Brood

by Chase Novak

  “We’re okay,” Cynthia answers. “Right, kids? Are you cool enough?” She worries they might be cold, without any fat on their bodies to insulate them. She feels enormous next to them, filled with hundreds of rich meals, oceans of tortellini and crème brûlée.

  A thought presents itself: What if she were still drinking? Her breath catches for a moment. She closes her eyes and thanks the Higher Power for her sobriety.

  “Hey,” she says to the twins. “I have a little present for you, no big deal.” She’d been counseled by friends and books that kids recoil if they think you’re making a big deal out of something. She opens her purse and takes out two wristwatches. As soon as she touches them, however, she thinks she has made a mistake. They are ridiculously gender-specific: an American Girl watch for Alice, a Swiss Army watch for Adam.

  She decides to let them choose which watch they want—both will fit their slender wrists.

  “Funny,” Adam says, choosing the American Girl.

  “Alpine,” says Alice, choosing the Swiss Army.

  “I know kids don’t really use watches anymore,” Cynthia says. “What with phones and all.”

  “No, this is amazing,” Adam says, strapping on the green-and-yellow watch with its face splashed with stars and daisies.

  Cynthia also read that amazing is what kids say now instead of cool. Things are clicking into place; this might not be as difficult as she was afraid it would be. Afraid? Forget it. Try petrified. Try sick with dread and uncertainty. Try hourly confrontations with her own inexperience. Becoming a parent at her age is like suddenly moving lock, stock, and barrel to a new country, knowing only a few rudimentary phrases of the language.

  “More AC?” the driver asks. His voice is foggy, strange, off. It occurs to Cynthia that he might be transgendered. What a brave new world!

  “We’re fine back here,” she says.

  She glances down at her hands and notices they are shaking. As much as she has looked forward to having custody of her sister’s children, she feels right now that the whole thing has been sprung on her as a huge surprise. No amount of thinking and wishing and planning has prepared her for this sudden and overwhelming sense she has that two helpless children have been entrusted to her. They have been through hell, and now Cynthia must remind herself that she has within her the power to restore them to some semblance of the carefree happiness and safety that she believes to be the birthright of every child.

  After accepting her gifts, they are paying no attention to her whatsoever. They are holding hands and gazing at each other. Their silent, cellular communication has not lessened in the many months they have been apart. Cynthia feels a small pang of exclusion, but mainly she is happy they have reconnected. Overjoyed, really. Overjoyed. No one will ever understand Alice the way Adam does, and no one will understand Adam like Alice, and thank God they are back together. May they never be separated again!

  “Did you have sisters where you were?” Alice asks Adam.

  “I guess. They had two girls, two boys, and me.”

  “Were they nice?”

  “The last ones? Which ones do you mean? I had four different families.”

  “Yeah. The last ones.”

  “They were pretty old. They worried a lot about money. You had to choose if you wanted one of the heated rooms or a real lunch.”

  “I bet you took the heated room,” Alice says.

  “Definitely!”

  “Eating’s weird.”

  “My Staten Island family served goose on Christmas Day,” Adam says.

  “Ick. Let’s be vegetarian.”

  “Okay,” Adam says. “How many calories do you do?”

  Alice frowns, looks away. “So I guess you’re all mature and everything now, right?” she murmurs.

  “No way!” Adam says, as if it were a matter of honor.

  And then, after a few moments of silence, Alice says, “Did you do okay in school?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  The ringtone on Cynthia’s phone is chapel bells, and they are chiming now in her purse. She glances at the screen: Arthur Glassman.

  “Hello, Arthur,” she says.

  “Where are you?” he asks. He sounds furious.

  “In the car. Thank you for arranging it for us.” She sees the driver’s eyes glancing back at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Your car is here, Cynthia. Waiting for you.”

  Chug-chug. The driver uses his controls to lock the doors.

  Chapter 2

  In a long, narrow apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, Ezra Blackstone and his sixth wife, Annabelle Davies, are fighting over air-conditioning. Ezra is seventy-one years old and has circulation problems and feels clammy and cold even on a hot day like this. Annabelle is twenty-eight; she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life in Monroe, Louisiana, and then, as she frequently says, she “came north to get out of the fucking heat.” They’d had a rather nice courtship, particularly refreshing to Annabelle, who’d come to believe that gallantry, seduction, roses, and romance were a thing of the past. The touch of her young flesh, the lemon-and-spearmint tang of her kisses, were like a time machine to Ezra, restoring him to a youthful vigor. But the rituals of courtship soon gave way to dailiness, and the excitement of her young flesh soon stopped working its decade-dissolving magic on Ezra. Since marrying five months ago, they have fallen into squabbling about any number of things, including where to eat, which candleholders to use, how to get to Amagansett, how much to pay their housekeeper, and whose turn it was to feed the piranha. But today’s confrontation over whether or not to air-condition their apartment is one of the most bitter fights they’ve had in weeks—well, if not weeks, then at least days. Or, at the very least, the worst fight they’ve had today. So far.

  For now, peace has been restored. The air-conditioning remains off, but the windows overlooking the park are wide open, letting in a soft summer breeze, barely strong enough to stir the gauzy white curtains.

  Their nerves are unusually taut because they are expecting the doorman to ring them any minute to announce a visitor, a young boy named Boy-Boy. Boy-Boy did not give—and perhaps does not even have!—a last name. He was that kind of visitor. Ezra’s connection to Boy-Boy is through Bill Parkhurst, who worked for Ezra back in the day, when Ezra was producing three daytime game shows, one on each of the major networks. Bill had been a loyal lieutenant but was, in Ezra’s view, weak of character, always chasing after the newest revolutionary therapy, the most enlightened guru, the next can’t-miss self-help regimen and, even as a young man, consuming a fistful of vitamins and supplements with every meal. And drugs too, of course, he had a contemptible weakness for drugs and the attendant softheaded beliefs—peace through pot, enlightenment through LSD, ecstasy through Ecstasy. Bill’s latest enthusiasm is something called Zoom, a drug so new to the New York underground that it is not even illegal.

  “A few years ago,” Bill had explained to Ezra during lunch at the Carnegie Deli, peering over a pastrami sandwich that was nearly as tall as he was, “a few very desperate people went over to some cockamamie place in Europe for fertility treatments.”

  “I remember,” Ezra said. “I remember the story well. Don’t tell me you’re taking that.”

  “No, no. Some of those people went crazy, and I think a few of them died. I like shtupping, but I’m not meshuga.” Bill had been raised in a bleak wintry village in New Hampshire by a Congregationalist minister and a descendant of Betsy Ross, but someone had told him when he was starting off in the entertainment business that it would be helpful to his career if he sprinkled a few Yiddish words into his conversation, and though there was no reason to believe the advice had any value, he had taken it to heart anyhow, and now it was an integral part of who he was.

  Bill took a modest bite out of his sandwich and chewed in silence twenty-six times before swallowing.

  “It’s their kids, they carry just enough of whatever that doctor gave those poor
schmucks. It’s in their blood, you know? Just a bissel. But the kids are supercharged. And a few drops of their blood? Whew. It’s like havah nagilah, and then have another nagilah.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Bill? Children’s blood?”

  “Hey, they’re not such children. They’re a lot bigger than me. Some of them have beards. I mean, come on. And believe me, they’re doing very well for themselves. They may be a bunch of shmendriks living who knows where, but they are first-class hondlers.”

  Ezra felt Bill’s eager little hand touching his leg under the table. Knowing the drill, Ezra put his hand under the table and accepted what Bill had brought—it felt smooth and cool when Ezra closed his hand around it.

  “What did you just give me,” Ezra murmured.

  “A vial of blood. You just drink it.”

  “Yeah? And get ass AIDS? What the fuck, Bill? Really, man. What the fuck.”

  “Best shtupping I’ve had since Haifa,” Bill said, referencing, as he so often did, a trip he made to Israel in 1973.

  The elderly Korean waiter approached their table, limping badly. “You want I should wrap that up for you, maybe have it for a nosh later on?” he said, indicating the elderly men’s half-eaten lunches.

  Later that week, Ezra was worried and bored enough to try the elixir Bill had given him, and, just as promised, he made love to his wife that night for the first time in weeks. It was not the best sex he had ever ever had, but it was without question the most pleasure he’d felt in months. And there was something wonderfully…ferocious about it too. He wasn’t shy about sharing with Annabelle the source of his vigor, and she agreed with him that it might be even more fun if she took some too. (She didn’t want to make waves and fully intended to stay married to Ezra until he died, but her body felt sluggish and thick with sexual boredom, so if there was something that could get her hobbled hubby humping away like a sailor on leave, she had every intention of getting in on the action.)

  The delivery is due at ten, and, right on time, the doorman calls up and says, “There is a Mr. Boy-Boy to see you, Mr. Blackstone.”

  A couple of minutes later—Ezra and Annabelle are on the nineteenth floor—there is a startling boom-boom-boom cop-like knock at the door. Ezra is the one who goes to answer. He carries an envelope with three hundred dollars in twenties in it. He’s already been told the cost is two hundred and fifty dollars, but his plan is to treat the kid right and maybe become a favorite customer, just as he used to regularly tuck a twenty into the headwaiter’s tunic at the old Russian Tea Room. Back in the day.

  Ezra opens the door to Boy-Boy. He is younger than Ezra had expected. Fifteen? Sixteen, tops. Dark luxurious eyebrows, with another set of eyebrows tattooed over them. He has hair down to his shoulders, a wide mouth, a small nose, green eyes, and the air of a wild boy living without protectors or rules. He wears blue jeans and a dirty T-shirt and carries a backpack with decals of flags of all nations plastered over it.

  “Ah, you must be Boy-Boy,” Ezra says. He gestures the boy in and closes the door behind him.

  Boy-Boy walks through the apartment’s long hall, and Ezra must hurry to keep up. Now they are in the living room, where Annabelle sits on the sofa fanning herself with a copy of Vogue. Boy-Boy looks appraisingly at Annabelle and then back at Ezra. “Don’t yous two worry. Everything’s going to be money. Dr. Boy-Boy is here.”

  He sits and wriggles free of his backpack, which he then places on his bony lap. He opens the backpack and takes from it a small vial of blood, so dark it looks almost black.

  “Weird color,” Ezra says.

  “You’s want it or you’s not?” Boy-Boy puts his hand out, waiting for the envelope.

  “I want it, but I want it to work.”

  “It’s going to work. All me’s customers come through other customers. Folks ain’t money, me’s fucked.” He holds the vial up, cocks his head. “You don’t like the way it tastes, put it in a soup or something. Little garlic, maybe some red pepper flakes. Some of me’s customers use cilantro. Drink some water. You should be hydrating anyhow. Peeps don’t drink enough water. Wait maybe fifteen minutes and you’s money.”

  Ezra feigns a toss of the envelope but holds on to it. “I’ve got a question.”

  Boy-Boy looks at Annabelle. “Your old man always like this?”

  “Always.”

  “How does this even work?” Ezra asks. “And why?”

  “First of all, it’s none of your fucking business,” Boy-Boy says, his voice oddly reasonable. His smile is fierce, a bright white knife. “You want it, here it is. You don’t—me’s taking your little envelope anyhow because me’s came all the way over here and Boy-Boy don’t do nothing for nothing.”

  Annabelle has seen more violence in her life than Ezra has, and she thinks of him, despite his age, as naive. She cautions him, using one of Ezra’s stock phrases. “Moving right along now, Ezra. Moving right along.”

  “I heard it was a lot better if it was fresh,” Ezra said, his voice a sneer. “What do you say you draw the blood right here, right in front of us? Word on the street is that’s the way to go.”

  Boy-Boy shakes his head. “Word on the street? Listen, old man, you don’t know shit about anything that goes on in the streets of this city. Word on the street. You’s got to be out of you’s mind.” He stands up, wriggles his backpack on again. “You’s want what I got? Want to do the wicked dance? You’s want to make this lady forget she married some dude with one foot in the grave?”

  “Listen here, you little punk—”

  Boy-Boy turns his gaze toward Ezra with the suddenness of an animal in the wild. There is no expression at all on his face except total absorption. His eyes are without emotion. They are only for seeing. And seeing and seeing.

  In a heartbeat, he pounces on Ezra and runs him back toward the open windows.

  Do it, Annabelle thinks, though at the same time she has never felt such terror in all her life. She hears her own screams as if they were coming from another room.

  Ezra is not a small man, but he can offer no resistance to Boy-Boy. Boy-Boy scoots him across the living room as if the old man weighed no more than a pillow. The next thing Ezra knows, he is half out the window. The upside-down world, with its taxicabs honking and nannies pushing strollers and a dog walker with eight dogs straining at their leashes, looks so distant and so sad…

  A few moments later, the crazy kid pulls him back into the apartment, sets him on his feet, straightens his clothes, and dusts him off, like some valet from hell.

  “We’s good?” Boy-Boy asks.

  “Yeah, yeah, we’re good.” Ezra is still holding the envelope, and he hands it to Boy-Boy, wishing there weren’t an extra fifty in there.

  Boy-Boy winks at Annabelle. “Have fun,” he says, and he tosses the vial of blood to her.

  Just like back home, where nothing was ever simply passed. Her brothers used to toss everything, from saltshakers to car keys to hammers. She snatches the vial out of the air and closes her hot little hand around it.

  Chapter 3

  Stopping the car in the middle of Center Street, impervious to the honks and furious shouts his blocking traffic has caused, the driver reaches into the back of the car and wrests Cynthia’s cell phone from her. His beard is bright with perspiration. A thick aroma of sweat and anxiety comes off him like heat off a highway.

  Cynthia gathers the twins close to her. They neither resist nor welcome her touch.

  “Who are you?”

  “Friends of Alice and Adam sent me. Me’s not hurting anyone and we’s not doing anything wrong.” It’s clear now: he is no more than sixteen years old.

  “What’s your name?” Alice asks. Her voice is steady, soothing.

  “Toby,” the boy says. “Toby’s a money name, yeah? You like that name?” He starts to drive again. New York is filled with people who don’t want to go where they are going but who are also frantic to get there. His finally moving the Town Car and freeing the f
rozen traffic seems to do nothing to soothe the furious drivers who have been honking and cursing at him and who continue to do so. “Going to take you to us’s place. People are waiting for you.”

  The twins exchange worried looks.

  “You’re going to take us home, Toby,” Cynthia says. “And if you don’t, you’re going to get in more trouble than you’ll know what to do with.”

  “Fuck you, lady. Okay? You’s in Toby’s car, and you’s on Toby’s ticktock. And this poor creature named me will fuck yous up.” He suddenly pulls into a bus stop, then turns around, glowering. “This being none of your business,” he says.

  “Where you taking us, Toby?” Alice asks in a calm, friendly voice.

  “Rodolfo is waiting for you,” Toby says. “You and you can live with us. We’s got a sick place way up on Riverside, yous won’t believe it. Bedrooms and bathtubs and all the foods we’s want. We’s kind of rich now, we’s in business.”

  “Sounds great,” Alice says. “What do you think, Adam?”

  “Rodolfo,” Adam says. “He always liked you.”

  “Oh yeah,” Toby says with a laugh. “Big-time.”

  “What about the lady?” Alice asks. “We don’t even know her.” She touches Toby’s shoulder with her fingertip. “She’s like our aunt or something.”

  “Yeah, let’s dump her,” Adam says. “Put her out right here.”

  “So how is old Rodolfo anyhow?” Alice asks. Just saying his name gives her a strange feeling. Of all the wild children she knew when she was running from her parents, Rodolfo was the one she liked the best. The last time she’d seen him, he was leaning out of a window and saying, “I love you.” To her. To her!

  “Rodolfo is king,” Toby says. “He runs the whole bidness, capiche? Back in the day, we’s all crashing here and there and we’s sleeping in the park and shit, but now we’s all carrying a knot of fifties and hunnerts and living in a bee-you-tiful place, wait till you see it. We’s making some mad money.” He pulls out of the bus stop, merges with the traffic.