Breed (16 page)

“Shhh. Mama knows. Mama’s here.”

Their tiny apartment on West One Hundredth Street is dark; its few small windows look out onto the darkness of the building’s air shaft, at the bottom of which, fourteen stories down, is a mysterious pile of broken bottles, soup cans, discarded lamps. The thick gloomy shadows of the apartment itself, depressing on the face of it, is actually a kind of blessing to Amelie and Bernard, muting the visual impact of Bernard’s countless deformities and hiding, as well, the chaos of their quarters.

There is no proof of Bernard having been born. The closest thing to any record of him is the hospital’s report of him emerging dead from his mother’s womb. Amelie has raised him in complete secrecy, allowing him contact with only the wild children who inhabit the city’s parks and the virtual world he inhabits on his computer. Because of this, all of his numerous and often pressing medical needs have been taken care of by her, and if their apartment were ever to be fully lit, it would look like a medical-supply locker, full of gauze, syringes, ointments, bath chairs, transfer benches, intermittent catheters, every conceivable type of pillow, and pills of all kinds: antibiotics, mineral supplements, vitamins, sedatives, painkillers, antispasmodics, laxatives, various antipsychotics, and sleeping aids, all of them pocketed by Amelie and brought home in her never-ending quest to make Bernard
1 percent
more comfortable and functional.

“What did you do today, Bernard? Park?”

“Yes.”

He rolls over, showing himself to her, as if he has already thought this through and wants her to experience the full impact of what he will say.

“They run so fast.”

“I know, I know.”

“And I sit.”

“You’re here.”

He shakes his head, at first slowly, sadly, and then with increasing vehemence, until it looks as if he is having a seizure.

It’s unbearable to Amelie. Her heart is breaking and her eyes are closing—how can she feel simultaneously this sad and this sleepy? A million times over she has relived the moment she took the gnarled, doomed newborn that this child once was, swaddled him in a sheet, and made him her own. They were going to kill him! They were going to throw him away as if he had never happened! As if he did not have a heart, a brain, feelings, a soul.

Bernard holds up his hand for his mother to see. “Saw another,” he says.

There was a time when she could easily decode his communication, but it takes more energy than she has now, and as her own powers steadily decrease, buried beneath a weight of accumulated years and exhaustion and isolation and discouragement, she finds that she and the boy, rather than growing increasingly close to each other, are actually drifting apart.
Saw another? Saw another what? Another hand?

He sees the combination of confusion and indifference in her face, and he holds his birthmarked hand up higher by way of explanation.

“Girl, my age. Nice too.”

“Really?” Amelie’s attentiveness rises. “Last night?”

“Yes.” The poor scrambled and twisted child’s good eye fills with tears, which he brushes away with his hand—the red squiggle is moist for a moment.

“Was she with the others?”

“They took.”

“Took?”

“Her.”

“I see.” She hears the gurgle of the boy’s bladder emptying. As usual, he seems completely unaware. He has that look of his—a kind of frightened stare, as if he has seen something dangerous that he is powerless to prevent. Without warning, he coughs deeply, and a bubble of saliva emerges trembling from his tiny mouth. If he were a comic-strip character, this would be the dialogue balloon, and it would say:
Why was I ever born?

This question, unthinkable once to Amelie and never ever spoken, has come to haunt her. In that way, the child has eroded her once-impregnable faith. When she spirited him out of that hospital while those two rich fools were cooing and sighing over their twins, seemingly unaware that triplets had been born, there was no question in her mind whether she was doing the right thing. She was saving a life just as surely as a fireman who carries someone out of a burning building or a cop who takes the gun out of a lunatic’s hand. He was not going to be handsome or fleet, that infant she was saving, but Amelie did not care about beauty or the usual paths to success—in fact, they filled her with a kind of contempt, their very easefulness suggesting something sneaky, morally lax, unfair, and vile. But what she had not taken into account was that by rescuing this child from the oblivion to which the doctor was all too eager to consign him, she was condemning him to something that might be worse. With the sudden horror that is the emotional equivalent of an avalanche of ice, she thinks:
I have done more harm than good.

Bernard tries to sit up, fails, and mewls with frustration, his hand clawing at the air as if the very invisibility of oxygen was part of the prison that held him fast.

“I know it’s sad for you, my darling,” Amelie says.

“Yes.”

“So hard.”

“Alone,” he says. “Alone.”

“The girl,” Amelie says.

“Mmm. Nice to me.”

“With the birthmark.”

“Nice.”

“Did she tell you her name?” She knows the answer; she has often thought of the two with whom this poor thing was born. She even knows where they live—several times she has succumbed to temptation and walked past their house, and once she has even seen them, being walked to school by their mother.

“So did you talk to your new friend?”

“Have no friends. Just you, Mommy.”

“I know, baby, Mommy knows.”

“Mommy.”

“It’s so hard, isn’t it?”

“So hard.”

“Every day,” Amelie says.

“Hard.”

“And getting harder too, isn’t it, baby?”

“Scared.”

“So hard, life is so hard.”

“Scared, Mommy.”

“Shhh.” Amelie puts her hand into the pocket of her nurse’s smock, touches the little bottle she has been carrying around for days: Dilaudid. Slowly, her fingers close around the cool glass. She has been thinking about this all day, all week. Her original plan was to shake thirty drops onto Bernard’s tongue and drink the rest of it herself. Now, however, her mind is going in a different direction.

“I have something for you,” she says. “It tastes a little icky, but it will make you feel better.”

He looks at her hopefully. “Nommy.”

“Stick out your tongue.” She takes out the bottle of synthetic morphine, shows it to him.

Trustingly, Bernard sticks his tongue out of his abbreviated dash of a mouth. His tongue is short, almost square.

“Mommy loves you.”

“Mmm,” he says.

“You know that, don’t you?”

It would be easier to die, for both of them. But she must not; she will not. Life must be protected above all else.

“This is going to make you feel a lot better. Okay? No pain. Just beautiful sleep.”

“ ’kay.”

Patting his perspiration-soaked forehead with one hand, she deftly unscrews the cap of the little bottle with her thumb and forefinger. The cap hits the floor, rolls beneath Bernard’s bed.

“Can you open wider for me?”

“Mmm.”

She shakes the bottle over his tongue.

“Icky icky,” he whines.

Alex has done what he can to chase Adam down, but he has failed to locate him, and now, dejected, he returns home, where he sees Leslie, who has had no more luck finding Alice than he had finding Adam.

She is on the sofa in their sitting room. A valuable—very valuable!—cherrywood-and-horsehair settee used to be in the spot where she now lounges; it has been replaced by a very, very informal piece they recently picked up at the Housing Works thrift shop, a butterscotch-and-vanilla-colored sofa still smelling faintly of the patchouli incense its former owners burned. The upholstery is already beginning to unravel. Indeed, this has been the case in a lot of their furniture, and inasmuch as they are aware of how rough they are with their belongings, it is always a battle between selling the things off quickly for the money needed and holding on to the old things and maintaining the connection they give them to their former life. Not so very long ago, it fell to Alex to be the cold, realistic one when it came to their once-beautiful possessions, and it was Leslie who balked and often bargained like a child, promising to be more careful and weepily saying the antiques were precious to her, even though she had in the past often complained that the furniture was uncomfortable, the paintings were oppressive, and the various decorative items made her think of a stage set for
The Mousetrap.

“I’m frightened,” Leslie says, supine. She is covered in a crocheted blanket; her eyes stare up at the ceiling, at a blotchy water stain.

“They’ll be back,” Alex says.

“They don’t know what they’re doing out there. Someone could hurt them.”

“No one’s going to hurt them,” Alex says. He sits heavily in an armchair that has been covered by a bedsheet to hide some stains left by a hasty meal.

“I still don’t understand how they got out,” Leslie says.

Alex bristles for a moment, thinking she might be trying to lay the blame for their escape at his feet. In the past, placing blame was the only really glaring weakness in Leslie’s character. Somehow, phrases like
Did it not occur to you
and
What exactly did you expect to happen?
fell trippingly from her sharp tongue. Now, however, that desire to fix blame has disappeared, or perhaps the
ability
to do so is no longer hers.

“I don’t understand how they opened the… the whatchamacallit,” Leslie says.

“The gate,” Alex says, supplying the word, though he has told himself a thousand times over that he ought not to do that. “I think one of them pocketed my key. Probably Adam. Though I wouldn’t put it past Alice. She’s quiet, but she has her ways.”

Leslie, still lying on the sofa, covers her eyes with her forearm, breathes deeply. “I love them so much. It feels like… crazy weather.”

“I know.”

“I love them.”

“I know, baby. I know.”

“I love them.”

Alex gets up from his chair, goes to the sofa, sits on its edge, and strokes Leslie’s forehead. There are a few patches of microscopic stubble where she has pushed back on the boundaries of her hairline, restoring with a razor and tweezers its original shape, but other than that, her skin is soft, and it makes him feel good and useful to sense her breathing begin to calm as he touches her. He covers her brow with his open hand, as if he were checking her temperature. He imagines he can feel her
mind,
which he pictures as a thing in pieces, glittering but broken, like a crystal goblet that someone has smashed.

“How did they get out?” Leslie asks, unaware that Alex has just tried to answer that question. Her memory! Once it was an orderly place, filled with names, dates, ideas.… Now those things are still there, but they share the space with smells and sounds, and soon, Alex fears, those wordless memories will take over more and more of the other memory’s domain. It was a wonder she was able to keep her job at Gardenia Press at all, even after voluntarily reducing her workload and her days in the office in the hope that increased time would give her at least a shot at completing her tasks. And it is a wonder that Alex’s own thought processes have not deteriorated as much as hers; at least not yet. At least, not as far as he can tell.…

Leslie kicks the blanket off and scrambles to her feet. She vigorously rubs her hands over her face as a way of waking herself, making herself ready for what must come next.

“We go,” she says, and then hears what she has said, which is not always the case, and quickly corrects it. “We should go. We can’t stay here if they are out.”

“They’re going to come back. Adam was at his teacher’s apartment, but he got away from me. You should see that place. Oh my God, whatever happens to us, however much money we lose and whatever life puts in front of us, we could never live in such a horrible apartment. We still have this.” He gestures toward the ceiling stain, the walls with the paper coming off in long curls and the pale squares where paintings used to hang.

“We have nothing, Alex. Nothing. And you know it. I don’t even know if I trust you with our children. And I don’t know if you trust me. And I don’t even know if I reserve that trust.”

“
Deserve,
honey.” He doesn’t mean to correct her, not now—too much going on. “They’ll be back, Leslie,” he says. “We just have to have faith. And we should be waiting for them.”

“Should should should fucking should,” Leslie blurts. She sits back down on the sofa, half on the cushion and half on the balled-up blanket. “I want to kill myself,” she says. “I do not want to be alive.”

Alex nods. “I know.” He moves closer next to her, takes her hand. “But we can’t,” he says, his voice soft and mournful.

“I know,” Leslie says. “More’s the pity.”

“Are you at all hungry?”

She shrugs. “I could eat. What do we have?”

“Cuban.”

“A human? I thought that’s what we… Oh God, I’m glad Adam and Alice aren’t here. It’s all happening too fast.”

“We resisted for as long as we could.”

“Have you resisted? Or have you been helping yourself without me knowing about it?” Leslie narrows her eyes.

“I have not, and I resent your asking.”

“Where is he?”

“In the cellar, with the others.”

“With the dogs?”

“In a cage. I think it’s time. Everything inside of me is telling me it’s time.”

“I’m not ready,” Leslie says, but she can feel her mouth watering.

“I feel like a teenager,” Alex says. “Just before having sex for the very first time. No force on earth could have stopped me.”

“Once we do that, there’s no turning back.”

“Not necessarily,” Alex says.

“You have done it before, haven’t you. I can tell just by how you’re talking about it.”

“He looks delicious, Leslie. It’s so horrible and so exciting. I mean, really, think about it. When was the last time we enjoyed ourselves? I mean, really and truly enjoyed ourselves?”

Leslie cocks her head, listens. And listens some more. Finally, she smiles. “I can’t hear a thing from down there. You did such a good job. I’m proud of you.”