by Chase Novak
The two men quickly push their cart away. It is filled with cut flowers, flats of smoked salmon, crackers, grapes, a bottle of olive oil.… Oh, life! thinks Leslie. The pleasures of life. Whatever happened to the pleasures of life?
A wave of grief buckles her knees. To regain her balance, she grabs hold of the nearest thing, which happens to be a clear-front riser holding a display of oranges. One falls, then another, and in moments dozens of them are bouncing and rolling down the aisle.
Rodolfo and a couple of the others have helped Bernard out of his bed. The effects of the Dilaudid have, for the most part, worn off, and now he is in the apartment’s front room, tapping away on his computer. The screen casts its watery glow on what there is of his face. The others wait silently, as if Bernard is cracking open a safe, inside of which is everything they have ever wanted.
Adam takes this opportunity to pull Alice into the kitchen, where he whispers urgently to her.
“We should get out of here.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Where do you think we should go?”
“I’m tired.”
“She’s going to come back soon.”
“She seems like she’s better,” Alice says.
“It’s mad dark. Maybe we should go.”
“There’s no place left to go, Adam. It’s night. Everyone is dead. This is it.”
“Someone.”
“Someone what?”
“I don’t know. Someone will take care of us. What are we going to do? Live in the park? Live here? There’s no way.”
“At least we’re together,” Alice says.
Adam nods. He takes his sister’s hand, squeezes it. It’s like touching a part of himself, another version of himself that has stepped out of a dream. But she’s no dream. She is the most real thing, the thing he cannot live without.
“Hey, Alice, come in here,” Rodolfo shouts from the front room. “Check it out, check it out.” His arms are stretched in front of him, and both of his pointer fingers are aimed at Alice. When her eyes meet his, he snaps his fingers, flicks his pelvis, smiles.
A freezing rain is pelting the city, and when Leslie and Amelie come in with the groceries, they are virtually soaked.
“Mom!” both Adam and Alice call out as soon as they see her.
“Come here,” Adam says. “You gotta look at this.”
Leslie stands behind Bernard, who has brought a video up on his screen. It is Dr. Kis, sitting at a desk, a window full of sunlight behind him.
“Oh my God,” Leslie says.
Tentatively, she touches the back of the hoodie that covers Bernard’s head. Son, she thinks.
The gesture is not lost on Adam or Alice. To see this moment’s tenderness in their mother reminds them of the love she has shown them, the love they feel, but most of all it fills them with hope. Where does hope come from when it miraculously appears; where does it go when it vanishes? No X-ray, MRI, or CAT scan can locate the wellspring of hope, yet it has been there during every moment of endurance and every triumph, and now that the twins feel it they realize how long they have lived without it, just as you can understand how much pain you have been in only once the agony stops.
Bernard presses the Play arrow, and Kis begins to speak.
“As some of you know, I have been offering fertility treatments for nearly fifteen years. People, many hundreds of them, have come to me, so many without hope. I have not been able to give each and every client a child, but my success rate is unprecedented in modern fertility medicine. There have been articles in Paris Match in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, OK! in Russia, Town & Country magazine in the United States, and of course numerous medical journals. There is no question, no question whatsoever, so make no mistake, my friends, I am, in all due modestment, the leading fertility physician in Europe, and the world.
“Have there been errors? Of course there have. Have some been… unfortunate? Yes, without question…”
“He can make it go away,” Adam blurts out, unable to stand there in silence while Leslie, her mouth half open, her eyes pinned to the screen, watches and listens as the distant doctor justifies and apologizes for what he has done.
“Mom,” Alice says. “Mom…” Her legs feel as if they are made of lead. Her stomach aches, her eyes burn. She knows she is crying now, and it is sort of embarrassing, but it’s not too bad. She feels a comforting hand on her shoulder—Rodolfo! “Mom? Mom?”
“Oh, baby,” Leslie says, gathering in her daughter and her son. “I am so so so sorry…”
The news stations are filled with reports of the bizarre killing in Central Park, of the murderer who rushed insanely into the traffic on Fifth Avenue, where he was executed by the M1 bus. The story first appears on local news, though the national cable stations are quick to pick it up, and the major networks are unable to resist it. For the newscasters, the story is a gift that keeps on giving. With one of the dead men a once prominent New York attorney and the other a beloved teacher in a prestigious and pricey Upper East Side private school who was also the teacher of one of the alleged murderer’s children, the story creates a kind of porn loop for TV and the Internet. There is a town house, graceful, frightfully expensive, just a touch dishabille. There is the heavyset neighbor rambling on about children climbing out of windows. There is the soaring facade of the publishing company where the mother used to work. There is the plain glass box where Alex Twisden turned the law into a lasso to rope in money for his clients. There is the Gothic facade of Berryman Prep. There is the beautiful office of the headmaster. There are the puzzled faces of the kids in the dead teacher’s classes—they look like shell-shocked models in a very sad Ralph Lauren ad.
Meanwhile, Cynthia remains in the precinct’s lockup. She has finally made it clear to the officer in charge of her that she does not live in New York, that she had nothing to do with the poor soul locked in that cellar, that she is, in fact, the person who called the police in the first place. As far as she can tell, they have finally gotten the story more or less straight. Yet she remains in custody, and the only reason for this is that it takes a bit of effort to release her, though it may also be the case that they mistakenly believe she knows where Leslie and the children are and that they think if she has to relieve herself one more time in front of another person, she will break down and tell them.
The next afternoon, Leslie, Adam, and Alice are at Newark International Airport, waiting for their flight to Munich, Germany, to be announced—it is already half an hour late, and every moment they are still in the United States, their fragile plan threatens to collapse. No one can glance in their direction without Leslie feeling a violent lurch in her stomach. Are she and her children being looked for? Is she a person of interest in whatever investigation is taking place into the deaths of Alex and Michael Medoff? Have her children been reported missing? Abducted?
She takes one of the sedatives Amelie gave her, swallows it down without water.
Following Amelie’s advice, last night Leslie gave the keys to her house to Rodolfo. His mission was to get her purse with her wallet and her credit cards, which, as best she could remember, was sitting in the kitchen. Next, he was to get the passports, though she wasn’t entirely sure where they were. Her best guess was that they were in a desk drawer in the third door to the left (or maybe it was the right—she has become muddled over the difference between the two) on the second floor, which Alex had been using as a kind of home office. In the bedroom, in the night table, was an envelope with several diamonds in it, seven or eight, maybe more, she wasn’t sure. They had been pried from various pieces of jewelry, some heirlooms, some more recently purchased, and she and Alex had been selling the diamonds to a Colombian dealer who had a little booth in a jewelry mart on Forty-Seventh Street. Kis was certainly going to want money, and these diamonds were going to have to suffice.
But the most important thing was this: If Rodolfo had the slightest inkling that the house was under surveillance, he was to
simply walk by and not make any attempt to get in. If he was to get picked up by the police… It was unbearable to even contemplate the ruination that would follow. Rodolfo chose one other of the wild children, Dylan Shapiro, to accompany him, and before he left he took Alice’s hand and kissed it, a gesture that he seemed to have learned from a movie about medieval knights risking all for the good of a lady.
As it happened, it took Rodolfo a full three hours to come back with the triple holy grail of Leslie’s credit cards, the envelope with the diamonds, and their passports. He was exhausted, unusually dirty, and he was without Dylan, who he said was hanging out near Bethesda Fountain. When Amelie asked him what had taken so long, he was evasive. Alice noticed there were little gleaming needles of broken glass on his jacket, and she guessed that he had not entered her house through the front door at all, and that even though he had come back with what they needed, it had not gone smoothly or well. When she questioned him with her eyes, he didn’t even try to be subtle when he looked away.
That night, no one except Bernard slept. Amelie watched Leslie as she took her Xanax. She was aware that all of the wild children and Amelie, too, wanted to keep an eye on her. For her to tell them that all she felt was crushing sadness and an exhaustion that seemed like a kind of fatal flu and that she was of no more danger to her children or to anyone else than a shadow on the wall would not have put anyone’s mind to rest, and so Leslie simply submitted to the indignity of being watched as the night plunged into its darkest hours and then slowly gave way to a weak, drizzling dawn. The twins alternated between playing their video game and sitting next to each other hand in hand, snuffling miserably over all that they had seen, all they had lost.
At one point—Leslie was afraid to look at a clock; knowing the exact time would only lead her to misery—Bernard joined the general wakefulness, and the next thing Leslie knew his chair was next to her. His computer was closed and he laid a plastic hand on its shell. She glanced at him, managed a weak smile, looked away; she had never seen anything quite like him. The genetic misfortune of him was overwhelming.
“Are you really my mom?” he rasped to her through his little hyphen of a mouth.
She shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said to him. But after a few moments of silence, she added, “I guess so.”
Leslie, Adam, and Alice sit in a row of chairs in the departures lounge at Newark, exhausted and silent. Adam takes Alice’s hand. Her eyes are half closed; she seems to be looking at the strips of light on the ceiling, almost as if she were in a trance. Yet at the feel of his touch, her hand closes around Adam’s. She is remembering this: When they left Amelie’s tenement apartment house this afternoon, someone (it was just as she had once dreamed it) opened the window—of course it was Rodolfo, it had to be—and shouted out, “Hey hey hey, I love you. See you when you get back! Okay?”
“Remember when I told you about my dream?” she says to Adam.
“Shh,” he says, and indicates with a slight gesture that someone is looking at them.
And someone is. A tall man in his fifties with a reddish face and unruly eyebrows. He cocks his head, like a dog trying to pinpoint the source of a noise.
“Mom?” Adam says.
Leslie looks up at the man and feels a twist of dread, sharp enough to cut through the haze of sedation. He looks like Richard Zolitor, the head of sales at her old publishing house. Has he heard what happened to her husband, does he know that she is missing along with the children, is he putting it all together now that he sees them?
But it turns out that the man’s inquisitive gaze has nothing to do with them at all. He is merely looking for the nearest men’s room, and now he sees the sign and hurries toward it.
Leslie glances up at the departures board—it’s odd to be waiting out here with the majority of the other travelers, in their dastaars and fedoras and yarmulkes and bad perms, not sequestered comfortably in some first-class lounge. She sees that several flights have been canceled. Right now, she asks so little of fate that it makes her feel a little less doomed and, in fact, vaguely fortunate that their flight to Munich is posted as only delayed.
She is ravenously hungry, and there is not an ounce of meat cooking in this entire airport, on a grill, on a stove, in a pot, or in a microwave, that she does not smell with the utmost intensity and avidity. Yet she is worried that any display of appetite will frighten her children. And even as Leslie is pulled emotionally in two directions—a deep, punishing sorrow over the loss of her mate and best friend, and a wild hope that soon she will be released from the biological prison that Dr. Kis condemned her to—the main thing she feels now is a fierce protectiveness toward her beautiful children.
She has always loved them, but sitting there in the departures lounge at Newark International Airport, bound to them by the chains of sorrow and fear, she never felt more attached than she does right now. What will happen to them once they find Dr. Kis and go through whatever it is he will require them to take or do or have done to them to reverse the mutation his treatment triggered—all that remains unknown. Maybe it will never be safe for them to come home to America—what is left of her money, the town house, her sister: all could be lost. Maybe they will have to live like fugitives, maybe in the forest somewhere.… No: that’s crazy. She shakes her head hard, as if to rearrange her thoughts.
“Hey, guys, stay right here, okay?” Leslie says. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
They look worried, but they make no objection, and Leslie, suddenly overcome with a need to relieve herself, hurries toward the ladies’ room.
“What if she doesn’t come back,” Alice whispers to her brother.
“She will.”
Alice opens her passport and looks at the little photo inside. It was taken three years ago, when they almost went to Mexico for a winter vacation but didn’t. Her hair is parted in the middle and her eyes are open so wide they almost look like circles. She has the jack-o’-lantern smile of a seven-year-old. Above all, she looks happy, and the sight of her own once-upon-a-time grin fills Alice with melancholy. She closes her passport but keeps it in front of her, holding it fast, not letting it out of her sight.
“Seven hours to Munich,” Adam says, nodding sagely, as if knowledge of flight times was part of being a male.
“We can sleep.”
“From there it’s about an hour to…”
“Lufthansa.”
“No. That’s an airline. Lub… Lub something.”
“We can never go back to school again,” Alice says.
“I don’t even want to.”
“You knew him better than me.”
“He was my friend,” says Adam, in a voice so small that Alice isn’t quite sure if he’s spoken or if she just knows what he is thinking.
Leslie sits in one of the stalls, her elbows propped on her thighs, her face buried in the warmth of her hands, trying not to make noise as she cries. She feels her tears oozing through her fingers. She sees it all, over and over and over again: the teacher flying through the air, the look on his face as he waited for death, Alex panting, a shimmer of drool hanging from his open mouth, the frantic dash toward Fifth Avenue…
For a moment, she forgets where she is.
For a moment, she forgets her own name.
But all that comes back, though she half wishes it would not. For the first time in her life she thinks she could possibly one day do it: kill herself.
There is a sharp, inquisitive rap against the stall door. She is too frightened to speak.
“Are you okay in there?” a voice asks.
Leslie is not able to answer. She holds her breath, wills herself to complete silence.
Whoever it is out there tries the door. The tongue of the lock rattles in its groove.
“Hello?” the voice says. “Are you quite all right? Would you like me to call someone?”
An elderly woman, by the waver of her voice. With an accent, a princess-type accent. No, that’s not what i
t’s called. What are those kinds of accents called? English. English. An English accent. Come on, Leslie, get it together. She gets up; the toilet flushes automatically. She looks at her upper legs as she pulls her pants up. Without Alex there to love her and to tell her she is beautiful, there is no one and nothing between her and the disgust she feels for her body.
“I’m almost out of here,” she calls through the closed metal door to the stall. She looks down to make sure nothing of her body might be showing through the gap between the door and the floor.
Suddenly, Leslie hears a great commotion. It begins with a scream, followed by another scream, this one even louder, and following that someone shouts, “Oh, for God’s sake, that is so gross.” There is a scuffling of feet, the sound of valises on their wheels quickly being rolled out of there, and then silence.
When Leslie leaves the stall, however, the bathroom has been deserted. No one is at the sinks; the other stalls are empty, their doors wide open. Someone has left a little plaid suitcase. Where has everybody gone? Looking left and right, moving with caution, Leslie makes her way toward the sinks. And now she sees what has emptied the ladies’ room: a rat, at least five inches long, and an alpha rat to judge by its bulk, with long whiskers and a tail the color of wet putty.
The rat makes a run for it—the small opening in the wall from which it emerged is behind Leslie, but she is too quick for the dashing rodent. Without meaning to, without really knowing what she is doing, Leslie stops the rat in its tracks by stomping on the end of its tail. As it turns around to sink its teeth into her foot, she crushes its spine with her other foot. It twitches once or twice; a dark delicate ribbon of blood unfurls from its mouth.
She stands there, swallows, takes a deep breath. What she would really like to do is pop that thing right into her mouth and eat it in big greedy bites. But as famished as she is, she must resist. If she goes back to the kids reeking of rat, it will destroy whatever trust they have in her… She kicks the rat’s body under one of the sinks and washes her hands, her face. As she pulls paper towels out to dry herself, a couple of women maintenance workers come in, one pulling a mop and bucket, the other holding a flashlight.