And yet, as well-behaved as they were, as smart as they were, I pitied them. I thought of David at fifteen, getting kicked out of one school after the next, the beautiful lines his body made when he tried to do a jump on his skateboard, the way he practically sprung back up after tumbling to the ground, the way he did a one-hand cartwheel in the grass at Washington Square, the way his skin seemed to glint in the sun.
The boys would be almost eighteen now, and as I knocked on their door, I thought, as I often did, of my Charlie. Let them be safe, I thought, because if they’re safe, my Charlie will be safe as well. But I also thought: If something happened to them, then nothing will happen to her. None of it made sense, of course.
When no one answered, I entered the code Nathaniel had given me into the keypad, and then I walked inside. I could tell from the moment the decontamination chamber opened that something had died. These new helmets enhance every scent, and I tore mine off and tugged my sweater up to cover my nose and mouth. The house was as dim as ever. There was no sound, no movement: only that stench.
“Frances!” I called. “Ezra! Hiram! It’s Charles Griffith—Nathaniel sent me. Hello?”
But no one answered. There was a door separating the foyer from the rest of the parlor floor, and I pushed it open and nearly gagged. I stepped into the living room. For a while, I saw nothing, and then I heard a faint sound, a buzzing, and I saw that there was a small, dense cloud hovering over the sofa. When I stepped closer, the cloud revealed itself as a swarm of black flies, whirring and humming in a tornado-like pattern. What they were circling was the form of a woman, Frances Holson, tucked up into herself, dead for at least two weeks, maybe more.
I moved away, my heart pounding. “Boys!” I shouted. “Hiram! Ezra!” But again, there was silence.
I continued moving through the living room. Then I heard something else, a faint crinkling. At the end of the space, I saw something moving, and when I got closer, I saw that it was a sheet of clear plastic, one that filled the entire doorframe that separated the living room from the kitchen, and that sealed the kitchen off from the rest of the house. There were two windows cut near the bottom right corner of the sheet: One had two plastic sleeves drooping through it, into the living area, and the other was just a plain rectangle. It was this window that had come loose, and was moving in the breeze from some unseen source.
I looked through the plastic into the kitchen. The first thing I thought was that it resembled some kind of animal’s burrow: a gopher’s, for example; a prairie dog’s. The window shades were drawn, and every surface was covered. I unzipped the plastic wall and walked inside, and here, too, there was a stench of decay, though here the scent was not animal but vegetal. The counters were covered with dishes and pots and pans, and stacks of textbooks. In the sink, there were more pots and pans submerged in an oily scum, like someone had tried to clean them and had given up midway through. Next to the sink sat two soup bowls, two spoons, and two mugs, all wiped clean. Pushed into every corner were bulging black garbage bags, and when I made myself untie one, I saw they were filled not with chopped-up human remains but with scraps of carrot and crumbs of bread so rotten they had gone slimy, tea bags that looked like they’d been sucked dry. The recycling bin was spilling over, a parodic cornucopia. I picked up a tin of garbanzo beans, and saw that inside, it was not just empty but meticulously empty, so clean it gleamed. The next tin, the same thing, and the next as well.
In the center of the floor, about a foot apart, divided by another stack of books, atop of which sat two laptops, were two sleeping bags, each with a pillow, and—a detail that upset me—each with a stuffed bear tucked beneath the top layer of the bag, their heads resting on the pillows, their black eyes staring at the ceiling. Around this sleeping area was a clear path, leading to a bathroom, where two oxygen packs were plugged into the wall; there were two glasses on the edge of the sink, and two toothbrushes, and a tube of toothpaste, still mostly full. The bathroom led to a laundry room, and here too nothing seemed amiss: The cupboards were stocked with towels and extra toilet paper and flashlights and batteries and laundry detergent; a set of pillowcases and two pairs of child-size jeans still lay in the dryer.
I returned to the kitchen and picked my way back through the detritus to the center of the room, where I looked around, considering what I should do next. I called Nathaniel, but he didn’t answer.
And then I went to the refrigerator to get something to drink, and inside was—nothing. Not a bottle of juice, not a jug of mustard, not a stray lettuce leaf withering in the back of a drawer. The freezer, too: nothing. And then a dread moved over me, and I began opening all of the cupboards, all of the drawers—nothing, nothing, nothing. There wasn’t a single edible thing in that kitchen, not even anything—flour, baking soda, yeast—that could be used to make something edible. That was why the cans were so clean: They had licked out every bit of food they could. It was why the kitchen was so messy: They had searched everywhere for something to eat.
I didn’t know why they had sealed themselves—or, more likely, why their mother had sealed them—in the kitchen, except that it would have been for their safety. But once they had run out of food, I understood that they would have explored the entire house, looking for it.
I ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “Ezra!” I shouted. “Hiram!” Their parents’ bedroom was on the second floor, and it had been overturned as well: Underwear and socks and men’s undershirts vomited from the drawers; shoes were scattered outside the closet.
On the third floor, the same pattern: drawers emptied, closets in disarray. Only their own study was as tidy as I remembered it—they would have known it intimately; they wouldn’t have needed to search for what they knew wasn’t there.
Here, I stopped, trying to calm down. I called and texted Nathaniel again. And it was as I was waiting for him to answer that I looked through the window and saw, far below me, two forms lying facedown in the back garden.
It was the boys, of course. They were wearing wool coats, even though it was far too warm for wool. They were very thin. One of them, Hiram or Ezra, had angled his head to face his brother, whose own face was pressed into the flagstones. Their oxygen packs were still attached to their pants, the chambers long depleted. And although it was warm, the stones were cool, and this had helped preserve their bodies to some degree.
I stayed until the forensic team came, told them what I knew, and then went to the house to tell Nathaniel, who did not take the news well. “Why didn’t I go over there sooner?” he cried. “I knew something was wrong, I knew it. Where was their housekeeper? Where was their fucking father?”
I made some inquiries; I argued that this could be a public-health matter, and asked that a full investigation be conducted, as swiftly as possible. Today I got the report of what happened, or at least what is thought to have happened: The theory is that, about five weeks ago, Frances Holson became sick with “an illness of unknown pathology.” She, realizing it was contagious, sealed the boys into the kitchen, and asked their housekeeper to come by regularly with food. For the first week, at least, she did. But as Frances deteriorated, the housekeeper was too frightened to return. It’s thought that Frances moved herself downstairs to be closer to her boys, and gave them the rest of the food she’d set aside for herself, handing it to them with sterile gloves through one of the windows cut into the sheet. The boys would have watched her die, and then lived with the sight of her dead body for at least another two weeks. It was thought they ventured out to hunt for food about five days before I found them, exiting through the door in the kitchen and climbing down the metal stairs to the garden. Hiram—the one lying facedown—had died first; it was thought that Ezra, who had turned his head to face him, had died a day later.