The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “Nate, it’s ten thirty,” Emily still had her hand on his back. “We should go see if the specialist is in.”

  Three hours had passed since they’d left Trevor, and Nate missed him already.

  They ditched the tray of food on top of the waiting room’s trash can, walked down the hall, took an elevator up to the second floor and, Emily first with Nate close behind, entered a small office. Inside, they faced the doctor with whom Nate had dealt the day before.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you got in,” he said to Nate. “I do rounds in Westerly in the mornings.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Nate said.

  “Sit.” The doctor shut the office door and motioned to a small couch. He extended a hand to Emily and introduced himself. “I hear you have questions,” the doctor said. There was barely room for the three of them in the office.

  “It’s about his father and Huntington’s,” said Emily.

  “About having a test done, for Huntington’s, and what that entails. I know there are tests, I don’t know if he’s had them,” Nate said. If there was something to be done, knowledge to be found, he was finally ready for it. He was in a hospital, his father was sick, it was the time for action.

  “There is a test, that’s right,” the doctor said. “I don’t know if your father has had it, either, but it’s not something you can request for him. You can’t request it for anyone but yourself.”

  “He’s unconscious. He can’t request it himself,” Nate said, though that information seemed obvious. He’d thought it would be easy to have his father tested. Surely the hospital had already drawn plenty of his blood.

  “And as long as he remains unconscious”—the doctor again motioned to his couch, and finally both Emily and Nate sat—“his Huntington’s status is of no consequence. To him, at least. Not everyone at risk for the disease wants to know his status. Plenty of people don’t have the capacity to process that kind of news. And you need to be aware that a positive diagnosis can trigger insurance problems. Mundane as that sounds, it is a consideration. As such, it’s your father’s right to deny the test for himself.” The doctor scooted back a few inches in his padded desk chair, as if making room for his words. “And he might not even need a test. From what you’ve told me, you haven’t confirmed that he’s at risk.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t—”

  “You don’t want to get tested yourself?”

  Nate didn’t know. He only knew that if George were tested, and it turned out he didn’t have the gene, it would mean that Nate had nothing to worry about. If George was tested and he did have the gene, it meant there was still a 50 percent chance that Nate was negative. If Nate was tested himself, though, the results would be definitive. There would be no going back.

  “Oh, seriously, can’t you just test the man? He’s in a coma. Nate’s his next of kin. Just let Nate request the test,” Emily said.

  “Emily,” Nate said, to quiet her down.

  “My priority is in treating Mr. Bedecker’s head injury and internal wounds. I’m going to write down the name of a counselor in our hereditary disease department”—he looked at Nate—“and you should speak with her as soon as possible, though there’s a better HD clinic in Providence. It might be worth the trip. If you do decide to get tested, you can’t do it today regardless. We have a counseling protocol. Once you’ve been through the counseling, you’ll decide whether to have the test.” He leaned over his desk and scribbled a name and phone number onto a page from his prescription pad, then handed the paper over to Nate. The doctor’s cursive was precise and unexpectedly neat. “There aren’t many conditions I can think of that are worse than Huntington’s. And there’s no treatment, as of yet, even if you test positive. There’s promising research being done, but it’ll be years before they’re testing on humans, and that’s only if the inhibiting drug proves out its promise. There’s no way for me to sugarcoat this disease.”

  Nate understood. The diagnosis wasn’t just a death sentence. It was a sentence to suffer, for a decade or more, prior to that death. To be rendered useless and then, after an excruciating wait, to die.

  He shouldn’t have had a child in the first place, that’s what it boiled down to. He should have pressed Emily to have an abortion. He looked over to Emily, sitting next to him on the vinyl loveseat. She seemed to think his glance was a cue for her to speak.

  “Isn’t it better to know if you have the gene?” she asked. Emily was a firm believer in knowledge. “I think it’s better to know.” She sounded angry. At Nate, probably. He didn’t blame her.

  “There’s no treatment,” the doctor said again. He had the patience of a saint. Or of a pediatrician. “Of course, if you two plan to have more children, you’ll want to know if there’s a risk.”

  Nate saw Emily glance at him. Would they want more kids? They’d operated on the assumption, in New York, that they’d stop with Trevor. They’d both come from small families. Emily’s only brother lived on the West Coast and was eight years her senior—it seemed like eighteen years, she liked to say. She often referred to herself as an only child. In Manhattan, when Emily and Nate had talked about having more kids, they’d agreed that it seemed financially reckless to try to raise two children when just one had put them in such economic straits. In Newport, they’d have enough space for a second child. Another kid: he couldn’t believe he was even thinking about it. He might have already poisoned their first, and Emily didn’t seem to be a moral exemplar for children these days. The phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” crossed Nate’s mind.

  “We should go,” Nate nodded to the doctor. “I need to think.”

  “Call the counselor,” the doctor said, opening the door to let them out. “We’ll know in the next few days if your father is out of the deep end.”

  Outside the office, Nate leaned against the pale blue wall and looked at Emily. “You’re not pregnant already, are you?” It was just a hunch, given the way she’d eyed him when the doctor mentioned more kids.

  “What? I drank my way through our minifridge yesterday. I’m not pregnant. Come on, Nate.”

  “You’d let me know if you were?” After she’d found out she was pregnant with Trevor, she’d waited weeks to tell him. After she stole a Rufino, she’d waited three long days.

  “Nate, I’d tell you.” She shoved her hands in her pockets and moved slightly away from him. “I thought we only wanted one child.”

  Nate nodded. Though Charlie was gone, Nate couldn’t imagine having grown up without him as a compatriot, as a witness to his own childhood and sharer of the family secrets. It was Charlie’s steady, if dreamy, presence in the family that served as a reminder, when Nate was a child, that all of humanity wasn’t crazy, that it might be possible to live in his household and still emerge a normal (because normal was the goal as an adolescent, nothing good came from sticking out) American kid. After Charlie was gone, Nate wondered whether his brother’s good nature in the face of their father’s stoicism and mother’s dissolution had been due to some sort of innate optimism or simply a result of his youth. He had been younger than Nate, after all. The qualities Nate most admired about his brother: Perhaps Charlie would have grown out of them if he’d been allowed to age into adulthood.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Nate said. “Let’s just get out of here.” He needed to be free of the hospital’s confines, to be somewhere neutral where he’d be able to rethink things. His father was in a coma and unreachable at the very moment when he, Nate, had, for the first time in his life, found a real reason to reach out. It was the first time he could remember ever actually wanting to talk to the man. “Let’s get in the car,” Nate said. He started to walk toward the elevator. The hospital was making him feel lightheaded and sick.

  “How about—” Emily said, stopping him. “How about you get the car, and I’ll call the hotel. I’ll meet you out front in a minute. I want to call to make sure Trevor is okay.”

  CHAPTER 23
<
br />   Emily Calls Out

  EMILY HELD THE CELL PHONE to her ear and counted her own heartbeats. Nineteen heartbeats, four rings of the phone (answer damnit!, she willed someone to pick up on the other end), and Emily was crying. She was bawling, fat wet tears worthy of Trevor’s deepest tantrum. When out in public, she usually fought tears with a fierce strength. She hated pity, the instant sympathy people felt for a crier—but here, in a hospital, there was none of that. Half the visitors in the ICU were either in tears, on the brink of tears, or recovering from a crying fit. The ward was drowning in salt water and whimpers. Here, Emily was just another bawler. The gasps between her sobs echoed off the close walls of the bathroom stall.

  “Hey, chica,” Jeanne picked up her cell on the sixth ring.

  Emily breathed out. “Jeanne, thank God.” It was good to hear Jeanne’s voice, a link to life before Friday, before Newport, before. Emily had been in the women’s room crying for five minutes now, maybe ten. The only break had been when she’d pulled herself together for a few moments and called the babysitter, confirming that everything was fine at the Viking. In all of this time, no one else had come into the restroom. Emily kept expecting to be disturbed, but clearly everyone in this wing was using bedpans. “I can’t believe you picked up,” she said into the phone. “Aren’t you supposed to be, like, ohm-ing and connecting with the spirit?”

  Jeanne tended toward the trendy and had passed through a number of phases since Emily first met her in college. She’d dabbled in punk, the last wave; ardent socialism; the pork-only diet; Pilates; daily shots of wheatgrass. During her first year in med school, Jeanne took up speed-walking. The fads had all come and gone, except for yoga. As with the rest of America’s masses, she seemed to be hooked on yoga for the long haul.

  “Yeah, I thought I’d be ohm-ing, too. Honestly, though, I’ve never seen a crowd so taken with their technology. The women here send texts while in Warrior Three pose. And the food bites. I thought it was going to be macrobiotic, but it’s minimum-calorie raw. I’ve been near fainting since I got here. My blood sugar, my electrolytes, everything’s tanking. The only thing saving me is the guy who drives the van to town. He graduated from Vassar, and he’s single and straight. And not bad in bed.”

  Jeanne had dated the same man for eight years when she was in her twenties, a corporate lawyer named Austin who promised he’d marry her and then, every year, forgot to propose. She finally left him during the summer of her thirtieth birthday and had been making up for lost time ever since. Despite the setbacks in her own personal life, Jeanne knew how to have a good time. She was an optimist. She could be relied on when good news was needed. Plus, she was a medical resident, trained to understand head traumas and genetic abnormalities.

  “I got your message,” Jeanne said. “Sorry to hear about the Jeep. At least you didn’t have a Rufino stolen from you.”

  “Who cares about the Barbers and their stupid art,” Emily said.

  Emily needed for the art theft to have never happened. If she wanted to sound credible to the cops when they came up to visit, she needed to believe, in her heart, that she had not done it. She wished, fervently, that she’d told Nate about it sooner. It would have been easy to tell him about it the night it happened, while she was still mid-freak-out, while she still hadn’t hidden it from him.

  “Yeah, they’re nut jobs. But really, I’m so sorry about the Jeep,” Jeanne said. Jeanne knew Emily as well as anyone, and knew Nate equally as well by simple transference. “Are you crying? Emily, it’s going to be okay. I’ve had three bikes stolen since I moved to New York, plus that stereo, though the stereo was my fault, and look, I’m still standing. I did a perfect neckstand today. It was only a car, it’ll be okay.”

  It would be okay. Emily nodded. She wished Jeanne were here with her, to see the nod. Talking was so hard. She and Nate had used up all their words last night and now Emily’s brain was a vacuum. She summoned a thought and then felt it shift from her empty head to her vocal cords, coming out sad and flat, wet with her tears. Like a truism.

  “It’s not the car. Or the Barbers’ stupid art.” Though it was the art, partly. “It’s Nate, and his dad. His dad is sick.”

  “George Bedecker? The George Bedecker?” Jeanne said. “Emily, I’m so sorry. I know Nate isn’t close to his dad, but a sick parent, it’s a brush with mortality. George Bedecker? Oh, Emily, sick with what?”

  “I don’t know. He was in a car accident. He’s in a coma, head injuries, all the stuff that seems so run-of-the-mill on TV, all of that horrible wait-and-see stuff. He’s here, in the hospital in Rhode Island. Nate’s kind of tuned out to it all; I think he’s in shock at seeing the guy. It’s not the accident, though.”

  “So it’s what? Head trauma falls all over the map. He could come out of the coma and be fine. Sometimes it’s only a matter of waiting it out. The coma could be his body protecting itself. Humans have unbeatable survival instincts.”

  “No. No,” Emily said. And then, before she could stop herself or reconsider her words she said, “He might have Huntington’s. Do you know what that is? It’s like, Korea, Huntington’s, from Korea.” Emily laughed. She actually laughed after she said this, a real, can you believe it? laugh. Life was funny, incredibly darkly humorous. She’d been out of New York for mere days, and already her world had turned more dangerous. “Why us, right? Nate thinks his dad has Huntington’s.” There. Emily had said it. She’d said Huntington’s with the same finality that Nate had employed last night, as if words could act as a barrier between the speaker and the thing itself.

  Emily lowered herself onto the toilet. The hospital stall was wide and deep (the proportions of a jail cell, she imagined), arranged to fit a wheelchair or a walker. Emily could live in here if she needed to; it was practically bigger than the bedroom that she and Nate had shared in New York. In Newport they’d have more space, but the trade-off seemed to be that they might have a fatal disease to deal with, too. “Jeanne?” Emily said, her sobs finished.

  “It’s chorea, with a c, not Korea,” Jeanne said softly, “Huntington’s chorea, it’s from chora, the Latin word for dance. The Huntington tremors.” She paused and then continued, her voice sad, “the tremors look like a dance.” And then her words died out. It sounded as if she were going to pick up the crying, too, as if Emily’s tears were transferable. “Oh, Emily. Do you want me to come up there? I don’t have to be back at work until Tuesday afternoon, tomorrow afternoon, and I have the rental car. I can be with you whenever, however quickly I can drive there. I’m already north of the city.”

  “No, God no, don’t come up here. We don’t have anywhere for you to stay. The three of us are crammed into a room at the Viking. We aren’t in our house. I’m not looking for a hug anyway,” Emily said. She was tired of people placating her without offering any tangible reward. “I don’t need sympathy. I need some perspective.”

  She didn’t need perspective. She needed a miracle, but she’d never believed in miracles. In lieu of a miracle, Emily would settle for hearing Jeanne say that Nate was overreacting. That he’d misunderstood all of that convoluted research, all of those Huntington facts that he’d laid out in his even-toned speech last night. It would be so easy for Jeanne to tell her that. It wouldn’t be a miracle at all. It would be a fact, wouldn’t it?

  “Oh, Emily,” Jeanne said again.

  “Look, Huntington’s,” Emily said before Jeanne could again offer to drive up. “It’s really that bad?” In the pause that followed, she thought of all the things that Jeanne could say, the answers that had prompted Emily to make the call: It’s not so bad, tons of people have it, what’s a little chorea? I’ll hook you up with a specialist. They’re on the brink of a cure. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. It’s just Huntington’s, don’t worry! Emily thought back to when she was pregnant. Even before having the amnio (which came back fine, all of the prenatal tests came back fine!), she’d been shocked at how carefree she’d been, how certain she was that
her baby would be born healthy. It wasn’t like her to be so calm, but she’d gotten pregnant so easily, without trying, and her morning sickness had been mild and routine. Maybe she should have worried more. Or maybe, even now, there was no reason to fret. Jeanne was a good friend. Jeanne would tell her the truth. Jeanne wouldn’t panic or overreact.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jeanne finally said. She waited a beat too long before continuing and Emily held her breath, tried to will herself back to yesterday, to last month, to the time before Nate started acting aloof. It was all starting to make sense: his withdrawal, his sudden quiet, his change in behavior that she’d dismissed as stress. The excuses she’d made! She could have questioned him instead of writing off his mood shift. She felt her tears welling up again. Her chest tightened as if under the force of an Elizabethan corset. “They could make progress, they really could,” Jeanne said. “They didn’t even have a test until twenty years ago, and there are advocacy groups pouring money into research. It could pay off. You never know, Emily. You never know.”

  You never know wasn’t the prescription Emily was looking for. She couldn’t lose Nate or Trevor. She couldn’t lose Nate and Trevor.

  “So you don’t know, for certain, that George Bedecker has it?” Jeanne said.

  “No. We don’t know. But it’s a solid hunch. I don’t doubt my partner’s hunches.”

  “You can’t panic until you know for certain. You can’t panic if he hasn’t even been tested yet,” Jeanne said, her voice awkwardly serious. “Even if he has it, like I said, they’re doing research. They’re always doing research.”