The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  Nate worked his way through the clips from the bottom up until he reached the final newspaper story, the most recent of them, published nearly four decades ago, a few months after Nate was born. It was a Boston Globe feature about Bedecker’s commission to design Worcester’s Human Rights Museum, a building that was never erected—though whether its failure stemmed from George’s design (impossible to build on any level of civic budget, the article pointed out) or the city’s inability to secure support was never determined. Stapled to the top of the Globe story was a faded photograph of Nate himself, a picture Nate had never seen but which wasn’t so different from the blown-up images Nate’s mother had propped in the one bookshelf along Bedecker House’s front hallway. The baby in the picture, two months old or so, lay on a bedsheet in the small clearing beside the glass-and-stone house—the same clearing where Nate would later camp out with his brother. In the picture, Nate was on his stomach, eyes to the camera, one ear to the ground. On the white border beneath the image, in George’s unmistakable, crisp writing (the photo had seemingly come from George; he’d thought to send his father a photo), it said only, “Here is Nate.”

  It could almost be Trevor in the picture. Nate thought back to Trevor eight months ago, lying on their living room floor in the city.

  A screech came from down below, from the first floor—Trevor. Shit. Nate had been in the attic at least half an hour. The boy could easily be awake. Or hurt. Or scared. The screech came again and Nate ran quickly toward the stairs and was halfway down to the second floor when he realized it wasn’t Trevor. It wasn’t the boy at all. It was the old-fashioned three-note clang of a manual-chime doorbell. Nate scrambled down the rest of the flight, taking the steps two at a time, from the attic to the second floor where he froze on the landing.

  Images of that caretaker came to him. Pictures of a nosy neighbor. A full-on feature film of his own deceit. He had nothing to gain by answering the door. No one except the teenaged Nicole knew he was here. He’d sit tight and quiet until whoever it was drove away. As long as the person outside—Norman Carlson or that neighbor or a knee-socked Girl Scout—didn’t go around the house and see the window carnage by the back door, there’d be no sign that Nate had broken inside. He would sit still and wait out this episode, everything would be fine, he was sure of this—and his plan would have worked, he was certain, except that right then, with the third clang of the doorbell, Trevor broke into a screaming wail from the living room. His cover blown, Nate bolted from the second floor to the first, where he scooped the boy into his arms and then walked as innocently as he could toward the front vestibule. Through the door’s frosted window, he saw the shadow of a man: pencil-thin, stooped, and dark. The stooped and dark posture, Nate realized as he reached for the door handle (time suddenly slowing down as he wished he could make it stop entirely), of George Bedecker.

  On the other side of the door stood a uniformed cop, lanky and leaning over. His badge sat high on his shoulder, more name tag than chest decoration.

  “I’m sorry,” Nate said, standing on the threshold, taking a deep breath of the outside air. The man at the door wasn’t George Bedecker. It took a moment for this realization to set in. This was either the first stroke of luck Nate had had in a month, or a catastrophe waiting to happen.

  He opened the door wider to allow the policeman a better look at the immaculate domestic scene inside. This officer’s hunched posture was painfully dour, like a willow tree. His lanky frame appeared brittle and ready to crack. Why was the cop here? Not about the Rufino, Nate told himself. They’d have no reason to search Nate out for the Rufino; Nate himself hadn’t known until three hours ago that it was in his possession. The painting couldn’t have a location-transmitting microchip embedded in it, could it? Did art collectors do that? No. No. If it did have a chip, the authorities would have found the piece before now. It wasn’t the Rufino. The cop hadn’t come for the Rufino. It must be the front porch; Nate had left something conspicuously out of place.

  “My father—” Nate started to say, since, in most families, it wouldn’t be a crime, really, to let yourself into your parent’s house. Most people, as Nate had seen on TV and the movies and in everyone else on Earth’s real life, actually welcomed their relatives into their homes. “My dad, George Bedeck—”

  “There’s been an accident,” the cop interrupted, nodding his head as if in agreement.

  Nate nodded back. Trevor breathed heavily in his arms, his breath leaving a wet spot on Nate’s shoulder. The boy looked confused. He had the diffuse gaze of an infant roused midnap, unsure of whether it was day or night.

  “A car accident,” the cop continued. “You can follow me to the hospital. Or I can give you a ride. We tried to call, but your phone here is disconnected.”

  “A what? The Jeep?” Nate said. He needed to put Trevor down, he needed to think, he needed to get out of this house and away from its history. Someone had had an accident in the Jeep? “Holy shit, is Emily all right?” He’d screamed. He hadn’t meant to scream. He leaned on the doorframe for support and looked at his watch. It was 1:00 p.m. He hadn’t seen Emily since he and Trevor left her at the Viking more than four hours ago. He hadn’t even heard from her. Emily was fine, though, she had to be. If there was a car accident, she was definitely fine, she wasn’t the one with their car, it was the thief, the car thief. The thief had had an accident. Good, Nate thought. He continued to hear the doorbell clang in his head even though the room, the entryway, was completely quiet now. Emily had to be fine. “Where the hell is Emily?” he spoke loudly over his inner gong—the Pachelbel’s Canon of his head. “What happened to the car? What’s going on?” Trevor started to cry, scared. Or maybe it was Nate who was scared.

  “Your father is George Bedecker, the George Bedecker who lives here?”

  Nate nodded. Yes, it was his father’s house. Yes, he was sorry he’d broken in. Yes, he nodded.

  “He’s been in an accident,” the man repeated. “Your father has had an accident.”

  The wind rustled the cop’s blond hair, exposing his receding hairline, the redness of his scalp. Other than in shape and posture, he looked nothing like George Bedecker. He was nothing but a messenger of news.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Drive: Prelude, Two Days Ago

  BEFORE MAKING THE drive east, George had carefully packed up his things: papers, mostly, architectural plans, contracts. He layered them in boxes and filing crates, carefully smoothing each page as if putting a life to rest. He wasn’t a sentimental man, he told himself. One only had to look at his work to understand this fact.

  His life had been built in the greater world, in the physical structures that bore his name. There were certainly people who’d achieved less with their lives, he understood this. There were also people who had achieved far more. George had long lived in fear of death. He saw now, too, how much he’d feared old age, if he was fortunate enough to achieve it. With age came reckoning, even to those who strove to avoid it.

  The first time George saw a computer rendering of his own work in progress was nearly fifteen years ago. He’d been stunned by the animation. In the rendering, of a plan for a San Diego office tower, the building’s exterior was depicted as a dimensionless spread of bronze cut through by shadows cast from an imagined sun. The windows appeared as uniform rectangles of flat aureolin, as if lit from within by a paint roller. This was how George had lived his life: in blurred vision, sidestepping the details. His buildings, however, were intended to reflect reality.

  The boxing-up of George’s things (actual hand-drawn building plans, as well as printouts of those renderings) moved slowly—at a steady pace interrupted only by the occasional twitch, or slightly longer periods during which he sat down to wait for his tremors to pass—until, sandwiched flat between two folders of financial papers, George found a CD. Its surface was solid silver, bare of explanatory text. Yet George recognized the disc. He was surprised that he hadn’t stumbled upon it sooner in recent years. Al
l of his other relics were visual. It was a thrill, of sorts, to happen upon one so totally aural.

  Since his apartment was nearly all packed, he no longer had a CD player hooked up, and he had no computer on hand. He slipped the disc into the pocket of his suit jacket and took the elevator down to the parking garage. He got into his Audi—the same one he’d drive east the next day, from this garage in Chicago to Narragansett. He started the ignition and slid the disc into the car’s stereo. The voice that came out of the speakers was both his and not his.

  “My plans for the courthouse? From the start they were fine, fine. The hold-up in the spring of 1984 was due entirely to the appropriation committee’s dispute over the court’s exterior. They had envisioned something in a pale gray, evocative of the dove, I suppose.” George’s tone was firm but round at the edges. He’d been younger when he’d taped this interview for the Copenhagen Central Court. He’d been younger, too, when he’d conceived the design for that courthouse. In the front seat of the Audi, his chest kicked—as if a Huntington’s tremor had bumped up against his heart—as he listened to his other self, the one he used to be, the one who spoke on the CD. “I insisted on the glazed tawny sandstone that you see today. The tawny colors of the earth are an imperative symbol of justice. What does a courthouse honor if not justice?

  “Justice is of the ground, a matter of the soil. In the end, this is where we all return, to the ground, good or bad, joining those who’ve come before. Justice is not a matter of treating the good with deference, but of treating all who are in the system with égalité, to quote the French. And nowhere are we as equal as in death. In death, the missteps that have marked our lives are irrelevant. Each of us is reduced to our essential biology.” He’d imagined himself fierce, back then.

  “To the contrary—” The interviewer interrupted. George remembered the man, a boy, really, probably the Danish equivalent of an intern at the time. They’d sat across from each other in the office that George’s firm rented for the duration of the project, empty white rooms outfitted with drafting tables, desks, phones with cords and dials.

  “Yes,” George said before the interviewer could finish his thought, “this is a godless vision, burial in the earth as a last and final resting place. It is contradictory to logic, I suppose, that I have built a heathen-inspired design for a government building here. Here, in the capital of a Lutheran country. To you, as a Dane and a Lutheran, justice and belief are intertwined. To you, justice is godly. To me, it is of the earth. Life is hard, incomprehensible, guided solely by our individual abilities to control our impulses.”

  George—the George in the Audi, the George of the new millennium—leaned back against the car’s headrest and closed his eyes. He’d left his family at home to build that courthouse twenty years ago. He’d left them at home for so many buildings. It seemed to be the right thing at the time, and now as well. His work had always been about people, about creating spaces to elevate the lives of other people. If that left him often alone, so be it. The courthouse hadn’t existed before George Bedecker arrived in Copenhagen to construct it. Today, it defined that city’s landscape. “The people and the earth on which they live, this is the highest plane. This is what deserves our utmost attention. Not the unknowable, an unprovable great beyond,” his voice continued from the speakers, steady, strong, historic.

  “When your life ends, you expect to be transported to some vision of heaven or hell. When my life ends, I expect to be returned without fanfare to that earth, to the tawny earth and its inherent implication of justice, where my trespasses will be of no consequence and my talents of no use. It’s the place to where my ancestors have returned, both the good and the bad. And in that idea I find peace.” The interview ended. George removed the CD from the player. He rode the elevator up to his apartment for the last time. He would sleep soundly through the night. He would pack the car in the morning. Wherever his life ended, whatever earth he returned to, it wouldn’t be here. He would make the drive east.

  CHAPTER 20

  Head Trauma

  FROM THE HOSPITAL’S EMERGENCY wing, Nate called Emily’s cell phone.

  “Hello?” Emily’s voice sounded far away when she finally answered, as if she was at the bottom of a canyon.

  “Are you okay? It’s me.”

  “Oh God, I’m—are you at the hotel? I’m on my way, really, I’ll be there in ten minutes. I don’t know what I’m doing here, I don’t know—” her voice caught, the edge of a cry breaking through. She was breathing hard. It was the first time Nate had heard her voice since he’d discovered the Rufino in her bag. He was surprised that she still sounded like the Emily he knew. “Sorry, I lost my feet for a minute,” she said. “I lost my head, Nate.”

  Nate was slouched down in a cold, plastic chair in the Kent Hospital’s waiting room. He held the phone to his ear and stared at a loose heating vent in the wall across from him. Trevor was out of sight, safely in the care of an overly enthusiastic nurse who’d offered to show him around the children’s playroom. Over the intercom, from a speaker directly above Nate’s head, a doctor was paged, his name a jumble of syncopated pauses and consonants and static. Nate was the only person in the waiting room. It seemed that in Rhode Island, Land of the Free, people didn’t have emergencies.

  “Em, listen, Em, I’m at the hospital. But I’m fine, Trevor’s fine. We’re fine.”

  After a deadly pause, Emily let loose a full, belated cry. Nate could hear tears. “Trevor?” she said.

  “Believe me, he’s fine, I’m fine.” Nate’s voice came out fast, like a mantra. “Em, it’s not the little guy. He’s great.”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Trevor’s fine, Em. It’s George, my father. He’s in intensive care.”

  Emily took some time to answer. Where the hell was she that her voice sounded so remote? Nate had considered not calling Emily. Given the Rufino situation, things would be complicated between them now, but until Nate heard her explanation, he was working hard to not wholly condemn her.

  “Here? Your father’s here?” she said.

  “He crashed his car into a ditch on Route 1, outside Charles-town. I don’t even know why he was behind the wheel; he hates to drive. The cops don’t know what happened.” When Nate’s brother was hit by a car, on a day nothing like today, the cops knew exactly what had happened. There were witnesses to the scene who’d watched the out-of-control Honda slam straight into Charlie and his bike. Charlie died before making it to the emergency room. That time, Nate hadn’t gone to the hospital. He’d waited at home by himself until Annemarie returned from the medical center, leaving Charlie in the morgue. During those hours alone, Nate had taken Charlie’s baseball cards down from their perch in a shoe box on the armoire’s top shelf and alphabetized them by team and sorted them by year, something Charlie always talked about doing but had never found the time. Nate, alone in the square house and scared, told himself that when his mother had said Charlie “passed,” maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was still alive, and he’d come home tomorrow and would be grateful when he saw what Nate had done for him, organizing his cards. Nate’s hands trembled as he flipped through the cardboard tiles; the air in the house began to feel thin and diffuse. Small, almost indecipherable tears slid down his cheeks as he moved a Hank Aaron card, a Topps from Hank’s Atlanta Braves era, to the front of the stack. Nate didn’t think, at that moment, he could live in this family without his brother.

  That night, George flew in from Seattle. Over and over, in the years since Charlie’s death, Nate had tried to imagine his father actually receiving the bad news, a truth over which he had no control. Nate tried to picture him answering the phone call out on the West Coast, and soon afterward standing alone at an airport gate waiting for the plane that would deliver him to his son’s body. Trying to picture these unfathomable moments was easier than rehashing the known details of Charlie’s death.

  “Your father is in Rhode Island? Right now?” Emily asked.

  “Ri
ght now. In the hospital.” Nate had just spent ten minutes standing next to the inert, unconscious old man’s bedside. It had felt like a dream.

  “Is he okay?”

  “Okay?” There had never been anything okay about the guy. “He looks terrible. I mean, not because of the accident. His injuries are internal, so there’s barely a mark on him, but he looks like he’s aged a century since I last saw him. Fuck, he’s old.” A decade put a lot of age on a guy, it turned out (it had been nearly ten years, Nate reasoned, since he’d actually stood next to his father, the years having accumulated like newspapers set aside for recycling). Nate did the math in his head: his father would be into his late sixties, the age when most architects reached their prime, yet George, flat on his hospital bed, looked like a mildewed retirement-home prospect. At least Nate’s mother had died before she lost any of it—her looks, her mind, her grace. Charlie, too, dead before life could chew him up and turn him into an adult, before he realized what hell growing up could be. “George is in a coma,” Nate said.

  “A coma? Tell me where you are. I’ll walk there. How far are you?”

  “Don’t come. We’re in Warwick, and wherever that is, it’s too far to walk.” He wasn’t ready to see her yet, anyway. He could only cope with one trauma at a time. “We’ll find a way back to the Viking, there’s nothing I can do here. I didn’t want you to worry.” The young nurse was walking toward Nate, pushing Trevor ahead of her in a yellow toy wagon. Trevor sang in nonsense words (ba, ba, bop bop, ba) to the smooth creak of the wagon’s wheels over the linoleum. His face was marked with fierce red splotches. He’d been crying. Or screaming, most likely screaming. The nurse must have had him in a soundproof room, because Nate hadn’t heard a thing. “I mean, the best that could happen, medically, is that he wakes up. And then? Who knows. I don’t know why I’m even here.”