Brood

by Chase Novak

  “You don’t know shit,” Toby says, but without much conviction.

  “You sell your blood. That’s very foolish, you know. You can get in trouble.”

  “We’s already in a lot of trouble. Rodolfo says you can’t drown a fish.” Toby dries the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Those two you were giving a ride to today, Toby. The twins. Alice and Adam.”

  Toby looks at him blankly.

  “We’d like to work with them. They are of particular interest to us.”

  Toby shrugs, looks away.

  “It’s okay. We know where they are going. We’ll see what we can do to convince them to help us out.”

  “What you’s wanting?”

  “Everything, Toby. Everything. Bloodwork. DNA. Psychological testing. Anything that will give us the means to duplicate what makes you all so special. Fountain of youth? Maybe. Fertility? Well, that’s already been demonstrated. Whatever it is that you kids have in you—it makes testosterone look like a cup of weak tea.” He runs his fingers over the back of Toby’s hand.

  “No.”

  “For a boy with such a rich beard, you’re not very hairy elsewhere, are you,” Keswick says. “Your hands are smooth. Your arms—not too bad. How about your legs?” He reaches down, yanks the cuff of Toby’s pants, lifts it. Dark down covers the shin, not remarkably different from what you’d expect on a teenage boy. “Good! You may be very important to our research.”

  “Me’s feel like crap,” Toby manages to say. He reaches back, runs his hand over the top of a large bush behind the bench. His hand clenches, and he pulls several little leaves off the bush, each delicate one the size of a mouse ear. In an attempt to revive himself, he shakes his head vigorously and tries to stand up, but his legs refuse to cooperate. Everything within him—his blood, his breathing, his thoughts—seems to be going slower and slower and slower and slower. Except for his heart, which is pounding with fear, racing as if it wants to outrun and escape his failing body. “Hey, me’s needing some help here.” He takes hold of Keswick’s wrist.

  “Hang in there, son. Your ride’s here.” As Keswick says this, he gestures to a battered white van parked at the curb. By all appearances, it’s a van belonging to a plumbing contractor. It says Watertight Plumbing on the side, and there is a drawing of a faucet with a single drop of water leaking from it.

  Keswick hoists Toby up and half drags him to the back of the van. “We’re going to fix you right up, son,” he says. “You don’t have a thing to worry about.”

  Chapter 5

  Dinner. Cynthia was certain she could cook to the taste of any twelve-year-old, but cooking to the taste of a twelve-year-old who is certain that calories will trigger puberty, and puberty might be the beginning of some practically unimaginable beastliness—that’s a whole other matter. She prepares what she hopes is an irresistible meal for the twins in her new, astonishing kitchen—so spacious, so well stocked with everything and anything a semi-ambitious amateur cook could desire. First of all, her signature popovers, simultaneously buttery and light. Burgers grilled. Her own variation of macaroni and cheese, with an herbed bread-crumb crust. Fresh-made lemonade. Cookies from a nearby bakery—at thirty-five dollars a pound, they had better be legendary cookies!

  The twins sit uncertainly in front of their plates. Their napkins are on their laps. Their hair is brushed, their faces scrubbed, they look obedient, compliant, painfully well behaved. She wants to tell them, Relax! You’re home! But—as they say in the Rooms—one day at a time.

  “Dig in, kids,” she says. She hears the excess of gaiety in her voice and reminds herself to keep things light. To a child, all adult emotions are outsize. Adjusting what you project so as to be tolerable to a young psyche means bringing the intensity down several notches, like an actor going from the stage to the screen—what worked on Broadway seems like pulling faces and shouting at the multiplex.

  The twins put exceedingly modest amounts of food on their plates, leaving the platter of burgers untouched.

  “This is really good,” Adam says, taking a cautious nibble at one macaroni.

  “This looks like a hat,” Alice says, holding the popover.

  “Careful,” Cynthia says, “it might be hot.”

  Alice shrugs, as if nothing could be of less concern.

  “Are those meat?” Adam asks.

  “The ones on the left are regular hamburgers,” Cynthia says. “The ones on the right are chopped-up veggies. I heard you guys talking about maybe becoming vegetarian.”

  “Yeah, we might,” says Alice.

  “Animal rights,” calls out Adam, holding up his fist as if he were at a PETA demonstration.

  “I guess I should do that too,” Cynthia says. “How would that be? I have plenty of vegetarian recipes. San Francisco, where I used to live? A lot of people there don’t eat meat. It’s probably the wave of the future.”

  The twins look at each other uncertainly.

  “I guess that would be okay,” Adam says finally.

  “Do you look like our mother?” Alice asks, breaking the popover into pieces, letting them fall onto her plate.

  “She was a little younger,” Cynthia says. She has been preparing for quite some time for questions about Leslie, but suddenly, faced with the reality of the children and the nearly palpable sense that in each frail chest beats a severely broken heart, she is at a loss for what to say. “She was very pretty. You both have her looks.”

  “You’re pretty too,” Adam says.

  “Oh, everyone always said your mother was the one who got the looks. I was the studious one. But thank you, Adam. It’s very nice of you.”

  “So, do you?” asks Alice.

  “Look like Leslie? Oh, I suppose so. Similar height. Similar build. She had redder hair. And those eyes.”

  “What eyes?” There is a lightning strike of alarm in Alice’s voice. And it reminds Cynthia: the children’s most recent memories of Leslie’s eyes are probably terrifying—eyes blazing with animal hunger.

  “Emerald green, flecked with gold,” Cynthia softly says. How to change the subject? “Oh, kids, I almost forgot. I made lemonade. Fresh lemonade.”

  In the kitchen, Cynthia takes the pitcher of lemonade out of the Sub-Zero fridge. She sets it on the counter and takes a deep, steadying breath. The smallness of those children, their startling skinniness, their helplessness, their aloneness. Her own love for them is suddenly so bright a flame that it burns away even the pity, leaving only love’s purest ember.

  She gathers herself. They don’t need to see their new mother with weepy eyes and a red nose. Once upon a time, she would have suppressed this rush of emotion with a stiff drink, and now, as has been her habit for years, she thanks God for her sobriety. She is here. She is present and accounted for. She has embarked on the greatest journey of her life.

  When she walks back into the dining room, the twins’ chairs are empty. They must have left just a few seconds ago. She can hear their little footsteps scurrying up the stairs.

  Cynthia is in her bedroom, which used to be her sister and brother-in-law’s bedroom and which Cynthia initially had not wanted to make her own. But in this sixteen-room house of four levels, with a library, three parlors, a game room, and enough sleeping quarters to accommodate fourteen people, it is still the best bedroom, with plenty of sunlight in the daytime yet angled in such a way as to protect it from street noises at night—New York is not only the city that never sleeps but also, she has come to realize, the city that doesn’t want you to sleep either. It’s a city that would like you to keep it company during its endless insomnia. The master bedroom is an airy, spacious room, majestic, really, with a white marble fireplace, parqueted floor in a starburst pattern, and, the one modern touch, a huge, hedonistic bathroom with a steam shower, a Jacuzzi, heated towel racks, and full-length mirrors that must have broken Leslie’s heart to look in after those fertility treatments wrecked her once-beautiful body.

  Like
all old houses, the town house on East Sixty-Ninth Street speaks its language of thumps and twitters and creaks and squeaks, especially at night. It takes getting used to. If you let yourself get frightened by all the odd noises, you’d never have a moment of peace. It’s a little after eleven at night, and they’ve lived here for a week.

  A full moon sails over the spires of Manhattan, almost unreal in its brightness and perfection, and it seems to pause for a while to send its cold silver light through the slats of the shutters on Cynthia’s bedroom windows. Cynthia, wearing an old T-shirt and underpants, sits yogi-style in the middle of her bed, sipping from the tumbler of Saratoga water. She sips, swallows, and listens, wondering if the twins are sleeping. They had both been in foster homes where bedtimes were early and inflexible, and Cynthia had expected them to celebrate their homecoming and their new freedoms by staying up late and keeping to a helter-skelter schedule.

  But they seem creatures of habit, and as the grandfather clock in the second-floor parlor strikes ten each evening, they are already making their way up the stairs to the third floor. And how deeply they sleep! Every day, they sleep later. It seems the more comfortable they become, the more tired they are. They are like travelers who have been waiting to come home, yearning like sailors on a distant sea.

  And now they are home. To Cynthia’s surprise, they both insisted on sleeping in their old rooms—Cynthia would have guessed they would rather have slept on the porch or the roof than spend a night in rooms into which they’d once been locked (night after night after night) and from which they had once been forced to escape. But no, they wanted their old rooms back, and that’s where they are sleeping right now.

  She places her water glass on the bedside table and picks up her journal and her old Montblanc ballpoint.

  Three times in her life, Cynthia has kept a journal. The first was when she was ten years old and her father disappeared, never to return. She wrote in her diary for a few weeks, but she was so consumed by the worry that either her mother or her sister would find it and read it that she wrote the entire thing in code, and the code itself was so complicated that even she couldn’t really understand what she had written.

  The second time she kept a journal was many years later when Gary Ziltron, her boyfriend at the time and her partner in Gilty Pleasures, also disappeared. But whereas her father disappeared like a lost sock, Gary’s leaving was explosive. He left a crazy, mean-spirited letter that undermined her sobriety, said rude things about her body, and all but announced he had never loved her. On top of all that, he took about three-quarters of their cash on hand. The post-Gary journal lasted for nearly two years, and she credited her eventual recovery from the pain and the shame of Gary’s leaving her to all that stream-of-consciousness writing.

  Now, in New York, she has purchased a beautiful notebook at nearby Dempsey and Carroll, the navy-blue cover fashioned from heavy linen paper, each page faintly watermarked with the company’s logo. Her life right now is strange and thrilling to her, and lacking people with whom to discuss it, she has quickly come to find solace and even a weird form of friendship in her journal. Maybe I always wanted to be a mother, she writes, and then stops, smiles, remembering that in the seven days she has been writing her thoughts into this notebook, she has already written that sentence seven times. I always felt sorry for the mothers I knew. Always so preoccupied, so drained. Kids are like vampires; they suck the blood out of you. Or so I thought. But now in the silence of this beautiful house, savoring the late hours when my thoughts are my own, I can hardly wait to hear their footsteps, their voices. Tonight’s dinner was not a total success, but still, it was something, a first step. I know I can do this. I know we can get this right. I can hardly wait for morning to come when I can meet them in the hallway as they pad down the steps from their bedrooms on the third floor. I can hardly wait to ask, Anybody hungry? Who wants breakfast? I love them. I love them so much. It’s like a fever that you pray will never break.

  She turns the page.

  It’s amazing how well they’ve adjusted. All those days and nights apart, living in foster homes. However it affected them, they have buried it—at least for now. Mainly, they are delighted to be with each other. Sometimes I feel almost jealous—no one in all my life has loved me the way those two love each other. Need to read up on twins!

  I know they are thin—frightfully thin. But that’s going to change. And they look sort of great, to be honest. Like little models.

  I also need to take it slow. They are not going to bond with me overnight—no matter how much I would like that to happen.

  The project of getting them out of the house is still on the old to-do list. They will sit on the porch and watch the passing parade of people—which never stops, by the way. New Yorkers walk everywhere, and they are out and about day and night. But in terms of exercise for the kids and real fresh air (if there is any to be had in this city!)—forget it. I have tried to tempt them, offering to take them shopping or out to eat (yeah, right), but so far all they want is to hang out with each other in the house. Arthur Glassman mentioned a couple of times that I might want to keep them out of Central Park, but so far, it’s not an issue. My issue is how to keep their cute little behinds off the sofa and their lovely brown eyes from staring for hours at the TV, which I should never have bought in the first place. And would not ever have brought into our lives if I’d known what video junkies those two little angels were going to be. The only good thing about the TV is that they sometimes snack while they watch—if you can call cucumber slices in seltzer a snack. But who knows? Maybe it will lead to something with a lot of high-fructose corn syrup in it.

  At least they don’t watch violent shows. Mostly Cartoon Network and family sitcoms. They go for the real super-gentle high-sugar-content fare, the shows where the studio audience is always going Awwww when one of the kid characters says something adorable or a puppy pokes his little head out of a basket or someone learns a lesson and a hug-a-thon ensues.

  She hears a noise. It is something not in the house’s usual nightly vocabulary. This actually sounds as if someone is on the porch, trying the door. She lifts the pen off the page, holds it midair, listens with all her might.

  Silence.

  A distant rumble. Someone speeding down Lexington with a faulty muffler.

  She waits another moment, shakes her head.

  Tomorrow morning, Adam has therapy. Wednesday, Alice. They’ve been seeing therapists since Child Protective Services took over. And of course, of course. They should have that, they need it. Both their parents dead and everything else they’ve been through. Some of which I doubt I will ever know. But I worry about these shrinks and their theories and I most of all worry about how quick some of them are to put them on meds. I don’t want that. All those medications have side effects. Suicide, especially. Both their parents killed themselves, right? So why would any responsible doctor want to risk the twins’ safety like that? I don’t even know if most of those so-called wonder drugs work anyhow. I’m not sure they’re not mainly cash machines for huge pharmaceutical firms.

  This is where I put my foot down. I have that right. I get to decide. I am their mother.

  God, it feels so strange to write it.

  But it’s true.

  I am their mother.

  Dear God, please guide me. Please help me do the right thing.

  Again: that sound.

  It’s more disturbing the second time. Cynthia holds her breath, cranes her neck, tilts her head. It’s the door, the downstairs door.

  But why would it be?

  She goes to the window, unconcerned that she wears only a T-shirt. She lifts one of the slats of the interior shutters and peers through. But what makes the master bedroom the best room for sleeping also makes it the worst room for surveying the outside world. Her only view is the back of a few town houses on Seventieth Street—pastel blue and gray by day, black by night—and her own garden, lush now with wild grasses.

  She
tells herself that she is just nervous. She tells herself that the city’s million sounds are freaking her out. She tells herself that right now, the best thing to do is climb into bed, switch off the light, and have a long, delicious sleep.

  Except that her heart is pounding like a regiment of monkeys running in place.

  She makes her way across the bedroom and opens the heavy, twelve-foot-high oak door. The hallway is dark except for a star-shaped night-light plugged into an outlet halfway between her bedroom and the staircase. A breeze from somewhere touches her bare legs; the down on her thighs stiffens and rises.

  She wishes she had a weapon—not that she would know how to use it. As she reaches the top of the stairs—she waves her left arm in front of her, searching for obstacles, like a blind woman in unfamiliar surroundings—she remembers there are two heavy brass candlesticks on a delicate pine table flush with the wall under one of the few ancestral paintings that survived Alex and Leslie’s descent into penury. It’s of the paper-mill magnate Thomas Twisden, painted in 1887, when he was obviously in physical decline, a thin old man with wispy hair and a crooked smile who seems to be realizing in the foreverness of the portrait that all the money in the world would not save him from death.

  Cynthia fumbles in the dark for the candlestick. Nothing. Nothing. Then—she grasps it! She wraps her fingers around the dull coolness of its long neck, feeling the deadly weight of its heavy base.

  She walks slowly down the stairs toward the darkness of the first floor, which waits for her like a pool of black water. Houses are meant to shelter us from all the dangers of life—yet they can be so terrifying. What if what you hoped so ardently to lock out is exactly what you locked in? For a moment, the headlights of a passing car illuminate the end of a sofa, a lamp, and then all is darkness again.

  She reaches the bottom of the staircase, feels along the wall for the light switch. But no…she does not want to announce herself, and she does not want to be seen. There is a lovely Queen Anne single-drawer desk in the foyer where Cynthia stacks mail and upon which are two cups, one for pocket change, the other for her keys. In the drawer, along with a jumble of little objects for which she has yet to find a place, is a flashlight—she has lived most of her life in earthquake territory and knows that a house must have several flashlights. By feeling her way along the walls, she makes it to the foyer. She opens the drawer as quietly as she can and removes the flashlight. She carries the candlestick in one hand and the flashlight in the other, moving it up and down as she walks, like a priest with a fragrant, smoking censer.