Brood

by Chase Novak

  But now. The bricks, the rafters, the beams, the window sashes, the glass—everything was pure hell. The house confounded her, mocked and tormented her. If you stood in one room, it seemed as if an evil presence was dancing happily in another. If you went to that room, the entity would have already moved on to another room, and another, and another, and another. If only she knew twenty-five people in New York City, twenty-five people who would help her, defend her, indulge her. She would have them here right now, one in every room.

  But what about the cellar? What about the attic? The yard!

  She scrambles off the bed again. Her journal slides to the floor. The noise of it turns her around. She laughs without joy, a ha and a ha no more merry than the sound of nails being hammered into the lid of a coffin. She races from room to room, switching on lights. A shadow—her own—terrifies her. A reflection in the window. The sound of her own breathing.

  On the third floor of the once-magnificent mansion, now a brick box of dread, she stands in front of the twins’ rooms, her chest heaving, her face contorted. The bedroom of a child is meant to be a cheerful, comforting place, brightly colored, sunny and safe, decorated with symbols of the innocent enthusiasms of youth—pictures of superheroes, beagles, kittens, pop stars, and dinosaurs. She has done her best to make the rooms right for the kids. Since their arrival, the twins themselves, however, have done nothing to make their bedrooms more theirs. Years in parental captivity, followed by the abrupt, powerless life of a child in the foster-care system, during which they were shuttled from family to family, house to house, room to room, have given them a permanent sense of impermanence. Wanting the children to make their rooms their own, Cynthia had deliberately left the walls empty, and they remain blank. The beds are tightly made, as if to pass inspection.

  Cynthia enters Adam’s room first. She turns on the overhead light, which shines brightly—too brightly for her nerves at this point. She switches it off, and the room settles down again, like a cobra retreating to its wicker basket. She crouches down and turns on the night-light, a winking, cheeky cartoon full moon plugged into the outlet and emitting a soft glow. The light—its kind intentions—breaks her heart. How we wish to make childhood a happy place and hope against all hope and against all evidence that if we love our children enough, we can keep them safe. Safe from the world. Safe from themselves.

  Whoever it was who came to this room to take Adam’s clothes left the dresser drawers hanging open, and now, going from the bottom to the top, she carefully slides them back into place. Next, Cynthia goes to his closet and picks up the hangers the intruder (or was it the twins themselves?) left on the floor. She returns them to the crossbar, steadies their swaying back and forth with her hand, and carefully closes the door. A part of her thinks that it might do some good to restore perfect order to the room.

  She sits on the edge of his bed and strokes the soft down summer-weight comforter, encased in a pure silk French duvet cover, a ridiculous extravagance and one about as meaningful to a little boy as an honorary AARP membership, but, while furnishing the house in anticipation of the twins’ becoming hers, Cynthia could not resist it. Now, however, she regrets it. She regrets…everything. She takes his pillow and holds it to her, as if it were a child. She buries her nose in it and there it is, mixed with the faintly lavender scent of the detergent, his soft, ever so slightly spicy smell, a combination of scalp and hair and skin and breath.

  It is more than she can bear. The children were put into her care. She petitioned the court and said, You must trust me. She took them out of homes where they might not have been perfectly happy but where they were at least safe—not once in foster care did either of them go missing! But now it suddenly seems that keeping them in one place is more than she can accomplish.

  She remembers how she used to feel selling antiques out of Gilty Pleasures, back in San Francisco about what now seems like fifty years ago. Sometimes, a wealthy customer would walk out of her shop with a delicate old painting or a fragile vase feeling that he or she had a right to the irreplaceable object because he or she had the money to pay for it. And Cynthia would watch the customer and the antique leave the store, mentally waving farewell to it and wondering if she were in fact sending the piece to its ruin and destruction. It was not enough to own a thing—you had to take care of it too. When you say, This is mine, you are signing a sacred contract that you will do it no harm.

  And now, as far as she is concerned, she has committed acts of heedlessness and irresponsibility far, far beyond anything she imagined a few of her feckless customers capable of. She has failed to protect two beautiful, blameless, mysterious, and delicate little human beings.

  She weeps into Adam’s pillow and continues to do so as the darkness of the house closes in around her, slowly rising like a river, erasing everything in its path. Monster darkness, greedy, insatiable, implacable, pitiless darkness, the enemy of safety, the enemy of sanity.

  Pay attention, pay attention, a part of her silently warns. Someone could be coming up the staircase right this very moment.

  Oh, leave me alone, the rest of her answers. I no longer care.

  Alice, fully dressed, slides out of Rodolfo’s bed. All he asked of her is to sleep next to him, and maybe let him put his arm around her. She was happy to agree—it sounded like fun, beautiful fun—but now she cannot sleep, and tonight’s meal moves restlessly in her stomach, like a dog pacing around for last outs. Someone brought in a sack of cooked chickens and gallons of mac and cheese and all kinds of sodas and energy drinks, and everyone was in pretty high spirits and it smelled unbelievably good. So Alice ended up eating more than her customary six well-masticated bites.

  And now, with the house quiet, and her privacy (she thinks) assured, she slips into the wreck of the bathroom to get rid of tonight’s meal and whatever other undigested calories might be dangerously lurking in there as well.

  When she learned (this was in Cold Spring, New York, in her first foster home) that she might at least maneuver puberty into a stalemate by starving herself, it was amazingly difficult for her to get rid of her food. She used to stick the eraser end of a pencil as far down her throat as possible, until a muscle was touched, and she gagged, and suddenly the whole machinery of the body began urgently to run in reverse. Then she learned to use her finger. The entire process was painful, laborious, convulsive, and once she got herself to hurl, she would be sweaty and shaking from the effort. Now, it’s easy-breezy. She can do it by swallowing a little bit of air, clenching the muscles of her stomach, and then forcing them out. It takes about two seconds, and bloop: she’s empty and clean. It’s really no more than an intestinal sneeze. It’s not a big deal. She often wonders why everyone in the world doesn’t do this, rather than letting themselves get gross. But she keeps it private. It’s her secret, and like many secrets, it turns her life into a tiptoe journey over broken glass. Oh, well. She flushes the toilet as she empties herself, and no one is any the wiser.

  Except that when she opens the bathroom door, Polly is standing there, fully dressed, holding a biology textbook, her dark brows raised and a crooked, superior smile on her face, like a schoolteacher who believes part of her job is to make sure your self-esteem is no higher than an ant’s ass.

  “Hi,” Alice says. She covers her mouth, pretends to cough.

  “Feel better?” Polly says. She is whispering.

  “I’m okay,” Alice whispers back.

  “I know what you were doing in there,” Polly says. She bends over, extends her tongue.

  Alice feels her color rising, beginning with her cheeks and going all the way to her scalp. Saying nothing seems the best thing to do, the only thing.

  “Right,” Polly says.

  “I wasn’t,” Alice manages to say.

  “We don’t do that,” Polly announces in a way that implies there is a whole list of dos and don’ts that Alice knows nothing of. If Polly is trying to make Alice feel like an outsider, an unwelcome guest who might be booted ou
t at any moment, she is succeeding.

  Alice shrugs, as if the whole conversation is stupid. And with that, she starts to walk past her.

  “Where are you going?” Polly asks, taking hold of Alice’s arm.

  “I’m tired,” says Alice.

  “Oh, look at her,” says Polly. “She just can’t wait to get back in bed with her boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Alice says.

  “You better use protection. Safe sex, girl, you hear?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Kids like us, we give birth to things this world has never seen.”

  “I know. You don’t need to tell me.”

  “Um…” Polly points at Alice. “You’ve got a little throw-up on your chin.”

  Nervously, Alice tries to wipe it away—but her chin is dry, and she realizes she has been tricked.

  “Psych!” Polly says, grinning. Then, suddenly serious, her whisper marbled with apparent concern, she says, “You shouldn’t do that. You could die from it. And it doesn’t even work.”

  Alice shrugs. She cannot argue, but she refuses to confirm the fact that she has been tossing her food.

  “Other kids tried it, you know,” Polly says. She hasn’t let go of Alice’s arm; in fact, her grip tightens.

  “Tried what?” Alice says, trying to shake loose.

  “Stopping their bodies from changing. It only works for a while. We all know how annoying the body is. It does what it does, right? It wants what it wants. You think the body is some kind of car that the mind owns and drives around wherever it wants. But the mind is a passenger. It can’t touch the gas, the brake, or the steering wheel.”

  “I know how to drive,” Alice says. “For really. A Mazda. I had a foster brother in Cold Spring, he taught me. ”

  “Yeah, for a blow job.”

  “Gross.”

  “Deal with it, Miss Perfect.” Polly looks away for a moment. She is not stopping to think about what she says, and so far she has been pretty surprised at what’s come out. In every back-and-forth in this house and with their friends out in the various parks, Polly has been the nice one, the reasonable one. Now she’s acting like (what she would call) a total bitch—and it feels just fine.

  Dylan suddenly appears. His hair is slicked back and he is holding a sandwich—peanut butter, from the smell of it.

  “So?” he says to Polly. “We’s leaving?”

  “Yeah. You ready?”

  “Me’s born ready, all my life, sister.”

  “I’m bringing Dylan back to his pack,” Polly says to Alice. “They’re up near One Hundred and Tenth, West Side. Come with?”

  “It’s okay,” Alice says.

  “No, seriously. You have to. I can’t walk back home all by myself.”

  “I’m so tired,” Alice says.

  “Come on,” Polly says. At last, she relinquishes her hold on Alice, but only to throw her arm over Alice’s shoulders. “You fucking owe me.”

  “I do?” But she has a feeling Polly has just offered to keep her secret and not tell anyone about her private weight-control program. It was insane, she thought. Even though these kids were living like animals, and selling their own blood, and sexing it up all over the place, and stealing, and some of them disappearing and some of them dying, Alice still didn’t want anyone to know she sent most of her meals straight to the sewer.

  A couple of minutes later, Alice, Polly, and Dylan are waiting for the elevator. The common hallway is tiled black and white, gloomily lit. The old elevator slowly rises, its cables shaking and rattling like shackles. Dylan cannot keep still. He is shrugging his shoulders, knocking his knees together, and the next moment, he somehow produces a hacky sack and is lifting it up with the toe of his sneaker and catching it on his forehead, humming tunelessly all the while. He basically makes most kids diagnosed with ADHD seem catatonic.

  At last, the elevator doors open. The on-again, off-again elevator operator is at the controls, much to Polly’s disappointment. (The rule of the house is to keep as low a profile as possible.) The elevator operates by push button, and Polly does not see why an elevator operator would ever be necessary, but here he is, old Dominick, with his basset-hound eyes and shiny shoes, and a blue-and-yellow uniform that looks like it came out of the 1980s or some other era of the past, an impossibly long time ago.

  “Here we are,” Dominick says as always, holding the door as if without his strength, it would cut Polly and her friends in half.

  “Thanks, Dominick,” Polly murmurs.

  “Sort of late to be going out,” Dominick observes.

  “Not really,” she says.

  “So…is your mother back in town yet?” Dominick asks, as he has on so many other occasions.

  “She called tonight, actually,” Polly says, her voice confident, convincing. “Thanks for asking.”

  Alice and Dylan stare straight ahead, trying hard not to laugh.

  “You take care of yourself,” Dominick says as the elevator reaches the ground floor.

  “You too!” Polly cheerfully calls out as the three of them clatter quickly over the lobby’s marble floor. There is no doorman—an automated ID system has been installed—and now nothing separates the kids from the night. They enter it like fish poured from a bucket back into a lake.

  They head east toward Broadway. Only Edible Broadway, which never closes, is open. The proprietor, a portly, pale greenish man whom everyone calls the Greek but who insists that he is, in fact, Portuguese, sits on a folding chair overseeing his display of grapes and plums, strawberries and oranges, as if without his constant vigilance, he would be bankrupted by marauding bands of fruit thieves. “Yo, Greek,” Polly says as Dylan pockets a couple of plums without breaking stride. As for the Greek himself, he is mainly relieved the three kids didn’t go into his store, where truffled olive oil and Kalamata figs and other pricey items are on display—he does not know what makes these kids special, but he can recognize these feral teenagers from twenty paces. He knows that until someone gets them under control, there is not a shopkeeper in the city who can consider his business safe.

  They move east across Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, go past the twinkling monoliths of Central Park West, and then scamper over the stone wall bordering New York’s great green space, Central Park.

  The three walk quickly, oblivious to sidewalks, tunnels, and the various paths ordinary citizens use when traversing the park. They have their own routes, direct and unmanicured. Dylan leads the way—he knows exactly where his pack will be, and he is also wired more tightly than the two girls and is constitutionally unable to proceed at anything resembling a leisurely pace. He jumps, skips, zigs, and zags.

  “Me’s wishing I’s staying with Rodolfo!” he calls back to them, ten paces in front. “All’s well when Rodolfo is here.”

  He lifts his hands in the air. In his excitement, his fingertips glow dark red.

  “Look at him,” Alice whispers to Polly.

  “He’s not the only one. All kinds of things are happening.”

  “It’s sort of pretty,” says Alice.

  “I guess. We’ve got evolution on the run.”

  She suddenly stops, and Alice stops too. A look of concern crosses Polly’s face. She tilts her head. She rests her finger on her lips, beseeching Alice’s silence.

  “Come on, you two!” Dylan cries out.

  “I heard something,” Polly says to Alice.

  “Where?”

  “In there.” Polly points to a tangle of honeysuckle bushes thirty feet to the left.

  “I once found a dog hiding in the bushes around here,” says Alice. “A little white dog, he was so cute. When I was young.” The memory of that time, the school she and Adam used to attend, their mother walking with them up Madison, the teacher, the other kids. It’s been a long time since she’s allowed herself to think about those days, and remembering them now feels ghostly and sad.

  Polly looks at her, and her expression clearly state
s that whatever little white dog Alice is remembering is a hundred miles beside the point, and for her to even mention something so stupid and juvenile is proof that she has no idea what is happening.

  Somebody is following us. Polly mouths the words silently.

  Dylan has finally stopped twirling about and looks at them questioningly now, his glowing fingers darkening to a dull, dirty rust. Polly waves for him to come back.

  The three of them, with utmost stealth, approach the bushes. They all have extraordinary hearing and they lean forward, turning their heads slightly to the left and then the right, aiming their auditory nerves the way you’d point a flashlight into a dark corner.

  Polly lifts one finger. Then the second, and the third. On three, they converge on the bushes, plunging in through the resistant green maze without the slightest hesitation, as if they are starving canines who sense a helpless quivering chipmunk there, marinating in its own fear.

  Rooting around in the dirt, they find nothing but condom wrappers and empty Snapple bottles.

  Yet the rest of their journey is a nervous one. Polly is used to being constantly on guard, fearing the park police, who can be on bicycles, on horseback, in squad cars, or on foot. Dylan has also learned how to be basically invisible when he roams the park, though the lessons in caution he has been taught have to contend with the counterweight of his upbringing. His time in Gracie Mansion, his tenure as the mayor’s son, in which he absorbed a kind of cellular certainty that he is privileged and protected, often interferes with the basic things the other feral kids have taught him about survival. (In fact, whenever Rodolfo thinks about the future of this new race of human over which he presides, that future does not normally include Dylan; he takes too many chances, and he is all over the map, and, worst of all, Dylan Morris is an extreme case of mutation—the ones who glow tend to be the craziest. One day, maybe next week, Rodolfo guesses, or maybe next year, Dylan Morris will be one of the Remembered.)