Going Through the Change

by Samantha Bryant

  “No,” he said, hesitating. “I don’t have a warrant.”

  Cindy looped her arm through the officer’s elbow, turning his bulk toward his car and walking him down the paving stone path. “Do you have a card I can give my Auntie when she comes back? I’ll have her call when she gets home, and you can come back and talk to her then.”

  The officer stopped, obviously not happy with this turn of events. But he fished out a business card and handed it to Cindy.

  The flirtatious smile fell off of Cindy’s face as soon as she had her back to the officer. It was replaced with a stony expression of resolve. She walked back to Helen on the porch and sat down next to her. “I think we’d better go, my friend. He’ll likely be back with that warrant in a few hours.”

  Helen nodded. Pushing with her arms, she heaved herself up and walked over to the hanging cloth samples. “How do I pack these up?”

  inda was stretched out on the sofa, watching her telenovelas on the DVR, when the doorbell rang. When she peeked out the small window beside the door, there was a woman she didn’t recognize standing there. She didn’t look like a saleswoman. She was nicely dressed in an expensive suit, and her short red hair was professionally coiffed. She wasn’t holding anything in her hands. Linda opened the door and stepped onto the porch. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  The woman looked uncomfortable. She looked down the street toward Dr. Liu’s house and then back to Linda. She leaned in to speak like someone could be listening. “I need to talk to you. It’s about your neighbor.”

  Linda was curious but cautious. She sized up the person standing on her porch. She was probably around sixty years old, in good shape, athletic. Her clothes bespoke money and work in an office. She was tall, nearly as tall as Linda was now. When she was female, Linda would have found her intimidating. Besides her height, the woman was also built strongly and had a serious and severe face. Something in her expression said she was not to be messed with. This could be very interesting. She’d listen. Linda leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms over her chest in what she hoped was a tough-looking pose. “Yes?”

  The woman paced a few steps back and forth, running her hand up the back of her short hair in an agitated manner. Then she stopped and turned to face Linda with a quick sidestep. She threw out her words quickly. “My name is Patricia O’Neill. Your neighbor, Cindy Liu, is an old friend of mine.” She paused, seeming to consider how to go on. She looked frustrated. “I don’t know where to begin.” She paused again. Linda waited, keeping her face impassive. “This is really a long story. Let me cut to the important part. That was me in the cape. When you rescued the blonde girl, the one who seemed to be floating out of your arms?”

  Linda stared at the ordinary looking woman before her and thought about the mysterious figure in a black cape with lizard-like claws poking through the sleeves. It could be true. The woman shared height and build with the figure. She hadn’t been sure at the time if the person inside was male or female. Other than the person with taloned hands, who else would even have known she was there?

  Silently, Linda pushed the door open behind her and gestured for the woman to come in. The woman entered and stood uncertainly in the small entrance hall. Linda closed the door, turned the deadbolt, and pulled the side curtains closed. She pointed to the living room. “Please, sit down.” The woman glanced around the room and then picked the big brown chair by the door and sat perched forward, both feet on the floor like she might have to take action.

  Linda picked up the remote and turned off the television. She sat at the end of the couch nearest the woman and waited, tucking one foot up under her own bottom and leaning her face on her hand, elbow resting on the cushioned armrest. They sat in awkward silence for a few beats and then the lady blew out a big breath. “How should I begin?” she asked.

  “Let’s start with how you found me,” Linda suggested.

  “I just watched where you went when you left,” Patricia said. “My assistant looked you up based on your address. I know that this is the house of Linda and David Alvarez, and you’ve lived here for twenty-eight years. I assume you must be David?”

  Linda didn’t correct her. She didn’t like the idea that this woman had been looking up things about her and her family. She untangled her legs and put both feet on the floor, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, flexing her fingers and cracking the knuckles. “And what do you want with me?”

  “I want to know what you know. I think we might be of use to one another.”

  Linda looked into the other woman’s face for a good long while, searching her eyes for signs of trustworthiness. The woman met her gaze levelly, her ice blue eyes calm and focused. Linda was a great believer in the feeling you get from a person, the sense of whether they possess a good heart. What she once would have called her women’s intuition. She didn’t get a bad feeling from this woman. But she also didn’t get a good feeling. “You first,” she said.

  Over the next half hour, Linda listened as Patricia O’Neill laid out her concerns about Cindy Liu. They had been friends since college, it seemed. Cindy had always been brilliant, a ground-breaking researcher and inventor. She had won grants and awards. There had been an article about her last summer, detailing her work with bio-luminescent insects.

  Linda could hear in her voice how much Patricia admired and respected her friend. She could also hear how worried she sounded. “I just keep coming back to what she has done, and I can’t explain it. It’s not like her. I want to understand what could have driven her to act like this. I want to understand where you and that blonde come in.” It was stated as a command.

  Linda could easily picture Patricia seated upon a throne and issuing the decree. But there was also a note of panic there, and of sadness.

  Linda couldn’t quite sympathize. Cindy had always struck her as strange. She’d seen her many times over the years, whenever she came home to visit. Every time she was in town, her mother would go into a tizzy, wanting to make everything perfect for her demanding daughter. But Cindy didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t even remember Linda, whom she had met on multiple occasions when Linda stopped by with a casserole to offer her condolences when Cindy’s mother died. Linda liked to believe the best about people. She wanted to think anyone could be good. She just had her doubts Cindy would make that choice.

  Kidnapping didn’t seem so far-fetched to Linda. But Patricia had won her over. She was a hard woman, but her concern and need for help were genuine. Linda might not buy her theory of a Cindy in need of rescue, but she felt she could trust Patricia to try and do what was right.

  She stood. They’d been talking a long time. She stretched her arms over her head, cracking her back. When she turned back to her, Patricia was staring at her strangely. “Come on,” Linda said, walking toward the kitchen. “I want something to eat.”

  Patricia seemed a little hesitant, but she followed Linda and took a seat on one of the high stools by the window. Her legs still reached the floor easily. Linda turned around, pulled a blue glass pitcher from the refrigerator, and grabbed a plate of cookies from the counter. In the couple of minutes it had taken her to grab the snack, Patricia had pulled out a phone and seemed to be checking her e-mail.

  Linda ignored her rudeness and poured two cups of horchata, placing one in front of her guest, along with the plate. Without looking away from her phone, Patricia picked up a cookie and nibbled at the edges. Then she smiled and took a larger bite, setting the phone aside. “These are wonderful. Your wife must be an excellent cook.”

  Linda laughed, a short bark that almost sounded like a sneeze. Wife, indeed. “Thank you,” she said and sat opposite Patricia at the tall table, stirring her drink with the cinnamon stick, waiting for the woman to begin.

  When she didn’t, Linda stood and walked to the window, glass in hand. She reached up and idly tugged a small cobweb from the upper corner of the window and then washed her hands at the sink. “You should know that I think your Cind
y Liu is crazy, Patricia. She kidnapped my friend. And the things she makes…”

  “Are dangerous,” Patricia finished for her. “We’ve got to stop her.”

  Linda sat back down and leaned toward Patricia. “There’s no delicate way to ask this, so I’ll just be blunt. What has she done to you?”

  Patricia stood up and removed her suit jacket. She pointed at the large patches of what looked like extremely dry skin on her upper arms. Linda must not have looked impressed, so Patricia explained. “This is what it looks like when I’m calm. When I get upset or worked up, it’s worse. There are scales and spikes.”

  “When we ran into you on the porch, I thought I saw claws,” Linda said.

  Patricia nodded. “When I had skin troubles, I went to see her, and she gave me a cream. I think that cream is what did this to me.”

  Linda sipped her drink and sat thoughtfully and then got up and left the room. She came back with the soap, sloppily re-wrapped in its paper wrapper. “I bought this from Ms. Liu at the neighborhood farmer’s market.”

  Patricia picked it up and looked at it. “What did it do?” she asked.

  Linda turned red, suddenly embarrassed. Her answer was a mumble. “It made me into a man.”

  Patricia laughed. “What?”

  “It’s no joke.” Linda grabbed a picture off the refrigerator and flung it on the table between them. It showed a large family: two grandparents, three young couples, and five grandchildren, all grinning at the photographer. Linda gestured at the woman in the center, a forty-something woman with dark hair surrounding her face in gentle waves. “That’s me, a matter of weeks ago.”

  Patricia’s smile died on her face. She picked up the photo, looking back and forth between the woman’s face and Linda, sitting across from her. “Dear God. Cindy’s soap did that to you?”

  Linda nodded, replacing the photograph carefully and affixing it with small round magnets her favorite grandson had made for her.

  “And your friend? The one you rescued?”

  “She floats, like a balloon.”

  Patricia nodded. “That’s why you were having trouble holding her on the porch. Cindy kidnapped her?”

  Linda explained how Jessica had come to see Dr. Liu for help but had changed her mind and tried to leave, and then woke up inside some kind of glass tube in the basement. “We’ve told the police, at least about the kidnapping part. That was her rescue you walked in on.”

  Patricia pulled her feet up onto the rung at the bottom of the stool and peered out the window. She seemed to be trying to see Cindy’s house, but Linda knew it wasn’t visible from the kitchen window. “Do you think they’ll do anything?” Patricia asked, turning back for another cookie.

  Linda had her doubts. Police were not used to things like this, things that should be impossible. Women becoming men. People who float like balloons or become dragons. “They’ll check out the kidnapping, but I don’t know what they can do about the rest. Even proving it would be crazy. They’d laugh us out of the station.”

  Patricia set her glass down. “We need a plan. We’ll have to take care of this ourselves.”

  Both women pulled out their phones at the same time. “We can meet here,” Linda offered and then stepped out the room to make her calls from the living room.

  elen watched Cindy pace around the hotel room she had rented for them. The woman had hardly sat down since they arrived. Helen didn’t know what to do with her friend’s nervous energy. Wasn’t she tired? It had taken all the previous day to set up the truckload of stuff from Cindy’s lab in a storage unit, rented in Helen’s name since the police were likely looking for Cindy Liu.

  As soon as she was awake, a good two hours before Helen would have preferred to rise, Cindy had wakened Helen and rushed her back over to the storage unit so she could select the items she needed for the experiments this afternoon. Cindy had been a flurry of activity all afternoon, running back and forth between three stations she’d set up in the kitchen area like a hamster on a diet of espresso beans. Helen had clicked through channels, nursing her sore muscles, bored out of her mind. You would think hiding from the police would be more exciting.

  Still, progress was being made. Helen’s new fireproof clothes were hanging to dry in the shower. The counter was covered in powdered varieties of different things, roots and bones and stones. Cindy had tested them all afternoon, refusing to say anything about what she was looking for.

  For a while, Helen watched. It was all intriguing, but since Cindy wouldn’t talk about what she was doing, Helen didn’t really understand it. Plus, Cindy kept snapping her chewing gum, an adolescent habit Helen had always found particularly annoying.

  Helen had read magazines and played with her phone, tempted to leave, but also wanting to linger nearby in case something happened. She hated to admit it, but she didn’t really have anywhere else to go. They had effectively shuffled her out of this month’s rotation at the realty offices. Her daughter was probably at work, and if she went home to Mary’s apartment and found her there, Mary would want to talk about their feelings. Helen didn’t feel up to more of that.

  She was growing restless. She wanted to be able to do something. While the results of Cindy’s experiments were wondrous and exciting, the process was boring as shit.

  She thought some more about the situation. It seemed that Dr. Liu’s products had interesting effects on others, not just her. When she’d been able to get Cindy to talk over the past few days, she learned Jessica had been drinking a tea designed to help with depression. Cindy thought the floating response had something to do with the girl’s survival of cancer. Maybe her body chemistry was altered in a way that caused a unique reaction, or maybe it had to do with the parts of her body the western doctors had hacked out of her. Cindy had all but spat on the floor when she said “western doctors.” Helen was willing to bet there was a juicy story behind that attitude.

  Patricia, the lizard lady, had been using a cream developed for skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis. Cindy had used it on several test cases, but Patricia was the only one to respond so strangely. Helen wasn’t surprised Patricia would be the strange one. There was something off about that woman. She hoped she’d get the chance to do something about her for Cindy.

  Even her own condition was an anomaly. Other users had described the same tingling and cooling sensation, but no one else could turn the heat into actual fire. Cindy hadn’t yet identified what it was in Helen’s makeup that made her react so differently. She thought it might have something to do with the amount of the product Helen had been taking, or maybe it was Helen’s ability to visualize so powerfully. Helen figured she’d stock up on more Surge Protector just in case. She was enjoying her new-found powers and didn’t want to take the chance that they might go away.

  Helen wished they were still in Cindy’s lab. She would have liked to go back into the fireproof booth and try out what she could do. She had played around in the bathroom a little, but she had to be careful, so she didn’t set the hotel on fire. They didn’t need to call any attention to themselves. No one was looking for Helen yet, and they hadn’t figured out Cindy Liu looked more than a little youthful for her age, but a fire would definitely attract unwanted attention.

  Finally, Helen couldn’t take Cindy’s pacing anymore. She caught her arm before Cindy could start another loop. “Cindy! Stop it. Sit down.”

  Cindy scowled and threw herself onto the high backed stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchenette. She immediately began drumming her fingers on the countertop. She hadn’t been seated five minutes when she jumped out of her seat again and moved to the window. She yanked back the curtains with a ferocious energy.

  Helen blew out the small flames she had lit over each of her fingers and walked to look out the window with Cindy Liu. “Great view, huh?” she joked, gesturing out at the sea of SUVs filling the parking lot. Cindy grunted, crossing her arms over her narrow chest. Good grief. She was behaving like a teenager. At least there
was a nice sunset.

  Helen’s phone made a beeping sound, and she saw that her daughter had acknowledged her text about having a girl’s night out with some friends. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” read the response. Helen was glad to see the attempt at humor. Mary had been really frightened by Helen’s fire play in the backyard the other night.

  Even with Mary’s willingness to believe in impossible things, it had taken the rest of that night and the following morning to calm her down and convince her it would be okay. Helen was really enjoying her flames now. But she understood how strange it must have seemed to her daughter. It would take time to help her see how exciting it really was, being able to do something like this.

  She texted back. “Guess that leaves me a lot of leeway then. LOL. Good night.” She slid the phone into the pocket of her jeans and grabbed Cindy’s arm. “Let’s go somewhere. Your pacing is wearing me out. You hungry?”

  Cindy blew out a breath, pushing her hair straight upward out of her eyes. “Yeah, okay. Anything has got to be better than hanging out here with nothing to do.”

  Helen shook her head. Just like a teenager, frantic to bored in thirty seconds flat.

  A few minutes later, the pair was cruising downtown with the top down in the little red convertible Helen had rented. Cindy was pouting because Helen wouldn’t let her drive. “Hey, it’s not my fault the rental place didn’t believe you were twenty-five. Besides, you drive like a crazy person. You’d get us pulled over.” Helen turned the corner to an area with more restaurants. She hoped Cindy couldn’t see her smiling with her head turned away.

  It had been something else when Cindy had presented a driver’s license for a sixty-seven year old woman. The clerk had lectured her about basic common sense and told her if she was going to use a fake ID, she should at least get a believable one. She threatened to cut up the license and call the police right there, but Cindy snatched it back and ran away.