by Allison Lynn
Nate had been brought up without religion, yet when he returned to Ohio for Christmas during his senior year of high school, he tripped over a small ivory Buddha. The diaper-clad demigod—sitting cross-legged in front of a woven prayer rug—had been installed in Bedecker House’s glass-paned entryway while Nate was away. The kitchen windows, the smallest in the house (miniscule portals sandwiched between the industrial cabinets and metal counters), had been covered with ethereal white muslin shades. His mother, who’d shunned God for as long as Nate could remember, had suddenly fallen for Western Caodaism.
“Western what?” Nate asked.
“Western Caodaism,” his mother said with an accent on Caodaism that he couldn’t place. She continued, “Existence is in accord, in every step.”
Charlie, who’d been home for a few days longer than Nate, walked into the room as Annemarie said this. He smiled at Nate. Clearly this wasn’t the first of these pronouncements from their mother.
“Existence in the accord?” Nate said.
“Come on, Nate! The great Western Caodaism, savior of the people!” Charlie smirked as he said this, though their mother showed no reaction. “Come on, Mom, I’ve done my research, and Austrians do not worship mass-produced ivory statues of naked Asians. Not even in the name of Caodaism.”
“I don’t worship the Buddha, lieben,” she said, her voice gentle. She spoke with the slow cadence she’d used to placate her sons when they were children. “The statue is simply in homage to our Eastern brethren. We live in a greater world, never forget that.”
Charlie tugged on the arm of Nate’s sweater and led him out of the room.
“Don’t we need to take action, intervene?” he asked Nate as they stood in the house’s entryway. He wanted a directive from Nate. As the younger brother, Charlie had always deferred to Nate on family-related matters. He listened to Nate, took his perspective as Bedecker law even though, as Nate saw it, Charlie was the sharper observer, the quiet synthesizer. Nate was a pro when it came to the surface details, but Charlie understood what was going on at the heart of matters. Nate worried that once they became true adults, equals and no longer younger brother and older brother, Charlie would curse himself for having relied on Nate’s skin-deep counsel for so many years.
“Nate, she’s freaking out. We need to save her.”
“How would we save her?” Nate said. “She’s only trying to save herself.”
“It’s psychiatric, isn’t it, what’s going on? There must be doctors who could treat her, or clinics.”
“What would she do at a clinic?” Nate said. “Clinics are for tennis lessons and heart patients.”
They heard a body shifting in the doorway and both turned to look behind them. George stood staunch in the square space, openly listening to his sons. He turned to leave and then turned back. “Don’t worry, boys, she’ll snap out of it in a year or two,” he said. “You’ll have your mother back.”
Two years later she’d withdrawn deeper into her own consciousness and Charlie was dead. He’d gone from there to not without warning, as if he’d never been alive at all. In the days after Charlie’s death, Nate found himself reaching out his arms to feel the air in front of him, as if he might brush up against Charlie’s chest. As if he weren’t dead but simply invisible. As if his mass still existed and it were merely a matter of locating it. It was at Charlie’s funeral that Nate, stoic in his disbelief, saw both of his parents cry for the first time. His mother’s tears were like a wet veil over her face; his father’s were softer and quiet in their unexpectedness. Nate understood, then, that these two strange adults truly shared something. After the funeral, they and Nate went their separate ways again, the bonds between them one person weaker. Two years after that, Annemarie was dead, too, the doctors promising that the speed of her leukemia had been a blessing and that she’d gotten the best care.
After Annemarie’s graveside service, where Nate (a senior in college at the time) and his father stood with a foot of cold Cleveland air between them, Nate spent his final nights in the glass house. He boxed up his and Charlie’s things for storage and signed a stack of papers: a contract with the storage facility, a form from the trust that Annemarie had set up and included just enough to cover the remainder of Nate’s education costs.
“We’re all that’s left,” Nate told his father on one of those nights as they sat across from each other in the kitchen. “What do we do?” He said it lightly, his voice tentative, and the we hit George and bounced back to Nate with the reflexive speed of a Super Ball. George had always been linked to his children through their mother and didn’t seem to have the instincts, or interest, to be a father. Nate’s questions were met with silence and headshakes. He could hear his father crying late at night, out in the living room, probably sitting in the Eames chair that was imprinted with the shape of his spine. Even through the heavy walls that separated Nate’s room from this expanse, he could hear his father’s choked sobs. George’s grief was private but unbridled, as if the man, the man inside the man, had been set loose.
Nate finished his last semester of college and continued—then and in the years that followed—trying to reach out, with occasional phone calls, to George. He was the only other person on earth with whom Nate had shared Charlie and Annemarie. George handled Nate’s calls (and the ensuing conversations about nothing, about Nate’s New York digs or the greater implications of solar power or the weather) haltingly. Sometimes in the silences Nate felt his father’s desire, perhaps, to make a connection. But before the silence could develop, before Nate or George could reach all the way across the line for some sort of tangible touch with the other, the call would be over. The calls finally dwindled to once or twice a year, and now the two Bedeckers came into contact on only rare occasions—once, in a call put through by George’s longtime assistant, Danielle, to tell Nate that the trust, effectively empty, was being closed out. And once, over a decade ago, to announce another death, that of Nate’s grandfather, George’s dad. After Nate answered that call, Danielle put George on the line.
“The old man in Rhode Island,” Nate said into the phone. “That’s who’s dead?”
He didn’t understand precisely why his father was making a point to call with the news. Nate had never known the old man, though he’d thought of him often, of that one glimpse of him.
“He made it to old age,” George said. “Confounding. He should have given up years ago.”
“I never knew him. I’m sorry for your loss.” These were the same platitudes people offered Nate when they heard he had a dead mother, a dead brother (two tragedies that had been numbed, in Nate, by time rather than platitudes). They were the only words he had in his possession when it came to talking about grief.
“If he’d been well, if he’d been accessible and in mental health, physically able, I’d have introduced you. You’d have known him. It wasn’t a possibility by the time you came along.”
There was a silence on the phone, like the arid, aural spaces that had filled the Cleveland house on so many empty Saturdays.
“I’ll be going to Rhode Island to settle his things. That’s why I’ve called. Before closing up his house, I’m planning to have my goods shipped from storage in Cleveland. I’ll keep them there, now. It’s an empty house, with a surplus of unused space,” George said. After Annemarie’s death, he’d relocated his office and residence to Chicago, seeing no reason to remain in Ohio, apparently, a place with either too many memories or too few. George had sold the glass-and-stone cube that served as the family’s home in Cleveland, boxed up its contents and moved them into storage. “If you’d like me to have your boxes shipped at the same time, I can have that done. No one is living in the Rhode Island house anymore. The space is free.”
Nate remembered the home in Narragansett, with its old-fashioned front porch and views over the water and creepily degenerated inhabitant.
“Why don’t you just sell the damn house in Rhode Island?” Nate said. After all, George
had found it remarkably easy to unload the Cleveland home, the house in which Nate grew up, a home that George himself built. The new owners had probably torn the place down by now. “You sold our home.”
“Our house was mine to sell,” George said. “The Rhode Island house has history.” And after a pause, matter-of-factly, as if his words were rationed, “I loved the Cleveland house. I loved your brother, too. I loved Annemarie.” And then, it seemed, there was nothing else to say. Nate would leave his boxes in storage in Ohio, cleaving his things from his father’s, a decision that made their physical rift final.
Nate wanted to be as close to Trevor as George had been distant with his own sons. That was the thought he had on the lawn in Newport—that perhaps he could be the negative image of his own father. That, ideally, Trevor could love him back. When the last parishioners had entered the church across the way, Nate looked back down at his son. A steady stream of drool dripped straight from Trevor’s lips to his now-damp T-shirt.
“Oh, kiddo,” Nate said touching the shirt’s wet spot, which stretched from Trevor’s neck down his chest. The boy’s diaper was wet, too. Nate could feel the familiar ooze as he wrapped his arms around Trevor’s back and bottom, adjusting the boy’s weight in his grasp.
He lay Trevor on the grass and reached into the bag for the diapers and wipes. What Trevor really needed was a dry shirt. Nate knew that finding one was a long shot, given their lack of clean laundry, but he rifled through the bag anyway. Emily usually kept a spare set of Trevor’s clothes in the diaper tote. The kid was constantly in need of changing.
“Bah!” The boy said, reaching an arm into the air and smiling at nothing. The kid was happy this morning. Oblivious and happy. Nate held him down with one arm and continued looking through the sack, the unrecognizable detritus of Emily’s life. Lipstick tubes and vitamins and coupons gobbed together with old lotion of some sort. He felt something soft and pliable in the inside zipper pocket. That was another thing women had over men: secret pockets. Zipper pockets in their purses, button pockets inside their coat linings, lockets around their necks that held the keys to their pasts.
Nate reached into the pocket and pulled out a tube of rolled fabric, held tight by a nylon hair band. Not a T-shirt, for sure. More like a diaper-changing pad. Emily had kept a diaper pad stashed in the bag for Trevor when he was a newborn, Nate remembered, but by three months the tot had grown too large to lie on it. Nate took the band off the tube and unrolled it, slowly, taking his spare hand off Trevor’s stomach to lay the fabric flat on the ground.
The swatch was covered in slick colors, like vinyl, like a placemat. Frayed white threads fuzzed at its edges. Its colors, a deep copper-orange and industrial gray, were unexplainably appealing. Trevor rolled onto his stomach and took a look, as well.
Nate’s eyes drifted over the piece the way he read a newspaper, from the top corners to the bottom, and that’s where, in the lower right, in barely legible print, his eyes locked on a name.
Rufino.
He drew away from the cloth quickly, as if from a flame, and then leaned closer in. Rufino. It said, Rufino. He was looking at the Barbers’ Rufino.
Naked, stripped from its frame, it resembled nothing more than an attractive shard of upholstery fabric. Nate, breathless and dazed, was stunned by how different a thing could look when shorn of its context.
CHAPTER 15
Breakfast at the Viking
EMILY WOKE WITH A start: light in her eyes, silence in the air. It was 9:30 a.m. and the only trace of Nate and Trevor in the room was a note on the pillow. They were out for a walk, giving her a break. From the sound of it, they’d be gone for a while. She lay back down but couldn’t sleep. As with yesterday morning, in new daylight the shock of their situation hit her with a fresh smack. They had no car, no home, no money, nothing but a useless work of art. In their escape from Manhattan, they’d already sunk several rungs below where they started out. She hadn’t meant to steal the Rufino.
The entire seriousness of her action hadn’t hit her until the theft was a fait accompli. And even then, none of it seemed real. She’d pushed it out of her thoughts over the past couple of days. It felt like someone else’s misstep (because, truthfully, how could Emily Latham commit an actual crime? She wasn’t competent enough to pull off a felony!) until Celeste mentioned, with such surety, that the cops would be questioning the Barbers’ guests. It hadn’t seemed real until that moment. At the time of the theft, four days ago, she’d been in a stupor.
She’d been alone in the Barbers’ study, at the far end of their apartment, barely able to hear the party. The only noise that reached her was the occasional shrill laugh and the knock of platters against one another in the kitchen. As she held the Rufino, she looked back toward the study’s door, which had shut behind her. She gazed up at the books arranged not by author or year but by color of the spines, and she ran her fingers along the flat wool of the carpet, and before she understood what she was doing, she reached into her bag and took out a pair of nail scissors. She lay the Rufino flat on the floor (yes, she’d made fun of his work in the past, but she could understand that there might be a bit of beauty in this piece, in its effortlessness and simplicity—effortlessness and simplicity being qualities that Emily was learning to deeply appreciate) and, as if slicing tape with a box cutter, she used one of the scissors’ sharp tines to cut the canvas from its heavy frame. She replaced the empty frame to the back of the stack and then rolled the liberated canvas into a baton with the painted side in. She secured it with a hair band that had been at the bottom of her purse. Instinctively she wiped down the edge of the frame with the hem of her sweater. Finally she stuffed the canvas, now a ten-inch-long roll the width of a banana, into the inside pocket of her purse.
And now, in Newport, the Rufino was still in her bag, zipped inside a practically hidden pocket that she never used. She wasn’t sure if it was a stroke of luck or a curse that the painting hadn’t been taken with the car. It was luck. It had to be. Much as she’d like to be rid of the piece (in the light of day, she understood that there was no power in possessing an easily identifiable, and identifiably stolen, work of art), at least she could keep an eye on it. It wouldn’t turn up at a pawnshop as incriminating evidence, linked to their vehicle.
The horror that she wouldn’t allow herself to acknowledge, the detail that had helped her push the entire theft to the deep reaches of her brain, was this: If she were caught with the Rufino and jailed (she tried to convince herself that Anna and Randy would never press charges—that they’d tell the cops it was just a misunderstanding—but that was a stretch, she knew) Trevor would be motherless. She couldn’t let herself get caught. She couldn’t get caught. She was fine, she told herself. There were no clues, that’s what everyone had said. There was no evidence. Emily simply had to maintain her composure.
In the moment when she’d first laid eyes on the Rufino, just before cutting it from the frame, she’d thought that perhaps the painting could buy her an intellectual life again, bringing her back in line with Nate. At minimum, it could give Emily a small bit of the financial security she’d always craved. Of course she’d been deluded about this. In Emily’s hands, the painting lost its worth. She had no idea how to unload the thing and turn it into cash. She didn’t have those kinds of connections. Or those kinds of guts. More than a criminal, she’d been a fool.
It was too much to acknowledge, so for the past three days, she’d willfully avoided the situation, told herself no one would ever know. She was beginning to understand, though, that moving to Newport hadn’t nullified the theft. It hadn’t negated the crime but had amplified it.
She should have dumped the Rufino in a rest-stop bathroom. She should have thought about her son before yanking a Rufino from its frame.
Wired on her own idiocy, Emily got out of bed, pulled on her crusty clothing, and settled into breakfast at the café downstairs, just off the hotel’s lobby. Barely ten minutes after her coffee arrived, she spotted he
r two men standing beyond the check-in desk. Nate was on the in-house phone and Trevor, the tired trooper, was perched once again on a marble hotel counter.
She hadn’t mentioned her crime to Nate. Well, she’d tried to say something several times, but it—her spontaneous proclivity to steal and the ensuing legal jeopardy in which she’d placed herself—was too humiliating to acknowledge even to her so-called life partner. How could she explain herself? Every time she attempted to bring it up, she stammered and went silent, and Nate, all caught up in his own head, hadn’t seemed to notice.
The lobby where Nate and Trevor stood now was bright with the morning sun, but the restaurant where Emily sat, some thirty yards away, was dark as a cave, illuminated solely by the large-screen TV behind the bar. Nate’s back was turned. Emily’s eye fell on the diaper bag slung over his shoulder—he had her bag. He had the Rufino! Emily caught her breath and felt a wince stick in her throat. Then she understood that he wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly, stumble upon the artwork. It was in the bag’s interior zip pocket, a pocket that a person would need a flashlight and foreknowledge to find. Nate, in all of his ten months of helping carry the bag, had never had to use that pocket. The diapers, cream, everything he would need was in the main pouch. He was a man, he wasn’t curious enough to explore a woman’s purse further. He wasn’t.
