Breed

by Chase Novak

  “Under the sink,” Leslie says to them as she hurries back to the departures lounge. She sticks her hand in her pocket and jiggles the vial of pills from Amelie. They seem to be working.

  The three of them sleep all the way to Munich. They sleep through the takeoff, the safety demonstration, the first movie, the second movie, the several instances of extreme turbulence, the pilot’s reassuring patter, and the landing. The smell of the evening meal temporarily awakens Leslie and she eats everything on her tray, and when that is gone she eats everything on the twins’ trays as well, because it seems nothing, not even the scent of chicken and chocolate chip cookies, can awaken them, and it also seems to be the case that even three airplane meals cannot satisfy her hunger.

  Because of the delay in their first flight, they have little time to get to the plane to Ljubljana. They have but one suitcase between them—and that suitcase is essentially empty, it’s more to help them look like normal travelers—but they must go through passport control before proceeding to the gate for Adria Airlines. German efficiency assures a fast-moving line, but as anxious as Leslie is to clear immigration and hurry to their connecting flight, approaching the immigration officers fills her with misgivings. Maybe by now a directive has gone out, and her name and the names of her children are on a… what is that called? Watch list! Their names could be on a watch list. After all, two deaths. Two children missing.

  And Cynthia!

  “Oh my God.”

  “What is it, Mom?” Adam asks.

  “I just remembered something,” Leslie says. “It’s okay.” But the memory of her sister sitting in the kitchen is connected to a second, even more startling memory: the man in the kennel downstairs. She lets out a long, corrugated sigh.

  “Mom?” Alice says.

  “Here we go,” Leslie says as the young uniformed man in the booth gestures for them to step forward. She has a powerful impulse to turn and run. She sees herself racing through the scrubbed hush of the early-morning airport, vaulting over rows of seats, bounding up an escalator. She puts out her hand, and first Adam gives her his passport, then Alice hands hers over, and a moment or two later Leslie slides all three of the passports to the border-control officer, whose eyes are small and unusually close together and whose lips are as plump and round as cocktail franks.

  As he types the serial numbers of their passports into his computer, he asks, in English, “You are staying in Germany?”

  Leslie tells him they are heading to Ljubljana, in Slovenia, and though it’s only an hour away by air, the immigration officer seems to have no idea what she is saying—either he has never heard of the place or he is too absorbed in running the edge of Leslie’s passport through his scanner and peering at the information coming up on his console. He furrows his brow, puckers his lips as if to receive a chaste little kiss. A moment passes, followed by another. The man’s pursed lips move up and down. He taps something on his keyboard. Waits. Taps something else. Waits.

  And just when it feels to Leslie that she cannot bear the uncertainty another moment, he whomps the German stamp onto each passport and slides them all toward her with a brisk nod.

  On the flight to Slovenia, Leslie and the twins are asked not to sit together. There are only fourteen passengers, and the stewardess in her dark turquoise jacket spaces them throughout the small jet so that their weight will be evenly distributed. Sitting in the middle of the plane, Leslie looks out and sees the alpine protrusions of the mountains below, jagged and broken, like immense glaciers floating through a sea of snow-covered trees.

  Their plane lands far from the gate, and the passengers are herded onto a bus—open-sided, despite the wintry air—which makes its way through a jumble of large jets, some idle, others with their engines warming. Leslie peers into the whirl of a Swissair jet engine, the sides of which look like a beehive; it turns around and around, faster and faster, its heat sending ripples into the cold gray air, the noise rising higher and higher, almost like a human scream.

  “Mom?” Adam says, tugging her sleeve.

  She looks at him questioningly.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  She knows it ought to be her asking him, asking them both: Has it really come to this? Are they really now looking after her?

  “Tired, I guess,” she says.

  “Do we have money?” Adam asks.

  She looks at him blankly. “Some.”

  “We need euros,” Alice says.

  “How do you even know that,” Leslie says. She is craning her neck, looking back at that whirling Swissair turbine: there is something in it that draws her.

  “Mom,” Alice says, with a child’s sweet exasperation. “I’m ten, not two.”

  The bus has brought them to the terminal. There are no customs to go through, no passport control either. Leslie almost understands why this is the case—something to do with Slovenia being part of Europe United, or whatever it’s called.… Sometimes her mind feels like an old car: she turns the key and the engine almost turns over almost…​almost.

  “We can get money at one of the money machines,” she announces brightly as the three of them walk across the modest airport, with its couple of cafés and its scatter of shops.

  “They’re called ATMs, Mom,” Alice says.

  Leslie fishes her bank card out of her purse and hands it to Alice. “Go to the machine and get some of the local money, okay?”

  “I need your PIN.” She sees the look of confusion on her mother’s face. “The numbers. You have to tell them the right numbers or the card doesn’t work.”

  Leslie’s face is blank, and she sadly, slowly shakes her head. Over the years, she gradually left more and more of the nuts and bolts of life to Alex. She can’t remember the last time she wrote a check, or did anything else regarding their financial life. Dealing with their dwindling investments, opening bank statements, paying taxes, and overseeing the steady stream of heirlooms they have brought to auction were all Alex’s responsibility since… actually, she cannot remember when it was that she handed the reins over to him. Nothing was ever said about it, it wasn’t a decision, it just happened. And now here she is, standing in the Ljubljana airport with her two children, and not only has she no real plan about how they are going to find Dr. Kis, she doesn’t even know where they are going to stay for the night or how to pay for a taxi into the city, and she sure as hell does not remember what the secret code is that would allow this piece of dark blue plastic to induce a machine in a foreign country to spit out a wad of cash.

  “I don’t know,” she says softly. Seeing their looks of dismay, she defends herself: “I’m not myself, okay?”

  Leslie hands the card to Alice and the twins go off to the ATM to try their luck. The first four numbers they try constitute their birth date, and they are still too young to fully appreciate how amazing it is that it works.

  “Ask for five hundred,” Adam whispers. “We’ll give her one hundred and keep the rest.”

  Alice agrees with a nod and they move to block their mother’s view and stand shoulder to shoulder, shoving bills into their pockets.

  “Take us to a very nice hotel, please,” Leslie tells the taxi driver, and he brings them to a section of the city that is familiar to her, though not to the hotel where she and Alex stayed nearly eleven years ago. For which she is grateful. Her missing of him is a dull ache that seems to spread—from her heart, to her stomach, to her bowels, to her eyes, to her throat, to her arms and legs. It occupies her as if it were a parasite and she its host.

  The driver is a good sort. He wears a brown leather jacket over a T-shirt bearing the picture of Tito. The driver has a round, youthful face, though his short hair is turning gray. His left ear is missing, and in its wake is a little pink ripple of flesh that looks like one of the folds of the labia.

  “This is good place,” he says, pulling his black Renault in front of the VIP Hotel.

  It is the kind of place that Alex would never have stepped foot in—even
on his way to bankruptcy, covered in coarse dark hair, and subject to the whip and rattle of unspeakable temptations, he maintained the tastes and sense of entitlement of his forebears and to the end saw himself as a man who simply did not stay in hotels frequented by software salesmen and budget tourists.

  “How much?” Leslie asks.

  “Forty euros, please,” he says. After she pays him, the driver takes a business card from a plastic holder attached to the car’s sun visor by rubber bands. “If you need anything, I want you please to call me. Slavoj Bucovec. You need drive. Sights. Maybe go to ski mountains. Slavoj Bucovec is on standby. I am here seven twenty four twelve.” He hands her his business card. It shows a cartoonish car with long eyelashes over its headlights and little Valentine hearts pouring out of its exhaust pipe. She reads his name.

  “Slavoj?”

  “Slave-oh,” he says. “The J at the end is silent, silent like so much is in this country, where most secrets are taken into the grave.”

  “Well, if you would wait here while we check in,” Leslie says. She looks at her watch. It’s a little after 9:00 a.m.; Kis is probably in his office or on the way. “We need to go to a doctor, and you could take us.”

  “Of course. Do you have the street and the number?”

  “That’s the problem right there,” Leslie says. “But I think I can remember how to get there. Or maybe you know the way—he’s rather well known.”

  “Slovene medical doctors are among the finest in the world,” Slavoj says.

  “This doctor, we crossed the bridge with the… what do you call them? Monsters.” Leslie spreads her arms and waves them up and down.

  “Mom,” Alice says, warning, imploring.

  “Dragon Bridge,” says Slavoj.

  “Yes!” Leslie says. Color rushes to her face. She knows now, with a kind of calm certainty, that this is all going to work itself out. “And it was on Castle Street.”

  “Very close by,” Slavoj says. “I can take you.”

  “Oh, thank you thank you thank you,” Leslie says. “Come on, kids, let’s get checked in, washed up, and ready.” Then to Slavoj she says, “Fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “Massive okays to that,” Slavoj says.

  When they check into the hotel, once again Leslie has to show their passports, and again all goes smoothly. The desk clerk makes it clear there are plenty of rooms available right now—if Ljubljana has a high season, November is not it—and it is no problem at all to give them two rooms right next to each other.

  “It might be better if we had a little… space,” Leslie says. “Do you have anything maybe one floor up, or down?”

  If the clerk finds anything strange in this request, he masks it expertly, and moments later the twins are in room 404, and Leslie is in 511. Her window looks out onto a public square, where a stage and several grandstands have been set up and now stand empty and forlorn in the morning’s cold rain. Old posters bearing the face of Gustav Mahler peel gradually from the lampposts.

  “Oh, Alex, Alex, Alex,” Leslie says, falling to her knees in front of the windows and holding the hem of the long curtain to her face. For the first time since his death, the loss of him exerts its full weight upon her, and it is like being pushed facedown by a giant hand, invisible, implacable, pitiless.

  There is still a faint odor of cigarettes, though housekeeping has left the windows open. The room is painted white, with turquoise trim, and there is only one bed for the two of them. A business card advertising a local nightclub and featuring a drawing of dancing girls in elaborate ostrich-feather headgear has been left on top of the television set. Adam picks up the card, looks it over, lets it drop from his fingers, and watches it as it flutters to the floor.

  “So, when we become teenagers,” he says.

  “I know,” Alice says. “Or puberty or whatever. I hate that word anyhow. It’s like pee-you.”

  “If we turn out like them,” Adam says. He opens the minibar and takes out a Toblerone chocolate bar, which he tosses to Alice; he keeps the Three Musketeers for himself. On the inside of the door, there are breath mints, a deck of cards, and a combination corkscrew and bottle opener, which Adam takes and puts in his back pocket.

  “Isn’t the doctor supposed to have something for us too?” Alice says.

  Adam shrugs. “I wish Mr. Medoff was our father.”

  “He’s as dead as Dad.”

  “Whatever happens, Alice. Us forever.” He extends his arm, as if to read a wristwatch, and moves his eyes along the length of it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing if it’s got a bunch of hair.”

  “There’s something so sick about what happens to people,” Alice says. “Even if nothing happens to us, it still sort of makes me nauseous.”

  There’s a knock at the door. “Kids?” Leslie says. “It’s time to go.”

  “I’m scared,” Alice says, as softly as possible.

  Adam pulls the corkscrew/bottle opener out of his back pocket and shows it to Alice.

  “Just let her try something,” he whispers.

  Slavoj drives the three of them to Castle Trg. It would have been a short walk, but by car they must contend with one-way streets and streets closed to vehicles. Despite the city’s attempts to make life easier for pedestrians, Ljubljana feels deserted. Low baguette-shaped gray clouds race from west to east; plump, piebald pigeons hop along the cobblestones unmolested.

  “There it is!” Leslie exclaims when they finally reach Castle Trg. There is the stone Art Deco building, the two carved women holding their swords.

  The twins stare at the swords, remembering their teacher and the agony that inch by inch ended his life.…

  “I wait here,” Slavoj says.

  “It could be a while,” Leslie says.

  “Everything is very quiet today,” he says, gesturing to the empty street. He adds, under his breath, “And every other day.” He opens his door and hurries around to the back of the car to open the door for Leslie and the children. “I’ll be here,” he says with a small salute. He seems a little out of breath. The picture of Marshal Tito swells and shrinks with the rise and fall of his chest.

  It’s as if she and Alex were here just a few weeks ago, or yesterday. Over the years, Leslie has done her best not to think about that day when they came to Dr. Kis, but now the memories of it come rushing back, shockingly detailed and eerily vivid. She climbs the stone stairs with her children behind her. She can smell rice cooking. On the third floor, the door to someone’s apartment is open. She can hear the TV or the radio, can see an umbrella stand holding six or seven umbrellas, the wooden handles like a bouquet of question marks.

  “How you guys holding up?” she asks.

  “Is he going to give us shots?” Adam asks.

  “We’re okay,” Alice says quickly.

  They hear claws clicking on the stone steps, coming in their direction. A few moments later, a man appears. He is stocky, with the empty left sleeve of his leather jacket pinned to the flap of the pocket. He holds a metal leash, at the end of which is a shaggy, panting Great Pyrenees, a hundred pounds at least, ice white except for a saddle of pale brown fur.

  For the moment, it seems likely to Leslie that this man and the giant dog are connected to Dr. Kis—just as that little Englishman was connected to the rottweiler.

  “Excuse me,” Leslie says to the man once he is in front of her.

  He looks warily at her, tightens his grip on the leash.

  “Do you know Dr. Kis?” she asks. “Is he still…”

  But her question is all but obliterated. The sound of her voice has triggered some guarding instinct in the dog, and his dark eyes flash furiously and he lets out a series of deep booming barks, attempting to lunge at her with each one. Each bark seems to have the power to push her back.

  The one-armed man pulls the dog away and continues down the stairs. He calls out to them over his shoulder. From the tone, it sounds as if he is apologizing, but they can’t be su
re.

  “I could kill him,” Leslie says, wearily. She realizes that the children have heard her. “You okay?” Leslie asks them.

  “That dog was scared,” Adam says.

  “It’s just a bad dog,” Leslie says. She feels her children’s eyes on her, can feel their gaze like little fingers looking for a way into her, a way of prying her open and peering in. It strikes her: They know everything. The next flight of stairs awaits them. And the next. And the next. She tells herself that the appearance of that terrible dog was, in fact, a good omen. It means Kis is here.…

  This much she knows: her mind is not reliable. At this point, half the people in nursing homes can think circles around her. But Leslie is sure that Kis’s office was on the top floor of this building, and, indeed, once she is in front of the door that once led to his suite of offices, she is more certain than ever that she has come to the right place. Yet the plaque on the door says something complex in Slovene, and etched into the metal of it is a silhouette of a woman doing yoga. And the smell of incense wafts through the crack at the bottom of the door. Nonetheless, Leslie knocks. Silence. She looks nervously at Adam and Alice. They are holding hands like two urchins who have been left alone on board a ship that is taking on water.

  At last, the door is opened by a woman in her thirties with a pixie cut dyed dark orange and wearing a gray sports bra and cargo pants, rolled-up yoga mat in one hand and a mug of something in the other. She looks at Leslie and the twins with unconcealed puzzlement.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Leslie says. “Do you speak English?”

  “Not so good, but yes, I try.” The woman’s voice is soft, melodious. She smiles.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Kis,” Leslie says. It sounds too blunt to her ears and she amends it. “We’re all three of us looking for him.”