Breed (12 page)

There had always been a diffidence in the boy, a melancholy that made him compelling to Michael, and though Adam has yet to ask for anything special, nor has he engaged Michael in anything more than the most passing conversation, Michael has sensed for months that the boy wants to connect with him and seek some guidance, perhaps even solace. He is almost always the first of the students to come into class and he is always the last to leave, and even though his test scores are just slightly better than average and his papers are full of misspellings and grammatical errors, and the ideas they contain rarely go beyond a simple parroting of the remarks Michael has made in class, the effort Adam makes is not only palpable but endearing. If A for effort has any meaning, Adam is an A student.

And yet his suddenly showing up here is confounding. Even though Michael’s address is far from a state secret, Adam would have had to make some effort to find it. And though there is nothing in the bylaws of Berryman Prep that explicitly prohibits a student from calling on a teacher after school, it is simply
not
the done thing, and frankly, it feels as divergent from the culture of the Berryman community as whistling in the corridors, picking your nose, or, for that matter, being openly gay.

“Send him up,” Michael says through the intercom, though as soon as he says it, it seems like a mistake. Perhaps he ought to have gone down to the lobby and dealt with whatever Adam wants—having him come up is a dangerous precedent, and, worse, it is going to turn the rumor of Michael’s homosexuality into an established fact: no one seeing Xavier and him sharing this small apartment would have the slightest doubt about the nature of their relationship, no one—not a child, not a grandmother, not a visitor from outer space, no one.

Faster, faster, faster faster faster—dodge, cut, hide, run again, faster still.

Alice, clutching her backpack, pounds down Lexington Avenue, not sure if her mother is still chasing after her, afraid to look and see.

It has all gone horribly wrong—she and Adam were not halfway down the fire escape before suddenly the lights of their house came on, square by square, like a model of a brain coming into consciousness. And then: shouts, threats. And Adam going south and her going north, yelling to each other:
Call me!

She is amazed by how good it feels to run, and how easy it is. She has muscles she didn’t know she had. She is in possession of a grace that was hers all along. Through the morass of fear and uncertainty, there comes a sudden blaze of sheer animal joy. Before this night, she had no idea what her body could do.…

Michael waits for Adam by the elevator, and when the doors slide open the boy emerges, wearing just a light jacket even though it is a cold wet November evening. The jacket is streaked with rain and dirt; it looks as if he has taken a fall in it. But what makes the jacket particularly strange-looking—and makes Adam himself look mentally unbalanced—is that it has been tucked into the boy’s jeans. His sneakers are soaked; leaves cling to their soles. He has scratches on his pale cheeks, and tiny twigs in his hair.

“Hello, Mr. Medoff,” he says. “Thank you very much for allowing me up.”

The elevator doors sigh shut behind him and the boy stands in the hallway, the path to nine other apartments on this floor, all but one with their doors firmly shut.

“Adam? What are you doing here?”

The boy opens his mouth to speak, but all that is released is a deeper silence. His eyes brighten as they fill with tears.

“Adam?” Michael says. His misgivings about this unexpected visit are suddenly cast into shadow by larger concerns. The boy seems to be tottering, and Michael reaches a steadying hand toward him, and at the touch of his teacher’s hand, Adam feels his knees buckle, and only quick reflexes allow Michael to catch him before he hits the floor.

He half pulls and half carries Adam into the apartment. “Oh my God,” Xavier says, dropping the dish towel and hurrying over to help. He closes the door behind Michael and the boy. He lifts Adam’s legs and helps to carry him to the sofa. “What happened?” Xavier says.

“I have no idea,” Michael answers, his voice unsteady. He crouches next to the sofa and gently shakes Adam’s shoulder. The boy’s eyes slowly open. They are an unusual shade of brown—closer to tan, really, and the whites of them are dark cream. They fix Michael with a stare stunning in its neutrality, neither friendly nor unfriendly, neither frightened nor trusting: all they do is
see.

The boy tries to lift himself up on his elbows, but he is too exhausted, and after making it halfway, he gives up and falls flat again. He reaches behind himself and unhooks the backpack’s straps and lets the thing fall onto the floor. “I didn’t know where else to go,” Adam says, staring at the ceiling now.

“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.” Michael glances up and sees that Xavier has retreated to the kitchen, the cloak of their privacy already unraveling, thread by thread.

“I don’t know,” Adam says. “I’m not sure.” He tries again to lift himself up on his elbows. This time he has more success and manages to swing his legs off the sofa and sit up straight. He rubs his hands over his face as if he were washing it with soap.

“Where did you get those scratches? Do you want to go to a hospital? And I need to call your parents right now.”

“You can’t,” Adam says.

“Adam, this is my home. It’s not a hideaway for guys who’ve had some kind of blowup with their parents. You understand?”

Adam nods. The chaotic smells of the night—wind, rain, soot, the burned-transistor tang of urban darkness—still cling to the boy’s hair. There is something in his proximity that strikes a sudden terror in Michael.

“But I can’t go home,” Adam says. He lowers his head and clenches his fists.

“I need you to tell me why. If something is going on there—I mean, if something is happening that makes you feel so afraid—I need to know. You understand?”

“No, no,” Adam says, very quickly. He waves his hand as if to dispel the notion of child abuse. “It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“They’re away.”

“Away?”

Adam hesitates before shaking his head. “They’re in Canada,” he says.

“Canada?”

“Yeah, Montreal.”

“And they left you alone?”

“Yes. With my sister.”

“Who’s looking after you, Adam?”

“No one.”

Michael narrows his eyes, tilts his head. Somewhere along the way, he has settled on this gesture as a way of extracting the truth from his students, though he has no idea if it works or not.

“Our mother has family in Montreal,” Adam adds.

“Family.”

“Yeah. A brother. He’s the mayor or something.”

“Your uncle is the mayor of Montreal.”

“Maybe not anymore.”

“Adam. I’m going to need to contact your parents. And right away. You can’t be here if no one knows where you are.”

Adam shrugs. “But they’re not home.”

“You can give me their cell number.”

“They don’t have cell phones. And anyhow, you need a special chip to make them work in Canada. Like for Europe or anywhere.”

Xavier comes out of the kitchen—he wasn’t making himself scarce after all—carrying a tray upon which is a mug of warm apple cider with cinnamon and a peanut butter sandwich cut into quarters.

“Here you taken this now so you no get seek,” he says to Adam in the most atrocious accent Michael has heard from him in years.

If seeing another man in his teacher’s apartment has any meaning to Adam, if it confuses him or confirms a theory, there is nothing in his demeanor to betray it. He reaches for the mug and looks up gratefully at Xavier.

“Oh, thanks,” he says. He holds the cup of hot cider and glances at the coffee table. “Is it okay to put it on your furniture?” he asks his teacher.

“Of course,” Michael says. He sees that the boy’s hands are trembling.

Adam leans forward a little as he brings the cup to his lips. At the moment he is about to drink, the phone rings, and the noise startles him so profoundly that he makes a sad little yelp, and his hands move as if to cover his face, which spills nearly the entire contents of the cup of cider onto his shirt and his lap.

Michael and Xavier have put Adam into the bedroom, where he removes the first of his clean pairs of socks from his backpack and changes into them. In Adam’s absence, Xavier and Michael sit on the sofa, not daring to speak for fear of being overheard but communicating their distress and confusion with shrugs and shakes of the head. Michael mouths the words
I’m sorry,
to which Xavier curtly frowns and waves his hand. Michael takes Xavier’s hand, links their fingers together, and squeezes.

Michael finds his class list and looks up Adam’s contact information. There are work numbers for both parents and a home number. One category is left blank—In Case of Emergency. Michael dials the home number; not only is there no answer, but there is no answering machine, no voicemail, just the unfamiliar experience of a phone ringing on and on and on.

“Mr. Medoff?” Adam’s voice comes floating out from the bedroom.

“I’m here, Adam.”

“Could you come here for a quick second?”

He enters the bedroom. The bed is made, the pillows stacked one on top of the other, a pair of slippers on either side, half hidden by the bedspread. Everything looks tidy, almost antiseptic, like a Holiday Inn. The room is gloomily lit, with only one of the bedside lamps on. Adam stands in the center of the room holding his T-shirt. The boy is skinny; his nipples are brown buttons; his belly button is raised and hard—it looks like a beehive; and most oddly of all, his chest is starting to get hair on it.

“My back feels weird,” Adam says.

Adam turns, and Michael sees his back has been clawed as if his skin were wrapping paper and someone was overly eager to see the gift within.

“Oh my God, Adam, what happened to you?”

“Is it bad?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t it hurt? It looks very bad.”

Adam’s small round shoulders bob up and down. Though silent, he is crying. He covers his face with the T-shirt.

“All right, this is completely insane. We need to get you to an emergency room. What the hell happened to you, Adam? Were you attacked?”

The scratches are deep red and the skin alongside of them is livid. Michael forces himself not to turn away and tries to compose his expression—he can feel his own grimace pulling at the muscles in his face, his neck.

“It’s okay, I just want to know if it’s bleeding,” Adam says. “It feels wet.”

“No, it’s not bleeding. Put the shirt on.”

“I’ll mess up the shirt.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get that looked after.”

Adam puts the T-shirt on, pulls it down over his torso, faces his teacher. “I’ll be okay.”

“What are you doing here, Adam? What happened to you? What’s going on? Who’s supposed to be looking after you? I find it hard to believe your parents just took off for Montreal and left you and your sister alone.”

At the mention of his sister, Adam’s face takes on a look of utter anguish.

“I need a place to stay.”

“I want you to tell me what happened to you.”

“I fell. In Central Park. On some rocks I was climbing.”

“They seem like gouges.”

Adam doesn’t answer immediately, but then he shakes his head. “No. I fell.”

“Where’s your sister anyhow? Where’s Alice?”

Adam tentatively reaches toward the bed and touches it, first with just his fingertips, and then with his entire hand. Before Michael can ask him what he’s doing, the boy collapses facedown onto the bed, draws his knees up to his chest, and tucks one hand under his head.

“Adam?” Michael stands over the boy, who seems to have fallen into a deep sleep. A stroke, a poison dart, death itself could not have extinguished consciousness so quickly and so totally. Gently, Michael shakes the boy’s shoulder. “Adam? Come on, son, you can’t…” He shakes his shoulder again, this time a little more forcefully. A low, vibrating sound comes out of the boy, something between a moan and a growl, and the sound of it touches a primal nerve in Michael, chilling his blood, raising the hairs on his arm, and causing him to hold his breath as he steps backward.

With the bed occupied and only one sofa in the apartment, that night Xavier heads uptown to Inwood to sleep at his sister’s apartment. Shortly after moving from Havana to New York, she and her husband separated—he has moved to New Haven to work as a security guard at Yale, and though he is there with the good excuse of taking a much-needed job, it is an unspoken truth between them that Raul has fallen in love with a woman in Bridgeport with whom he spends every spare moment—and now the long New York nights are particularly lonely for Rosalie.

“Bring me a pack of Winston cigarettes,” Rosalie says. “And the sugar and I have coffee for morning.” Her English is still something of an adventure, but she refuses to speak Spanish with her brother, or with anyone else. It might have been part of what drove Raul away, thinks Xavier. Plus her bossy manner. However, he feels bad for having anything but gratitude for her generosity; who else in this city could he call with the announcement that he was on his way over for the rest of the night? New York is a place of great friendliness, but limited hospitality.

He is half a block from his apartment house now. The night is cold and wet. Tires from the passing cars, taxis for the most part, whisper and hiss over the wet pavement; the streetlamps reflect on the windshields, which are dotted with rain. In Havana, drivers use their windshield wipers as little as possible, but here they wave frantically back and forth even in a drizzle.

His plan is to walk to Twenty-Third and Park Avenue South and catch the East Side train to Grand Central Station, where he will connect with the shuttle that will bring him to Times Square, where he can board the A train to his sister’s neighborhood. As Xavier walks west on Twenty-First Street, he notices that each step he takes is mirrored by the step being taken by someone across the street. When Xavier speeds up, the man across the street quickens his pace too, and when Xavier deliberately slows down, the man across the street slows down as well. He seems to dodge the circles of light dropped by the streetlamps, and the night is too thick to see anything but his shape. Xavier has a vague idea that this same fellow was posted across the street from the apartment and had begun shadowing Xavier from there, but Xavier was engrossed in his phone call and wasn’t paying close attention.