Breed (23 page)

“You visiting there?” he asks Cynthia.

“Why do you ask?”

“You can tell them I stopped delivering. Mail just piles up—it’s a hazard. So if they want their mail they can go over to the branch and pick it up. You tell them that, all right?”

“I didn’t say I was going to be visiting anyone,” Cynthia says, but the mailman has already passed her by and she is not sure he heard her.

She tries Leslie’s phone for the sixth time this morning and is bounced over to voicemail yet again.
I didn’t come all this way to stand on the street,
she thinks, and, after picking up her suitcase, she mounts the five-step staircase to the front door. An air of dereliction is over everything. Unswept leaves have been frozen onto the porch landing. The glass that borders the front door has been papered over from the inside, so no one can peek in, not even for a glimpse of the foyer. A whiff of something dank and possibly even rotten wafts from the house. When Cynthia rings the doorbell, the button wobbles in its casing, and when she pushes it again and again and presses her ear against the door, she hears nothing but the thump of her own heartbeat. The bell is surely not working, and so she knocks, casually at first, with a light rap of her knuckles, and then vigorously—yet still there is no answer.

Oh! Cynthia remembers something, and it’s too bad for her, because it would have been better forgotten—more than ten years ago, when Cynthia often traveled to New York to buy stock for Gilty Pleasures and used her sister’s beautiful home as her headquarters, Leslie and Alex had graciously given her a set of keys so she could come and go at will and feel that the place was truly her own. Had she ever gotten around to throwing those keys away?

Cynthia opens her handbag and finds her key ring, a tarnished silver circle three inches in diameter holding at least twenty keys: for her car, her bicycle lock, her health-club locker, her summer rental at Stinson Beach, her mother’s apartment, her mother’s and her safe-deposit box, and four keys for her own apartment. She can’t really tell one from the other, but the third one she tries in Leslie’s door slips right in. Cynthia’s breath catches in her throat, and the lock is satisfied with a deep, resonant click.

She pushes the door open, though something within her tells her not to—something frightened and wise and insistent. She steps in, calling out for her sister as she walks with utmost trepidation into the foyer.

“Leslie?” she says, stepping into the first room to her left, what was once a sitting room graced with lovely old pieces and presided over by the stern gazes of various extinct Twisdens: admirals and bankers, with their ruffles, their flushed cheeks, their bright, avaricious eyes. Now the room is used only for the storage of things that there seems to be no earthly reason for storing—boxes of oversize plastic bags, piles of sheets and towels, broken cutlery.

Cynthia senses that someone has crept close behind her, and she whirls around, but there is no one there, just the faint trace of her own breath in the cold watery air.

As so often happens, fear lops over into anger and she is suddenly furious with her sister for breaking the long silence between them. And where in the hell is she? Cynthia stops, breathes, reminds herself that she is being unreasonable. Leslie called in the first place because she was frantic that the twins had gone missing. And Leslie is not here probably because she is out somewhere in the city searching for them. It doesn’t matter how many people are on the hunt—no mother is going to sit home and wait for a call when she could be out looking herself.

“Leslie!” Cynthia calls. Her voice echoes through the house, up and down the empty stairways. She gropes for the light switch, turns it on. Weak, anemic light drifts from the overhead lamps.

“Alex?” Again she waits, and again all she hears is her own voice, bouncing around the house like the lonely cry of a ghost.

Cynthia crosses the foyer, this time going right rather than left, and enters what had once been a library, a temperature-controlled home for first editions, most of them bound in leather, many of them hundreds of years old. The dark cherry shelves are still there, but they are empty now, and the old leather chair placed near the shelves, where once you could curl up and read, has sprouted a spring from its seat cushion, and the arms are ragged, as if cat-clawed. It smells like cats. It smells like cats, best-case scenario.…

Her heart is pounding harder and harder. She can feel it in her throat, even behind her eyes. Something is wrong.

“Leslie!” she calls out, and she can detect the fear in her own voice. She puts down her suitcase, clears her throat, calls again, but the fear is still there. It will not go away. It grows like spores, like cancer, choking her. She lowers her head, tries to clear her throat more forcefully, and wonders:
Am I going to puke?

No, she’s not going to get sick, not just yet: She’s going to scream. She’s going to scream because something has touched her from behind, something cold and a little bit slimy, and it has touched her on the bare skin on the back of her leg, just above the line of her boot. She whirls to see a rat, dashing from one side of the room to the other, glancing at Cynthia over its shoulder as it makes its way to its escape route in the tile-lined fireplace. As it disappears into a crevice, she hears a chorus of twitters and cheeps, the colony of kith and kin awaiting it in the dankness of the inner walls, where the vermin conduct their parallel lives.

Cynthia’s legs wobble, as if fear exerted a weight upon her that is more than she can bear. She staggers forward and is about to steady herself by grabbing hold of the mantel, but the commotion of the rats freezes her. She backs up without remembering she placed her suitcase on the floor, and she trips on it and must wave her hands frantically to stop herself from falling flat on her back.

“Leslie!” she cries, as much out of fury as fear.

Yet the fury has a cauterizing effect. It scorches the terror and kills it at its root. The next thing Cynthia knows, she is heading up the narrow staircase leading to the second floor, where, back in the time when she was a regular visitor here, most of the socializing took place. How happy everyone was! How comfortable and beautiful and full of style and ideas! The tinkle of cocktail glasses, the sexy whisper of silk, always the smell of fresh roses, their dark red petals beaded with mist… Why oh why oh why did they not remain satisfied with what they had? Why the mania to have a child, the very thing (of this Cynthia is convinced) that ruined everyone’s life? Why did Leslie go along with Alex’s mania for an heir? For surely it was Alex’s doing, surely his vanity and stubborn old-school values were behind the project. Why was someone who would never think of having a reproduction on his wall so mad to reproduce?

The stair creaks beneath her weight. Cynthia stops, waits, listens. This time she does not call out her sister’s name but proceeds again toward the house’s second story, one stealthy footstep at a time. But when she is halfway up, something stops her. A sound. From below. What is it? Barking? A human cry? She turns. Waits.

Adam and Alice make their way through Central Park, heading toward the Upper East Side for no better reason than they are marginally more familiar with that part of the city. It is not even noon, but it looks as if evening has already rolled over the city. Dark, heavy clouds hover threateningly over the defiant spires of the great apartment houses on either edge of Central Park. Rain? Snow?

Alice shivers, and Adam puts his arm over her shoulders as they bow their heads and walk quickly into the wind. A woman in high-heeled boots has just had her umbrella flip inside out and she turns in a circle trying to get it under her control, as if the broken black thing were going wild with the pain of its own brokenness.

“Are you okay?” Adam asks his sister.

“I’m okay. Are you?”

“I wonder where we’re going.”

Alice smiles; this somehow strikes her as funny. “I wonder too,” she says.

After a few moments of silence, Alice says, “Mom and Dad aren’t like those two up on the balcony.”

“I guess not.”

“I still think they’re nice,” Alice says.

“Me too,” says Adam. “Most of the time. But you know what?”

“What?”

“We can never go back.”

Suddenly, they stop in their tracks. They both see it—the dark, windblown, somehow familiar silhouette of a man at the crest of a hill not more than fifty feet away from them.

“Fucking fuck,” Adam whispers.

Alice squints. Her nostrils dilate as she cranes her neck forward.

“It’s not him,” she says.

As the man jogs past, it becomes obvious it’s not him, and they hold hands and run, laughing, their hair streaming behind them in the cold wind as they move like beautiful wild creatures across the park.
Not him! Not him!

They don’t speak of it, but they veer in a northerly direction as they continue their dash toward the Upper East Side, heading toward Berryman Prep, though they could not say why. Neither of them believes that this will be a safe place for them. If their parents are not sitting there at this very moment waiting for them, then they will surely come by at some point. Or someone from the school will call them. Do they think that Michael Medoff can somehow help them? Not really. They are not thinking of anything in particular. They are cold, they are tired, they feel frightened and alone, and they are heading toward their school because it is a weekday and that is where they belong. What they would really like to do is go home. They would even like to be locked into their rooms. They want to see their parents—even as they run from them. But all of that is wrecked, all of it is impossible. So they are running toward school because right now they simply don’t know where else to go.

In all the many times Cynthia has been in this house, she has never been in the cellar—why would she? Yet now here she stands. A door beneath the staircase. She puts her ear to it—silence. But she waits until she hears it. A low, rumbling growl. She turns the engraved copper doorknob—but it won’t budge. She twists it back and forth—but it is locked tightly.

She knocks against the old, heavy wood. “Hello?”

And sure enough: barks rise up, exhausted and hopeless, the calls of animals who have barked and barked and now assume no one will ever hear or care but who must bark nevertheless.

But wait… There is something else. Another sound. Another
kind
of sound. A sound within those sounds. A human voice.

With ever more urgency, she tries to open the door. Key… key… Where would the logical hiding place be? She reaches as high as her arm can stretch and feels along the crown molding over the door frame, the invisible dust like seal skin. She feels the cool metal teeth of a large, old-fashioned key.

Without meaning to, she brushes it off its perch, and it rattles to the floor, skitters along the bare wood, and comes to rest somewhere beneath an old, vaguely Victorian table upon which Leslie and Alex have piled hundreds of pieces of mail, everything from catalogs and magazines to Con Ed bills.

The dogs below begin barking with renewed vigor. But where has the key gone? It’s shadowy beneath the stairs, and even in the bright part of the day it’s nearly dark here. Cynthia gets on her hands and knees and reaches beneath the table, blindly groping for the key. She sweeps her hand back and forth. Dust has accumulated here, as thick as the web of seeds inside a cantaloupe. “Acchh,” she says.

Her back is to the front door, so she does not see the wedge of light that has fallen over her, as long and narrow as a sword. She did not hear the opening of the front door, and she does not hear the footsteps drawing closer and closer to her. She has no idea that she is no longer alone.

Leslie is looming above her, her eyes yellow with rage.

Michael can no longer tolerate the lonely tension of sitting in his apartment waiting for
someone
to tell him
something.
He has called every hospital in the city. He has called a few of their friends, not one of whom seemed to grasp the severity of the situation—“You haven’t heard anything from Xavier, have you?” has been taken by all of them as pertaining to some huge domestic squabble rather than as the emergency Michael knows it is. He can also no longer tolerate the bored, bureaucratic tone of the cop who answers his calls at the precinct and who tells him to “Sit tight,” as if Michael’s nervousness was slightly annoying and possibly even getting in the way of the search for Xavier—a search that Michael is certain is not taking place. And, finally, he cannot tolerate the hourly phone calls from Rosalie, whose suspicions of disaster are, as time passes, even stronger than his own.

And so he walks the streets of his city. Where to look? There is no logical place. He stops in the Greek coffee shop they both like, and he hits a couple of similar establishments, the one they go to when the one they like is crowded, and the one they haven’t gone to since Xavier found an eyelash in the yolk of his poached egg. Nothing. Michael weaves in and out of shops—shoe stores, magazine stores—and he scours the faces of passersby, as if one of them might betray in a glance some knowledge of Xavier’s whereabouts.

He walks north, following the route of the Lexington Avenue subway line, which rumbles beneath him as he goes. He walks quickly, then slowly, then quickly again; a half hour passes, an hour. He pulls his cell phone out of his jacket and sees it is actually Xavier’s phone. He flips it open to see if anyone has called. Nothing, nada, bupkes… He calls the landline in the apartment. Nothing… He calls his own cell phone and listens to the ring, but, no, that’s intolerable. The thought of that phone ringing in Xavier’s pocket as Xavier lies—what? Dead? In someone else’s bed? Cuckoo in some clobbered amnesiac state? Intolerable… Michael stops, tries to catch his breath.

He forces himself to calm down. Nothing could be less productive than losing hope. When he finally takes a deep, normal breath he realizes he has walked all the way to Berryman Prep, its schizophrenic architecture—half of it was built in 1894 and half of it in 2007—carved against the steely sky.