Brood (2 page)

After accepting her gifts, they are paying no attention to her whatsoever. They are holding hands and gazing at each other. Their silent, cellular communication has not lessened in the many months they have been apart. Cynthia feels a small pang of exclusion, but mainly she is happy they have reconnected. Overjoyed, really. Overjoyed. No one will ever understand Alice the way Adam does, and no one will understand Adam like Alice, and thank God they are back together. May they never be separated again!

“Did you have sisters where you were?” Alice asks Adam.

“I guess. They had two girls, two boys, and me.”

“Were they nice?”

“The last ones? Which ones do you mean? I had four different families.”

“Yeah. The last ones.”

“They were pretty old. They worried a lot about money. You had to choose if you wanted one of the heated rooms or a real lunch.”

“I bet you took the heated room,” Alice says.

“Definitely!”

“Eating's weird.”

“My Staten Island family served goose on Christmas Day,” Adam says.

“Ick. Let's be vegetarian.”

“Okay,” Adam says. “How many calories do you do?”

Alice frowns, looks away. “So I guess you're all mature and everything now, right?” she murmurs.

“No way!” Adam says, as if it were a matter of honor.

And then, after a few moments of silence, Alice says, “Did you do okay in school?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

The ringtone on Cynthia's phone is chapel bells, and they are chiming now in her purse. She glances at the screen:
Arthur Glassman.

“Hello, Arthur,” she says.

“Where are you?” he asks. He sounds furious.

“In the car. Thank you for arranging it for us.” She sees the driver's eyes glancing back at her in the rearview mirror.

“Your car is here, Cynthia. Waiting for you.”

Chug-chug.
The driver uses his controls to lock the doors.

I
n a long, narrow apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, Ezra Blackstone and his sixth wife, Annabelle Davies, are fighting over air-conditioning. Ezra is seventy-one years old and has circulation problems and feels clammy and cold even on a hot day like this. Annabelle is twenty-eight; she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life in Monroe, Louisiana, and then, as she frequently says, she “came north to get out of the fucking heat.” They'd had a rather nice courtship, particularly refreshing to Annabelle, who'd come to believe that gallantry, seduction, roses, and romance were a thing of the past. The touch of her young flesh, the lemon-and-spearmint tang of her kisses, were like a time machine to Ezra, restoring him to a youthful vigor. But the rituals of courtship soon gave way to dailiness, and the excitement of her young flesh soon stopped working its decade-dissolving magic on Ezra. Since marrying five months ago, they have fallen into squabbling about any number of things, including where to eat, which candleholders to use, how to get to Amagansett, how much to pay their housekeeper, and whose turn it was to feed the piranha. But today's confrontation over whether or not to air-condition their apartment is one of the most bitter fights they've had in weeks—well, if not weeks, then at least days. Or, at the very least, the worst fight they've had today. So far.

For now, peace has been restored. The air-conditioning remains off, but the windows overlooking the park are wide open, letting in a soft summer breeze, barely strong enough to stir the gauzy white curtains.

Their nerves are unusually taut because they are expecting the doorman to ring them any minute to announce a visitor, a young boy named Boy-Boy. Boy-Boy did not give—and perhaps does not even have!—a last name. He was that kind of visitor. Ezra's connection to Boy-Boy is through Bill Parkhurst, who worked for Ezra back in the day, when Ezra was producing three daytime game shows, one on each of the major networks. Bill had been a loyal lieutenant but was, in Ezra's view, weak of character, always chasing after the newest revolutionary therapy, the most enlightened guru, the next can't-miss self-help regimen and, even as a young man, consuming a fistful of vitamins and supplements with every meal. And drugs too, of course, he had a contemptible weakness for drugs and the attendant softheaded beliefs—peace through pot, enlightenment through LSD, ecstasy through Ecstasy. Bill's latest enthusiasm is something called Zoom, a drug so new to the New York underground that it is not even illegal.

“A few years ago,” Bill had explained to Ezra during lunch at the Carnegie Deli, peering over a pastrami sandwich that was nearly as tall as he was, “a few very desperate people went over to some cockamamie place in Europe for fertility treatments.”

“I remember,” Ezra said. “I remember the story well. Don't tell me you're taking that.”

“No, no. Some of those people went crazy, and I think a few of them died. I like shtupping, but I'm not meshuga.” Bill had been raised in a bleak wintry village in New Hampshire by a Congregationalist minister and a descendant of Betsy Ross, but someone had told him when he was starting off in the entertainment business that it would be helpful to his career if he sprinkled a few Yiddish words into his conversation, and though there was no reason to believe the advice had any value, he had taken it to heart anyhow, and now it was an integral part of who he was.

Bill took a modest bite out of his sandwich and chewed in silence twenty-six times before swallowing.

“It's their kids, they carry just enough of whatever that doctor gave those poor schmucks. It's in their blood, you know? Just a
bissel.
But the kids are supercharged. And a few drops of their blood? Whew. It's like
havah nagilah,
and then have another
nagilah.
”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Bill? Children's blood?”

“Hey, they're not such children. They're a lot bigger than me. Some of them have beards. I mean, come on. And believe me, they're doing very well for themselves. They may be a bunch of shmendriks living who knows where, but they are first-class
hondlers.
”

Ezra felt Bill's eager little hand touching his leg under the table. Knowing the drill, Ezra put his hand under the table and accepted what Bill had brought—it felt smooth and cool when Ezra closed his hand around it.

“What did you just give me,” Ezra murmured.

“A vial of blood. You just drink it.”

“Yeah? And get ass AIDS? What the fuck, Bill? Really, man. What the fuck.”

“Best shtupping I've had since Haifa,” Bill said, referencing, as he so often did, a trip he made to Israel in 1973.

The elderly Korean waiter approached their table, limping badly. “You want I should wrap that up for you, maybe have it for a nosh later on?” he said, indicating the elderly men's half-eaten lunches.

Later that week, Ezra was worried and bored enough to try the elixir Bill had given him, and, just as promised, he made love to his wife that night for the first time in weeks. It was not the best sex he had ever
ever
had, but it was without question the most pleasure he'd felt in months. And there was something wonderfully…ferocious about it too. He wasn't shy about sharing with Annabelle the source of his vigor, and she agreed with him that it might be even more fun if she took some too. (She didn't want to make waves and fully intended to stay married to Ezra until he died, but her body felt sluggish and thick with sexual boredom, so if there was something that could get her hobbled hubby humping away like a sailor on leave, she had every intention of getting in on the action.)

The delivery is due at ten, and, right on time, the doorman calls up and says, “There is a Mr. Boy-Boy to see you, Mr. Blackstone.”

A couple of minutes later—Ezra and Annabelle are on the nineteenth floor—there is a startling
boom-boom-boom
cop-like knock at the door. Ezra is the one who goes to answer. He carries an envelope with three hundred dollars in twenties in it. He's already been told the cost is two hundred and fifty dollars, but his plan is to treat the kid right and maybe become a favorite customer, just as he used to regularly tuck a twenty into the headwaiter's tunic at the old Russian Tea Room. Back in the day.

Ezra opens the door to Boy-Boy. He is younger than Ezra had expected. Fifteen? Sixteen, tops. Dark luxurious eyebrows, with another set of eyebrows tattooed over them. He has hair down to his shoulders, a wide mouth, a small nose, green eyes, and the air of a wild boy living without protectors or rules. He wears blue jeans and a dirty T-shirt and carries a backpack with decals of flags of all nations plastered over it.

“Ah, you must be Boy-Boy,” Ezra says. He gestures the boy in and closes the door behind him.

Boy-Boy walks through the apartment's long hall, and Ezra must hurry to keep up. Now they are in the living room, where Annabelle sits on the sofa fanning herself with a copy of
Vogue.
Boy-Boy looks appraisingly at Annabelle and then back at Ezra. “Don't yous two worry. Everything's going to be money. Dr. Boy-Boy is here.”

He sits and wriggles free of his backpack, which he then places on his bony lap. He opens the backpack and takes from it a small vial of blood, so dark it looks almost black.

“Weird color,” Ezra says.

“You's want it or you's not?” Boy-Boy puts his hand out, waiting for the envelope.

“I want it, but I want it to work.”

“It's going to work. All me's customers come through other customers. Folks ain't money, me's fucked.” He holds the vial up, cocks his head. “You don't like the way it tastes, put it in a soup or something. Little garlic, maybe some red pepper flakes. Some of me's customers use cilantro. Drink some water. You should be hydrating anyhow. Peeps don't drink enough water. Wait maybe fifteen minutes and you's money.”

Ezra feigns a toss of the envelope but holds on to it. “I've got a question.”

Boy-Boy looks at Annabelle. “Your old man always like this?”

“Always.”

“How does this even work?” Ezra asks. “And why?”

“First of all, it's none of your fucking business,” Boy-Boy says, his voice oddly reasonable. His smile is fierce, a bright white knife. “You want it, here it is. You don't—me's taking your little envelope anyhow because me's came all the way over here and Boy-Boy don't do nothing for nothing.”

Annabelle has seen more violence in her life than Ezra has, and she thinks of him, despite his age, as naive. She cautions him, using one of Ezra's stock phrases. “Moving right along now, Ezra. Moving right along.”

“I heard it was a lot better if it was fresh,” Ezra said, his voice a sneer. “What do you say you draw the blood right here, right in front of us? Word on the street is that's the way to go.”

Boy-Boy shakes his head. “Word on the street? Listen, old man, you don't know shit about anything that goes on in the streets of this city. Word on the street. You's got to be out of you's mind.” He stands up, wriggles his backpack on again. “You's want what I got? Want to do the wicked dance? You's want to make this lady forget she married some dude with one foot in the grave?”

“Listen here, you little punk—”

Boy-Boy turns his gaze toward Ezra with the suddenness of an animal in the wild. There is no expression at all on his face except total absorption. His eyes are without emotion. They are only for seeing. And seeing and seeing.

In a heartbeat, he pounces on Ezra and runs him back toward the open windows.

Do it,
Annabelle thinks, though at the same time she has never felt such terror in all her life. She hears her own screams as if they were coming from another room.

Ezra is not a small man, but he can offer no resistance to Boy-Boy. Boy-Boy scoots him across the living room as if the old man weighed no more than a pillow. The next thing Ezra knows, he is half out the window. The upside-down world, with its taxicabs honking and nannies pushing strollers and a dog walker with eight dogs straining at their leashes, looks so distant and so sad…

A few moments later, the crazy kid pulls him back into the apartment, sets him on his feet, straightens his clothes, and dusts him off, like some valet from hell.

“We's good?” Boy-Boy asks.

“Yeah, yeah, we're good.” Ezra is still holding the envelope, and he hands it to Boy-Boy, wishing there weren't an extra fifty in there.

Boy-Boy winks at Annabelle. “Have fun,” he says, and he tosses the vial of blood to her.

Just like back home, where nothing was ever simply passed. Her brothers used to toss everything, from saltshakers to car keys to hammers. She snatches the vial out of the air and closes her hot little hand around it.

S
topping the car in the middle of Center Street, impervious to the honks and furious shouts his blocking traffic has caused, the driver reaches into the back of the car and wrests Cynthia's cell phone from her. His beard is bright with perspiration. A thick aroma of sweat and anxiety comes off him like heat off a highway.

Cynthia gathers the twins close to her. They neither resist nor welcome her touch.

“Who are you?”

“Friends of Alice and Adam sent me. Me's not hurting anyone and we's not doing anything wrong.” It's clear now: he is no more than sixteen years old.

“What's your name?” Alice asks. Her voice is steady, soothing.

“Toby,” the boy says. “Toby's a money name, yeah? You like that name?” He starts to drive again. New York is filled with people who don't want to go where they are going but who are also frantic to get there. His finally moving the Town Car and freeing the frozen traffic seems to do nothing to soothe the furious drivers who have been honking and cursing at him and who continue to do so. “Going to take you to us's place. People are waiting for you.”

The twins exchange worried looks.

“You're going to take us home, Toby,” Cynthia says. “And if you don't, you're going to get in more trouble than you'll know what to do with.”

“Fuck you, lady. Okay? You's in Toby's car, and you's on Toby's ticktock. And this poor creature named me will fuck yous up.” He suddenly pulls into a bus stop, then turns around, glowering. “This being none of your business,” he says.

“Where you taking us, Toby?” Alice asks in a calm, friendly voice.

“Rodolfo is waiting for you,” Toby says. “You and you can live with us. We's got a sick place way up on Riverside, yous won't believe it. Bedrooms and bathtubs and all the foods we's want. We's kind of rich now, we's in business.”

“Sounds great,” Alice says. “What do you think, Adam?”

“Rodolfo,” Adam says. “He always liked you.”

“Oh yeah,” Toby says with a laugh. “Big-time.”

“What about the lady?” Alice asks. “We don't even know her.” She touches Toby's shoulder with her fingertip. “She's like our aunt or something.”

“Yeah, let's dump her,” Adam says. “Put her out right here.”

“So how is old Rodolfo anyhow?” Alice asks. Just saying his name gives her a strange feeling. Of all the wild children she knew when she was running from her parents, Rodolfo was the one she liked the best. The last time she'd seen him, he was leaning out of a window and saying, “I love you.” To her. To her!

“Rodolfo is king,” Toby says. “He runs the whole bidness, capiche? Back in the day, we's all crashing here and there and we's sleeping in the park and shit, but now we's all carrying a knot of fifties and hunnerts and living in a bee-you-tiful place, wait till you see it. We's making some mad money.” He pulls out of the bus stop, merges with the traffic.

“Let's dump her and go,” Adam says, a little more urgently this time.

“Adam!” Cynthia says. “I'm your mother now.”

“My mother's dead,” Adam says, thumping himself in the chest. “You're no one's mother.”

“She got us out of foster,” Alice says, her voice soothing, as if she is trying to talk a cat down out of a tree. “And now we're free.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “But she's okay. Let's not hurt her. Okay?” She touches Toby's shoulder again.

Adam tries the back door. “Open it up and let's get her out of here. And go.”

Toby hits the master switch, and the locks pop up.

“Stop here,” Adam says.

“Or wherever,” says Alice.

They are on Canal Street now. The owners of the shops selling headphones, old DVDs, Crocs, pot holders, plumbing supplies, household cleaners, plastic flowers, and weirdly deranged-looking baby dolls with red hair and mad eyes have dragged their wares onto the sidewalk and now guard them anxiously as thousands of pedestrians stream by. Toby pulls into a loading zone behind a feeble little truck from which two sad-looking, overworked Chinese women are unloading open cartons of shower slippers.

“All right, get her out of here,” Toby says.

“I'm not leaving,” Cynthia says. She jams her feet against the back of the front seat, locking herself into place.

“She probably wants her phone,” Alice says.

Toby glances at the phone on the empty seat next to him. “Fuck it,” he says, tossing it back.

Alice catches it, puts it in Cynthia's purse.

“Go,” Alice whispers.

“Absolutely not,” Cynthia says. So this is what it's like, parenting. Jesus Christ Almighty, it's a nightmare…

“Flush her,” Toby growls. “Come on, we gotta bounce.”

The twins close their small but shockingly strong hands on Cynthia's arms, and, despite her efforts and in spite of her cries and threats, they pull her out of the car. Will she ever see them again? Her mind is chaos, an explosion of words, terrors, and impulses. They have overwhelmed her, and the world throbs and spins.

The next thing she knows, she is standing on the street with the twins beside her.

“Let's go, get in,” Toby calls out to Alice and Adam.

But the kids take Cynthia by the hand, Adam on the right, Alice on the left, and, holding on to her, they break into a fast walk, a trot, a run.

They hear Toby's furious shouts.

The screech of tires as he guns the car into reverse.

“Subway,” Alice says.

“On the corner,” says Adam.

“Oh, kids, kids,” Cynthia manages to say. Her feelings are symphonic—strings, brass, pounding timpani—and she feels a love beyond any measure.

As they run toward the subway entrance, the children lift her hands and bring them to their lips and kiss the backs of them. One of them—she is too rattled, too confused, to say which—also licks her hand.

Rodolfo sits on the window seat of the rambling old apartment on Riverside Drive. He is trying to keep his mind occupied—there is so much to take care of, orders to keep track of, money to stash; his business has a hundred moving parts—but he cannot keep himself from continually checking the street below for signs of Toby and the twins, and now he has succumbed to his own preoccupation and simply sits there, waiting.

Alice.

Oh, Alice…

In the time Alice was out of the city, he thought of her often. And when he learned she was returning, his desire to see her became a kind of mania. To hear her voice. To touch her. He has waited patiently for this day. And now the day has come and he has no more patience. His mind races. He has so much to show her. The apartment. The money. The Sub-Zero Pro 48 fridge, perfect for keeping blood market-fresh.

Rodolfo hears footsteps behind him,
click-click
on the bare hardwood floors. He doesn't want to be bothered and does not turn around. He sees from the reflection in the glass that it is Polly, just about the smartest and the least wild of all the cast-off boys and girls of Rodolfo's crew—a crew that includes not only the nine people living here on Riverside but about a hundred others, spread around the city in squats, shelters, and parks.

Polly waits for Rodolfo to acknowledge her presence. A minute passes. Silently. Finally, she speaks.

“Maybe there's a lot of traffic.”

“Maybe,” Rodolfo whispers.

She waits for him to turn around. She has always known she is not pretty enough for him.

“You can't do her, you know,” Polly says. She is aware of the sneer in her tone, regrets it.

Rodolfo doesn't respond and gives no evidence that he is even aware of Polly's presence.

“Just saying…” Polly says. She turns to leave—but can't. She still believes that misunderstandings can be cleared up with a sentence or two. “I hear she's really sweet,” Polly says. “Alice. But, you know, all I'm saying is if you had an accident, the baby might be really…you know. Weird.”

“Well, here we are, kids,” Cynthia says, putting the long shiny key into the lock of the twins' ancestral home on East Sixty-Ninth Street.

Because she has been supervising the cleanup of the house, Cynthia can now see it without being flooded with memories of Leslie and Alex and the life that once took place in these stately rooms. She can see it without recalling the museum-quality antiques, the profusion of heirlooms, the gloomy old oil paintings of long-deceased Twisdens. And she can also finally see the place without nauseating memories of the depths to which it had sunk—the clawed walls, the mildewed upholstery, the locked doors, the cellar filled with kennels that were also abattoirs.

She wonders, How does the house look to Adam and Alice? This is their home. But it is also the place where they were imprisoned at night, the place they risked their lives to run away from. As she opens the door and ushers them in, she is very glad that the air inside is cool and that the first thing they see is a vase full of white roses.

Yet something is wrong. She feels a presence in the house. She does not pause to think it over. She pushes past it, but the thought clings to her, like the smell of tobacco after you've walked across a smoky room.

“Well, kids,” she says, but that's all she has time for. The twins have burst into the house, and now they race madly into its interior, their feet pounding on the newly varnished floors, their excited voices echoing against the high plaster ceilings.

This is the moment she has been waiting for, and she stands in the foyer clutching her purse to her breast and letting their joy infuse her. She breathes deeply. Though the house is nearly 170 years old, it smells new: untold hours of scrubbing, disinfecting, sanitizing; fresh paint, new plaster, sanded and varnished floors. This is going to be their home. This is where the healing will be done, and where they will be a family. A family! The word has never meant more to her than it does right now.

“Up here, up here!” Alice is calling.

“I'm coming!” Adam answers.

Cynthia listens to the crazy drumbeat of his feet racing up the stairs. Oh, to be young. To be able to recover so quickly, to seize happiness the moment it appears.

Cynthia's eyes fill with tears. Like a fever finally breaking, her misgivings have disappeared.

And in their place is a joy like none she has ever experienced. She is not a religious woman, but the warmth filling her right now feels holy. Holy is the love of a defenseless child, holy is putting others before yourself, holy is the memory of her poor sister, holy is tomorrow, tomorrow, oh, beautiful tomorrow—the greatest of God's consolations: time untouched, ours to make the world more perfect.