Breed (33 page)

Leslie, Adam, and Alice sit in a row of chairs in the departures lounge at Newark, exhausted and silent. Adam takes Alice’s hand. Her eyes are half closed; she seems to be looking at the strips of light on the ceiling, almost as if she were in a trance. Yet at the feel of his touch, her hand closes around Adam’s. She is remembering this: When they left Amelie’s tenement apartment house this afternoon, someone (it was just as she had once dreamed it) opened the window—of course it was Rodolfo, it had to be—and shouted out, “Hey hey hey, I love you. See you when you get back! Okay?”

“Remember when I told you about my dream?” she says to Adam.

“Shh,” he says, and indicates with a slight gesture that someone is looking at them.

And someone is. A tall man in his fifties with a reddish face and unruly eyebrows. He cocks his head, like a dog trying to pinpoint the source of a noise.

“Mom?” Adam says.

Leslie looks up at the man and feels a twist of dread, sharp enough to cut through the haze of sedation. He looks like Richard Zolitor, the head of sales at her old publishing house. Has he heard what happened to her husband, does he know that she is missing along with the children, is he putting it all together now that he sees them?

But it turns out that the man’s inquisitive gaze has nothing to do with them at all. He is merely looking for the nearest men’s room, and now he sees the sign and hurries toward it.

Leslie glances up at the departures board—it’s odd to be waiting out here with the majority of the other travelers, in their dastaars and fedoras and yarmulkes and bad perms, not sequestered comfortably in some first-class lounge. She sees that several flights have been canceled. Right now, she asks so little of fate that it makes her feel a little less doomed and, in fact, vaguely fortunate that their flight to Munich is posted as only delayed.

She is ravenously hungry, and there is not an ounce of meat cooking in this entire airport, on a grill, on a stove, in a pot, or in a microwave, that she does not smell with the utmost intensity and avidity. Yet she is worried that any display of appetite will frighten her children. And even as Leslie is pulled emotionally in two directions—a deep, punishing sorrow over the loss of her mate and best friend, and a wild hope that soon she will be released from the biological prison that Dr. Kis condemned her to—the main thing she feels now is a fierce protectiveness toward her beautiful children.

She has always loved them, but sitting there in the departures lounge at Newark International Airport, bound to them by the chains of sorrow and fear, she never felt more attached than she does right now. What will happen to them once they find Dr. Kis and go through whatever it is he will require them to take or do or have done to them to reverse the mutation his treatment triggered—all that remains unknown. Maybe it will never be safe for them to come home to America—what is left of her money, the town house, her sister: all could be lost. Maybe they will have to live like fugitives, maybe in the forest somewhere.… No: that’s crazy. She shakes her head hard, as if to rearrange her thoughts.

“Hey, guys, stay right here, okay?” Leslie says. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

They look worried, but they make no objection, and Leslie, suddenly overcome with a need to relieve herself, hurries toward the ladies’ room.

“What if she doesn’t come back,” Alice whispers to her brother.

“She will.”

Alice opens her passport and looks at the little photo inside. It was taken three years ago, when they almost went to Mexico for a winter vacation but didn’t. Her hair is parted in the middle and her eyes are open so wide they almost look like circles. She has the jack-o’-lantern smile of a seven-year-old. Above all, she looks happy, and the sight of her own once-upon-a-time grin fills Alice with melancholy. She closes her passport but keeps it in front of her, holding it fast, not letting it out of her sight.

“Seven hours to Munich,” Adam says, nodding sagely, as if knowledge of flight times was part of being a male.

“We can sleep.”

“From there it’s about an hour to…”

“Lufthansa.”

“No. That’s an airline. Lub… Lub something.”

“We can never go back to school again,” Alice says.

“I don’t even want to.”

“You knew him better than me.”

“He was my friend,” says Adam, in a voice so small that Alice isn’t quite sure if he’s spoken or if she just knows what he is thinking.

Leslie sits in one of the stalls, her elbows propped on her thighs, her face buried in the warmth of her hands, trying not to make noise as she cries. She feels her tears oozing through her fingers. She sees it all, over and over and over again: the teacher flying through the air, the look on his face as he waited for death, Alex panting, a shimmer of drool hanging from his open mouth, the frantic dash toward Fifth Avenue…

For a moment, she forgets where she is.

For a moment, she forgets her own name.

But all that comes back, though she half wishes it would not. For the first time in her life she thinks she could possibly one day do it: kill herself.

There is a sharp, inquisitive rap against the stall door. She is too frightened to speak.

“Are you okay in there?” a voice asks.

Leslie is not able to answer. She holds her breath, wills herself to complete silence.

Whoever it is out there tries the door. The tongue of the lock rattles in its groove.

“Hello?” the voice says. “Are you quite all right? Would you like me to call someone?”

An elderly woman, by the waver of her voice.
With an accent, a princess-type accent. No, that’s not what it’s called. What are those kinds of accents called? English. English. An English accent. Come on, Leslie, get it together.
She gets up; the toilet flushes automatically. She looks at her upper legs as she pulls her pants up. Without Alex there to love her and to tell her she is beautiful, there is no one and nothing between her and the disgust she feels for her body.

“I’m almost out of here,” she calls through the closed metal door to the stall. She looks down to make sure nothing of her body might be showing through the gap between the door and the floor.

Suddenly, Leslie hears a great commotion. It begins with a scream, followed by another scream, this one even louder, and following that someone shouts, “Oh, for God’s sake, that is so gross.” There is a scuffling of feet, the sound of valises on their wheels quickly being rolled out of there, and then silence.

When Leslie leaves the stall, however, the bathroom has been deserted. No one is at the sinks; the other stalls are empty, their doors wide open. Someone has left a little plaid suitcase. Where has everybody gone? Looking left and right, moving with caution, Leslie makes her way toward the sinks. And now she sees what has emptied the ladies’ room: a rat, at least five inches long, and an alpha rat to judge by its bulk, with long whiskers and a tail the color of wet putty.

The rat makes a run for it—the small opening in the wall from which it emerged is behind Leslie, but she is too quick for the dashing rodent. Without meaning to, without really knowing what she is doing, Leslie stops the rat in its tracks by stomping on the end of its tail. As it turns around to sink its teeth into her foot, she crushes its spine with her other foot. It twitches once or twice; a dark delicate ribbon of blood unfurls from its mouth.

She stands there, swallows, takes a deep breath. What she would really like to do is pop that thing right into her mouth and eat it in big greedy bites. But as famished as she is, she must resist. If she goes back to the kids reeking of rat, it will destroy whatever trust they have in her… She kicks the rat’s body under one of the sinks and washes her hands, her face. As she pulls paper towels out to dry herself, a couple of women maintenance workers come in, one pulling a mop and bucket, the other holding a flashlight.

“Under the sink,” Leslie says to them as she hurries back to the departures lounge. She sticks her hand in her pocket and jiggles the vial of pills from Amelie. They seem to be working.

The three of them sleep all the way to Munich. They sleep through the takeoff, the safety demonstration, the first movie, the second movie, the several instances of extreme turbulence, the pilot’s reassuring patter, and the landing. The smell of the evening meal temporarily awakens Leslie and she eats everything on her tray, and when that is gone she eats everything on the twins’ trays as well, because it seems nothing, not even the scent of chicken and chocolate chip cookies, can awaken them, and it also seems to be the case that even three airplane meals cannot satisfy her hunger.

Because of the delay in their first flight, they have little time to get to the plane to Ljubljana. They have but one suitcase between them—and that suitcase is essentially empty, it’s more to help them look like normal travelers—but they must go through passport control before proceeding to the gate for Adria Airlines. German efficiency assures a fast-moving line, but as anxious as Leslie is to clear immigration and hurry to their connecting flight, approaching the immigration officers fills her with misgivings. Maybe by now a directive has gone out, and her name and the names of her children are on a…
what is that called? Watch list!
Their names could be on a watch list. After all, two deaths. Two children missing.

And Cynthia!

“Oh my God.”

“What is it, Mom?” Adam asks.

“I just remembered something,” Leslie says. “It’s okay.” But the memory of her sister sitting in the kitchen is connected to a second, even more startling memory: the man in the kennel downstairs. She lets out a long, corrugated sigh.

“Mom?” Alice says.

“Here we go,” Leslie says as the young uniformed man in the booth gestures for them to step forward. She has a powerful impulse to turn and run. She sees herself racing through the scrubbed hush of the early-morning airport, vaulting over rows of seats, bounding up an escalator. She puts out her hand, and first Adam gives her his passport, then Alice hands hers over, and a moment or two later Leslie slides all three of the passports to the border-control officer, whose eyes are small and unusually close together and whose lips are as plump and round as cocktail franks.

As he types the serial numbers of their passports into his computer, he asks, in English, “You are staying in Germany?”

Leslie tells him they are heading to Ljubljana, in Slovenia, and though it’s only an hour away by air, the immigration officer seems to have no idea what she is saying—either he has never heard of the place or he is too absorbed in running the edge of Leslie’s passport through his scanner and peering at the information coming up on his console. He furrows his brow, puckers his lips as if to receive a chaste little kiss. A moment passes, followed by another. The man’s pursed lips move up and down. He taps something on his keyboard. Waits. Taps something else. Waits.

And just when it feels to Leslie that she cannot bear the uncertainty another moment, he whomps the German stamp onto each passport and slides them all toward her with a brisk nod.

On the flight to Slovenia, Leslie and the twins are asked not to sit together. There are only fourteen passengers, and the stewardess in her dark turquoise jacket spaces them throughout the small jet so that their weight will be evenly distributed. Sitting in the middle of the plane, Leslie looks out and sees the alpine protrusions of the mountains below, jagged and broken, like immense glaciers floating through a sea of snow-covered trees.

Their plane lands far from the gate, and the passengers are herded onto a bus—open-sided, despite the wintry air—which makes its way through a jumble of large jets, some idle, others with their engines warming. Leslie peers into the whirl of a Swissair jet engine, the sides of which look like a beehive; it turns around and around, faster and faster, its heat sending ripples into the cold gray air, the noise rising higher and higher, almost like a human scream.

“Mom?” Adam says, tugging her sleeve.

She looks at him questioningly.

“You all right?” he asks.

She knows it ought to be her asking him, asking them both: Has it really come to this? Are they really now looking after
her?

“Tired, I guess,” she says.

“Do we have money?” Adam asks.

She looks at him blankly. “Some.”

“We need euros,” Alice says.

“How do you even know that,” Leslie says. She is craning her neck, looking back at that whirling Swissair turbine: there is something in it that draws her.

“Mom,” Alice says, with a child’s sweet exasperation. “I’m ten, not two.”

The bus has brought them to the terminal. There are no customs to go through, no passport control either. Leslie almost understands why this is the case—something to do with Slovenia being part of Europe United, or whatever it’s called.… Sometimes her mind feels like an old car: she turns the key and the engine almost turns over almost…almost.

“We can get money at one of the money machines,” she announces brightly as the three of them walk across the modest airport, with its couple of cafés and its scatter of shops.

“They’re called ATMs, Mom,” Alice says.

Leslie fishes her bank card out of her purse and hands it to Alice. “Go to the machine and get some of the local money, okay?”

“I need your PIN.” She sees the look of confusion on her mother’s face. “The numbers. You have to tell them the right numbers or the card doesn’t work.”

Leslie’s face is blank, and she sadly, slowly shakes her head. Over the years, she gradually left more and more of the nuts and bolts of life to Alex. She can’t remember the last time she wrote a check, or did anything else regarding their financial life. Dealing with their dwindling investments, opening bank statements, paying taxes, and overseeing the steady stream of heirlooms they have brought to auction were all Alex’s responsibility since… actually, she cannot remember when it was that she handed the reins over to him. Nothing was ever said about it, it wasn’t a
decision,
it just happened. And now here she is, standing in the Ljubljana airport with her two children, and not only has she no real plan about how they are going to find Dr. Kis, she doesn’t even know where they are going to stay for the night or how to pay for a taxi into the city, and she sure as hell does not remember what the secret code is that would allow this piece of dark blue plastic to induce a machine in a foreign country to spit out a wad of cash.