Authors: Chase Novak
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 scalp. 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 They are withdrawn, sleepy, mumbly—they seem like sad children.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?”
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…