Brood by Chase Novak Read Free Book Online Page B

it’s not an issue. My issue is how to keep their cute little behinds off the sofa and their lovely brown eyes from staring for hours at the TV, which I should never have bought in the first place. And would not ever have brought into our lives if I’d known what video junkies those two little angels were going to be. The only good thing about the TV is that they sometimes snack while they watch—if you can call cucumber slices in seltzer a snack. But who knows? Maybe it will lead to something with a lot of high-fructose corn syrup in it.
    At least they don’t watch violent shows. Mostly Cartoon Network and family sitcoms. They go for the real super-gentle high-sugar-content fare, the shows where the studio audience is always going Awwww when one of the kid characters says something adorable or a puppy pokes his little head out of a basket or someone learns a lesson and a hug-a-thon ensues.
    She hears a noise. It is something not in the house’s usual nightly vocabulary. This actually sounds as if someone is on the porch, trying the door. She lifts the pen off the page, holds it midair, listens with all her might.
    Silence.
    A distant rumble. Someone speeding down Lexington with a faulty muffler.
    She waits another moment, shakes her head.
    Tomorrow morning, Adam has therapy. Wednesday, Alice. They’ve been seeing therapists since Child Protective Services took over. And of course, of course. They should have that, they need it. Both their parents dead and everything else they’ve been through. Some of which I doubt I will ever know. But I worry about these shrinks and their theories and I most of all worry about how quick some of them are to put them on meds. I don’t want that. All those medications have side effects. Suicide, especially. Both their parents killed themselves, right? So why would any responsible doctor want to risk the twins’ safety like that? I don’t even know if most of those so-called wonder drugs work anyhow. I’m not sure they’re not mainly cash machines for huge pharmaceutical firms.
    This is where I put my foot down. I have that right. I get to decide. I am their mother.
    God, it feels so strange to write it.
    But it’s true.
    I am their mother.
    Dear God, please guide me. Please help me do the right thing.
    Again: that sound.
    It’s more disturbing the second time. Cynthia holds her breath, cranes her neck, tilts her head. It’s the door, the downstairs door.
    But why would it be?
    She goes to the window, unconcerned that she wears only a T-shirt. She lifts one of the slats of the interior shutters and peers through. But what makes the master bedroom the best room for sleeping also makes it the worst room for surveying the outside world. Her only view is the back of a few town houses on Seventieth Street—pastel blue and gray by day, black by night—and her own garden, lush now with wild grasses.
    She tells herself that she is just nervous. She tells herself that the city’s million sounds are freaking her out. She tells herself that right now, the best thing to do is climb into bed, switch off the light, and have a long, delicious sleep.
    Except that her heart is pounding like a regiment of monkeys running in place.
    She makes her way across the bedroom and opens the heavy, twelve-foot-high oak door. The hallway is dark except for a star-shaped night-light plugged into an outlet halfway between her bedroom and the staircase. A breeze from somewhere touches her bare legs; the down on her thighs stiffens and rises.
    She wishes she had a weapon—not that she would know how to use it. As she reaches the top of the stairs—she waves her left arm in front of her, searching for obstacles, like a blind woman in unfamiliar surroundings—she remembers there are two heavy brass candlesticks on a delicate pine table flush with the wall under one of the few ancestral paintings that survived Alex and Leslie’s descent into