Brood (19 page)

“You shouldn't call her your mother. It's disrespectful.”

“I guess.”

“I guess,” Polly says simultaneously in a simpering voice, followed by openly cruel laughter.

They walk in silence for a full minute. The spires of the San Remo float into view.

Suddenly, Polly stops. She turns to face Alice.

“You need to go home to your new mommy,” she says.

Alice returns Polly's stare. She waits for that familiar feeling of cringing and wanting to hide, what she has always felt when threatened or upset. But this time, for some reason, it doesn't come. She feels nothing. No. Not nothing. She feels calm. She feels ready.

“And you need to keep away from Rodolfo,” Polly adds.

“I don't have to,” Alice says. Her voice is small, but it is steady.

“Oh yes, you do, you little bitch,” Polly says. Her breaths are rapid, and her face is flushed. She is trying to look as angry and as threatening as possible, but in fact, she looks frantic. She waits for Alice to back down, to start stuttering and promising and I-guessing and basically falling to pieces, but Alice looks calm.
Has the little bitch gone crazy?
wonders Polly.

In a moment of inspiration, she slaps Alice across the face. Not as hard as she could, but hard, definitely hard.

Alice is stunned. Her eyelids flutter. She steps back and places inquiring fingers on the spot where Polly's blow landed.

Polly interprets this as weakness and strikes again, this time planning to hit even harder and settle this once and for all. But Alice has quick reflexes and catches Polly by the wrist before the blow lands.

The little bony shrimp's grip is amazingly strong. Polly's hand is like a fox in a trap, crippled by pain, shit out of luck.

“Let me go,” Polly demands.

“You were hitting,” Alice says. Something is happening to her eyes. The brown of them is darkening, deepening. The pupils grow larger. She radiates a terrifying indifference. People who don't know any better talk about an animal being vicious when all the animal is is hungry. An animal cannot hate, any more than it can really love; at least, not love in the way humans want the word to mean. An animal won't burn a CD with seductive songs on it, and it won't lie to make you jealous. That story that gets told about the dog waiting for his owner patiently at the door years after the owner has fallen on the field of battle is either a myth or a story about a broken dog. Animals don't exact revenge, nor do they experience pleasure from the suffering of other creatures. What an animal can mostly do is want, and eat, and protect. An animal is designed to survive.

And yet, as Polly looks into Alice's eyes and feels the stubborn steely grip of Alice's fingers around her wrist, she does feel fear, a great, dizzying geyser of fear. She tries to yank free, and, failing that, she strikes out at Alice with her other hand. “Let me go, you little bitch, let me go,” she shrieks furiously.

Alice feels a power spreading through her. It begins in her stomach and travels down to her legs and up to her throat, her hands, her face, and her scalp. Her mouth hangs open; her blood feels like warm honey. Phrases from childhood occur to her, and she repeats them now. “You need to learn some manners. What were you, raised in a barn?” Except when she heard these words, they were accompanied by a frown, a slow shake of the head. However, when she says these words, they are accompanied by a physical fury that is sudden and absolute. It is as if she is being electrocuted by her own emerging nature.

“All right,” Polly says, as if anything were up to her anymore, “we better get going. We can talk later.”

“Leave me alone,” Alice manages to say.

“Yeah, right,” Polly says, unable to concede more than that.

“Don't ever hit me again,” Alice says. The muscles in her neck are painfully tight. She strokes them with an open hand, lifting her chin, grimacing.

“Then keep away from Rodolfo!” Polly says, her own courage and energy suddenly resurfacing.

Alice cannot think of what to say next, so she growls, moving still closer to Polly, baring her teeth.

“Freak,” says Polly. “You're the worst.” Yet she takes a step away. They are off the paved walk now; she feels the scratch of a shrub of some sort on her back.

Who is this girl? Who is this new Alice who lowers her head, stretches her lips so even more of her teeth can show, and who charges at Polly now? Once, in Cold Spring, she accidentally stepped on a little toad, camouflaged and practically invisible in the leaf litter on the front porch. The poor thing popped beneath the weight of her foot, and when she jumped back in horror and looked down, it was dying, its tiny front feet pressed together as if in prayer, a look of disgust and resignation on its little face. That night she wept in her bed, mourning the life she had accidentally taken, promising herself that one day when she was grown and on her own and had money and freedom, she would buy a ranch or a farm or a mountain somewhere and make a sanctuary for animals of all kinds. Was that girl—so tender, so humane, so human—still within her? Or has she been swallowed whole—like a little fish consumed by a big fish—by the self she has so abruptly become?

A self that grabs Polly by the shoulders and twists her left and twists her right and twists her left again—with such force that Polly wonders if the top half of her is going to be torn from the bottom half. “Stop it,” she shrieks as her feet lose their purchase on the ground and she falls first to her knees and then flat on her back. She is exposed. Her stomach, with its treasure trove of guts, her throat, and the thin, utterly vulnerable coating of skin that shields the major arteries.

She makes a quick calculation of her chances and decides her best hope for survival is to beg.

“Okay, okay, I'm sorry.”

Looking at Alice's face, Polly is not at all certain Alice heard or understood what Polly said. Or if she cared.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Polly says, her voice rising.

As if to try it out, curious, tentative, Alice scratches Polly's right cheek. She steps back, peers down, waiting to see the effect of what she has done. Three red lanes of welts rise on Polly's face, a superhighway carrying pain from the corner of her eye to her upper lip.

Using her other hand, Alice strikes again, gouging the left cheek. Polly screams in pain. She knows now that adopting a posture of surrender will not save her. The animal courtesy of sparing the vanquished will not apply in this situation. Alice is not enough of an animal, or she is the wrong kind of animal. Whatever. Polly scrambles up, staggering backward as she regains her footing, whirling her arms to get her balance.

It takes Alice a moment to realize that Polly is going to get away. She is already running before Alice starts to chase after her. Polly is fast. She is a beautiful runner. Her long legs. Her long braid. Her arms hanging limply at her sides.

Alice is fast too. But not as fast as Polly. She runs hunched forward, her arms extended, her fingers pointing down. It briefly crosses her consciousness—like a shooting star, only half seen—that she might do better if she dropped to all fours and ran like that.

They reach the part of the park where they first entered. Alice does not want Polly to get back to the apartment before she does, though she is not sure why. She wants to catch Polly, and she is not sure why that is either. She wants to hurt her, and again she is not sure why. But she does. She does. She wants to hurt her. She really does.

And then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the desire to hurt Polly disappears, leaving no more trace of itself than a burst soap bubble. Alice slows down, letting the distance between herself and Polly lengthen.

Polly senses she is no longer being chased. She allows herself to look back over her shoulder, and sure enough, there is Alice, immobile in a yellow pool of lamplight. Polly stops, turns completely. Why has Alice stopped? Oh, well, no time to think about that now. She turns again to resume her journey back to the apartment on Riverside and finds she is face-to-face with a man in a black T-shirt, a grown-up with a pale face, dead eyes, a short greasy nose.

“Time for your see-ya juice,” he says. Hot-dog-onion-and-coffee breath. He reaches for her. He is quick. He knows what he is doing. She feels a sharp pinch between her shoulder blades. She steels herself, prepared for hideous pain. But she feels nothing. Well…a little something. But not too bad. Oh… a little more. Trouble thinking. Her brain like a radio with the dial stuck between stations.

“Polly!” Alice shouts.

The man picks up Polly and slings her over his shoulder as if she weighed no more than a jacket. With a few quick, efficient steps, he is out of the park.

Alice is running as fast as she can, but she is too late. A van is waiting for him, the engine coughing, a plume of black smoke wagging its way out of the tailpipe. The man opens the back of the van, tosses Polly in. Alice now is just a few steps away, but the van speeds off. She chases after it, but it's hopeless. There is a dripping faucet painted on the side of the van. The windows in back have been painted black.

I
t's 4:30 in the morning, the very quietest time in the park. The wind is almost nonexistent; the squirrels and the birds are two hours from running their rounds; the homeless human foragers have gathered up every can and bottle from the trash bins, the lawns, and the bushes and wheeled them away in creaking shopping carts. The troublemaking humans have already made their trouble. The spooning lovers have put a fork in it. The night-shift cops are comatose, and the day-shift hard-asses have yet to punch in. It is the ideal time to converge the packs and have a general meeting, but even if it weren't the ideal time, Rodolfo would have had to send out the word, because what had been, up till now, an ongoing crisis has become a flat-out emergency.

“You's listen now, me's quick,” Rodolfo says from his perch on top of the slide at the Diana Ross Playground. His opening words are repeated by those closest to him, and then are repeated again and again as his message spreads out like ripples on a pond.

“Three hours,” he says, and then points over his shoulder to indicate the past. “Polly.” He stops, collects himself. It hurts to say her name. He knew it would—but not this much. “The snatcher. Ours Alice”—he points to her, in the front of the pack—“her sees it. One man.” He holds up a finger. “One truck. White. Words on the side.” He looks questioningly down at Alice.

“Watertight,” she says.

“Watertight,” Rodolfo repeats, and waits until the word makes its journey to those standing farthest away.

“We's finding the man. We's finding the truck. We's getting us brothers and us sisters back to freedom.” He waits for the message to be transmitted through the network of feral boys and girls.

“We's not asking for this,” Rodolfo proclaims, placing his hand, with its long shapely fingers, over his heart. “We's never asking to be born, we's not asking, no, to be the way us is.” He lets this travel back, waits for it to sink in. “But we's proud. We's not bad. We's not broken. We's not worse. We's better!”

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.”