by Chase Novak
At last, the newscasters’ faces fill the screen. Cynthia has an impulse to turn off the TV, but she forces herself to watch. Film of two bodies, both on the small side, covered with Mylar sheets. The whirling red and blue lights of several emergency vehicles flicker in the leaves of the abundant trees. Yards of yellow tape isolate the crime scene; hundreds of people who look as if there is no place else in the whole world they’d rather be stand off to the side, watching the bodies being taken away.
Who are these people? she wonders. Who are these people standing and watching?
And yet, she is one of them. She is staring at the TV screen, waiting for the unlikely moment when one of the blankets will fall to the side and reveal who is beneath it—or show a hand, a shoe, anything…
The on-site reporter, a young, cooperative-looking man in his late twenties wearing a striped seersucker jacket over a white T-shirt, is speaking into the camera in a rather droll, laconic voice. “Right now, Tina and Doug, police are not releasing any details about the two victims, awaiting positive identification.”
“Is there anything we know so far about them, Rafael?” Doug asks in some vague approximation of actual conversation.
“Well, my sources tell me the victims appear to be somewhere between fourteen and sixteen years old. They were carrying no identification. Interestingly, they had quite a bit of money on them.”
Money? thinks Cynthia. She latches on to the oddity of this—it gives her hope.
“Both young men were well-dressed, and right now no cause of death has been given,” Rafael continues.
Young men? Without realizing she was doing so, Cynthia had lowered herself into a kind of crouch in front of the TV, and with this last bit of news—both victims male—she falls forward onto her hands and knees, drops her head, and simply stares at her hands and the pattern on the Persian carpet.
The reporter is still talking, but Cynthia is no longer taking it in. All she knows is this: both victims were male. Which rules out Adam and Alice. And besides that: Who could see them and mistake them for sixteen-year-olds? More likely to mistake them for ten-year-olds. And they had no money on them, at least none to speak of. She feels crazy and horribly tainted—to be so elated that the dead children are not her own. A sin, certainly. And as a longtime citizen of San Francisco, she believes that the laws of karma will one day have their way with her.
“Thanks, Raf. Try and stay cool out there,” Tina says.
Cynthia switches off the set and paces the room. She is momentarily overjoyed. She wants to tell someone the wonderful news: the corpses found in Central Park are not the twins! Yes, it’s come to that: Slain children not her own qualify as good news.
She goes to the window and looks out, expecting to see them. But they are not there. She returns to the sofa, sits, rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. Is there really nothing she can do to bring these children home? No call to make, no favorite place to look, no one to help her? Hillary Clinton used to say it took a village to raise a child, but right now, Cynthia would settle for a barbershop quartet or a couple of cousins or, really, just one extra person: someone who could be here in the house in case they return while Cynthia goes up and down the streets of New York, hoping to get lucky.
She needs a drink. Why, oh why, did she have the thousands of other drinks, none of which she needed as much as she needs one right now? If only she had not already once—well, actually, twice—wrecked her life with alcohol, she could do what any normal person would do in a situation like this. She could pour herself a modest little drink. She could put two ice cubes in a glass and pour a bit of vodka over them. A splash. Nothing crazy. Just a splash, a goddamned splash. The warmth of the vodka would startle the ice, and the cubes would creak and crack and secrete a little bit of moisture, mixing in with the vodka, and she’d move the glass in a tight little circle to stir the ice water and the vodka, and then she’d take a sip. The vodka would be cold and astringent on her lips, on the tip of her tongue, in the back of her throat, and then, as it went down, it would miraculously mutate from cold to warm to very, very warm indeed. And by the time it was in her stomach, it would be like a lovely hydrangea made out of pure shimmering heat. Would it be the solution to all her problems? Of course not! All it could do was settle her nerves, which, she reasoned, would probably make her a more useful person than she was right now. Now she was approaching the edge of her endurance, and her thoughts were repetitious and maddening. This is what every person in recovery dreads: the voice inside one’s head, reasonable, persuasive, and utterly evil, repeating over and over that a shot, a snort, or a drink is the only thing that will help.
And yet…it could be argued, the case could definitely be made that if she did not have something to calm her nerves, she would soon go mad. And what better thing to soothe her than a modest little sip of alcohol? This was tried-and-true. This was ancient—older even than prayer. She had read somewhere that the consumption of alcoholic beverages dated back to the very dawn of human society. In fact, as she recalls, pacing now from one room to the next, the article seemed to have suggested that without fermented drinks and the good vibes they engendered, human society might have been delayed by another couple of thousand years.
So how was it that people—beginning with the ones who lived so long ago that they could barely walk upright all the way to the several million folks just beyond the glass of her house’s many windows—could all of them enjoy an innocent little snort of something lovely and relaxing while she, the accursed Cynthia, had to white-knuckle it? Where was the justice in that? Why was she being punished?
And then it occurs to her: If all this viciously enforced sobriety is a prison, she is, in fact, her own jailer. She has the keys right in her own pocket! She can walk out to freedom—the freedom to choose, the freedom to exhale—any time she wants to.
There is not a drop to drink in this house. There is not even cooking sherry or aftershave. She wonders how close the nearest liquor store is, pretending for the moment that she doesn’t know full well—she knows, in fact, the location of every liquor store within a ten-block radius of the house, carries the invisible map of their locations. She even knows which ones deliver.
She is holding the phone. Much to her own surprise. She wonders when she picked it up, how long she has been pacing around with it in her hand. She pushes the Talk button, listens to the dial tone. Testing. Testing. In a kind of panic, she throws the phone onto a sofa. Get thee behind me, Satan!
Okay, one thing for sure. She is not going to have a bottle of vodka delivered to the house. First of all: What a waste of money! Second, the last thing in the world she needs is to start forming relationships with liquor stores, to be opening accounts, talking to clerks, tipping delivery people. No way. No fucking way! If she wants a bottle of Grey Goose, she can walk to the corner of Seventieth and Lex and get it herself. And by the way, Grey Goose is out of the question. If she’s going to take a little vacation from sobriety, she’s not going to indulge her love for certain brands; she will make do with the cheapest vodka they carry. Once, back in SF, she recalls, smiling weirdly, she bought a gallon of a vodka called St. Pitersberg for $4.99. The dumbbells who bottled it couldn’t even spell Petersburg! It left an aftertaste that reminded her of a fly she had accidentally swallowed when she was seven years old.
The afternoon turns to evening. The evening light, a dark dusty blue, hangs on like someone clinging to the edge of a cliff, and then, suddenly, it lets go and the darkness rushes in. Completely lost now in faulty thinking, Cynthia tells herself, Well, it’s now or never, and she hurries toward Lexington Avenue, scarcely able to breathe—each breath is like swallowing a rag soaked in gasoline. Passersby seem to be glancing at her, shooting her looks that say Don’t do it. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. She knows this. And yet, she also does not know it.
The clerk at Lexington Quality Spirits has a head shaped like a lightbulb. He decides to torture Cynthia by asking her if she’
d like him to gift wrap her bottle of cheap vodka. “Just put it in a bag,” she manages to say. As she trudges home, she holds the sack away from her, like those people on dog walks carrying bags of their pet’s shit.
Home! She left the door unlocked in case they returned in the five minutes she was absent. “Kids!” she calls, walking in. “Kids? Kids?”
The door slams behind her. She whirls around. Why did it do that? Oh, well…
She unscrews the bottle. Great word: unscrew. Like removing your sexual experiences, sip by sip, until you are just a slab of meat programmed for metabolizing alcohol. Anyhow, it’s good to get the suspense over and done with—this bottle has not been brought home for storing away. This quart will be drunk. Only one question remains: Just a few restorative snorts, or drain the thing down to the glass stalagmite on the bottom of the bottle?
She sits with the vodka, delaying that first drink. She sniffs the fumes rising from the bottle’s neck. Wow! Horribly wonderful, wonderfully horrible.
And then she realizes: She is not alone.
Her heart is racing, completely out of rhythm. “Alice? Adam? Kids?”
She lifts the bottle as if it were a club, forgetting she uncapped it. The vodka cascades over the heel of her hand, her wrist, up her arm to her elbow. She curses, puts the bottle down on the table. She licks the trail of wetness—and this is it, after all, this is how her unbroken string of sober days is suddenly ended, not with a toast, not with any pleasure, not with a slap or a tickle: just a hurried, half-conscious series of little cleanup licks.
Darkness rolls through the house like black water that has breached a levee. Room by room, she keeps ahead of the darkness, switching on lamps.
Each lamp illuminates the piece of furniture next to which it stands. The Queen Anne sofa with the lilac damask covering, one of the few lovely pieces that somehow survived the chaos of Alex and Leslie’s final days. An engraving by John La Farge of a ragged boy with a lyre mesmerizing a pack of wolves. The deep dark leather chair Cynthia bought in a home-decor shop near Union Square, part of her weeklong shopping spree as she tried to fill a huge house that had been all but denuded of usable furniture by her sister and Alex as they descended into animalistic madness.
Each time she turns on a light, Cynthia hesitates, listens. All she can hear is the life outside, the traffic noises that get in despite the soundproof windows. The house is silent, but within that silence, she feels there is a presence, something lurking.
Something crouched.
Something waiting.
She pulls a brass poker out of its stand next to the fireplace in the dining room. She doubles back into the living room and stares for a moment at the open bottle of vodka. What an unbelievably lucky break, she thinks, having it here. Her old friend and protector.
Yet something stops her. Some surviving thread of resolve. A promise remembered that rises from the ashes and is suddenly alive, shouting to her. Pour it down the drain, a voice commands her.
The voice is persuasive enough to prevent her from guzzling the whole bottle in one long, nihilistic swallow, but not quite so convincing as to get her to do its bidding.
It’s a standoff. She glares at the bottle, points at it in a warning sort of way, and then turns her back to it—but leaves it full. And she continues to sniff her arm, sickeningly thrilled by the scent of the booze on her skin, the way she aroused herself as a young girl by paging through at the girlie magazines her idiot father thought he had securely hidden—how those Hindenburgian boobies transfixed her, whipsawed her senses between admiration and revulsion.
Oh, the body, the human body: what a source of humiliation and horror. Suddenly, Cynthia is desperate to relieve herself. Her bladder is full and it has blotted out every other sense, just as the dopey little moon can eclipse the enormous burning sun. Her hands clenched into fists, she hurries to the nearest bathroom. She hikes up her skirt, lowers her knickers, glances into the bowl—she will never again sit on a toilet without checking to see if some hideous creature is floating in the water. Her urine comes out of her in a long scalding twist; it goes on and on and on, for she has been holding it in since the morning.
She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. She allows herself to close her eyes—but a moment later, she gasps with terror. Something cold and horrid has touched the back of her neck. In her fright, her feet get tangled in her underwear and she falls to her hands and knees. She rolls onto her back, scuttling away, using her heels to propel her. She looks up and sees on the ceiling a dark spot, roughly the size of a human heart, and from its center comes the drip-drip of water.
Moments later she is pounding up the stairs, calling out for the twins. In the back of her mind she is trying to remember which room on the second floor is above the bathroom she was just using. As far as she can recall, it is not a room with water—it’s a room with floor-to-ceiling glassed-in shelves, dark wainscoting, once the home of framed antique maps, precious old globes, and various artifacts culled from scientific and touristic expeditions Twisden ancestors took part in.
The room now is empty—freshly painted, but as yet unfurnished. There is an accumulation of water on the wide plank cherrywood floors. Cynthia looks up and sees the huge water stain on the ceiling—and here the water is coming down much more quickly. Each drop is the size of a thumbnail. As the plaster falls away, insects that have been living behind it start oozing out. Are they ladybugs? She’s not sure. A clump of them, the color of ear wax, bubbles up, the collectivity of their little wings fluttering into a whine.
She races up to the third floor. She can already hear the water lapping out of the tub in the twins’ shared bathroom. The door is closed and she stands there with her hand on the knob, afraid to open it. “Adam? Alice?” She waits for a moment and then twists the knob, pushes the door open, and walks into a world of thick soapy steam, choking in its sweetness. The steam touches her skin like a million tendrils. Fear like a finger opens her mouth, and the steam fills her lungs.
Coughing, she waves the steam away from her as it rushes toward the cool air of the open door.
“Kids?”
She switches on the overhead light. It’s dim behind the layers of steam, like a lozenge moon in a cloudy sky. She stands over the tub, peers in. There’s no one in it—but she doesn’t trust her senses; someone could be lurking beneath the surface.
She is standing in two inches of water. The overhead light is starting to sputter and spit sparks. She has a vision of herself stiff and charred from electric shock, an image so sharp and convincing it seems more like a memory than a premonition.
She twists the porcelain hot- and cold-water faucets closed, but water continues to flow over the lip of the tub and onto the floor. She must pull the black rubber plug that covers the drain. She reaches into the murky water, gropes for the plug. And something wet and rough wraps itself around her wrist. In fright, she yanks her hand out of the water—but it’s only a washcloth, a dark brown washcloth purchased a couple of weeks ago from Bed, Bath & Beyond.
She stands there watching the water drain out of the tub. She doesn’t know for the life of her why she is transfixed here. It could be as simple as this: Her mind is overloaded and she can’t think of what to do next. As the water glugs down the drain, she throws some more of the Bed, Bath & Beyond bounty onto the floor, trying to soak up the water and prevent further damage—though soaked floors and falling plaster seem the least of her worries.
The tub is nearly empty now. Clinging to the sides is a layer of dirt so thick it seems almost like fur. In fact, it looks so thick that she must touch her forefinger to it, just to make certain. Whoever has bathed in this water was unspeakably filthy.
Now she does not think there is someone else in this house; she knows it. She wonders if she ought to dial 911…But how would it look if she called the police to find her own children in her own house? And who trusted the police, anyhow? With their guns drawn, their trigger fingers hyperreactive. If only this hous
e were smaller.
She goes from room to room, each one as inanimate as a painting. Yet the more evidence she acquires that no one is here, the more certain she feels that she is not alone. She can feel the invisible presence like cold air against her. Unseen fingers almost touch her, just graze the ends of the down on her arms, the wisps of hair on the back of her neck.
Finally, every light in the house is on. And every room in the house has been inspected. Closets opened, clothes parted, hangers sent clattering. Beds looked under. They’re not here. And yet, she is sure they are.
And if they are not, who is?
On her third pass through the front sitting room, she once again confronts the open bottle of vodka. No, not today, not today. She grabs it roughly by the neck, as if to master it, and pours the contents into the nearest sink, which happens to be in a tight little half-bath wedged beneath the staircase to the second floor. On the way out of the bathroom, she sees the heavy oak door that leads to the cellar.
Once that cellar was a crime scene. It was the place Alex and Leslie kept the pets they devoured more and more regularly as their appetites became more feverish and uncontrolled. And it was the place where they first ventured into cannibalism, eating a young Cuban immigrant piece by piece. It was into the cellar that Cynthia herself ventured after heeding her sister’s call to come to New York, and it was here that she saw that poor caged young man, his arm devoured.
In readying the house, Cynthia instructed the contractors to take everything out of the cellar—not only the cages, and the sinks, and the darkly stained concrete slabs, but also the boiler and the hot-water heater, which were relocated to a small shed specifically built for that purpose behind the house. And once the cellar was but a shell, Cynthia padlocked the door, and she has not opened it since. The lock is huge and heavy, with a thick steel shank the weight of a log. And the lock, she sees now, is missing.