Brood by Chase Novak Read Free Book Online

strike of alarm in Alice’s voice. And it reminds Cynthia: the children’s most recent memories of Leslie’s eyes are probably terrifying—eyes blazing with animal hunger.
    â€œEmerald green, flecked with gold,” Cynthia softly says. How to change the subject? “Oh, kids, I almost forgot. I made lemonade. Fresh lemonade.”
    In the kitchen, Cynthia takes the pitcher of lemonade out of the Sub-Zero fridge. She sets it on the counter and takes a deep, steadying breath. The smallness of those children, their startling skinniness, their helplessness, their aloneness. Her own love for them is suddenly so bright a flame that it burns away even the pity, leaving only love’s purest ember.
    She gathers herself. They don’t need to see their new mother with weepy eyes and a red nose. Once upon a time, she would have suppressed this rush of emotion with a stiff drink, and now, as has been her habit for years, she thanks God for her sobriety. She is here. She is present and accounted for. She has embarked on the greatest journey of her life.
    When she walks back into the dining room, the twins’ chairs are empty. They must have left just a few seconds ago. She can hear their little footsteps scurrying up the stairs.
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    Cynthia is in her bedroom, which used to be her sister and brother-in-law’s bedroom and which Cynthia initially had not wanted to make her own. But in this sixteen-room house of four levels, with a library, three parlors, a game room, and enough sleeping quarters to accommodate fourteen people, it is still the best bedroom, with plenty of sunlight in the daytime yet angled in such a way as to protect it from street noises at night—New York is not only the city that never sleeps but also, she has come to realize, the city that doesn’t want you to sleep either. It’s a city that would like you to keep it company during its endless insomnia. The master bedroom is an airy, spacious room, majestic, really, with a white marble fireplace, parqueted floor in a starburst pattern, and, the one modern touch, a huge, hedonistic bathroom with a steam shower, a Jacuzzi, heated towel racks, and full-length mirrors that must have broken Leslie’s heart to look in after those fertility treatments wrecked her once-beautiful body.
    Like all old houses, the town house on East Sixty-Ninth Street speaks its language of thumps and twitters and creaks and squeaks, especially at night. It takes getting used to. If you let yourself get frightened by all the odd noises, you’d never have a moment of peace. It’s a little after eleven at night, and they’ve lived here for a week.
    A full moon sails over the spires of Manhattan, almost unreal in its brightness and perfection, and it seems to pause for a while to send its cold silver light through the slats of the shutters on Cynthia’s bedroom windows. Cynthia, wearing an old T-shirt and underpants, sits yogi-style in the middle of her bed, sipping from the tumbler of Saratoga water. She sips, swallows, and listens, wondering if the twins are sleeping. They had both been in foster homes where bedtimes were early and inflexible, and Cynthia had expected them to celebrate their homecoming and their new freedoms by staying up late and keeping to a helter-skelter schedule.
    But they seem creatures of habit, and as the grandfather clock in the second-floor parlor strikes ten each evening, they are already making their way up the stairs to the third floor. And how deeply they sleep! Every day, they sleep later. It seems the more comfortable they become, the more tired they are. They are like travelers who have been waiting to come home, yearning like sailors on a distant sea.
    And now they are home. To Cynthia’s surprise, they both insisted on sleeping in their old rooms—Cynthia would have guessed they would rather have slept on the porch or the roof than spend a night in rooms into which they’d once been