by Chase Novak
They look at her with some skepticism until Jeremy, whose father is a matrimonial attorney known as the Piranha of Park Avenue, steps forward and says, “This isn’t art class, right?”
“No, it’s not, Jeremy, and that’s an excellent point. It’s a science class, and a very important part of science is observation.” Edie takes a deep breath; her lungs are poised for a cloud of nicotine-rich smoke and seem horribly disappointed to receive only air. “So what I am going to need you to do now is observe and record.”
In short order, Edie repairs to a nearby bench, seating herself so she can suck down a few long drags of her cig while at least being able to imagine she cannot be seen by her students, and the class makes its way toward the London plane, with Alice, as usual, straggling behind—she has developed a strategy in which her exclusion from the group appears to be a function of her slow pace and not a rejection of her company.
Just as Alice makes the first lines of her drawing, her attention is drawn to the sound of crunching leaves and twigs, and she turns toward the sound and sees that beneath a hawthorn bush, a large one, about the size of a refrigerator, there is a pair of flashing eyes. Someone—a child—is crouched there, hiding. And she can tell from the way the child breathes—and oh, she can hear; how she can hear!—that his heart is wild with fear. So much fear that it makes Alice afraid too.
Her hand begins to shake. She forces herself to draw the London plane, but the lines she makes jump up and down like the record of an electroencephalogram. She closes her eyes, breathes. Who are you? she thinks. And a voice within her answers: Don’t look at me!
A moment later, a man on a silly-looking bright red gas-powered scooter comes putt-putting by. The man has lank brown hair down to his shoulders, a thick beard the shape of the blade of a shovel, and he wears a long woolen coat. The scooter may look silly, but the man looks fierce, frightening, and very, very angry. He moves his head to the left and the right, scanning the walkways and the open spaces. He is looking for something, and Alice is sure that that something is crouched beneath the bushes, hiding and in terror.
“Caleb!” the man calls. “Come on, man. Everything’s cool. Caleb?”
He stops, kills the motor on his scooter, and looks around with increased intensity and concentration. He senses something…
“Caleb?” he says, more softly this time. He makes a kissing noise such as you would use to reassure a dog or some other animal. He waits. Waits. Finally, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a small silver cylinder, places the end of it in his mouth, and blows—his cheeks puff out. None of the other children seem to notice the high shrill piping sound of the whistle, but it is just short of unendurable to Alice. The suddenness of the pain it causes her is as frightening as being grabbed in the dark, and she claps her hands over her ears, her heart racing, her legs cold and wiggly as snakes.
After a couple more blasts on his excruciating whistle, the bearded man is satisfied that Caleb is nowhere near, and he starts the engine of his scooter again—the deep, gassy sputters of the little machine are a relief to Alice after the audio-dagger of the whistle.
When the scooter is out of sight—though she can still hear it putt-putting, even over the river of noise that flows southward on Fifth Avenue—Alice makes sure Ms. Delaney is not looking and then scurries over to the bush where she saw the flashing eyes. She parts the stiff, bare branches. There is the smell of dirt and decaying vegetation, and mixed in somewhere the juniper tang of feline urine. The branches are stiff and resist Alice as she struggles to part them, and for a moment she thinks the boy is no longer huddled there.
“Hello?” she quietly calls.
“Go away,” a scratchy, frantic voice answers. “Go away or I’ll kill you.”
She falls back, landing on her seat, so frightened that the world seems to snap and shiver before her eyes like a flag in a high wind. With her hands behind her and her heels dug into the ground, she crawls backward, away from the bush, away from the voice, in a panicked crabwalk.
Partly because of his advanced reading skills, and partly to minimize the number of classes he shares with his sister, Adam is put in a combined fourth-through-sixth-grade English class, where the students this semester are studying the Bible as literature with one of the school’s more popular teachers, Michael Medoff. Mr. Medoff is a tall, well-built man in his early thirties, with wavy hair, a scimitar nose, olive-green eyes, and a kindly but distant manner that draws children to him. Today, he is trying not to stand too close to any of the kids because he senses that his skin reeks of rum. He has trouble metabolizing alcohol, and last night he and his boyfriend, Xavier, were out late at a club frequented by Cuban exiles whose ideas of merriment and personal freedom seem to have no boundaries. (Michael’s idea of personal freedom is to be able to choose whatever he cares to read, with no papers to grade or classes to prepare.)
The fourteen students here today sit at a large oval table while Medoff paces near the front of his classroom reading aloud from the King James version of the Old Testament.
“Okay, here’s God in a particularly vengeful frame of mind,” he says. “This is from…” He glances at the Bible in his hands. “Jeremiah.”
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” more or less sings Ry Finnegan, whose father produced about 10 percent of Rolling Stone magazine’s Greatest Rock Albums of All Time.
“The Jeremiah of the Old Testament is so not a bullfrog, Ry,” Medoff says. And, not able to resist reminding the boy that the teacher not only gets the reference but knows the lyrics, he adds, “He was so not into joy for all the fishies and making life terrific for you and me. Listen.” He looks at the Bible again and reads, “ ‘And I will make this city desolate.’ And if that doesn’t make you wonder about God’s anger-management issues, maybe this will. ‘And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend.’ ”
Medoff looks up, smiling. He loves these kids, their brightness, their newness to the world, and he can hardly wait to start kicking ideas around. Yet as his eyes lift from the book, the first thing he happens to see is Adam Twisden-Kramer, whose face has suddenly drained of all color. If Adam were an old man, or even middle-aged, Medoff’s first thought would be that he was having a heart attack or a stroke. His breathing is shallow, and beads of perspiration are on his forehead now, and the wings of his nose.
“Adam?” the teacher manages to say as the boy slides from his chair and onto the floor in a dead faint.
All day long the key has burned like a coal in Adam’s pocket. Now it is night, nearly ten o’clock, and he and Alice have been locked in their bedrooms since six thirty. He connects with her phone and texts her: We get out of here.
2 early, she taps back.
Cant wait.
He climbs out of his pajamas and back into today’s school clothes. He takes the key out of his pocket, and at first it does not fit into the lock that keeps the burglar gates shut, In fact, it seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the lock. But even as his spirits spiral downward, Adam continues to twist and turn the key, and before too long he can push it into the invisible canal within the lock. He twists the key, and though it does not really turn, there is enough of a jiggle to lead him to believe that with a little patience he can make it work.
The baby monitor is on the bed, the volume turned up so he can hear if his parents leave their room and come to check on the twins. The speaker emits a steady whoosh of static; it sounds like a cat that can’t stop hissing.
From far below, and not broadcast through the monitor, comes the howl of a dog—Adam cannot tell whether the sound comes from outside or from a neighbor’s house or from the cellar of his own house, that dank, terrible place he will never, no matter what, step foot in—he’d rather die.
He hears their voices, his mother’s and father’s coming through the monitor.
So sleepy, his mother says. That tasted amazing.
Gives
new meaning to the phrase ‘good dog.’
Don’t. I just like to think of it as meat.
Have you given it more thought?
I hate thinking. I really do. I completely hate it.
It’s something we need to think about, Leslie.
I don’t even understand.
We just go there. We get on a plane and go there. If he could lead us in, he can fucking well lead us out.
Lead us out where?
Look at us, Leslie!
Suddenly, the lock surrenders to the key and unclenches itself from the gate, allowing Adam to push it to one side. He stands there for a few moments, closer to freedom than he has ever been.
He hoists the dark maroon JanSport backpack from its resting spot on a chair. He unzips it to make certain he has remembered to stuff in the things he imagines he might need: three changes of underwear, three pairs of socks, a cord to recharge his phone, three Rice Krispies bars in their shiny foil wrappers. He looks around his room—what else should he be taking?
But he must hurry. This much he knows. He unplugs the baby monitor, stows it hastily beneath his bed. He takes a last look around the room, wondering—fearing—that he will never return to it. Where will he go? He has no idea. He looks at the walls, the floors, the hooked rug, the poster of the giraffe with the funny look on his face, his pillow, his books, his toys, his computer. He turns off all the lights in his room but turns the small television on. “Good-bye, room,” he whispers.
He stops. Is someone coming? He leans toward the door, listens as hard as he can with his eyes closed, his breath held. All he can hear is the working of his own heart. I’m going to be a heart doctor one day, I’m going to fix hearts. The thought calms him for a moment—the future is like a guardian angel. But the creaks and twitters of the old house chase the angel away.
He listens to the silence. He cannot shake the feeling that his parents are standing just outside his door. They are preternaturally capable of sensing his every move, and even capable, it often seems, of reading his mind. Of course they know he has opened the safety gates. How could they not?
He wonders what they will do to him. The thought of it is too immense, too wild and overwhelming; it is like trying to see a polar bear in the midst of a blizzard. All you can do is squint and wait to be devoured…
He thinks of the baby monitor tossed carelessly under the bed. Maybe he can retrieve it, plug it back in…
But it’s far too late for that.
He walks across the unlit room, which he could navigate blindfolded. He presses his ear to the door. Waits. Listens.
“Mom?” he whispers. And hears in reply only silence. With a little more fear in his voice: “Dad?” Again, the silence. Is it the benign silence of emptiness or the silence of a beast waiting to strike? No matter how hard Adam presses his ear to his bedroom’s door, the silence persists.
With the gate out of the way, his next task is to open the window—a window that has not been open for as long as he can remember. His small hands clasp and yank the brass lifts on either side of the lower sash, but the window does not budge. His face is fiery; his slender fingers feel as if they are about the break. Adam steps back, his heart racing. He sees that the thick wooden frame encasing the window has been painted so that there is not even a crack of space between the window and the molding that holds it in place. Once he saw his father struggling to open a window that had been painted shut. His dad had hammered the heel of his hand up and down the window frame, breaking the paint’s seal, and then opened the window with no further trouble. But Adam does not dare bang away—such noise will surely bring his parents upstairs, if they are not already there, waiting.
Adam takes a series of deep breaths, telling himself, You do this, you do this, you can. He grabs the brass lifts, expels his breath with a strongman’s mighty huff, and to his great surprise the window opens with a long crackle.
There is no time to be proud or happy. Adam climbs out of the window and steadies himself on the windswept landing of the fire escape, reminding himself that if he looks down into the frozen, barren patch of backyard three stories below, he will surely fall. He takes a moment, waiting for his heart to slow down and for his breaths to come more easily. I’m going to make it, he tells himself.
A kind of iron gangplank connects the part of the fire escape he’s standing on to the landing beneath Alice’s window. He looks toward it and sees her peering nervously through the steel diamonds of the burglar gate. He’s pretty sure that the key that opened his gate will work on hers as well. It has to. It must.…
And if her window has been painted shut? He will open it. He has found a strength beyond what he knew, or even imagined. He has tapped into his will to survive.
The fire escape is slippery. It vibrates in the wind. It seems to sway when he moves; it wants to pull away from the bricks of the building. The rusted bolts attaching it to the side of the house chirp and squeak.
Slowly, Adam takes a step toward his sister, and another step. The metal groans beneath his feet, but as frightened as he is, there’s no turning back.
He looks out into the night, which is as unfamiliar to him as the terrain of some distant planet. He has seen it only in pictures and through his window, but now it strikes him as somehow more alive than he had ever imagined it. There is the sound of traffic. He can hear two people laughing on the street, invisible, but vivid too, like they are right there beside him. A plane pushes its lights across the inky sky. The sound of distant music, the thrum of the bass. The world!
He hears knocking. Knuckles on glass. Terrified, he turns toward his room, expecting to see his father’s furious face and the angry come-here gestures beckoning him back. But all he sees is the darkness of his old room. The knocking comes again. It’s Alice. She’s scared. She wants him to hurry. It’s her turn to be set free.
In the building just west of the Twisden house, a similarly built town house that has long since been divided up into steeply priced “cozy” apartments, a very large, tired, and discouraged middle-aged woman named Dorothy Willis lives on the dwindling inheritance left to her by her parents. She has been writing a book about an animal actor of the 1950s named Francis the Talking Mule, a book that she had thought would be easy and amusing to write, but, like everything else in her life, it became sadder and more difficult as it proceeded until she was practically unable to eke out a page, a paragraph, or even a sentence. But she remained at her desk deep into the night, playing computer solitaire, eating, trying not to eat, and surveying the backyards and lit windows of her neighbors.
For the most part, the windows of the houses within her view are curtained, and Dorothy must piece together narratives from shadows and silhouettes. It’s a bit like trying to figure out what people are saying in a language you don’t know. Is that figure of a man going up and down someone chinning himself on a bar, or is some repulsively energetic sex act being performed? Is that woman draping her arms around the silhouette of a man comforting him or seducing him, or, given the fact that neither of them has budged in twenty minutes, are they not people at all? Dorothy knows it’s rude and just a bit creepy to spy on your neighbors, but the people in the adjoining buildings are not really neighbors. She doesn’t know their names or anything else about them, which coats them all with a veneer of unreality.
As to the comings and goings in the expensive little yards below, there are often diverting things to look down upon during the warm months, but since the beginning of November the gardens have been empty save for the ever-diligent pigeons and squirrels, and a few fat rats. A couple of times, once near dawn, once around midnight, she saw Mr. Twisden digging a hole in his backyard and then burying something in a blue plastic sack, but he was so unhurried and confident that it never occurred to Dorothy that anything untoward might be happening.
But tonight she sees something that amazes her right out of her seat, though she has been sitting for so long that her legs cannot hold her bulk steadily and she immediat
ely falls back down into the expensive orthopedically designed desk chair she treated herself to when the Talking Mule project began. But even huffing and puffing from a sitting position she sees it: a little boy is crawling through the window and scrambling onto the fire escape. Dorothy’s first thought is that the house next door is on fire, in which case the whole block might soon be engulfed in flames, most particularly the house she lives in, in which case she is in mortal danger. So once again she forces herself out of her seat and this time she goes to her window. There he is, the child, looking up at the sky—he does not look like a kid escaping from a house on fire. Yet he looks too young to be sneaking out at night to meet some little sweetheart. Dorothy presses her bulk against the window to get a better angle, and she peers out: There is no sign of flame, or smoke. And no one else but this solitary child is moving.
Oh my God! The boy almost slips off the fire escape, but he rights himself. And now he is walking toward a lit window about fifteen feet away. Dorothy is breathing with such force that her inner humidity is clouding the window. She wipes the vapor clear and by now the boy has been joined by another child, exactly his height and weight. A girl, maybe, through Dorothy cannot be certain. She herself had once been coltish and thin and had to be urged to eat. She once climbed, too, the live oak that ruled the little kingdom of their Baton Rouge backyard.…
Suddenly she sees the two children clambering down the metal staircase, the end of which sways back and forth, like the point of a blind person’s cane. They are in the yard, through the gate, gone.
Kids, Dorothy says to herself. Well, show’s over. She gathers herself and is about to return to her desk, her book, her bag of Bugles, when all of a sudden a head pops out of the boy’s window. It must be the father. Dorothy has seen him many times, this well-built, unfriendly man, often with a hat pulled down over his brow, warmly dressed even when the weather called for short sleeves.… He looks left, right, up, and then down, and wastes no more time holding on to the illusion that those children are somehow nearby. The window slams shut and by the time Dorothy makes her way from her back window to the front of her apartment, both the father and the mother are on the street. They stand in the gauzy swirling cone of light dropped by a streetlamp, touching each other nervously as they look up and down the street. They lift their faces. They seem to be.… what? Sniffing the air? How strange. They are. They are definitely sniffing the air.
