Brood by Chase Novak

at the same time, she exposes the infant’s back for all to see. Those farthest away don’t know what to make of it, but those who are standing in the first couple of rows see it very clearly: where the child’s shoulder blades would have been, Gort has sprouted two pale gray wings.

Chapter 7
    S ometimes the twins call her Cynthia, and sometimes Aunt Cynthia. The Aunt Cynthia is a bit disheartening to her—it seems permanent, a dead-end job with no promotion possible. It surprises her to be continually colliding with that small, tender, and undefended part of her that would love it if one day Adam and Alice called her Mom.
    But no matter. One way or another, they are becoming a family.
    The children cleave to her. They don’t help but they closely observe her every move when she makes her bed. They sit and talk to each other right outside the bathroom door while she takes her shower. They eat quickly and they watch quietly while she finishes her breakfast. It’s heartbreaking and slightly annoying, and it’s also sort of amusing, and on top of all that, it is touching and even a tiny bit gratifying. This is what she is learning: In family life, no one thing is just one thing. Everything holds a multitude of meanings.
    There is no downtime. Especially not with these two. Their needs, as yet unspoken, overwhelm her. The fear they lived with, the gruesome things they saw, their months and months and months tumbling through the social-service system. What do they dream of? What do they say to their therapists?
    A week that feels like a month goes by. She wishes she were younger, in better shape. Yet older now—she is forty-five—she is perhaps able to tolerate their using up every minute of her day, every ounce of her energy, without feeling impatient or trapped. If the worst thing you feel in your life is exhaustion—not pain, not loneliness, not hopelessness, not rage, not hunger, not terror—then you might as well consider yourself among the fortunate.
    Another week passes. The New York summer is the kind Al Gore predicted: the sun a dirty yellow scream, the sky a crazy jumble of clouds, the nights thick as oil spills.
    She knows she ought to have found a meeting by now, but it’s been years since she’s had a drink, or even thought about using, and there is something about being in New York that says fresh start to her. Drinking and its attendant dependence on AA feels like something she left back in California.
    Cynthia has many contacts in the New York antiques world, and though it doesn’t seem realistic to think that she will soon have her own shop—when she closed Gilty Pleasures back in San Francisco, she did so with the knowledge that she might never run an antiques store again—she has to begin earning some money, and a job has been all but promised her, working for Fay and Jiwani a few doors down from the Pierre, and there is a good chance at another position at a place called American Pastoral. But right now, who has time?
    The twins must be fed. Every day. Three or four times a day. Though they are still determined to limit their caloric intake, they are also—despite all their talk about becoming vegetarian—ravenous for meat, which they seem to grab with one hand and push away with the other. She is happy—delighted, really—to feed them all the meat they could ever want, and often the huge kitchen smells like a barbecue pit. And they must be clothed. Cynthia doesn’t want to be snobby or grand about it, but they don’t look right in those Target and Kmart outfits they came out of foster care with. She takes them to City Outfitters, drawn in by the funky mannequins wearing casual clothes, but feels faint when she sees that a pair of pre-torn blue jeans costs $250. Luckily, the twins do not object when she steers them out of the place. Eventually, she gets them clothes she hopes will take them through the rest of the scorching