by Allison Lynn
After he finished explaining in detail Huntington’s disease and his fears, Nate got off the couch and strode to the window, turning his back as if to give Emily an out, a moment to flee for her life. Slowly, she rose up from her seat. She held her breath and walked the short distance to the bedroom, to the side of the Pack ’n Play. Trevor looked intact and at peace. His breath was sleepy and even, while Emily’s was speeding up. Her head grew light and her eyes moved up and down the boy’s body. He was lying on his back with his limbs splayed flat and long across the thin mattress beneath him, intertwined with the sheet’s brightly silk-screened ducks and swans. “Trevor,” she said, testing his name in the air. She leaned down and spread a hand flat across his chest. “Trevor,” she said reminding herself that the boy had special powers. He was superhuman. He would be okay. He could beat DNA. He had to beat the DNA. In his short life, he’d hurt no one. She raised her hand off his body and sat down on the ground where she was eye level with her son. Through the mesh wall between them, she watched Trevor sleep. She heard footsteps behind her. Nate.
“You should have told me,” she said, not taking her eyes off the boy. She clenched her muscles, holding her body as firm and still as possible, in hopes of keeping her anger contained. Unleashed, it would be uncontrollable. This, she understood as her insides froze, was what real fear felt like.
“I should have told you,” Nate said from behind her. Emily nodded.
If he’d told her a month ago, though, when his own suspicions reached their full height, what could she have done? According to Nate’s sequence of events, by the time he discovered that newspaper clip, that iota of ostensible proof, not only had Trevor been conceived, but he’d already been born and was more than eight months old. It was already too late. So what would Emily have done if she’d known this news a month ago? Two months ago? She’d have hoped. She’d have spent the past two months pinning her hopes on Trevor and his future and the health of her family instead of wallowing in her own petty dramas, convincing herself that her own dreams—her shoe purchases and her passion for the pills—were the most important thing in the world. She wouldn’t have stolen the Rufino in a momentary delusion that it could help her achieve some sort of greatness. Who cared? Who cared about Emily’s dreams? Trevor had to beat the odds. All this time that Emily had been telling Nate that children were nearly indestructible? It turned out she was talking about other people’s children, not her own.
Emily, the Rufino, their fiscal distress. None of it mattered any more.
“While we’re making revelations,” she said still looking at Trevor, pausing to reconsider what she was about to say, “I stole the Barbers’ painting. I stole the Rufino. It’s in the diaper bag.”
She expected Nate to laugh, to say, “good one, Em” or “very funny” or “this isn’t a time for jokes.” When he didn’t say anything, she continued, “The painting, the one that Jeanne and Trish and Sam Tully can’t stop talking about. I have it. I have it, Nate. You were walking around with it all day today. I stole the Barbers’ precious Rufino and it’s here in Newport with us. It’s in the diaper bag.” She looked up. Nate was standing next to her. “I stole a Rufino.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw it.”
PART IV
Monday
CHAPTER 22
Morning in the ICU
GEORGE LOOKED EXACTLY as he had the day before, connected to tubes, withered, lifeless, and wrapped in a hospital gown. Nate couldn’t remember ever having seen his father’s bare arms before. The thin skin, bunched at the elbows, was pale and pockmarked. Nate felt wrong and voyeuristic as he hovered at George’s bedside, yet Emily, who had met Nate’s father only five minutes ago—the meeting being one-way, given that George was still in a coma—was already taking him in with no apparent unease. Emily (an actual art thief, Nate had confirmed last night, upending everything he thought he knew about her) stood at the head of George’s bed, her arms folded lightly across her chest.
“He’s real,” she said.
“You thought—?”
“I don’t know, that he was a figment of your imagination? You’ve done a pretty good job, historically, of portraying yourself as an orphan.”
“He’s real.”
“Should I leave? I’m not sure he’d want me here,” Emily said, making no motion to exit. “Your father is pretty much naked. It’s weird. Isn’t it weird?” She rested her hand on a monitor next to the bed, then quickly removed it, as if afraid she might break something. “I haven’t been in a hospital since Trevor was born.”
The air in the room smelled like toothpaste, disinfectant. Emily, too, seemed sanitized this morning, watching her words and softening her edges, reining herself in, the aftereffect of last night’s conversation. She’d lashed out at Nate last night. He’d deserved it. They were both in the wrong, that’s how things shook down. So while he wanted to hate her (not for stealing the painting, but for spending days face-to-face with him, hours in the car talking nonstop, and never mentioning the thing, not even when the topic came up), he couldn’t. She’d seemed as shocked by her own thievery as he was. Emily had walked straight out of a packed party in front of dozens of friends, acquaintances, and rich fucks, and done so with a world-class work of art under her arm. First the beauty of that action struck Nate, then the obliterating disaster of it.
“What the hell did you do?” he asked her last night after she confessed to the theft and told Nate that the cops had called her.
“I didn’t mean to take it,” she’d said. “It happened.”
“It happened?”
“Something inside me had to have it. I didn’t mean to take it.”
“You did take it. You took it.” Impulses were the bane of the human race, that’s the motto Nate had lived by for as long as he could remember. “Holy shit, Em. Why? Why the fuck couldn’t you have just left it there?” Trevor was in the suite with them, playing with his own toes in the Pack ’n Play.
“You’ve got to give the painting back. I’ll go with you. The minute we have credit cards, we’ll rent a car. You stole the fucking Rufino?” he said. Until the moment she’d confessed, some small part of Nate still believed that there was another explanation, that she hadn’t taken the art, that she hadn’t even known it was in her purse. He’d wanted to believe that, he’d been willing to suspend his disbelief. “You’ve been holding on to it all this time? You didn’t think I deserved to know?”
She started wheezing, quietly, like an asthmatic in denial. “We can’t return it now,” she said softly. As he looked again at the painting, he understood: Returning the piece was impossible. She’d killed its value when she cut the canvas and rolled it. Even from a few feet away, the buckling of the paint and fraying at the edges, right along the border of the paint itself, was discernable.
“Your fingerprints must be all over that empty frame, and the Barbers’ study,” Nate said. “I cannot believe you didn’t feel the need to tell me that you had the Rufino.” He wondered if Sam Tully suspected anything, and if that was why he’d called Nate and left a message about the theft. No, Tully would have told Nate if he had any hunches. Tully, unlike Emily, wouldn’t try to pull one over on him.
“I wiped down the frames with the hem of my sweater,” Emily said, sounding like someone who’d premeditated her crime. “It was instinct. I’m sure I was sloppy. I can’t believe I was so stupid.” I can’t believe you didn’t say anything to me, is what Nate thought.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. He couldn’t imagine that she—and now he—could possibly get away with this. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He couldn’t talk any further until he had an answer to that question.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He’d thought he was the dishonest one of the two of them, yet his subterfuge had a pure motivation. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her unless he was sure of his hunch. She, on the other hand, had no excuse at all.
“I wasn’t thinking. I was asha
med.”
“There’s no way you wiped off all of your fingerprints with your sweater. A sweater?”
“Would they know the prints are mine, anyway?” Emily said. “I mean, I don’t think my prints are on file anywhere, are they?” she said.
Of course not. For the police to get Emily’s prints, they’d have to come up to Newport to see her in person—which is exactly what they were planning to do on Tuesday. Couldn’t she see that? He and Emily would have to devise an out before then. George’s comatose state was starting to look like an appealing way to live. If it weren’t for Trevor, that is. Nate and Emily had to get their lives together for the sake of the boy.
Today they were free of Trevor. Before falling asleep last night—exhausted, mentally worn, all cried out (Nate hadn’t expected tears, but they’d come—his first and then Emily’s small dry sobs)—Nate had called the front desk and asked about the babysitting service they’d seen mentioned on the room-service menu. Within a minute they were signed up for a full day of sitting, charged to their room, and at seven thirty this morning an off-duty maid showed up at their door. She was stout, in her fifties, bilingual, and trained in CPR. She possessed all of the attributes most coveted in Manhattan nannies, Emily noted once they were in the elevator and out of the babysitter’s earshot. Emily had tried to give instructions (“He takes a nap at eleven; he’ll eat anything, but I like him to stick to oatmeal before noon”) but the babysitter merely nodded and said “okay” and “I sit many, many times” and confidently picked up the boy and easily soothed his cries, remarkably easily, while Nate and Emily slunk away.
It was starting to seem like a waste of good babysitting money. There was nothing Nate or Emily could do, or wanted to do, for George. He showed no signs of regaining consciousness. Emily put her arm around Nate’s waist, and he turned his attention to her, to the genuine sympathy on her face.
“I’m okay,” he said. “He’s like a stranger to me.” Looking at George’s inert frame, Nate thought back to his elementary school, where the playground had bordered on a thick patch of woods filled with scurrying beetles and garter snakes. You touch it, Nate and his friends would taunt one another each time a wounded squirrel or sparrow fell at the forest’s edge. No, you touch it first! The only motion coming from George’s body was the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
Neither Nate nor Emily had said much this morning about their conversation from last night. Nate knew that the Huntington’s thing was somehow bigger than Emily’s art caper. They might find a way out of the art thing if they schemed together. There was nothing, however, they could do about the Huntington’s. And Huntington’s, unlike art theft, was deadly. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” Nate had said to Emily this morning. She countered with, “I need to let my head settle.” Finally they ended up in this hospital room after Emily asked, seeming to honestly want an answer, “What do we do now?”
“He looks at peace,” Emily said, her eyes on George. She was studying the old man’s face. “All of that stuff”—she paused and Nate could feel her tense up—“that Huntington’s stuff. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s been wracked with shakes.”
“You can’t tell. They always look peaceful in their sleep. The articles say that the tremors, the chorea, it subsides in sleep. It’s like a return to babyhood, so much unexplained craziness during the day and then a solid crash at night.”
According to the doctors, there had been no change to George’s prognosis. He was still in a coma, still suffering from brain trauma, still no word on when or whether he’d come out of it. It was fascinating to watch: a completely unconscious body, continuing, at minimum function. All men were simply carbon-based machines when it came down to it. Brain function was purely a bonus.
The door to the room opened and Nate stepped out of the way, separating from Emily.
“Good morning!” chirped a male nurse, carrying a tray. His starched uniform was leaning closer to gray than to white. “Breakfast, if the patient feels up to it.” The nurse set the plastic tray on the table by George’s bedside and Emily started laughing. Her guffaws came out choked, as if she was trying to stop them.
“Oh, come on,” she said to the nurse. She let her laugh grow unbridled for a moment. “Does the patient look like he feels up to it?” The nurse glared at her and left the room.
Beneath the tray’s steam-dotted transparent cover, Nate could make out scrambled eggs, dry wheat toast, and a sectioned orange.
“It’s a bummer,” Nate said. “When I was a kid, my father used to request dry toast for breakfast from my mother all the time. Dry and tasteless, it fit his personality.” The word lifeless also came to Nate’s mind. The word described his father even before the accident, but it felt tactless today, here.
“You know, I used to imagine what it would be like when I met your dad for the first time,” Emily said, stepping away from the bed. “The great George Bedecker. I imagined him in his gray suit like in all the pictures, but what would I say? ‘I love your work’ or ‘I was astounded by the Prague Art League building’ or ‘I’m the woman who loves your son’? It all felt so loaded, even in my head.”
Nate and she had barely talked about George after their early months of dating, when Nate made clear that he and his father hadn’t much spoken in years. George Bedecker was someone Nate read about in newspapers. Doesn’t that make you sad? she’d asked. I have a full life, a lot of people have less, he’d told her. It was true, it was a fact that had helped him get through plenty of rough times and financial setbacks. It seemed a small consolation now, though. His father, lying here unconscious (his coma starting to seem sinister and escapist), held all of the secrets to Nate’s past, and maybe his future. If Nate spent any longer in this room he’d lose his mind. Prematurely. Pre-prematurely.
“He’s totally unaware. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go,” Emily said.
“He’s a young guy, Em. He’s not even seventy,” Nate’s voice was hard, chastising. He wanted her to understand. He wanted her to already know all there was to know and to have already synthesized everything she’d heard last night. He was being unfair. He turned away from the bed. “I don’t think he’s seventy. Walter Gropius was seventy-five when he started the Pan Am Building,” Nate recited straight from one of his childhood monographs, information he hadn’t known he’d retained. “George can’t die. An architect’s career starts at age seventy,” Nate said.
He can’t die, Nate thought. For so long Nate had assumed that he might never lay eyes on George, in person, again. Now the man was here, in the flesh, and Nate began to see that perhaps what he wanted from his father, what he was owed, was not simply hard answers but amends and restitution as well.
The eggs from George’s hospital tray were cold. Frigid, hard, overcooked, and tasting like cement—even after Emily dressed them up with a shake of pepper and a splash of hot water. Nate didn’t have an appetite anyway, but apparently Emily did. Sitting next to him in the waiting room, she nibbled on the eggs and the toast, her teeth making half moons in the wheat bread. They’d stolen the tray from George’s room, though it hadn’t felt like theft. George wouldn’t be waking up in time for breakfast, or lunch or dinner, most likely, and the grub would go to waste. And did it really count as theft when the loot was so undesirable? That was probably the Jeep thief’s rationale, Nate thought. It’s not stealing; this truck is a wreck. Perhaps the same spin could be applied to the Rufino: it’s not stealing; this art is shit.
The car was of little concern to Nate this morning. What he couldn’t get out of his head were Emily’s words: the old man was real. For years George had been someone Nate saw only in TV documentaries and in books, someone who lived through his buildings. It had been more than a decade since he’d been a real blood-and-guts human to his son, the way he was today. He was real. He was still alive, he was breathing (he wasn’t in need of a ventilator, and the resident on duty this morning assured Nate that this was a good sign), he still had a brain in the
re, he still had time to mend his fences. He was still Nate’s father. Or, he still had a chance to be Nate’s father. Annemarie and Charlie had lost their futures, but it wasn’t too late for George.
George still had a chance to apologize, though Nate hated that word. It had become so vapid, all of the sorrys that he and Emily loaded onto Trevor and exchanged with each other every day: sorry I’m late, sorry I didn’t make the dinner reservation, sorry I’m not on the partner track, sorry the best job I could get was in Rhode Island, sorry I’m me, sorry you’re stuck with me, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry I’m an art thief, sorry. It was all so empty. Yet in this situation, an apology would be welcome, Nate thought. He pictured George coming out of his coma, slowly opening his eyes, registering the IVs attached to his arm, the strange sterile surroundings, the diffuse light coming in the high hospital-room window. He’d fret over the design of the place, the colors and textiles which mimicked nothing in the natural world. As he was trying to make sense of it all, he would turn his gaze toward the side of his bed and he’d see his son, his one surviving son. What would George say to his child? Would he even recognize him? How would he phrase his amends? Nate hadn’t thought that far ahead. There were so many apologies for George to make: for his absent fathering, for completely taking off after Nate’s mother’s death, for possibly passing down his tainted genes, and for not alerting Nate to this possibility before he had his own son.
Emily put down the food and rubbed Nate’s back. He’d expected her to wake up and be distraught, but he’d forgotten that she pulled together when faced with acute trauma—trauma not of her own devising. She could barely function when she misplaced her apartment keys or found herself in possession of stolen art (last night she’d told Nate about the low-level tremors she’d been feeling in her heart ever since grabbing the piece, of her futile attempts to put it out of her mind, not unlike his more successful attempts to deny the Huntington’s), but when she’d discovered that she was unexpectedly pregnant, for example, she’d grown strong and taken control.
