Breed (15 page)

“Downtown,” he says, tapping the fly of his jeans. “Or uptown,” he adds, slapping his chest. He sees the look on her face. “Don’t be afraid,” the boy says. “I’m just asking. But when it happens, you’ll see, you will definitely understand.” With a complicated set of movements, like a West Point cadet on a parade ground, he moves his skateboard from his shoulder onto the pavement, mounts it, and skates to Alice’s side.

“She’s okay, brother,” Bernard says.

“What are you doing here?” the boy asks, his voice less harsh now. “You running?”

“My dad’s going to come and get me in a minute,” Alice says.

“I’ll bet.”

“Well, he is.”

The boy looks deeply into Alice’s eyes, squinting and frowning, like a lawyer reading a contract’s fine print. “You’re mad afraid of your father.”

“No, I’m not.”

“And your mother too, right?”

“You don’t even know them.”

“So maybe I don’t and maybe I do. But I will tell you one thing about them—they are hairy bastards, right?”

Alice doesn’t have the will to further insist. She lowers her gaze, shakes her head.

“Eli, Nell, Oliver, Djuna.” The boy counts the names off on his fingers. “Chelsea, Kim.” He ends in a shrug. “I’m pretty young to have so many dead friends.”

“I guess.”

“You know what happened to them?”

“How should I know?”

“You could actually guess, if you thought about it.”

But Alice does not want to think about it. She shakes her head.

“Think.”

“I don’t even know you,” Alice manages to say.

“Their fucking parents killed them.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s true. Ask Eli, Nell, Oliver, or Djuna. Ask Chelsea. She was six. Ask Kim. We lost him two weeks ago.” The boy reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a wrinkled photograph of a golden-skinned boy with long floppy hair, wearing jeans and a blue-and-white sweatshirt that says
I
♥
SLOVENIA.

“Is that him?” Alice says, her voice shaking.

The boy puts the picture back in his pocket and pulls out a cell phone, which he flicks open like a switchblade. He steps back and takes a picture of Alice. “In case you disappear,” he says.

“Can I use your phone?”

“Do you have any food?” he asks.

“I don’t walk around with food.”

“My name’s Richard, but everyone calls me Rodolfo.”

“I’m Alice.”

“Do you have any money, Alice?”

“No.”

“Honest?”

“Honest. Can I use your phone?”

Rodolfo is silent for a few moments. Finally, he pats Alice’s shoulder. “Hungry? Come on, we’ll show you how to get food. You like to hunt?”

He turns toward Bernard. “Go home, Bernard. Your mom’s a nice lady and if she wakes up and sees you’re not there she’s gonna freak out.”

“What about your phone?” Alice says.

“My parents cut off my service a year ago,” Rodolfo says.

Michael gropes for his wristwatch, which he had placed on the coffee table, thinks for a moment that it is somehow ten past six until he turns the watch the correct way and sees it is twenty minutes before one, which makes more sense. But still: Who could be ringing the buzzer at this hour?

He decides to do nothing, at least not right away. It could be one of his neighbors making a mistake, or it could be some dopey kids screwing around in the lobby. He sits up, leans against the arm of the sofa, waits. A few moments go by and he is about to make another attempt at sleep when the phone rings. Startled, Michael grabs it immediately.

“I know it is late,” says Rosalie, Xavier’s sister. “But I wait for Xavier and he no here.”

“He’s not there?”

“No. I wait.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yes. Me too, What the fuck?”

The buzzer sounds again, this time in a series of short bursts that seem to convey furiousness on the part of whoever is downstairs.

“This might be him, Rosalie. I’ll talk to you later.”

“I’m calling police,” Rosalie says as he hangs up the phone.

Michael decides to meet fury with fury and when he speaks into the intercom, his voice is ragged with irritation. “What in the hell do you want?” he says through clenched teeth. “Is that you, Xavier? Where’s your key?”

“This is Alexander Twisden, Mr. Medoff. My son is in your apartment, and I have come to take him home.”

Michael cannot immediately rid himself of the idea Adam planted in his mind—that the Twisdens are in Canada, and Adam and Alice have been left alone. “Who is this?” Michael says into the intercom, gruffly, though not quite so aggressively as a moment ago.

“Would you like me to come back with the police?” the voice says.

Rather than answer, Michael buzzes the lobby door open. He quickly climbs into his trousers, pulls a cotton sweater over his undershirt, and jams his feet into his shoes, dispensing with socks. The thought of being seen even remotely undressed in this small apartment with one of his students—one of his
boy
students, no less—asleep in the next room fills Michael with waves of panic, as if he is descending a staircase in the dark and suddenly finds a step missing.

Alexander Twisden emerges from the small elevator and looks up and down the hallway, his nostrils flared in disdain. He sees Michael standing in front of the door to his apartment and walks toward him with the long, princely strides of a man who knows that everything he says, wears, and does is important, a man who knows how to project his personal power so well that only a complete fool would fail to note it.

“What are you doing, Mr. Medoff?” Twisden says as he brushes past Michael and enters the apartment. “I have to tell you, I am stunned by your lack of judgment.”

“Adam told me you were out of the country.”

“Oh, Adam told you.” He expels air, as if no words could adequately describe the idiocy of Michael’s remark. He surveys the apartment, and Michael feels a slow, cold twist of dread, wondering what this place looks like through those icy eyes. “So?” Twisden says. “Where is he?”

Michael clears his throat. A strong coppery scent emanates from Twisden, and as Michael backs away from the odor, he notices that there is something red caked beneath a few of Twisden’s fingernails.

“He’s asleep,” Michael says. Somewhere in the back of his mind, banging distantly like a shutter in a window too far away to be seen, is the thought that somehow Twisden has gotten this information from Xavier…

“Adam!” Twisden says loudly. “Please come out here.”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Michael says, pushing back a little as a way of regaining his confidence and his self-respect. “You can’t come in here and start shouting. I’ve got neighbors on all sides.”

“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to know you are keeping one of your little boy students tucked away in this shit box of an apartment.”

Alex Twisden’s bluster may often have had a disarming and even disabling effect on his adversaries, but when the bluster is used on Michael, it has a nearly directly opposite effect. He feels himself tremble at the volume of Twisden’s voice and the rancor of his words, but the effrontery of it, and the implied assumption that Michael is some poor weakling who will quake and tremble when faced with the bluster of a Real Man, brings out the innate stubbornness at the core of Michael’s personality. Gay men from intolerant small towns are among the toughest people in America.

“Hey, back off, all right?” Michael says. He sees Twisden’s eyes widen. “He showed up here in the middle of the night. He said you were out of the country. I mean, come on, what is going on?”

“What’s going on? You would presume to question the way my wife and I are raising our children. There is no one who cares more about their children than we do. No one. But I think the question here, Mr. Medoff, is what kind of teacher turns his little apartment into a clubhouse for ten-year-old boys.”

The two men are silent for a moment, and in the silence Michael hears a soft
click
. Adam has locked the door to the bedroom.

“I find your tone offensive,” Michael says. “And I find—”

But he doesn’t have a chance to list the things he objects to because Twisden has grabbed him by the shirt and now runs him into the wall, where he hits with a bone-bruising thud.

“Adam?” Twisden calls, in a surprisingly tranquil voice, considering that he is pinning Michael to the wall at the same time.

Both men’s eyes turn toward the bedroom door, but Adam is silent.

“I’m going to have you fired,” Twisden whispers to Michael.

“I’m going to have
you
arrested,” Michael says.

Twisden gives Michael a last shove and goes to the bedroom door. He tries the handle, but it barely turns. “Adam, please, come out. Now. I need you to come out now.” He waits, listening, tries the handle again, and finally steps back and runs his shoulder into the edge of the door. The effort of it barely shows on Twisden’s face, but the result is a splintering of the door’s frame. Casually, as if this were a perfectly acceptable and normal way of entering a room, he reaches through the jagged opening and undoes the lock on the inside. He brushes the splinters and dust from the shoulder and sleeve of his jacket and walks into the bedroom.

The bedroom is filled with shadows going this way and that at mad angles. A bedside lamp has fallen to the floor, turning shoes into hills and chairs into watchtowers. The white cotton curtains dart and dance away from the open window. In the midst of the commotion, Adam has fled.

“I am dialing nine-one-one right now,” Michael says as Alex goes to the window. He flings it open to its widest and looks up and down. The rusted, pigeon-spattered fire escape is flush with the outside of the window.

“Oh God,” Alex says, running his hand through his thick head of hair. “Oh please. My little boy! My son!”

With amazing agility he slips out of the window and stands on the fire escape, looking up, down, and side to side, but Adam is nowhere to be seen. He dips back into the bedroom, shaking his head.

“It’s ringing,” Michael says. He holds the phone toward Twisden.

“Why would I be afraid of you?” Twisden says. “With all that I’ve got going on in my life, how would I ever be able to find the time or the energy to be afraid of you?” And with that, he brushes past Michael, making sure to jostle him, almost, in fact, knocking him over.

“Asshole,” Michael says, somewhat quietly, secure in the knowledge that Twisden is already halfway out of the apartment building. He hurries to double-lock the door behind Twisden and then turns to survey the damage done to the bedroom door.

When he goes back into the bedroom itself, Adam is sitting on the edge of the bed, shaking with fear.

“Why did you lie to me, Adam?”

The boy looks up at him, helpless and afraid. He shakes his head.

“I think I just made a huge mistake, Adam. I should have—”

“No,” Adam says. “You can’t.”

“I can and I must. He’s your father. I’m going to call him, and I’m going to take you home. This is nuts.” He reaches for Adam to get him off the bed.

But the boy takes Michael’s hand in both of his and presses it to the side of his face, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth twisted.

“Adam?”

“They’re going to kill us.”

This is what children say when they are worried about being sent to their rooms, or being grounded, or having their iPods taken away for a week. But Michael knows that in some cases—not so few as we would like to imagine—this is what children say when they are genuinely and legitimately afraid of suffering harm at the hands of the people pledged by nature and the law to protect them.

“What do you mean, Adam?” Michael says in a soft, calm voice.

Adam shakes his head.

“Does your father hit you?” Michael asks.

“No.”

“Do either of them?”

“No.”

“Spank you really hard? Shake you? Twist your arm?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Then what? Threaten you?”

The boy shakes his head and shrugs, looks away.

“Then what are we talking about here, Adam?”

“What I know.”

“And what’s that? What do you know?”

“That late at night something happens to them. They get different.”

“Adults have their own time, they have adult time. And they are different then than they are when they’re with their children.”

“It’s not that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Michael sighs. “I don’t know, Adam. It sounds like things are basically okay at your house.”

“They’re going to kill us,” Adam says, his face reddening, his voice rising. “I don’t think they can help it. But at night something happens. I’m not lying. This is true, I swear to God. They want to…”

His voice breaks, and he looks down, his body trembling.

“They want to eat us,” he says, in barely a whisper.

Bernard’s mother comes home after her shift plus overtime at the hospital to find the boy in his bed, fully clothed and sobbing. The sight of this is more wearying to her than upsetting—she has seen him like this countless times. In fact, lately, as he grows up, more often than not she finds him in various states of despair, from loneliness because of his isolation; frustration because his physical limitations are so severe; or shame and revulsion, if he has disobeyed her stern warning to keep away from the mirror, all mirrors, any mirrors, and anything else with a reflecting surface, be it a toaster or a spoon.

The mother, Amelie Gauthier, sits on the edge of his bed and pats his back. She is tired, so tired, more tired than a human is meant to be. She is feeling the exhaustion driving through her like a steady rain. She glances at the boy’s motorized chair; the seat is thick with crumbs, the detritus of the cakes and cookies he munches day in and day out. His ever-present laptop is open; his screen saver is the face of Jesus. Faith in Jesus is the one thing she has been able to give him.… Her open hand travels up and down his curved, bumpy spine, feeling the practically prehistoric rise and fall of it. She knows this boy’s body as well as her own.

“Bernard?” she whispers.

“Oh, Mama, Mama,” the boy whimpers. “Sick, I’m sick.”