The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  As he pulled onto the highway, George hunched close to the steering wheel and kept the car moving at a constant pace in the right-hand lane. He was used to sitting in the passenger seat or the back when he was in a car. As a passenger, he routinely let his eyes roam the landscape next to the road. Here, in the driver’s seat, out of necessity he kept his eyes steadily on the pavement and the lane lines that marked his way. It was a narrow view, jolting in its lack of periphery, but it would get him where he was going. He’d survived brushing his teeth and navigating the first leg of today’s trip, now his goal was to keep on course and forestall his deterioration for one more day, he and his Audi working in unison. An Audi, as if driving a German car might be all it took to be seen as the next Walter Gropius. As if all it took to conceive great buildings was an expensive European toy. Le pauvre George Bedecker. He was becoming transparent, even to himself.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nate Faces the Truth, the Half Truths, and the Possible Truths

  NATE COULDN’T REMEMBER which pier he and Charlie had set off from for their childhood sailing lessons thirty years ago. What he remembered, instead, was Charlie’s innocence, his unflappable enjoyment of the whole vacation. On their second day of lessons, Charlie stubbed his toe on the rough wood of the dock. His blood leached onto the boat’s slick white deck. For a moment, Charlie had looked almost sick, devoid of color. Nate felt sick, too, when he saw Charlie go pale. He often wished Charlie would toughen up—yet when the boy was actually in pain, Nate softened and felt the urge to take the hurt on himself. Charlie’s pain was only momentary this time. After the sailing instructor taped him up, he began to look proud. “I hurt myself sailing,” he’d said with alert, nearly joyful eyes.

  As for whether it was this pier that they’d sailed from in June 1974, Nate couldn’t say. All of Newport’s pristine, parallel docks looked the same. And anyway, memory loss was routine for the almost-forty-year-old male. What you had to take note of, he’d read, was a diminishment of short-range recollection, especially if accompanied by joltish mood swings.

  For the past month, Nate had been monitoring his own behavior carefully but peripherally, without overtly admitting (or barely admitting, at least) that he was checking up on himself. He subconsciously quizzed his memory each night by reparsing the events of his day (what he’d had for lunch, which phone calls he hadn’t yet returned, what color underwear Emily had worn), telling himself that he was creating a personal narrative simply for the sport of it. It wasn’t a joke, though. With every twitch, every unexpected stumble, he was on the lookout.

  On the Newport dock, his footing was steady and sure. His eyes were on Trevor, who gawked at the bright masts of the boats tied to the moorings. Trevor, who’d been dragged into this mess with no say of his own.

  “He’s going to have a future on boats!” Emily had said. It hadn’t occurred to Nate that Trevor might grow up sailing. It seemed so obvious, but Nate hadn’t let himself think about the future at all. And regardless, a life on the water was so contrary to Nate’s past. After that one childhood trip, he had never sailed much again. He’d been a guest on friends’ boats throughout the years, vessels considerably larger than those he and Charlie had maneuvered, but he’d never taken up sports, unless you counted weekend Wiffle Ball and the occasional halting squash game with the guys from work. As long ago as middle school gym class, it was clear that there’d be no career in athletics for Nate, unless tetherball went pro.

  Today Nate simply wanted to live long enough to see his boy throw his first ball. He wanted Trevor to live long enough, too. Trevor was his son, the same way Nate was George’s. Heredity was a terrifying concept.

  “That’s a sloop or something, a yacht, Trev,” Emily said, approaching from down the dock.

  “Hey,” Nate reached out his hand.

  “SPF forty,” she passed him the sunscreen.

  Nate took the tube while Emily undid the Bugaboo’s protective straps and lifted the boy out of Ollie’s bucket.

  “Watch it—” Nate said. The buggy had started to roll and he grabbed it with his free hand, using his foot to readjust the brake.

  “Thanks,” Emily said. “Goddamn orphan.”

  The faulty brake was the most noticeable hazard of buying the stroller secondhand. They’d saved $400 by purchasing it from Ed Auberley and his wife after their youngest kid outgrew it. Ed had warned Nate about the brake—it worked, but it jammed open if you weren’t careful. That was a small issue. The bigger one, which Nate hadn’t anticipated, and he bet Ed hadn’t, either, was the shame they’d shared after the transaction. Nate and Emily now knew that Ed and Marissa, who’d always seemed enviably flush, were so strapped that they’d sold their Bugaboo rather than recycling it or donating it to charity. And Ed and Marissa were aware that Nate and Emily didn’t have the reserves to spring for their own firsthand stroller-of-the-moment. Just days after they completed the deal, Nate and Emily and the infant Trevor happened to run into the Auberleys on Lexington and Seventy-Seventh Street, where they’d all kept their eyes awkwardly averted from the Bugaboo’s unmistakable red awning.

  That’s when Nate and Emily nicknamed the stroller Ollie, for Oliver Twist, the haggard little orphan boy. Since then, whenever Emily saw an industrial Stokke on the street—a Norwegian import far more technical than even a new Bugaboo—she’d glance pleadingly at Nate and joke, in her best cockney accent, “Please, sir, may I have some more?” In Newport they hadn’t seen a single Stokke. They hadn’t even seen any Bugaboos other than their own.

  “Hey, is it a sloop?” Emily asked, pointing to the boat on which Trevor’s eyes, unblinking and singular in their focus, were fixated. It had a tall main mast and a small second sail. A jib, was that what they called it?

  “Maybe?”

  “We’ll to have to learn the terminology,” Emily laughed. “We won’t want to embarrass the kid once he has school friends.”

  “Do you honestly think our kid is going to be in the sailing crowd?”

  “Are there other crowds here? We’ll see, I guess. I’ve sort of been picturing him at St. George’s, once he gets old enough. I assume everyone at St. George’s sails and plays lacrosse. But maybe he’ll be in the theater crowd, all grunge and poetry. Whatever Trevor wants.” She swept her palm across the boy’s smooth cheek, and he smiled.

  “St. George’s,” Nate said. “He’d be a day kid at the boarding school.” Nate had boarded at the Hill School in Pennsylvania—it was there that he first met a number of the acquaintances he still saw in New York, at parties and banking-industry events and booze-fueled minireunions. In high school, Nate had cherished his day-student classmates and their insider knowledge, their split-level abodes. “I hadn’t anticipated Trevor getting old enough for high school. I mean—” Fuck it, that’s not a thought he was ready to have.

  “Or us sticking around here that long?”

  “Maybe,” Nate said. He simply hadn’t thought of Trevor as an adolescent or grown-up at all. The boy looked so much like Nate as a child, but with Emily’s wry smile, that Nate found it easy to focus solely on Trevor now. He had Nate’s dark hair and pasty skin, his oval face (already losing its baby roundness), long limbs and wiry-long toes. Finger toes, Emily called them.

  The only other baby Nate had ever known, up close, was Charlie, born when Nate was two. All Nate remembered of those early years was Charlie’s tendency to snag his diaper on their shared toys, his unexplainable blond hair (which turned dark by the time he was school-aged), and his cleft chin. After Trevor was born, Nate searched the baby’s face for signs of Charlie, kept expecting to see a resemblance, but there was none. That fact made Nate sad, as if even more than before, it was possible to believe that Charlie had never existed. A reminder, any hint of him in Trevor, would have comforted Nate. He wanted to believe that his brother’s life had meant something, but the younger Bedecker had died before graduating from high school, before having his chance, before—just two weeks before—playing his first tru
mpet solo. Nate liked to think that he himself would have been a different person if Charlie had never been born, that at least Charlie’s presence had made Nate a better man (or at least his death had made Nate wiser about life), but perhaps Nate’s path would have been exactly the same if Charlie had never lived. It was gut-wrenching to think this way.

  As for Trevor, there wasn’t much of Emily in the boy, either. Everyone—friends, work colleagues, the boy’s pediatrician—commented that the boy looked exactly like his father. Still, Trevor’s genes were only half Nate’s. It was a fifty-fifty lottery, procreation. That’s why he hadn’t wanted a kid in the first place—or why he’d thought he hadn’t wanted one—too much of a child’s future was left up to chance, and risk terrified Nate. That was probably why he’d never truly succeeded on Wall Street. His new bosses, however, were looking for a conservative money manager. For once, Nate fit the bill.

  “Do you smell that?” Emily held Trevor’s butt up to her face. “Oh, I guess not. He’s still fresh.” Trevor opened his mouth wide, the way he often did in the moments before launching a cry, but held silent. He twisted against Emily’s arm hold and she readjusted her grasp and said, “It must just be the salt from the water. It smells a little rancid.”

  She stood Trevor on the ground and he clung to her leg.

  “Em, seriously, we’re on a dock.” Trevor seemed to hear the edge in his father’s voice and fell to the ground. “You need to keep your eye on him.” Nate grabbed hold of the boy’s arm and steadied him.

  “Sorry,” said Emily. “I’m just picturing our bright future.”

  Emily spoke incessantly about the future. As if it were something a person could bank on.

  “This isn’t Manhattan,” he said. “Newport has good public schools. Trevor doesn’t have to go to St. George’s.” Newport did have good publics, at least on the elementary level. This was supposed to be the appeal. Newport symbolized an escape from the rat race for both Nate and his son.

  Newport’s anti-allure (other than the disappearance of their Jeep with their detailed financial histories inside) was Nate’s family history with the area. He’d never planned to move back to his father’s ancestral homeland and, as a result, had almost turned down the Newport job, sight unseen. That would have been foolish, he understood now. There weren’t any Bedeckers left in Rhode Island and their history here had been largely eradicated, given that, in public, George never spoke about growing up in Narragansett. He chose, instead, to portray himself as a self-made Midwesterner or a man rooted in old Europe. The only thing that remained of the Bedeckers in this part of the country was a boarded-up Narragansett homestead, empty and left to rot, for all Nate knew.

  He watched a small motorboat, a whaler maybe, navigate the narrow channel between docks. He touched Emily’s arm as she lifted Trevor and held him high, helping the boy see past the boats to the open harbor. Nate hated keeping information from her. Until recently, he’d hadn’t lied to Emily ever, never held back, but once he started he couldn’t stop. And now there was a New York Times clip burning a hole in his wallet. The folded-up article had been there for more than a month, for forty-one days. It was nothing, probably, just a small mention of Nate’s father. And yet the clip had awakened Nate’s dormant health fears and put him on high alert. He’d told himself that he was justified in keeping it from Emily, that he would talk to her about it when the time felt right. Still, he was increasingly glad that he’d missed his chance to have that talk last night. There was no reason to scare her, not until he’d done the preliminary investigating himself. Not until he knew whether there was anything, honestly, to say.

  “Here, I’ll take him,” Nate said, holding his arms out for the boy. Trevor was growing heavy, no longer an easy carry. Emily handed him off and then looked out over the water, which was choppy in the midday wind, and Nate did, too. He looked past the docks and beyond the boats. Across the harbor, south of Jamestown, Nate saw land. On that strip of coastline, he knew, lay Narragansett and the Bedecker house, the old Bedecker house, his father’s childhood home.

  CHAPTER 11

  Where Do You Think We’re Going?

  THEY’D ALREADY BEGUN spending the cash. First on necessities: a jumbo pack of Pampers, two cans of ready-to-drink formula, five two-packs of Gerber Organics, and a bunch of bananas. Then, as lunchtime approached, Emily insisted on splurging—and she didn’t regret it—on two picnic sandwiches and an iced tea to split. They were down to $42.50, not even enough for dinner with wine, barely enough for a few hours of babysitting in New York. Emily knew that they could have saved the cash by eating at the hotel (they had to return to the Viking anyway, for Trevor’s nap), but it meant the world to Emily, when in dire straits, to be able to eat a sandwich in the open air. Under the thin October sun, she’d fed Trevor a small tub of pureed sweet potatoes along with the pack of oyster crackers that the deli had thrown in for free.

  Now Trevor was sound asleep in the Pack ’n Play. He’d caused a scene in the lobby when they got back to the hotel, kicking his legs against Ollie’s footrest and emitting one chest-rattling cry, a single extended husky tone. Emily had smiled at the other guests in the foyer, hoping an awkward grin might substitute for an apology. By the time they reached their suite, the tired boy’s neck had begun to go limp against the side of his stroller.

  It was Emily’s fault, hers and Nate’s. They’d kept Trevor out for too long, almost an hour past his nap time. Children were ruled by bodily schedules, the triple demons of sleep and excrement and food that Emily, with her contrary internal timetable, battled against every day. When Trevor was a newborn, she and Nate had taken him out to eat almost every night. With Trevor strapped to Nate’s chest, they’d dined at nearly all of the low-key cafés near their apartment (linoleum-countered joints that most of their friends walked by without a second glance), always arriving early to avoid the throngs of first-year analysts and lawyers who crowded their neighborhood as if they’d been seeded in the window boxes. These dinners out were slow and languorous, Nate and Emily so tired that they could barely lift their forks to their mouths, but at least they were outside the apartment! They’d fooled themselves into believing that they were still in charge of the household. They’d been the first in their crowd to Ferberize, as well, letting Trevor cry himself to sleep at five months.

  Today, with Trevor out cold in the Viking’s bedroom, Emily lay on the outer room’s plush loveseat, letting her legs sink into the understuffed cushion. The chicken salad from her sandwich sat heavy in her stomach. She shouldn’t have eaten it; stress and food were a dangerous mix. She watched Nate, who was hunting through the suite’s minifridge. He squeezed a bag of salted almonds and flashed it toward her before stuffing it into his pants pocket.

  “These will be good for later. Next time we’re out, we won’t have to shop,” he said as he popped open a Diet Coke. He set the can on top of the TV and peeled off his button-down, smelling the underarms before hanging it in the closet. He stripped out of his T-shirt, too. He was still almost as slim as when Emily first met him four years ago. Even the small bulk that had accumulated around his waistline, the only bulge on his lithe frame, held its own well-defined shape.

  “Later? Where do you think we’re going?”

  “We’ll go as far as we can get with a Bugaboo and a boy. What’s the record for that?” Nate picked up the soda and took a long swig.

  “Not far,” Emily said. “Unless you’re planning to sneak into Doris Duke’s mansion.” She closed her eyes, giving her retinas a break from the room’s overwhelmingly floral decor. The room could use fresher textiles, exposed hardwood, maybe some stolen art to perk it up.

  “Doris Duke’s mansion? They call them cottages, babe, not mansions,” Nate said. “It’s the local lingo. Cottages. How fucking cute.”

  “We can’t afford them anyway. The admissions prices would eat up our whole stash.” Emily had a feeling that they’d spend the rest of the weekend in this room, hoarding the cash they had le
ft. As for the one daytime adventure that was free of charge, the Newport Cliff Walk, it wasn’t ideal with a baby.

  “Stretches of the path are jagged and au naturel,” the concierge downstairs had said, smiling condescendingly. “They’re in the process of renovating the final leg, smoothing out the largest of the boulders. It’s not safe with a stroller.”

  Emily had a horrifying vision of Ollie tumbling off the Cliff Walk or into a bottomless crevasse, Trevor spread-eagled as he fell, his mouth open in a silent cry—finally he masters the silent cry! But it’s too late!—à la Hitchcock. The horror! Emily had studied fear in college, from a philosophy standpoint. She’d focused on the ways traditional images of disaster snuck into eighteenth-century theories on existence. We’re all haunted, it turned out, by our own idiosyncratic but also shockingly familiar doomsday prophesies: This was her lecturer’s point of view. Even at the time, Emily had wondered if that was historically correct or simply the kind of thesis (fear! universal fear!) that the scholars at Michigan knew would get undergrads all worked up and keep them academically interested. It was a pedantic fireball. It was the kind of knowledge that was regurgitated at frat parties to impress the humanities-deficient econ majors. Econ majors: those guys would have turned into great cheese makers, all concerned with exactitude and numbers and toeing the line. Who knew back then?

  She missed the innocent intellectualism of that time, entire years when she was expected to do nothing more than discuss Yeats and Rousseau, when she was surrounded by scholars who understood that these men’s words mattered, that there was a larger world, that we were all cogs in the light of history. In the years since, Emily had drifted so far from this former self. Her life of the mind had morphed a life of the material—and the maternal—without her noticing it happen. That drift had hit her hard, smack-hard, at the Barbers’ party. Standing in Anna and Randy’s expensively spare living room, she couldn’t deny who she’d become.