Breed (32 page)

The boy was able to awaken himself enough to call his mother at the hospital, but, still clutching his phone in his two-fingered hand, he has fallen deeply into a vast narcotic sleep. Even from a distance, and even through the darkness of this room, Leslie sees enough of Bernard to make her let out an “oh” of dismay.

“How dare you,” snarls Amelie. She goes to Bernard’s bedside, takes the phone from him, and holds out his hand for Leslie to see. “You see that?” With her fingertip, she traces the path of Bernard’s reddish birthmark, a serpentine squiggle just like the marks on the hands of Leslie’s other children.

Leslie does not speak. It is all she can do to nod her head. Calamities collide within her until she cannot tell exactly where one has ended and the next one begun.

Suddenly, she feels something touch her on the back. With a shiver and start, she turns around and sees Alice looking up at her.

“Mom?” she asks. “Are we going to go home?”

Leslie and Amelie are in Fairway Market on Broadway and Seventy-Fourth Street, filling their shopping cart with food for the children. Between Amelie’s apartment and the store, they passed two cops conversing in their squad car, a mounted police officer, and two women on foot patrol, and none of them paid Leslie the slightest mind.
Maybe it never happened,
Leslie thinks. Yet memory reacts quickly and decisively to the effrontery of fantasy, and as soon as she imagines that Alex and the teacher are out there, alive, the images of their deaths rush forth to shred her illusions. Now, with everything else, she has a new enemy: the memories that stalk her every step of the way. Her own mind has become a forbidden zone.

Amelie pushes the cart decisively through the thronged aisles, full of people on their way home from work. She fills the cart with plums and apples, orange juice, almonds, rice crackers.…

“These kids don’t eat anything decent most of the time,” Amelie says over her shoulder. “It’s the least I can do.”

“What about some meat?” Leslie says, in not much more than a whisper.

Amelie stops her cart, turns, and holds Leslie in her gaze for a couple of long moments. “That’s the last thing in the world they need.”

“Protein,” Leslie says, with a shrug.

“Look, Leslie, I know what you’ve been going through. I know how hard it’s been, and it gets harder every year.”

“It was just a suggestion.”

“I know what to feed these kids. Meat is full of hormones. You know how you feel at night? The temptations? The cravings? Well, that’s how some of them start to feel when the hormones really kick in. Right now, they’re still basically just kids. But some of them, you have to keep an eye out.”

“I have to take care of my kids,” Leslie says.

“I know, I know. I’ve got stuff I can give you back at the apartment. Pills that will take the edge off, pretty much.”

“I don’t like pills.”

“They’re not going to turn night into day, but if you take them they might help, for a little while.”

“Why just for a little while?”

“You’ll get used to them. You’ll burn through them, they’ll stop making a difference. They might not even make a difference at all. But don’t worry. As long as you’re with me, I’ll keep an eye on you.”

“And after that?”

“I’m a nurse,” Amelie says. “Mainly nurses just try to alleviate suffering.”

A couple of shoppers—a dapper older man and a heavyset younger guy—are listening to Leslie and Amelie with unmitigated curiosity.

“May I help you?” Amelie says to them, her voice as blunt as a kick in the shins.

The two men quickly push their cart away. It is filled with cut flowers, flats of smoked salmon, crackers, grapes, a bottle of olive oil.…
Oh, life!
thinks Leslie. The pleasures of life. Whatever happened to the pleasures of life?

A wave of grief buckles her knees. To regain her balance, she grabs hold of the nearest thing, which happens to be a clear-front riser holding a display of oranges. One falls, then another, and in moments dozens of them are bouncing and rolling down the aisle.

Rodolfo and a couple of the others have helped Bernard out of his bed. The effects of the Dilaudid have, for the most part, worn off, and now he is in the apartment’s front room, tapping away on his computer. The screen casts its watery glow on what there is of his face. The others wait silently, as if Bernard is cracking open a safe, inside of which is everything they have ever wanted.

Adam takes this opportunity to pull Alice into the kitchen, where he whispers urgently to her.

“We should get out of here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Where do you think we should go?”

“I’m tired.”

“She’s going to come back soon.”

“She seems like she’s better,” Alice says.

“It’s mad dark. Maybe we should go.”

“There’s no place left to go, Adam. It’s night. Everyone is dead. This is it.”

“Someone.”

“Someone what?”

“I don’t know. Someone will take care of us. What are we going to do? Live in the park? Live here? There’s no way.”

“At least we’re together,” Alice says.

Adam nods. He takes his sister’s hand, squeezes it. It’s like touching a part of himself, another version of himself that has stepped out of a dream. But she’s no
dream.
She is the most real thing, the thing he cannot live without.

“Hey, Alice, come in here,” Rodolfo shouts from the front room. “Check it out, check it out.” His arms are stretched in front of him, and both of his pointer fingers are aimed at Alice. When her eyes meet his, he snaps his fingers, flicks his pelvis, smiles.

A freezing rain is pelting the city, and when Leslie and Amelie come in with the groceries, they are virtually soaked.

“Mom!” both Adam and Alice call out as soon as they see her.

“Come here,” Adam says. “You gotta look at this.”

Leslie stands behind Bernard, who has brought a video up on his screen. It is Dr. Kis, sitting at a desk, a window full of sunlight behind him.

“Oh my God,” Leslie says.

Tentatively, she touches the back of the hoodie that covers Bernard’s head.
Son,
she thinks.

The gesture is not lost on Adam or Alice. To see this moment’s tenderness in their mother reminds them of the love she has shown them, the love they feel, but most of all it fills them with
hope
. Where does hope come from when it miraculously appears; where does it go when it vanishes? No X-ray, MRI, or CAT scan can locate the wellspring of hope, yet it has been there during every moment of endurance and every triumph, and now that the twins feel it they realize how long they have lived without it, just as you can understand how much pain you have been in only once the agony stops.

Bernard presses the Play arrow, and Kis begins to speak.

“As some of you know, I have been offering fertility treatments for nearly fifteen years. People, many hundreds of them, have come to me, so many without hope. I have not been able to give each and every client a child, but my success rate is unprecedented in modern fertility medicine. There have been articles in
Paris Match
in France,
Der Spiegel
in Germany,
OK!
in Russia,
Town & Country
magazine in the United States, and of course numerous medical journals. There is no question, no question whatsoever, so make no mistake, my friends, I am, in all due modestment, the leading fertility physician in Europe, and the world.

“Have there been errors? Of course there have. Have some been… unfortunate? Yes, without question…”

“He can make it go away,” Adam blurts out, unable to stand there in silence while Leslie, her mouth half open, her eyes pinned to the screen, watches and listens as the distant doctor justifies and apologizes for what he has done.

“Mom,” Alice says. “Mom…” Her legs feel as if they are made of lead. Her stomach aches, her eyes burn. She knows she is crying now, and it is sort of embarrassing, but it’s not too bad. She feels a comforting hand on her shoulder—Rodolfo! “Mom? Mom?”

“Oh, baby,” Leslie says, gathering in her daughter and her son. “I am so so so sorry…”

The news stations are filled with reports of the bizarre killing in Central Park, of the murderer who rushed insanely into the traffic on Fifth Avenue, where he was executed by the M1 bus. The story first appears on local news, though the national cable stations are quick to pick it up, and the major networks are unable to resist it. For the newscasters, the story is a gift that keeps on giving. With one of the dead men a once prominent New York attorney and the other a beloved teacher in a prestigious and pricey Upper East Side private school who was also the teacher of one of the alleged murderer’s children, the story creates a kind of porn loop for TV and the Internet. There is a town house, graceful, frightfully expensive, just a touch dishabille. There is the heavyset neighbor rambling on about children climbing out of windows. There is the soaring facade of the publishing company where the mother used to work. There is the plain glass box where Alex Twisden turned the law into a lasso to rope in money for his clients. There is the Gothic facade of Berryman Prep. There is the beautiful office of the headmaster. There are the puzzled faces of the kids in the dead teacher’s classes—they look like shell-shocked models in a very sad Ralph Lauren ad.

Meanwhile, Cynthia remains in the precinct’s lockup. She has finally made it clear to the officer in charge of her that she does not live in New York, that she had nothing to do with the poor soul locked in that cellar, that she is, in fact, the person who called the police in the first place. As far as she can tell, they have finally gotten the story more or less straight. Yet she remains in custody, and the only reason for this is that it takes a bit of effort to release her, though it may also be the case that they mistakenly believe she knows where Leslie and the children are and that they think if she has to relieve herself one more time in front of another person, she will break down and tell them.

The next afternoon, Leslie, Adam, and Alice are at Newark International Airport, waiting for their flight to Munich, Germany, to be announced—it is already half an hour late, and every moment they are still in the United States, their fragile plan threatens to collapse. No one can glance in their direction without Leslie feeling a violent lurch in her stomach. Are she and her children being looked for? Is she a person of interest in whatever investigation is taking place into the deaths of Alex and Michael Medoff? Have her children been reported missing? Abducted?

She takes one of the sedatives Amelie gave her, swallows it down without water.

Following Amelie’s advice, last night Leslie gave the keys to her house to Rodolfo. His mission was to get her purse with her wallet and her credit cards, which, as best she could remember, was sitting in the kitchen. Next, he was to get the passports, though she wasn’t entirely sure where they were. Her best guess was that they were in a desk drawer in the third door to the left (or maybe it was the right—she has become muddled over the difference between the two) on the second floor, which Alex had been using as a kind of home office. In the bedroom, in the night table, was an envelope with several diamonds in it, seven or eight, maybe more, she wasn’t sure. They had been pried from various pieces of jewelry, some heirlooms, some more recently purchased, and she and Alex had been selling the diamonds to a Colombian dealer who had a little booth in a jewelry mart on Forty-Seventh Street. Kis was certainly going to want money, and these diamonds were going to have to suffice.

But the most important thing was this: If Rodolfo had the slightest inkling that the house was under surveillance, he was to simply walk by and not make any attempt to get in. If he was to get picked up by the police… It was unbearable to even contemplate the ruination that would follow. Rodolfo chose one other of the wild children, Dylan Shapiro, to accompany him, and before he left he took Alice’s hand and kissed it, a gesture that he seemed to have learned from a movie about medieval knights risking all for the good of a lady.

As it happened, it took Rodolfo a full three hours to come back with the triple holy grail of Leslie’s credit cards, the envelope with the diamonds, and their passports. He was exhausted, unusually dirty, and he was without Dylan, who he said was hanging out near Bethesda Fountain. When Amelie asked him what had taken so long, he was evasive. Alice noticed there were little gleaming needles of broken glass on his jacket, and she guessed that he had not entered her house through the front door at all, and that even though he had come back with what they needed, it had not gone smoothly or well. When she questioned him with her eyes, he didn’t even try to be subtle when he looked away.

That night, no one except Bernard slept. Amelie watched Leslie as she took her Xanax. She was aware that all of the wild children and Amelie, too, wanted to keep an eye on her. For her to tell them that all she felt was crushing sadness and an exhaustion that seemed like a kind of fatal flu and that she was of no more danger to her children or to anyone else than a shadow on the wall would not have put anyone’s mind to rest, and so Leslie simply submitted to the indignity of being watched as the night plunged into its darkest hours and then slowly gave way to a weak, drizzling dawn. The twins alternated between playing their video game and sitting next to each other hand in hand, snuffling miserably over all that they had seen, all they had lost.

At one point—Leslie was afraid to look at a clock; knowing the exact time would only lead her to misery—Bernard joined the general wakefulness, and the next thing Leslie knew his chair was next to her. His computer was closed and he laid a plastic hand on its shell. She glanced at him, managed a weak smile, looked away; she had never seen anything quite like him. The genetic misfortune of him was overwhelming.

“Are you really my mom?” he rasped to her through his little hyphen of a mouth.

She shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said to him. But after a few moments of silence, she added, “I guess so.”