The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  Did she feel guilty about Henry? She should, she knew that she should, but she was the one who’d suffered from the dalliance, and it had only made her want Nate more. She understood immediately that she shouldn’t have risked Nate for one night with a nobody from her past. Who cared if Nate was financially undesirable, as economically impaired as she was? After the slip (a slip that only she and Henry and the nascent Trevor-fetus knew about), Emily never questioned her love for Nate again, not until recently. Not until, over this last month, he’d begun pulling away from her. It was just stress, she continued to tell herself. The other new mothers with whom Emily spent time—at the baby gym or music class, women with whom Emily had little in common except for the age of their children—frequently made jokes about their Wall Street husbands, men they rarely saw. “Either they’re working really hard or they’re all having affairs!” the women would say. They laughed hard about this, the assumption being that becoming fathers had rendered their men impotent.

  Nate was neither impotent nor deceitful. He was a straightforward man, honest when it counted. If his distance wasn’t due to stress, Emily worried that its roots were in the way his and her lives had diverged. He went to work every day and interacted with the outside intellectual world—a riveting proposition—while she stayed home, turned her brain off, and mixed baby formula. She cherished Trevor, she did, but as she spent her entire days with him at her side, she felt her interior life starting to wither and die, even more than it had during her career at the ad agency. As she sat across from Nate at dinner, she found that she had little to say that didn’t involve rehashing the baby’s bowel movements and eating habits, details that evoked slight smiles from Nate and polite silences. In her head she’d become a mother from the 1970s and began to fear she was proof that women had made no progress in the decades since. She wanted to rejoin Nate in his full life. She wanted to assert herself as an equal partner again. It’s what she craved: her own intellectual existence outside the house. It was the one thing Emily’s mother had that Emily herself, as an adult, coveted.

  What would Emily’s outside life be? She had no interest in returning to the soulless world of advertising and had spent countless hours since Trevor’s birth coming up with new, down-home business schemes (artisanal cheese-making, nicotine-infused water, audio philosophy), dozens of ideas, looking for the one single brainstorm that would satisfy her intellect and, she hoped, bring in a paycheck, too. New mothers complained about how hard they worked! Yes, Emily was relentlessly tired during those first months with Trevor, when the days and nights bled together, but for so long she’d been subjected to the endless and arbitrary whims of irrational, ego-charged bosses. To suddenly find herself at the mercy of no one but a baby whose impetuous outbursts were age-appropriate? On most days this was a luxury. While Trevor was awake, he was an adorable time-suck, but the minute he went to sleep, or acquiesced to a half hour of Baby Beethoven, during those moments of respite Emily’s beta-blockers allowed her to concentrate and devise and plan.

  All of her ideas turned out to be insurmountably flawed. Nicotine water was an FDA-approval nightmare. Cheese-making happened to be more science than art—the humidity and temperature had to be monitored to the fraction of a degree. A philosophy audio library was already in the works out in L.A. She gave up on all of these as tenable plans. On a whim one night in bed, though, tired and limp after she and Nate had managed to find the time and desire to make love, she told him about her now-ditched idea to open her own dairy operation—something in soft goat cheeses, maybe, given that the soft cheeses were so much more forgiving than the hard varieties. When spoken aloud, she began to consider the scheme again. It sounded romantic and viable and appealingly hands-on. Still, she laughed as she described it. She let loose a self-deprecating guffaw, which apparently gave Nate the idea that her whole thing had been nothing but folly, and he laughed, too.

  “Hilarious,” he’d said. “You could also churn butter. We’d buy one of those colonial bonnets for you to wear. I could develop a bonnet fetish like that.” He called her Bessie for the next two days. The name stung. Emily had stopped breast-feeding only a month earlier and was finally beginning to feel less like a cow and more like a woman again. She thought of her mother, a feminist, yes, but one who’d always loved this kind of joke. It was no surprise that Emily’s mother and Nate had taken to each other so easily.

  Since then, Emily hadn’t told Nate about any of her ideas. They hadn’t, honestly, had much time to talk. A few weeks ago, while feeling especially disconnected, for the second night in a row she’d woken up just after midnight to find that Nate wasn’t in bed with her. She could hear him on the other side of the bedroom door, in the living room. She tried to slip back into sleep, but the irregular tap of his fingers on their computer keyboard kept jarring her awake. He had a tendency to pound on the keys with the kind of force most people reserved for slamming the return-change buttons on vending machines. After a few minutes, she called out to him.

  “Nate,” she said in a whisper loud enough, she hoped, to be heard in the living room.

  “Shh,” he said, walking quickly back to the bed. “You’ll wake Trev.”

  “Your typing is going to do that anyway. Can’t you sleep?”

  “I’m not tired. It’s okay.” It was pitch-black in their apartment except for the faint blue glow from the computer screen. Their windows looked out over an unlit courtyard, and after the sun went down, unless the moon was full and bright, the only light that came in was from the lamps of the strangers who lived in the apartments across the way. At this hour, none of those neighbors were still awake. The computer beeped from the living room, a generic alert sound. “I was just surfing,” Nate said. He rubbed his eyes, pressing his palms firmly against them.

  “Find anything good?” she asked.

  After a pause, he said, “I thought it might be cool if I could locate the audio from the old baseball games I listened to when I was a kid, in Cleveland. I thought it might be fun to share those with Trevor someday.”

  “I guess.”

  “They must have recorded the games. You’d think the radio station would have an archive and put it online, but I can’t find it. All that Internet bandwidth, and you can never find what you need.”

  “Unless you’re looking for naked cheerleaders or driving directions,” Emily said, her voice groggy.

  “Naked cheerleaders, that’s something I can share with Trevor someday.” Nate said. “I should probably give up. I’ll come back to sleep.”

  “Don’t rush for me.” Emily genuinely meant that. She felt spoiled, having the whole bed to herself. She stretched out her limbs and took advantage of the wide expanse of flat, cool sheets.

  Nate returned to the computer and Emily lay awake thinking about Nate and his attachment to those baseball games. It was like a smack in the face, his constant pull toward nostalgia just as he and Emily were constructing their joint future. This time, though, he had a valid point. Those games had to be online somewhere.

  Emily saw, then, how off-the-mark her life had become. Had she had any foresight, she’d have left the ad agency and used her experience to gain a foothold in the growing tech sector. Instead, she’d honed her skills in the old-economy model. By the time Trevor was grown, she’d be totally unemployable. And if she’d learned anything from watching so many tech start-ups flourish (and later die, as so many of them did) far beyond her reach, it was that the majority of these ventures were less about the intellectual idea and more about knowing how to raise the cash. Cash was the cog at the center of everything, especially as the country’s brainpower was on the fast road to decay.

  “We have eighty-five dollars to our name, and we’re not spending them in here,” Nate whispered into Emily’s ear. She still stood inside the tchotchke shop’s doorway; she hadn’t made it any farther into the hushed, dusty museum of a store. He lay his arm loosely around her shoulder and pointed to the nearby wall, a Newport wall. Newport was safe. It w
as another, newer world, separate (even now, in the era of cell phones and wireless) from whatever was transpiring to the south, from the misguided, old-fashioned existence she’d left behind. She understood how physical distance might become a form of comfort.

  “That framed map of Easton Bay? Twenty-two hundred bucks. It dates back to 1823,” Nate said.

  “And it doesn’t offer point-to-point driving directions? A scam.”

  “A beautiful, antique, hand-painted scam,” Nate agreed.

  “I need some fresh air,” Emily said. “You still have the cash?” Nate had taken charge of their money last night, after they finished counting it out on the bed.

  “In my wallet.”

  Nate pushed the stroller out of the store and Trevor, deep in the seat, moved his head from side to side, his wide eyes the size of half-dollars. Like his ears, the boy’s eyes were slightly too big for his face, giving him an unnaturally alert look whenever he was awake. Some of his alertness these days was real, though. There was an energy to the boy, simmering under his pale skin. He was on the verge of walking. Each time he pulled himself up on a coffee table or chair leg, he looked ready to let go and take off running.

  “Hey.” Emily motioned down the dock, past a yacht insurance office with a yellow life preserver painted on its sign. “Let’s show Trevor the boats. He’s going to have a future on boats if we stay here.”

  “I guess he will,” Nate said, as if the idea hadn’t yet occurred to him. “Did you bring sunscreen? I want to get his face covered.”

  Emily rifled through her tote. The bag was littered with old credit card receipts and appointment reminder slips from the pediatrician’s office, the wayward pieces of paper mingling with her lipsticks and estranged pen caps and contraband that included the bottles of shampoo she’d stolen from the maid’s cart at the hotel. She reached deep into the main pocket, gripped the tube of children’s Coppertone, and pulled it out—along with two stray scraps that were stuck to the tube’s slick plastic. The first was a coupon, two dollars off a six-pack of flavored Italian seltzer. The second paper was, unbelievably, a crumpled twenty-dollar bill.

  “Nate?” She held it out away from her body as if it were otherworldly and dangerous. With the twenty added in, their cash would total more than $100. “Nate…” she tried again, but he was already halfway down the dock, unbuckling Trevor from the Bugaboo and directing the boy’s attention to the water. He couldn’t hear her. She stuffed the bill into her back pocket and strode quickly down the wooden walkway. The stiff creases of the crumpled twenty pressed against her skin through her pants, sharp yet light, like the feeling in her head, the guilt of pocketing the extra cash and the relief of now having an innocent secret, her own money, like an escape hatch. One forgotten bill that was hers to save or spend.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Drive through Pennsylvania

  THE EXTERIOR OF THE Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, minimart appealed to George Bedecker. He was drawn to the square geometry of the flat-roofed store, the ordinary assemblage of gas pumps, the vernacular familiarity of the roadside way station. Inside the minimart, however, the precision gave way to Day-Glo lunacy. The stacked aluminum shelves were piled high with boxes and bags and wrapped pouches of artificially colored candy and salt nuggets and deep-fried nuts. Slim Jims, Tato Skins, Maxx bars, Casbah Crisps, Flav-R-Pacs. A mound of bagged charcoal and lighter fluid. The offerings stretched from floor to ceiling in no discernable order, nudging against refrigerated beverage cases and a heated glass cage in which withered hot dogs rotated in slow circles. A white light, an astral glow, kept the space so well illuminated that there were no shadows. It took George a moment to locate the ambient source: extended strips of fluorescent slimline tubing that hung on J-brackets from both the ceiling and the walls.

  George had left the motel this morning without eating breakfast, but he wasn’t hungry. George was never hungry. This wasn’t a symptom of his illness, it was something that had been true of his life for as long as he could remember. Even during his marriage—to a woman who’d come from a large tradition of warm hearths and who served long-cooked European roasts that should have preyed on his sense of duty—even then he’d seen food as a means to an end, a necessary irritant.

  Those roasts and stews, they were a lifetime ago, but he could still remember their heavy musks, odors that worked their way into his skin like ringworm and clung to the threads of his suit jackets long after his wife was gone. If he had a regret—a regret about his home life, not about his rapidly truncating career—that would be it, the way he’d remained cloistered in his own head until the end of his wife’s life. He’d been present physically for her, beside her bedside, but in his head and heart he’d denied to himself that her end was so close. Out of fear he had looked away. The lesson he’d learned finally: Denial was a dangerous path.

  He picked up two rectangular breakfast bars from the minimart’s shelf. The brand name on their labels was familiar to him from the cereal boxes that lay tucked away in his small pantry in Chicago, at home. When he was there, cereal often stood in for dinner. Cereal, or soup and buttered rice. More often, he ate away from home. If he wasn’t traveling, he remained at the office until well past dinnertime, eating whatever meal his junior associates ordered in for the evening. The office pantry was kept stocked with coffee, tea, and saltines. Occasionally he’d leave the office for an hour and take a taxi to Philippa’s condominium, where she’d prepare him a small dinner of cheese and charcuterie, or noodles in sauce. Like George, Philippa saw food in a practical light, as a form of energy, a daily ration.

  Today the breakfast bars would suffice. He approached the store’s cash register, where a boy in a shiny basketball uniform sat slumped over a tabloid. George lay the two foil packets on the counter, pulled out his credit card, and tapped it on the linoleum. The clerk, with a knee-jerk response to the sound of a charge card on the counter, snapped to attention.

  “That’s it?” the boy asked, picking up the foil packets and passing them under an electronic scanner. Next to the counter stood a shoulder-high copper rack hung with plastic Halloween costumes. The pirate suits were the right size for a six-year-old child, George figured. Or a maybe a nine-year-old. It had been a long time since he was able to tell the difference.

  “I’ve also filled up the tank, gas,” George motioned with his head toward his Audi outside. It was a relief that his neck and head were working today. On so many afternoons, his conscious physical impulses slipped out of reach, tumbling down the scale from control to mania. Today, everything was intact. The drive had been uneventful.

  “That your Audi?” The boy asked, picking up the credit card from the counter and punching a code into the register. The Audi was the only car at the pumps.

  “It is.”

  “Yeah?” The boy asked.

  “Yes,” George repeated. “It is.” This was the first time George had used his voice all day, having been alone in his car for five hours. He’d have to get accustomed to silence; he was heading into self-imposed seclusion. Eventually he’d have a home nurse, if he remained in Narragansett, but not yet. For now, he was aching for solitude and airtight quiet. He was expecting that the seclusion would fall over him like a cool muslin drop cloth, but for all he knew it could end up crushing him like granite.

  “Nice,” the boy said.

  George signed the credit card receipt. His small, fine movements, even on days like today, good days, were hampered. His signature emerged as a shaken scrawl.

  George took the translucent yellow customer receipt and awkwardly folded it in half and then in half again, slipping it into his pocket. From his other pocket he retrieved and tightly grasped his car keys.

  George walked the ten yards to the Audi, one foot in front of the other, a deliberate gait as he crunched over the loose black gravel. The air outside the store was slick with tar and engine fumes. Once he was safely in the driver’s seat with the doors locked and his seat belt secured, he lay the two breakfast
bars next to each other on the dashboard and started the ignition. The vehicle was free of distractions. No coffee in the cup holder, no road maps strewn on the floor, no sound coming from the radio. The only noise was the engine’s subtle hum and a sudden voice command from the GPS, breaking the silence. The trip locator’s voice was deep and demanding, the rasp of a middle-aged German Frau, most likely recorded directly at the central Audi plant in Ingolstadt. Each time the matron ordered him to take a turn or to veer left, it sounded as if she was scolding him for bad behavior. Yesterday he’d missed an exit and was forced to travel two hundred meters out of his way to get back on course. “You’ve strayed from the course! Please turn left to return to the highlighted route!” she taunted him. All he heard was You’ve strayed. You’ve strayed. You’ve strayed. He was a bad man. He’d never enjoyed driving, and now the art of it had changed for the worse. It had become interactive.