would change the world.”

  “I believe it will. We focus on what annoys us and ignore everything else. In the new culture we’ll focus on positive change and be quick to help it along because that works. That creates a better life. So yes, I can change a lot. On the other hand, could I save my marriage? No.”

  “You made things better,” Louise said. “You made things a lot less crazy!”

  David said, “I raised a very nice daughter. That’s what I did.”

  Have I changed? Chad wondered. Other than liking Queenie? Or was liking Queenie part of something bigger? It might be. The world seemed fluid to him, as if the old boundaries were not really boundaries, as if the limits and the laws were only veils. But what did that mean, really? What should he do?

  David said, “You kids are being shaped every day. Adults are trying to mold you into what they like. I want you to understand that, so you can be an equal. Anyone who’s shaping you can be shaped by you.”

  “Like land and water,” Louise said.

  The waterfall, Chad thought, the water wearing away the stone, the stone pouring the water onto the rock below, where it dug out a pool, where the rock dammed it, where it eroded the lip of the dam. Rock and water were equals, though the water was weak and slipped away, and the rock was hard and constant.

  “Enough philosophy,” David said. “Do you feel like working? If I can remember what we do next?”

  “Yes.” That was exactly what he did feel like: working, letting his mind slip along the cool channels of observation and choice.

  “What do you want to do with her?”

  Chad didn’t know. What did you do with a dog besides hang out? “What do you need me to do?”

  Louise slipped out of the room. A moment later Chad heard music come on in another part of the house. “Easy, boy!” it said to him. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

  David said, “Well … I guess we could start with targeting. You can go on to almost anything from there.”

  So they spent a while—twenty minutes at most—teaching Queenie to touch the end of a dowel with her nose. Of the three of them, she was the only one not rattled, not a little shy. By the end of the session Chad was already varying the reinforcement, withholding the click until she touched two or three times.

  “She’s a smart dog,” David said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “She’s not bad,” Chad said. It was still a little hard for him to admit that.

  Louise poked her head into the kitchen. She gave Chad a direct, clear-eyed smile. “By the way, is it all right now to give you a door?”

  David gave him doors for Sky and Julia as well, and Gib brought them home in the van. “Comes a time when a guy needs a door,” he said to Chad. Chad thought they all had needed doors for a long time.

  He’d imagined hanging them himself, but it turned out he didn’t know how. Gib did, almost without thinking, and when Chad’s door was a little too big, he shaved off the excess with a plane. That’s right, Chad thought. Gib had built this house. Jeep hadn’t done that. He hadn’t built anything up at the farm. House and barn had already been there.

  When Gib finished with the doors, Chad showed him the gaps in the walls.

  “I’d forgotten about those,” Gib said. “Real sieve up here, isn’t it?” He looked around Chad’s room, taking the measure of it and maybe of the person who’d shaped it. Chad looked at it, too; it felt as if he hadn’t seen it, his own room, in a long time. Those paintings looked young to him. He thought he could do better.

  Sky put his head through the gap. His face was red and puckered, and he looked as if he were about to cry. “I don’t like my door!”

  “Why not, buddy?” Gib asked.

  Sky screwed his face up tighter and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. He didn’t answer.

  Chad knew. That made a warm, light feeling flow out of him. Everything was like that today, golden and glowing as if the air were ginger ale. He loved his own door, as creamy blank as a piece of hot-pressed paper, but Sky had wanted a moat, a drawbridge.

  “Don’t worry,” he told Sky. “You’re going to have the door of your dreams!”

  CHAPTER

  22

  IT DIDN’T HAPPEN fast. First Chad had to draw a castle gate and courtyard on the outside of the door, a castle gate and landscape on the inside. The technical problem’s of perspective and illusion had been solved by medieval paint
ers centuries ago, but that didn’t make it easy. He’d been right, though; his drawing had actually improved. Maybe his color control had, too. As he drew on the pale door, his mind leaped ahead, trying to extract the greatest possible brilliance from his poster paints.

  The next morning Louise limped up the hill to play with Sky. At noon, when Chad and Queenie walked home—Queenie knew the word touch now—Jeep’s truck went down past them. Sky waved out the window. Chad hurried, but Louise was waiting out on the deck with her feet up.

  “Daddy’s coming to get me. I’m not up to walking both ways.”

  She could have gotten a ride home with Jeep, but she hadn’t.

  “Sky showed me his door,” she said. “I didn’t know you painted.”

  Chad looked down, shrugging. “We’ll see. He wants a knight, a dragon, and a dog on it. And a beautiful lady!”

  “Cool!”

  “Actually,” Chad said, “he wants you.”

  Louise looked directly at him. Her eyes were wide and clear and steady. After a moment she said, “He does, does he? Inside the door or out?”

  “Uh, both. Both, actually. So … would you be willing to … pose for me?”

  She considered him, looking cool and self-contained, though bright color stained her cheeks in triangles. She blushed exactly the way her father did. “Maybe,” she said at last, firmly. “Let me see what you do with the door first, and then … maybe.”

  So the door was a test. Chad threw himself into painting: castle and landscape and dragon scales and dog—a golden dog with a plumy tail because gold showed up bright against the grass. As he worked, thoughts tumbled through his mind: complementary colors, and Louise, and Queenie.

  Queenie seemed like a queen now, like someone you went to for very important favors. He wondered if she thought of him as someone who could grant favors, too, and if she had any idea that things had changed. Did she remember that a few weeks ago everybody had just yelled at her? Did she feel any dislocation because, out of the blue, people like himself and David had started applauding certain actions, started feeding her cues so she could get applause again? A person might conceivably be weirded-out by this change of tactics. Queenie just seemed waggy and content.