Brood

by Chase Novak

  The crowd begins to cheer even before this last proclamation is relayed. They stand on the rise, on benches, on rocks. The smaller ones sit on the shoulders of the tall and the broad. Long hair, short hair, tattoos, and piercings, some dressed so raggedly it is almost comical, some in shorts, some in expensive jeans stolen from expensive stores, some still wearing the remains of their old school uniforms—blazers with the crests torn off, ties repurposed as headbands, regulation-length skirts filthy with food, grass, and all the other detritus of an ad hoc way of life.

  “We’s better!” they cry out.

  “We’s best!” Rodolfo shouts. He raises his fists above his head.

  “We’s best!” the gathered packs cry back—and now their voices are raised and there is a tumult of sound.

  “We have to go home,” Adam whispers to Alice. They stand together in the front of the crowd. On one side of them is Boy-Boy, and Little Man is on the other. All the crew from Riverside are front row; their faces show signs of the deepest distress, a collective grief.

  “We can’t,” says Alice.

  “Alice. We have to. It’s not fair.”

  “Fair,” says Alice, shaking her head.

  “Alice.” He tugs at her arm.

  She doesn’t want to fight back. She doesn’t want to feel anything like that in herself. Ever again. She feels something rising within her, something frightening and shameful. It is like she has two kinds of blood, one normal and warm, the other fierce and hot. She has fought and fought to keep this bad blood at bay, but she is getting tired. The fight is too hard, too constant, and she is thinking about giving it up. Giving it up and letting nature take its course.

  “After this,” she says.

  “We have to go. Now.”

  “Okay.” She looks up at Rodolfo, but he is no longer making eye contact with her. He is transported. The sight of all the packs together and in harmony, the sound of their voices rising up in the most beautiful howl of courage and togetherness, the joy of all that mixed with the sorrow of knowing that somewhere Polly is in trouble and suffering and scared…it is more than he can absorb. His eyes are glazed with wonder and an ever-mounting sense of his own power. These wild boys, these wild girls: they are not just people with whom he shares a difficult genetic fate—they are all extensions of him. He has become a multitude.

  Alice and Adam slowly make their way to the edge of the gathering, and their movement catches Rodolfo’s eye. He turns quickly toward Alice and makes an exaggerated shrug.

  Alice holds up one finger, as if to say she and her brother are just stepping out for a minute and will be right back.

  They walk quickly, but in silence, not wanting to attract any attention. When they are fifty feet away from the playground, they walk in a diagonal, heading north by northeast, toward the East Side, uptown, and home.

  Adam is the first to speak. “You slept in his room.”

  “Not really,” Alice says. “I think we should go back.”

  “We are going back.”

  “I mean back to the place. Back to the other kids.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s mean.” He pulls out his phone, shows it to her. “I already texted Mom and said we were coming home.”

  Alice is silent. At last, she says, “You call her Mom?”

  Adam doesn’t bother to answer.

  A few steps later, Alice says, “And you call it home.”

  “She is our mother now. And it is our home. It’s where we live. It’s where we always have lived, just about. I don’t like that apartment over there. It’s noisy, it’s dirty, you can’t even dry yourself after you take a shower, and there’s blood and needles everywhere. They’re all going to get in trouble.”

  “That’s baby talk,” Alice says. “We’re going to get in trouble,” she says in a high mincing voice.

  “You’ll see,” Adam says.

  “You’re not smarter than me,” Alice says.

  “I know.”

  “So don’t act like you are.”

  There is a tremor of true irritation in her voice, and Adam glances at her uneasily. After a few moments, he says, “I can hardly wait to get home.”

  “Then let’s go,” Alice says. She starts to run, and Adam keeps up with her. They are running side by side. Crocodile clouds glide by the moon, snapping idly at its fullness as they drift from west to east. A searchlight from somewhere arcs across the dark gray starless sky. Alice runs faster and faster, and Adam matches her step for step. A sense of relief fills both of them. It just feels so good to run, to feel their muscles warm, to have their lungs fill with the heavy summer air. Faster and faster. They are smiling now. Alice reaches out her hand, and Adam takes it. She bends a little at the waist, and he does too. She loosens her grip on his hand and reaches forward with both arms, bending lower as she does. He watches her and his own actions exactly mirror hers.

  “You want to try it?” she asks.

  “Okay,” he says. “Just once.”

  A moment later, they are both running on all fours, racing their way home faster than they ever imagined.

  Cynthia doesn’t know what to do about the twins. She doesn’t know what to do about her children. Her children. The more she repeats those two words, the less sense they make. Once, in San Francisco, in what now seems like a former incarnation, she had been seeing a man who was a corporate recruiter, and when he wanted to make her believe that she didn’t know what she was talking about or when she was expressing what was to him an unacceptable opinion, he would say, “Uh, I think that’s a bit above your pay grade.” (It was the number two reason she stopped seeing him; number one being his strutting around her apartment naked except for his knee-high black socks.) But now, in her solitude and disorientation, she thinks that yes, when it comes to mothering Alice and Adam, she may be above her pay grade.

  They have come home. She is sitting with them in the kitchen, watching them eat—which, today, basically means watching them not eat. Morning sun streams through the windows, igniting bursts of light on the handle of the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the dials of the stainless-steel La Cornue stove, and the backs of the spoons the twins idly move around and around and around their bowls of granola. They look tired. They are filthy. And, quite frankly, though Cynthia hates to think it, they don’t smell very good. Actually, they stink. Of sweat. Of dirt. Of wildness, wind, and heat.

  What to do? How to relate to the fact that they disappeared and cast her into a chaos of fright and despair? She wonders if she should scold them—they surely deserve to be scolded. They deserve to be put into a time machine and sent back a hundred years so they can be soundly spanked! And yet, they did come back on their own, and isn’t positive reinforcement better? If they come to associate returning to their home with punishment or scolding or even dark looks, who is to say that they will return home the next time, or the time after that? Isn’t it her job to teach them that this house is a place of safety (Is it? she wonders in passing), a place where it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter and where there is always good food and clean sheets and state-of-the-art televisions sucking in the signals of premium cable?

  So no, she decides, no—she will not punish, she will not scold.

  Should she even ask them where they have been? Surely, she has a right to know that—and a duty. She needs to know where they went, in case it is a place of danger or disease. And also it would be good to know in case they ever pull a disappearing act again—she will know where to start looking for them, at least, rather than having to wonder which of the city’s five million doors to look behind. And yet—here comes that cursed and yet again—wouldn’t it be a hundred times better if she were to wait it out a bit and let them volunteer the information? Wouldn’t that really be the way to go? In the long run, isn’t it more important to build trust than to maintain discipline? And a parent, she reminds herself, must in all situations think of the long run, because raising kids is not
a sprint, not a dash, it’s a marathon, a marathon plus a mountain climb plus a potato-sack race plus a rodeo plus a bungee jump plus a sail around the Cape of Good Hope in a little sea-battered skiff without a compass, without a map, and with only the stars to guide you. Yes, that is what a parent does, she thinks, and apparently I am a parent.

  But ought she just sit there in silence? She worries. (Oh, if only the turbines of worry could be harnessed, she could generate enough power to light the city and have enough left over to send across the Palisades and into New Jersey!) She worries that her silence will be misinterpreted—though she is not sure what she means by misinterpreted, since she herself does not know what her silence means, or is meant to mean. More worries! She worries that they will take her silence for indifference. Or they may decide that an immense choking fury has rendered her unable to speak. Or they may decide that she is silent because she is afraid of them. Who knows what kinds of ideas get into the heads of twelve-year-olds? Especially twelve-year-olds who happen to be twins; twelve-year-olds who lost both of their parents within a week of each other; twelve-year-olds who were raised in utter splendor and luxury and then, after living like rich kids, spent two years in foster care; twelve-year-olds—and let’s not forget this last salient point—who spent years locked into bedrooms at night and who finally caught on to the unspeakable truth of their parents’ forbidden appetites, appetites that, in the end, could only be satisfied by having the twins themselves as a midnight meal.

  And then there is the thing she cannot bear to think. That they are beyond repair. That the fertility treatment that pushed their parents into a nightmare existence has left its rancid residue in Alice and Adam. She tries to push it away but it keeps coming back. And every hour the twins are away, it gets stronger—the only real explanation for the children’s behavior is that slowly, inexorably, they are turning into their parents. All the love she has for them are just tears in the ocean…

  No. She won’t allow it. She knows that some of the offspring of the parents who went to Slovenia have gone…what? Feral? Is it fair to call a child a little wild animal? Some of them. But not all of them. Not. All. Of. Them. And she knows these two. She can feel their goodness, their sweetness. They may be drawn to wild kids but they are not wild themselves. Of this she is certain. Her task will be to make sure, as much as she can, that they steer clear of bad influences.

  “Kids,” she finally says. She doesn’t know where to go with this, but she does know how to put one foot in front of the other and trust her heart to somehow keep her on the right path. “Kids, you know I love you, don’t you?”

  “We know,” says Alice.

  “And we love you too, Mom,” says Adam.

  Cynthia forces herself to maintain a calm maternal demeanor, though hearing Adam say that they love her makes her want to pitch forward, rest her head on her forearm, and sob. That, she feels, would not be helpful or good in any way—and to that, there is no and yet.

  “Well, we need to keep working it out,” Cynthia says. Am I twelve-stepping them? “It works if you work it”? “We’re still getting used to each other. And we need to set some…rules.”

  “Why don’t you just come out and say what you want to say,” Alice says in an unpleasant voice. Not quite bratty, not quite mean—exasperated, as if she has been humoring Cynthia and now has reached her limit.

  “She is,” Adam interjects. He gives his sister an imploring look.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Cynthia says without quite considering it. “That trip to Mount Washington I was going to take us on? I don’t really see that happening, not any time soon.”

  “Oh, wow,” says Alice, holding her heart as if it were breaking.

  “What I am saying is this.” Cynthia hears her voice, calm and confident, and thinks: Hey, this is me. “You guys just absolutely, one hundred percent cannot leave the house without telling me you’re leaving and telling me where you’re going.”

  “So are we prisoners here?” Alice asks.

  “Don’t,” Adam says.

  “Maybe love is a little bit of a prison,” Cynthia says. “When you’re in a family—like we are, kids, right?—you get love and protection and all kinds of material things and things that just can’t really be put into words. And in return, you give up some of your freedom. You’re not just living for yourself. You’re connected to other people. Is that really being in prison? I don’t know. There’s an old song called ‘Chains of Love.’ Maybe that’s what you’re talking about?” She regrets turning that last statement into a question, that fatal girlie-girlie interrogative lilt. And she particularly regrets referencing “Chains of Love.” She doesn’t want to be one of those mothers who are constantly trying to have their Cool Cards punched. She takes a breath. She feels a weird, destabilizing rush of anxiety. It’s like being on a date and working yourself up into a frenzy over whether you are talking too much, making the person across the table from you like you either more or a great deal less.

  “We won’t do it again,” Adam says.

  Alice looks away. Her expression is contemptuous.

  What is she thinking? Cynthia wonders.

  Cynthia folds her hands, leans forward. Without having planned it, she has embarked on a line of inquiry that she is going to follow without regard to where it is heading, what it might accomplish. Will it do more harm than good? She really cannot say, but she will nevertheless go forward.

  “Won’t do what again, Adam? That’s something I need to know—because right now, I don’t know where you went, or why, or anything, really.”

  Alice is the one who speaks up, and she does so quickly. It’s clear she doesn’t want Adam to answer this question. She has lost faith in him. “We walked Dylan home.”

  “Dylan?” says Cynthia, her voice rising. She reins herself in, as if she were both horse and rider. “The whole city is looking for that boy. The police. Everyone.”

  “Oh?” says Alice. “Why?”

  “Because he’s the mayor’s little boy.”

  Alice laughs. “Oh, that’s just something he says. He’s just a kid.”

  “Alice, come on.”

  “Well, how are we supposed to know?” Alice says. She acts as if she is being relentlessly questioned, as if out of nowhere and for no good reason, she is being persecuted and, even worse, even more hurtful and unjust, doubted.

  “I guess he is,” Adam says softly.

  “You guess he is?” says Cynthia. The panicked horse she rides threatens to rear up and wave its front hooves in the air.

  “I guess so,” Adam says.

  Alice breathes out a disgusted sigh and pushes her chair back from the table.

  Is she getting ready to make a run for it? wonders Cynthia.

  “His dad is mean,” Adam says. “His parents are like ours used to be.”

  “Mayor Morris?” Cynthia is amazed. She is new in town, of course, and does not have strong feelings about any of the city’s leaders, but the impression she has of the mayor is that he’s a self-regarding but basically decent guy, not subject to short-man syndrome, like many of the pipsqueaks she has known in her life. To think of him and his seldom-seen wife, Claudia, herself a diminutive woman, half bouffant, half Italian heels, going through the same dreadful, filthy, insane fertility injections Leslie and that horrible Alex submitted to…

  “You know half the city is looking for him,” Cynthia says. “Right, kids? You know that, don’t you?”

  Alice picks up her spoon. She holds it as if it were a knife, something with which she was planning to harm…someone. She takes a deep, unsteady breath and plops it back into the bowl, upsetting the bowl and spilling milky granola across the table. It looks as if she is about to say she is sorry, but something stops her. She rises from her seat and glares at Cynthia.

  “We went to the park with him, okay?”

  “You weren’t in the park all this time, Alice. I know it.”

  “So?”

  “Come on, Alley-O
op,” Cynthia says, her voice lowering.

  “I hate that name,” Alice says. “Don’t ever call me that again.”

  “All right, I won’t. But it’s important to me—”

  “It’s always about what’s important to you,” cries Alice. “What about us? We have things that are important to us, you know.”

  “That’s fine, Alice.” Now what do I say? Cynthia wonders. She has been following a line of questioning like a path through the woods, but suddenly the path is gone, and all there is are trees, bushes, rocks, here and there a little patch of sky. “I’m not saying your stuff is unimportant.” Her voice falters. “Your stuff is absolutely important.”

  “We met kids we knew from before,” Alice says quietly. “We hung out with them.”

  “Are they your friends, Alice? Adam?”

  “Kind of,” Adam says.

  “Did one of your friends come to this house and take clothing from your room?”

  Alice just stares at Cynthia. Adam shrugs.

  “What’s happening here, kids?” Cynthia says. “Come on. Where are we going with all this? What will happen to us if this is how we’re going to treat each other?”

  “I don’t know!” Alice almost screams the words. She turns and makes her way out of the kitchen.

  Cynthia is not thinking of anything. There is no strategy, and there is no on-the-one-hand-this-and-on-the-other-hand-that. She bolts from her chair and reaches Alice before the frail little thing can get very far. She catches the child by the shoulders and turns her around. Alice struggles, but her strength is down; she is exhausted, hungry, frightened. She squirms, pushes, but Cynthia’s grip on her is strong.

  “Shhh, shhh,” Cynthia says, as millennia of mothers before her have crooned to distraught children. She holds Alice, pets her, feels the child slowly relaxing.

  At last, Cynthia relaxes her own hold, but as soon as the embrace lessens, Alice burrows deeper into her, grasping at her with sudden fervor.