Breed

by Chase Novak

  It is November and the darkness comes quickly, as if night is a garrulous old man who cannot wait to tell his terrible story, and with the darkness comes Adam’s and Alice’s bedtime or, at least, their exile.

  Adam lies in the darkness of his room with the receiver of the baby monitor resting on his stomach. It rises and falls as he breathes.

  Nothing is being transmitted. All he can hear is the whoosh of electricity, like wind blowing through his parents’ bedroom.

  Then he hears their footsteps. At first he is startled, thinking they are coming to his room. He pushes the monitor under his covers. But he realizes that what he has heard is their footsteps approaching their own bedroom, and he disentangles the twisted wires of the monitor and places the speaker once more on his stomach.

  I feel something happening in me, Alex.

  I’d like to give you something to feel in you too.

  Stop it, me serious.

  You smell so good.

  The sounds of scuffling.

  All right, all right, what is it?

  I’m having thoughts, Alex.

  Thoughts are okay. Thoughts are good. Thoughts are what make us human, right?

  Bad thoughts, Alex.

  What happened here?

  Cut myself shaving. Alex?

  What?

  Don’t you want to know what my bad thinks are?

  Thoughts.

  Right. Don’t you want to know what my bad thoughts are?

  I think I know, Leslie. We don’t have to talk about it.

  It’s about the children.

  Shhh.

  Our children, Alex. Our children.

  Crying sounds.

  I know, baby. I know. Shhh. It’s okay.

  Crying. Then: Do you have these kind of thinks too?

  A long silence. At last, the father speaks, softly. Yes.

  I can’t sleep.

  Leslie. Please. I’m exhausted.

  I smell smoke.

  It’s not from here.

  Her smelling it!

  Who’s smelling it, Leslie. Who?

  Me!

  Then say, “I smell smoke.”

  I smell smoke. You pedantic motherfucker.

  I just happen to think it would be nice if we sounded as if we were… you know. Whatever. Something decent.

  I smell smoke, Alex.

  It’s from next door. Their fireplace. The smoke from their chimney wafts near our window.

  Wafts?

  Blows.

  What if there is a fire, Alex? In our…

  House?

  Yes, what if there is a fire in our house.

  Don’t scratch me like that.

  Sorry. I thought you liked it. But what if?

  There’s not going to be a fire. But if there is, Leslie, we call the fire department and we leave the house. Just like anybody else.

  But what about our children?

  What about them?

  They’re locked away.

  Yes. I know. We must.

  But they’ll be trapped.

  There are fire escapes right at their windows.

  With gates, Alex. We put gates over those windows and the gates are locked.

  And I have the key. We go up; we unlock the gates.

  I don’t have the key.

  You shouldn’t have the key, Les.

  Because why?

  Because I have more control over myself. I’m sorry, but that’s just a fact.

  Well, I know where the key is. It’s in the candy dish right over there. So there. Asshole.

  Nice.

  Oh, I forgot. Mr. Sensitive. Mr. Well-Born.

  What is wrong with you?

  I think I’m going into heat.

  Adam quickly turns off the monitor. His heart scrambles around his chest as if it were looking for a way out. I’ve got to get out of here, he thinks.

  The next morning, the twins are released from their rooms by their mother, who seems to be starting another cheerful day. She is wearing brand-new blue jeans, which might mean she actually went to a store. Though she is smiling, Adam notices she has a new bruise on the side of her face. He and Alice know that sometimes their father hits her. But they also know that sometimes their father is hit by her. And sometimes they just play sort of rough with each other and things happen.…

  Family secret.

  The children walk behind their mother, down the third-floor hallway, past the empty spots on the walls, where once gloomy oil paintings hung, forbidding portraits of their supposedly important ancestors. An antique Persian runner once covered the floor here, and royal blue carpeting once covered the stairs, but all is bare now.

  “I hope you two are hungry,” their mother says. “I made a really nice breakfast.”

  “Not so much,” Alice says.

  “What did you make?” Adam asks.

  “Eggs!” Leslie says. “Beautiful fresh eggs.”

  “I had a good dream last night,” Alice says to Adam.

  He shrugs. Dreams don’t do it for him.

  “I dreamed someone shouted—I was out walking and someone shouted ‘I love you’ out of a window,” Alice says. “He said, ‘Hey, I love you’ and… I don’t know. Other stuff. ‘I’ll wait for you’ and like that.”

  “Nice,” says Adam, only because he is polite.

  On their way downstairs, they pass their parents’ bedroom. Normally, the door to this room is shut, but today it is wide open, and the children glance in, curious about the mysteries of the parental chamber. Alex, in maroon-and-white-striped pajamas, his long, lustrous hair hanging in a dark curtain, is on the floor, effortlessly doing push-ups—in fact, the push-ups come so easily to him that he increases the degree of difficulty by clapping his hands together after each one as if he were not a middle-aged lawyer enduring a professional rough patch but an eager young Marine in basic training.

  “Hi, kids,” Alex says, showing off a bit by clapping his hands twice after this push-up. The bedroom is a mess: furniture overturned, clothes everywhere, plates and saucers, bowls, cups, knives, and dirty napkins.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Alice says.

  Adam mumbles something indistinct. He is noticing the coarse tufts of body hair surging out from between the buttons of his father’s pajama top, as well as the hair at the bottom of his father’s legs, exposed where the pajamas have ridden up during exercise.

  Adam is also noticing something else—the little candy dish on the night table on his father’s side of the bed, a dish that Adam now knows contains the key to the accordion-style burglar gates that secure their windows.

  “Come on, you’re going to be late for school,” Leslie says, noticing that Adam is lingering behind.

  In the kitchen—where scented candles burn to somehow camouflage the smells of fresh meat—the twins sit at the plain wooden table, and their mother presents them with a skillet filled with scrambled eggs, enough to feed ten people. The mound of eggs is so massive that the sight of it robs both children of whatever small appetite they had, but neither wishes to court controversy and they do their best to eat enough to satisfy their mother that her efforts have been appreciated.

  Soon Alex comes into the kitchen. He is not dressed for work but is in his pajamas and robe—it’s been months since he has gone into the office. Money is an issue, and even though they are basically supporting themselves by selling off their huge cache of valuable belongings, the disposal of all these pricey antiques is not without effort. In fact, it is practically a full-time job.

  With everyone absorbed with breakfast, Adam quietly excuses himself from the table, mumbling something about needing to go to the bathroom. He walks as quickly as he dares up the staircase to the second floor, though there is no good reason why he would not use one of the bathrooms on the first floor. Certain things in the lives of the twins are predictable—they will be locked into their bedrooms shortly after dark; pets will appear and disappear, though by now they have learned to remain detatched from the animals wh
o come through the household, just as they have learned not to go anywhere near the cellar door at the far distant end of the house; they will hear strange sounds through the night and they are never to ask about them. They are never allowed to invite children over to their house, nor are they allowed to make anything but the briefest visits to the homes of their classmates—not that invitations are any longer forthcoming. And family secrets must be kept. Divulging any detail to outsiders about the life of that house would be like blasting a hole in the hull of a submarine.

  Adam is halfway up the stairs and he stops, listens. All he can hear is his own nervous breathing. He takes another step up. Stops. Waits. Listens. And then another. He hears his father coughing, and the hack hack hack of it seems to be coming from right behind him. Adam dares a peek over his shoulder—there is no one there. The coughing ends with a little whoop that turns into laughter. Adam exhales and takes the rest of the stairs two at a time.

  He tiptoes into his parents’ bedroom. A number of vanilla-scented candles burn on the mantelpiece and on the windowsill, but even with the camouflage of perfume, there is a heavy scent of bodies in the air. Adam glances at the king-size bed, which has been carefully, almost primly made, with the corners tucked in and the pillows just so. But there is nothing prim about the deep gouges in the wall behind the brass headboard, and though Adam has seen them before, he cannot help but stare at them.

  He reminds himself he must hurry. At any moment one of his parents might become suddenly aware of his absence and come bounding up the steps in that uncannily speedy way both have of getting from one spot to another—sometimes they move so quickly, it is like watching a movie where there has been a break in the film: a character can be on the porch one moment and in the next frame unnervingly be standing in the living room. Adam uses his finger to stir the coins that fill the spare-change dish on his father’s night table. All he finds are quarters pennies dimes and nickels.

  “Adam?”

  Adam hears his father’s distant call and looks up, his heart pounding. He stirs the change more vigorously, this time managing to spill some of it onto the table and the floor. But it’s there! The key! He shoves it into his back pocket and starts to pick up the change, though his fingers are rendered practically useless by his fear, and each coin defies his grip.

  He hears footsteps coming up the stairs. He has no choice. He must leave a few of the coins on the floor—and get out of there.

  But when he looks up he is no longer alone.

  Alice stands in the doorway of their parents’ bedroom, her eyes blazing, her face icy and pale.

  “What are you doing?” she whispers.

  “Is he up there?” their father hollers from downstairs.

  “I’ve got him,” Alice calls back, her voice shrill. She squats next to Adam and the two of them pick up the rest of the coins and then hurry toward the steps, at the bottom of which Leslie, already in her coat, stands at the mirror in the foyer, adjusting her hat and looking thoughtfully at her reflection.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Adam whispers to Alice.

  “To where?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Adam…”

  He grips her arm and practically hisses, “They’re going to kill us.”

  “Come on, kids!” Leslie calls from the bottom of the stairs. “Late for school!”

  Gone are the days when the children would be taken to Berryman Prep by private car, and gone, too, are the trips to and from school in a taxi. Now, no matter what the weather, they walk, accompanied by either Leslie or Alex. Today, Leslie escorts them to Berryman Prep. She holds their hands as she speed-walks up Fifth Avenue. She never walks them on the western side of the street, the sidewalk next to Central Park, though as they race along she seems always to be glancing toward the park, at the pigeons rising up in pink and gray clouds, at the mad squirrels scurrying up and down trees as if at every moment their lives hung in the balance. Today, as Leslie hurries the twins toward school, the squirrels seem to vex her so much that at one point she stops right in the middle of the street and stares across Fifth into the park, her eyes blazing, her neck craned forward, her black-stockinged legs slightly trembling, and with what sounds to the twins something like a whimper trapped deep in her throat.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Alice asks.

  The question seems to snap Leslie to attention, and she blinks as if coming out of a hypnotic trance. Her smile is wide, radiant. “Nothing’s wrong my precious. Just…” She taps herself on the head. “Still sort of in dreamland, that’s all.”

  Because Berryman requires uniforms, both Adam and Alice are dressed in blue blazers. Adam wears gray trousers; Alice wears a gray pleated skirt that falls to one inch below the knee. They walk in silence for a few moments, and Leslie’s face brightens. “Hey, did I ever tell you two what the happiest day of my life was?” They are stopped at a light on Seventy-Ninth Street. She holds on to the twins’ jackets, as if they had no sense and might at the slightest provocation race into traffic. Cabs, all of them carrying passengers, stream by; and then a flatbed truck carrying hot-dog carts that will eventually be distributed to street corners all over the city; followed by a school bus for children with special needs; and finally a crosstown city bus with two advertising posters on its side, one for a local bank offering low ATM fees and showing a man dancing with a dollar sign, and the other one advertising a new horror movie called Blood Sausage and showing a nearly naked female corpse hanging from a slaughterhouse meat hook.

  “The happiest day of my life was when you two were born,” Leslie is saying. “What a dream come true. And twins! Oh me, oh my, it was like winning the cosmic lottery.”

  The twins steel themselves. They have heard this song before—and sometimes there’s a verse in it about the baby who did not make it out alive, and this verse is tearfully delivered, and it makes them feel awful, sick to their stomachs with pity for their mother’s unhappiness, and even sicker with helplessness.

  But today there is no dead baby, no tears, just happiness, sheer glowing happiness.

  “We wanted you guys so much, and believe me, there is not a day that goes by when I don’t feel grateful to have such beautiful, terrific kids. And don’t forget, I was once a kid too. And I know how hard it can be. Sometimes the other kids aren’t that nice. Is that sometimes how you feel? Alice?”

  Alice shrugs. She feels so distant from the other children in her school that the question of their niceness doesn’t often occur to her—in fact, it never occurs to her.

  Leslie puts her hand on Alice’s shoulder. “I think the way some of the kids nowadays are being raised—it’s just crazy and irresponsible. And I know—we both know, your father and I—that you might wish you had a little more freedom, but one day, I promise you, one day you’ll look back on what we have done to keep you safe and healthy and you’ll thank us, you really will.”

  They are close to the school now. The architecture of the place used to terrify Adam—immense terra-cotta bricks, carved Doric columns, a gargoyle here and there, Gothic windows. Berryman Prep looks as if it were built in New Haven, Connecticut, and somehow drifted down from the Yale campus and found a spot on the Upper East Side. It speaks of tradition, privilege, learning, and a great seriousness—in other words, it proposes childhood without childishness. Directly across the street from venerable Berryman is a public school made of pale bricks with greenish pseudo tiles on the ground floor that frame windows that, because of askew venetian blinds, all look cockeyed. Next to the public school is a large blacktopped playground where hundreds of middle-school children dressed in every imaginable color and in every kind of clothing from Levi’s to djellabas call out happily to one another as they stream toward the entrance before the morning bell rings.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Adam says.

  “Of course, my precious,” Leslie says. She gathers him close, kisses the top of his head.

  He can hear her breathing in the scent of his scal
p. It makes him shiver, though he knows it is just her way of loving him.

  “Why do we have to get locked in at night?”

  “This again?” his mother asks.

  “We don’t want to be locked up anymore,” Adam says.

  “It won’t be forever,” Leslie says.

  “I don’t get it,” Adam says.

  “Neither do I,” says Alice.

  “So we don’t eat you up,” Leslie says, her right hand tousling Adam’s hair. She says it as if it were a joke, but it has the sound of the most truthful thing she has ever said to them.

  When Alex and Leslie enrolled the twins at Berryman Prep, the staff went to some lengths to make sure that the twins were not in the same classes. The feeling was that, for all of its wonders and beauties, being a twin was something children also had to overcome, or compensate for, and the more time the Twisden children spent separately, the better they would do in their studies, the more friends they would make, and the more chance they would have to develop into autonomous, well-adjusted adults. Apart, the twins seem to long for each other, and neither of them has met with much social success. They are not outcasts, nor are they the victims of teasing or exclusion. They simply do not click with the other students. They are withdrawn, sleepy, mumbly—they seem like sad children.

  Today, Alice is with her fourth-grade science class traipsing through Central Park. Their teacher, Edie Delaney, insists that there is more nature to be observed in an acre of Central Park than in an acre of the Serengeti Plain, though it is also the case that she likes to sneak a few quick puffs of her Marlboro Lights while leading these supposedly educational expeditions.

  “All right,” Edie Delaney announces, jiggling her Bic lighter in the pocket of her trench coat, “here’s what we’re going to do. Remember that hundred-year-old London plane tree we saw in the beginning of the year?” She points to the tree, which stands a hundred or so feet away, its bark mottled green, yellow, and black, like camouflage wear, floating in a sea of its own dropped leaves. “Did everyone bring their notebooks? Hands?” The fourteen children in her class raise their hands. “Great. Gather around the tree and make the best drawing you know how. Okay?”