Within/Without

chapter fifty-two.

Val

Perhaps this is the most important story I will ever tell.

Once upon a time, a boy was born with many bodies instead of one. He assigned them names and personalities, talents and faults. The boy fell in love with a girl who he thought would never know him for who he really was, and because he was afraid, he hid. On a cold night outside of a bakery, the truth finally arose between them, and because she was afraid, she hid. But fear has a strange way of working, sometimes. Sometimes fear is the very thing that brings people together.

In the end, however, it is this: A boy fell in love, and it destroyed him.

Great Granny Etta's bedroom is located beside the staircase; the door is painted a vintage dark emerald with a gold S for St. John painted on the front. I take a pen, a notepad, and a picture with me. The picture is of Simon. He's sixteen. His hair is a fiery red in the sun, much shorter, and though freckles dot a large swath of his face the remainder of his skin remains pale. This is the face I know best. I could say it's the face I fell in love with, but that wouldn't be true, because I didn't fall in love with a face. I just fell in love with Simon.

Simon's parents both told me that talking to Great Granny Etta is useless. "She's senile, Val," Mary said. "She won't remember a thing."

I just said, "I have to know. I have to know what ruined him."

After that, they let me go.

I knock, but there's no reply. The door creaks on its hinges as I nudge it open, peeking inside. The walls are the same emerald as the door, the room filled with stuffy, stagnant air. The antique dresser and four-poster bed and floral, lilac-colored comforter all ooze of the 1970s. I catch the scents of mothballs and grass, burning wax.

My eyes pan to the right. Great Granny Etta sits in a rocking chair, squinting at the candle that sits on top of the dresser. Only when the door shuts behind me does she look up, confused. "Is someone there?"

I flutter about for an awkward moment before I decide to take a seat on the edge of the bed, facing the old woman. Every feature of her face is framed by wrinkles, her eyes brown-gray and her hair a clean white as it settles in thin, cotton candy-like bushels on her shoulders. "Um, hi," I say. Etta turns toward me, slowly. "My name is Valerie Love. You don't know me, but I'm...a friend of Simon's?"

"Valerie..." Etta murmurs. She plays with the blanket draped across her lap in a hapless way that makes me realize she's blind. "That name does sound familiar, doesn't it?" She laughs to herself. "I must have heard the boy mention it before."

"I just—" The past few days' events play on repeat in my head. The airport. The hotel room. The catastrophic downhill fall of Simon's health in all the hours after that. And then, just one hour ago. Watching him gasp for what I feared was his last breath. Watching him go still, after a while. Like he was done fighting. Like all the please don't go's and the don't give up's and the I'm sorry's meant nothing, nothing at all. "I need to ask you something, Miss Etta."

She laughs again, a gentle, peculiar sound, turning her head in the direction of my voice. "Go on, then, child."

"Your husband," I say, referencing the name I scribbled down earlier. Joseph St. John. "Joseph. How did you lose him?"

Etta pauses for a while, dragging her tongue over her lips. Her broken eyes watch the wick of the candle, as if tracking the dancing flame through intuition alone. "He perished in the Second World War."

I exhale. Maybe it really was just a futile attempt. "I see."

"At least, that is what they told me," Etta says, and I jolt, picking up my pen again. "They said he got sick, which I may have believed, had they not told me the origins of his sickness."

"Which was—what, exactly?" I ask. I'm trying to keep my voice steady, comforting, but my curiosity is beginning to get the best of me. Could it be? Could it be that the birth of the St. John family secret didn't start with Larry, or with Simon, but with someone long before them? Could it be that all the answers Hank and Mary spent years trying to find have been behind the emerald door beside the staircase for all this time?

I don't know whether to be nauseated or elated.

"There was no origin, dear. It was sudden. The reports called them seizures, but they weren't seizures. Oh, no, no. Seizures do not change you from skin to skin. Seizures do not change who you are."

I place my hand to my heart; it pounds somewhere beneath my fingers. "Are you saying Joseph was a shapeshifter?"

Etta nods, sadly. "He was," she says. "He loved being a shapeshifter, too. Always said that if he was normal he'd never know what to do all day. Too bad it's the very thing that killed him, in the end."

I drop the notebook and the pen into my lap; my hands are trembling too much. Simon and Larry's great grandfather was a shapeshifter. It's not supernatural. It's not possession. It's genetics, and it's been sitting in front of us this entire time.

I ask, "Etta, why didn't you ever tell anyone?"

She smiles; she's missing a fair amount of her teeth. "You mean why I didn't tell that middle one. Simon."

"I...yes, I suppose."

"Because I wanted his story to end differently," says Etta. "And besides, the child simply never asked."

I stay there for a long time. I ask about Joseph and their life together. How they met and how she learned to look past his strange ability. I ask if she misses him. A tear springs in the old woman's eye as she says, "Everyday."

When Hank eases open the bedroom door and peers at both of us strangely, the clock behind his head reads nearly one in the afternoon. "Valerie? Oh, you're still here."

"Yes," I say, a smile forming on my face. Just wait till he knows. Just wait till they all know. "Is everything okay?"

A small grin forms at Hank's mouth. It's the first time I've ever seen the man smile.

"It's Simon," he says. "He's awake, and he wants to see you."