Breed (38 page)

“Now what?” Alice says as Slavoj turns the car around and starts off for the main highway.

“You’ve never had a chance to know your aunt Cynthia,” Leslie says.

“Mom,” Alice says, “I mean it. What are we going to do now?”

“Mom?” Adam says insistently. “We’ve come all this way.”

“She’d be a really fun person to live with,” Leslie says. “Fun for you, and fun for her.”

“Mom, what are we doing?” Alice says.

“I don’t think we should be leaving,” Adam says. “We came all this way. Maybe the doctor just went out and he’s coming back.”

“No,” Leslie says. “He’s not coming back.” She forgets there are traces of blood on her hands and she puts her arms around her children and gathers them close. “He’s not going to be able to help us. I’m sorry. I know children like to believe that there’s always someone out there who’s going to rescue them, maybe we all believe that, maybe I do too, or did, but that’s not how it works. Not now, not for us. We’re on our own.”

The children’s expressions are grave. She feels their hearts, the rise and fall of their chests as they breathe as one.

“Oh, my darlings,” Leslie says.

A thin skin of deep bluish gray spreads over the low-hanging clouds as the oncoming evening paints the first coat of darkness across sky. The airport lights burn bright yellow. Slavoj turns into the departures lane, drumming his fingers nervously against the steering wheel.

“You have tickets, everything you need?”

“We’re all set, Slavoj,” Leslie says. “Thank you for everything.”

“My job and my pleasure,” he says. “You are good people and the doctor you have come to visit is a bad man. But don’t worry. Justice in my country sometimes slow, but she arrives, she always arrives.”

He pulls up to the curb in front of the international departures and runs around the other side of the car to let them out. With great solemnity, the twins shake his hand and say their good-byes. He can see the fear in their faces, but there’s nothing more to do now but smile and pretend that this is just another trip to the airport, another good-bye.

“Here is something for you, Slavoj,” Leslie says, reaching into her purse. She takes out the envelope holding the diamonds and sticks her thumb and forefinger into the corner of it. She pinches up three small diamonds. “Open your hand,” she says, and when Slavoj does as he is asked, she places the glittering little stones in his palm. “They’re valuable, Slavoj. Bring them to any jeweler. You’ll see.”

Slavoj looks at the diamonds winking in the cadmium airport light. Slowly, his hand closes on the little jewels, and he makes a small nod in Leslie’s direction.

“Safe flight,” he says.

They are in luck. There is a flight to Munich leaving in half an hour, with a connecting flight to Newark, a night flight, which will mean only an hour and ten minutes’ layover in Munich. Despite there being plenty of open seats on both flights, Leslie has to pay a penalty for changing her reservation, but other than that it all goes smoothly. While they were not required to go through immigration on the way in to the country, going out is a different story, and as they wait in line, holding their passports, Leslie grows increasingly anxious. The possibility of catastrophe has doubled—police in America will be looking for them, and perhaps they have put a tag on their passports, and police here in Slovenia by now might have discovered Dr. Kis’s body. Step by step, they draw closer to the booths where the immigration officials check documents, the eerie icy light of their laptop computers glowing on their hands.

The immigration officer who looks over their passports has a sad, worried demeanor. He sighs frequently and his eyes are opaque, cloudy, the eyes of a defeated man. He seems barely engaged in checking their passports, going no further than trying to match the pictures in Adam’s and Alice’s passports with how they look now, three years after. His one vigorous act is to stamp their passports with a kind of controlled violence, and then he brusquely slides them through the slot in the bulletproof glass.

Next, they go through airport security. The two security officers, in bulky uniforms, the material as thick as porridge, stand with their feet wide apart, their hands folded behind them, staring intently at the monitors as the carry-on luggage rides the conveyor belt and is x-rayed.

Their flight is announced and Leslie and the children must make haste.

Leslie places their suitcase on the steel rolling pins that spin in front of the conveyor belt. She gives the valise a little poke with her finger and it begins its journey.

“Backpacks,” she tells Adam and Alice.

They do as she says, after which they follow her through the metal detectors. Leslie and Alice walk through without incident, but something on Adam’s person sets off the alarm. One of the security workers is roused from his fugue state, and he quickly intercepts Adam and takes him to one side, where he wands him, head to toe. The offending object is not difficult to find. Before leaving the hotel this morning, he put the corkscrew into his back pocket, and though he has been sitting on it all day, he has forgotten it is there. The wand reacts to the corkscrew with a frenzy of clicks. As the guard gestures for Adam to remove the corkscrew, Adam’s backpack is being x-rayed, and the other guard is discovering that nestled into the socks and T-shirts are two knives.

Adam is flushed with shame and fear. With one security officer having grabbed him by the arm, and the other emptying his backpack, he wonders if he is going to be taken somewhere, questioned, kept.

Alice’s face, as well, scalds with shame. Those knives are as much her fault as his.…

“Mom?” Adam says.

Her eyes are filled with tears. “Oh, Adam,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Oh, baby, poor baby.”

The security officers have no interest in detaining Adam. They simply confiscate the corkscrew and the knives and send them all on their way.

“We have to run,” Leslie announces, and the three of them hold hands and race down the corridor toward gate 11, where the Adria clerk checks their tickets and tells them in English that the bus to their plane is just about to leave. “Hurry, please, you are the last ones,” she tells them.

They go through the terminal gate, through the pedestrian tunnel, and down the movable metal staircase. A stiff wind is blowing now, though the night is clearing up; thin shreds of silvery cloud race past the full moon, which displays its many mountains and craters in a kind of hypervisibility and seems unnaturally close. Leslie, Adam, and Alice are the last ones on the bus, and as soon as they board the driver starts the journey over the tarmac toward the small jet that awaits them. On their way, they pass a Swissair jet, a Lufthansa, and a Federal Express jet, all of them 757s, warming their engines for takeoff.

There are still empty seats on the bus but the three of them stand, holding on to a single pole for balance. Adam is staring at his mother’s fingers on the cold silver pole. She feels the intensity of his stare and she knows without checking that he must see the little wisps and spatters of the doctor’s blood that she has been unable to wash off.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs to him.

“I love you, Mom,” he says.

“I love you too, Adam. I love you both.”

“We’ll find a way,” Alice says.

“I know you will,” Leslie says.

“She means all of us,” Adam says.

Leslie gazes at the other passengers on the transit bus. Businessmen, students, a pensive short-haired girl holding a French horn case. There are a couple of nuns sitting side by side and talking excitedly to each other, and for a moment Leslie is sure they are the same sisters she and Alex saw leaving Ljubljana ten years before. But how could they be? They are young, and those two nuns from the past were old, and now would be very old, possibly dead. Yes, nuns die too, and the thought of dying nuns fills Leslie with an unutterable sadness. Everyone dies, schoolteachers, husbands, everyone.

“Are we sitting together?” Alice asks.

Leslie looks at her.

“On the plane,” Alice says. “On our tickets.”

“I think so,” Leslie says. She pulls their boarding passes out of her purse and hands them to Alice.

“You worry so much,” Leslie says. “You worry about everything.”

“Not really,” Alice says, nervously.

“Mom,” Adam says. He gestures with his eyes and Leslie follows his gaze and sees a police car racing silently across the runways, its light bar a frenzy of blue and white.

“Listen to me,” Leslie says.

They stare at her, afraid to speak.

“Kids have a way of blaming themselves for things that are not their fault. Can you just remember this? You never did anything wrong. You were always really good kids, I mean, really, really good. Everything that turned so awful, it was never your fault. You understand me? It was never your fault. Ever.”

“Mom…” Adam’s voice cracks.

“Whose fault was it?” Leslie asks. “I want you to tell me. I want you to say. Whose fault was it?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mom. We just want to stay together.”

It’s Adam who says this. Or is it Alice? Suddenly, Leslie cannot be sure. Her mind is starting to break into pieces. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. One of them said it, and it’s not going to happen, they are not going to stay together.

She thinks of it. The corkscrew. The pathetic little knives. It might be the worst thing yet. Yet they point a way. They do, they do.…

“Don’t forget your aunt Cynthia,” she tells the children.

They look at her, confused. But they won’t be for long.…

The police car has made a sharp turn and now it is heading directly toward the bus. Every thought in Leslie’s mind is eclipsed by the overwhelming imperatives of freedom and escape. The bus is starting to slow as they approach the Adria flight to Munich, but before it comes to a full stop Leslie hops off it. Waving her last good-bye to her children with her back to them, she starts to run.

For a few moments she runs with no one chasing her. But when the police car sees the figure of a woman racing between the idling jets, it sets off in pursuit of her, and a moment or two after that a mechanic, and after the mechanic a baggage handler, and then a security guard are also chasing after her.

There really is no possibility of escape. There are simply too many people in this airport whose primary job is to protect the integrity of the airport. But there are more ways of eluding your pursuers than outrunning them. You can also disappear. But how to disappear? Can you clap your hands and become invisible? Can you chant a magic spell and turn into a bird and fly away? Leslie cannot do these things.

But she has another idea, one that has been with her since the hour they arrived in Ljubljana and the bus brought them past the whirling turbine engines of the jumbo jets, with their lethal titanium honeycombs.

When she is beneath the engine attached to the right wing of the Delta 757 she is at first surprised and discouraged by how much higher off the ground it is than she had realized. From a distance, it had looked as if you could just reach up and touch the engine, but now that she is right next to it, it looks to be fifty feet above her. The plane itself seems immense, impossibly so. Fumes of burning fuel ripple through the air. She looks up, and through the smudgy glass of the cockpit she sees a pilot with headphones over his ears. He seems to be looking down at her.

She hears voices behind her, shouts. She imagines they are crying out for her to stop, to turn around, to give herself up.…

She feels strong. She feels the tension in her legs. She takes a deep breath. Air fills her lungs like helium, and she leaps. It is almost as if she has taken flight. She rises up and up and when she can rise no farther she reaches out and clasps the lip of the turbine’s wide-open mouth. She can feel it wanting to suck her in, to consume her. Her hair is streaming toward it. The noise is deafening. It feels as if her eyes want to pop right out of their sockets. With one more burst of energy, she hoists herself up, and that is all it takes. In less time than it takes for her heart to contract and expand, she is sucked into the jet, like a goose, like debris, like something of no account, and the engine has its way with her. It eats her as if it were ravenous, and in moments there is nothing recognizable left of her.

Everyone on the bus taking the passengers to the Adria flight to Munich sees what happens to Leslie. There are no screams, no shouts, no words. Every last person just stares in a complete stunned silence, and the silence persists until it is broken by a strange keening noise. The passengers look to the left and to the right, trying to locate the source of those long, lonesome howls. The winds have blown the last of the clouds out of the cold night sky, and it really does sound as if a wolf—no, it’s two wolves!—two wolves baying brokenheartedly at the big orange moon, so close, so bright and round that it looks as if someone has punched a hole out of heaven.

Chase Novak is the pseudonym for Scott Spencer. Spencer is the author of ten novels, including
Endless Love
,
which has sold over two million copies to date
,
 and the National Book Award finalist 
A Ship Made of Paper
. He has written for
Rolling Stone
, the
New York Times,
The New Yorker,
GQ,
and
Harper’s.
Breed
is his debut novel as Chase Novak.