The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

“We’re heading to Narragansett,” Nate said, leaning down toward her. A pink plastic gnome hung from the Hyundai’s rear-view mirror. Its naked form beckoned.

  “Oh, posh. I can bring you door to door. I’m going to Kingston, but it’s not like I have to get there immediately.”

  “I—I mean we—we don’t want to put you out,” Nate said, taking a step back toward the curb. The curb was a safe place to be. “Forget about it.”

  Forget about it. Because even if he made it to the old house, he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to get inside. Even if he could, what did he expect to find? A medical chart? A diagnosis? He needed to keep a level head. He should see a specialist about Huntington’s and wait to go to Narragansett until he had his own car. That was the sane way to go about things, yet here on a dangerously fast stretch of America’s Cup Avenue, without his own wheels and with a kid on his hip, Nate was itching to do something.

  “Narragansett is like, a minute out of my way, which is nothing,” the girl behind the wheel, the malnourished cheerleader, was saying. “There’s like fourteen thousand minutes in a day. I’ve got extras. Just tell me that you’re not one of those rapists who uses kids as a decoy to get into girls’ cars.”

  “No rapists here,” Nate said. He still considered running from the car. Trevor looked happy to stay, though. Didn’t he? The boy was watching the toy gnome sway in front of the girl’s windshield. Why not? The gnome beckoned with each arc of its swing. Why not! Trevor reached out toward its pink tuft of hair. “If it’s no problem, we could use the ride,” Nate said. His left arm, which was wrapped around and under Trevor, was going numb. “Thanks.”

  He began to get into the Hyundai’s front seat with Trevor, and then, with one foot in the car and one foot out, he stopped. It was like asking for an accident, sitting with his kid—and no baby seat—in the front. He withdrew and got in back, on the passenger side, moving an American history textbook and a Yoo-hoo bottle out of the way to make room for his feet. He pulled the seat belt tight across his and Trevor’s bodies. The seat’s new vinyl strained beneath their weight.

  “I know that town like the back of my hand, my dad’s practically mayor of Narragansett, thinks he’s king of Rhode Island even though, literally, he’s a tax accountant,” the girl said, craning her neck around to look at Nate. She faced forward again and drove the car away from the curb. “Nonliterally, he’s an egotist.”

  “All dads are,” Nate said. The car emitted a circular hum, like a cocktail blender on low. “Dads of their generation, the old guys. Your generation’s luckier. Women have power now.” He looked at Trevor, the kid Emily had given him.

  “Dude, when’s the last time you were in a high school?”

  As they pulled onto the Newport Bridge, Nate tried to ignore the fact that to get to the bridge they’d driven directly through the center of a cemetery, tried not to see this as an omen. He gazed intently at the road ahead as they navigated away from the harbor and into Jamestown with its sparsely settled coast. Jamestown, as if it were a colony waiting to happen instead of an overpriced resort town on the rise.

  “Where in the Gansett should I bring you?” the girl asked, the car listing slightly to the right. Nate held onto Trevor tightly, shielding the small body with his own.

  Nate gave her an address, the only Bedecker he’d found when he’d looked up the name in the Viking suite’s phone book on the night he and Emily arrived at the hotel.

  The girl took one hand off the wheel to fiddle with the air vents. “How long have you had your license?” he said.

  “Fourteen months. I’m a pro. How long have you been a father?”

  The neophyte driver, Nicole (“Not Nic, not Nicky, nothing cute, gracias”), drove at exactly the speed limit and took twenty-two minutes to get to Narragansett. After a few stops to examine misleading street signs, she turned onto the road Nate was looking for and then slowed to a crawl, checking for house numbers.

  “That’s—”

  “That’s it,” Nate said, surprised, as they pulled through a hedge and into a driveway. Seeing the house again was like déjà vu but without the supernatural element. He was taken aback that he recognized the place, that the picture in his head hadn’t been merely a figment. His brain remained healthy, he reminded himself. He should recognize places he’d been before.

  The wood-sided home was still painted white with yellow accents, a broad front porch, sweeping lawn, and off-center front door. The rhododendrons framing the porch were mangy and overgrown but the lawn was mowed. Erected at least a few years before George himself was born, the house was strikingly more classic than Bedecker’s own designs. Nicole brought the car to a stop halfway up the drive.

  “The paint’s definitely been retouched, but the place is standing. Holy shit,” Nate said. Shit. At this rate, Trevor’s first word would probably be motherfucker. Nate looked down at his son, who appeared to be all ears.

  “What? You were looking for a place you thought burned down?”

  Nate shrugged.

  “Dude, in this part of the world, homes last forever,” Nicole said. She put the car in park. “My folks’ house was built in the old days, when people rode in buggies and didn’t shave their legs. My parents haven’t changed a thing. It’s like they wish they were colonial people, Betsy Ross or something.”

  Nate unbuckled the seat belt and opened the door to get out, to take a closer look. The driveway’s gravel was freshly raked. Someone was keeping the place up. Maybe it wasn’t even in the Bedecker family anymore. Nate had previously dismissed that thought based on the fact that the address was still tied to the name “Bedecker” in the white pages—and Nate had never met a Bedecker to whom he wasn’t related. Nate had barely met any Bedeckers to whom he was related. They were a small, and dying, clan.

  “No one’s here,” Nicole said, outside the car herself now, standing next to the driver’s side door. “I think you’ve been stood up. Want me to drop you somewhere else? I can take you to town or whatever.” Though the landscaping was fresh, the shades were all tightly drawn and the driveway was devoid of cars. Nate didn’t see any security company stickers on the front of the house or propped in the lawn.

  Nate continued studying the outside of the house and didn’t respond to Nicole’s question.

  “Dude,” Nicole said, “you’re a nice guy, but I’m not carting you all the way back to Newport.”

  “No, of course,” said Nate. “I wasn’t going to ask you to do that. You can leave us, we’ll be fine.” Getting back to Newport would be a challenge, sure—and they’d have to head back soon or Emily would wonder about them—but if they couldn’t hitch a ride here on the street outside the house, they could go the expensive route and call a cab. A taxi back would blow through almost all of Nate’s cash (his and Emily’s cash), but at least they had the option as a safety net, one they probably wouldn’t need. It was a holiday weekend. This road was primarily residential, but plenty of cars were driving by. He’d come this far.

  “You sure?” Nicole said.

  “You bet,” Nate answered, and within seconds Nicole was back in the Hyundai, door slammed, pulling away and waving good-bye to Trevor. The boy pushed against Nate and groaned, paused for breath, and groaned again. He wanted to get down and crawl. Or maybe sleep. His squirms tended to mean he wanted either movement or rest, polar opposites, from what Nate could tell.

  The Narragansett house’s front door was wrapped by a traditional sweeping porch, with wide wooden planks and bright white rails. The last time Nate had seen this porch, he’d been with his brother and mother. They’d been an intact family back then, in an era when Nate, the childhood Nate, had assumed they’d all live to be ancient. He’d stared long and hard at the house that time. Now, Nate didn’t allow himself that languor. He carried Trevor up the front steps and gave the door a cursory push, but wasn’t surprised to find it locked tight. He then searched underneath the doormat for a key, and beneath the two small tables (nothing there) and inside the
seams of the rocking chair that sat next to the door. Trevor’s moans had turned to whimpers and Nate pressed his lips against the top of the boy’s head, feeling the fine, soft wisps of his baby hair.

  After coming up keyless at the front door, Nate carried Trevor to the back of the house. It was just after 11:00 a.m. Was this when Trevor napped? Emily was the one who arranged the tot’s rigid schedule. Trevor’s eyes were closing now, a slow descent into sleep that seemed alarming only because the boy usually screamed when he was tired, but now even his groans had stopped. Perhaps the fresh air and Nate’s gentle breath on the top of his head had lulled the boy into complacency. The back lawn was lush and quiet and Nate spread his jacket on the grass beside the tiny back porch, then lay Trevor on top of it.

  Nate climbed the three short steps to the back entrance. The doorway here, the one that day-to-day inhabitants would use, was constructed of wood so old that paint lay piled up on the frame in consecutive layers like the rings of a tree. Nate flattened his hand over the latex as if channeling the structure’s history. Between this frame and the door itself was a gap, the width of a nickel standing on its edge. Nate could maybe knock the door in if he took a running start, except that he’d never forced a door in his life and the whole point was to sneak in and out undetected. He searched under this doormat and around the edges of the porch. No key.

  He could bust through a pane of the glass and reach inside to the door handle probably, if necessary, but if George still owned the place (and Nate continued to believe that was the case) there had to be a key. In Cleveland, Nate’s mother had always left one hidden beneath a loose slate next to the door. She and Nate and Charlie all had their own keys, but George hadn’t wanted one. He preferred to carry as little as possible with him every day. His blueprints and designs fit flat into his leather carrier. His heavy glasses resided permanently on the bridge of his nose. His pens and pencils were stored in a felt pouch that slipped smoothly inside his suit jacket. His wallet, Italian, was kept paper-thin, filled only with two credit cards and one single hundred-dollar bill for emergencies. He couldn’t be bothered to carry stuff around. He rarely drove himself anywhere, so he had no car key. And he insisted that his minions work around the clock, so he never needed an office key. Someone was always at work to open the door for him.

  So where was the key to this house? Next to the door sat a classic terra-cotta flowerpot, filled with a mound of dry dirt. Nate lifted the pot, hopeful, but the key wasn’t underneath. He then gently dug through the mulch, with no luck. The tiny porch was largely unadorned. Three steps and a small landing with nothing on it except for the doormat and the flowerpot. The back of the house was remarkably serene. Off-white shades were pulled over all of the windows, and the neatly mowed grass was only marred by one patch of dirt, exactly large enough to have once held a picnic table and benches. The grass ended some thirty yards out, where the land sloped down to rocks and the sea. Nate looked over to Trevor, who was safely asleep and still.

  Nate backed down the steps and took a wide-angle look at the residence. There was nowhere left to search for the key. The adventure was over. He took his phone out of his pocket and checked for messages, but he had none. It seemed odd that Emily hadn’t called, concerned and looking for them, but he supposed that his message to her at the hotel had been competent and soothing. She sometimes said she could use a day off from Trevor, and it seemed she was taking it. There was no way, at 11:00 a.m., that she was still asleep. They’d all gone to bed well before midnight.

  Nate could search for a ride or call a cab, take Trevor back to Newport, hang out at the dock, and pretend they’d been there all morning. Emily would never know and it wasn’t as if Trevor could tell her. So this morning’s trip had been fruitless. So what? Life was full of disappointments. He tallied his own recent misfortunes in his head, the list taking shape like an Excel spreadsheet of noteworthy inadequacies. Around him, the morning was silent except for the whirr of the occasional car passing the front of the house.

  Nate had set himself up for failure; he’d acknowledged this even before he and Trevor strapped themselves into Nicole’s car. They’d taken a ride twenty miles, across the bridges and down the coast, to find a house that he hadn’t seen since he was a kid and to investigate his primeval and ongoing family history, trying to solve the depressing and probably damning secrets of his own inevitable genetic future, a future he was terrified of and aching to see all at the same time. He had nothing and everything to lose. Nate looked over at his child, a safe distance away and completely innocent of the future (of any future) that awaited him, and then walked back up the steps, leaned down, grabbed the flowerpot, and swung it at the window in the door. The glass shattered and the pot crumbled, and Trevor awoke with a scream and Nate tenderly reached through the broken panes (careful not to let the jagged edges scrape his skin), when suddenly, as if willed into existence by the commotion, a single key fell from its perch atop the doorframe. Nate withdrew his arm, picked up the key, and unlocked the house.

  CHAPTER 17

  Where Emily Goes When She’s Alone

  SO THIS WAS WHAT Bob Daugherty meant about the holiday crowds. It wasn’t yet noon and the streets were teeming. Retired couples and middle-aged tourists lined up outside kiosks (kiosk after kiosk after kiosk) advertising harbor tours and private boat trips. The pedestrians on Newport’s central drag waddled toward the large white tent erected on the harbor. Oktoberfest! a banner heralded in gothic letters, bright purple and a morbid red. Old men in lederhosen wove their way through the horde, accompanied by women wearing dirndls and fake braids and speaking in harsh Boston accents. A breeze came off the water; despite the warm sun it was certainly autumn. Emily held her canvas jacket close around her and drank from a paper cup of French roast. She’d paid for it out of her twenty dollars at a small chain shop off the main strip, leaving barely more than eighteen bucks in her secret stash. Nate would be back soon, though. As she walked along the water, Emily kept her eye out for him. This time, if she saw him and their son, she’d flag them down. Still, she delayed going back to the Viking. It was getting harder to face Nate—her lie seemed to have grown overnight and now coated her tongue like oil. She took her phone out of her jacket pocket and called Jeanne on speed dial.

  It went straight through to voice mail.

  “It’s me,” Emily said after the beep. “Calling from Newport. Newport!” she forced a laugh. Jeanne had left her five phone messages since Friday, when Emily had quickly spoken with her from the police station. Emily hadn’t called back until now. Nate had a point, though. If they avoided calling New York, they’d only end up looking like fugitives. And Emily could use a friend. “I got your messages. Sorry I’ve been AWOL. The Jeep got stolen. We’re living in a hotel, the Hotel Viking. I have no shoes.” And with that, she’d run out of news. “No need to call back, I’m sure you’re busy at yoga camp. Sorry for the Zenless message.”

  As she stuffed the phone back in her pocket, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned and found herself facing a stranger. He looked like a local, not one of the tourists, and he smiled at her expectantly. He was age forty or so, burly and firm.

  “Ma’am? Hi? Mrs. Bedecker?” he said. She flinched and looked harder at the guy, searching.

  “Officer Sebastian,” he prompted Emily, pointing at his chest. “Eric. I took your statement, your stolen car?” He waited for her to catch on.

  “Oh!” Of course! “Thank you. Yes!” How offensive that she hadn’t even registered that he looked familiar. She’d been a wreck in the precinct. “I was pretty beat on Friday, I guess. I’ve never had a car stolen from me before,” Emily said. She’d never had anything stolen from her, unless you counted her youth. “Emily. Emily Latham,” she pointed to herself. The officer appeared awkward in his civilian clothes. “Nate’s last name is Bedecker, but not mine.”

  “Emily,” he said. “You found somewhere to stay?” He wasn’t the officer who had driven them into town. That duty had f
allen to a young rookie who’d remained official and zipped-up during their ride.

  “The Viking took us in. Nate—” she’d almost said my boyfriend, but she had a hunch that people here didn’t give birth to children out of wedlock, “Nate’s stayed there for business, so they trust that we’re not the kind of people who’d run out on a hotel bill. He’s there now, napping with our son.” She assumed that, by now, they’d had enough father-son time around town and made their way back to the hotel. Emily felt conspicuously alone. She felt conspicuously like a felon, too, now that she had a cop standing in front of her. She needed not to be conspicuous, as if it were so easy.

  “The Viking?” the officer smiled. He seemed impressed. “You two looked shell-shocked when you came in on Friday. You three.”

  “The third always looks that way. He’s ten months, just being in the world is a jolt to him.”

  The rest of Officer Sebastian’s crowd—two women and one man who looked enough like the officer that Emily wondered if they were brothers—had now caught up, and the officer, Eric, made the introductions, explaining Emily’s stolen car situation, adding, “They’re new in town, bought a house up by you, Winnie.” He nodded to the older woman in the group, probably only forty-five but weathered, as if she’d been tanning with a reflector in her lap for the past three decades. Emily tried to embed these people’s names in her memory, making a point to repeat Winnie’s name silently in her head, cementing it in the gray matter. These were the first real people she’d met in town. She could easily run into them again, especially since one seemed to be a neighbor.

  “Willkommen.” Winnie grinned and extended a hand weighed down by a cocktail ring with a walnut-size emerald. Emily tallied the carats in her head (trying to recall what Jeanne’s old roommate, who worked in the gem department at Tiffany, had taught them about appraising). The stone could be worth close to half of what Nate and Emily had surrendered as a down payment on their house. It was probably worth a quarter of a Rufino. Emily shook the woman’s hand. She missed her stolen Tod’s.