The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, reaching over and touching her shoulder, rubbing the rough, real fabric of her shirt between his fingers. She was here. He couldn’t forgive himself for thinking that she had run off. He couldn’t, he saw now, go through this alone.

  “You have all my money, thirty-five dollars’ worth,” Emily said. “And a brand-new Audi. You think I’d leave all that?” She rubbed her eyes. “I never in my life thought I’d be so lucky.” Nate couldn’t tell if she was serious. He put the car in drive and the normally loquacious GPS kept its mouth quiet.

  Fifteen minutes later, Nate and Emily were settled into a sprawling corner booth at the Gateway Diner clutching lukewarm mugs of coffee.

  “I thought he’d look bigger,” Emily said. She was still thinking about George. She seemed obsessed with the daintiness of George Bedecker. She motioned across the room at the waitress, miming a refill. Refills were good, they were free. Of the thirty-five dollars Nate and Emily had left, they needed to hold on to ten, to make sure the Audi didn’t run out of gas, and at least another ten or fifteen in case they had trouble getting their accounts reactivated tomorrow.

  “I thought your father would be more daunting, even when unconscious,” Emily said.

  “You said that already.”

  “It’s what I thought.”

  “No one looks big in a hospital bed.” Nate’s voice was quick. He didn’t have the brain space, at this moment, to focus on the specific size of his father against the hospital’s creased white sheets.

  “That guy in Queens did. The man they had to cut out of his own home last year, he’d grown so large he didn’t fit through the door? Even in the ‘after’ photos, when he was recovering from his stomach stapling, he looked huge.”

  “Emily.” Nate said, simply to cut her off.

  The waitress refilled Emily’s coffee. Nate played with a stack of sugar packets, stacking them and then unstacking them, once, twice, three times.

  “Emily, we’ve got some issues.”

  “A few,” she said.

  “The Huntington’s. My dad complex. Your stolen artwork.”

  “When I stole the art, I didn’t know that your father was sick,” she said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done it. If I’d thought about it for even a split second, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t intend to complicate things. I don’t think I’ll go to jail, if that’s what you’re worried about. I doubt that the Barbers will press charges once they find out I’m the one who did it. We’d just have to pay them back, we’d find a way, and we could tell the cops it was a misunderstanding. I mean, don’t the New York cops have more important crimes to deal with?” She breathed in, deep. “I cannot believe the city has enough money to send them up here to talk to me. We’ll set something up so that ten percent of your paychecks, or something, go straight to the Barbers. We’ll find a way. I’ll find a job, someone will hire me. I am so sorry.”

  “Em, you can’t get caught. It doesn’t matter if the Barbers press charges—you committed a crime, the police can charge you even without Anna and Randy’s consent.” He paused. “They can’t arrest you without proof. We have to make sure that there’s no proof, and that you don’t give them anything to go on when they question you. You can’t slip up.”

  She nodded and spread her napkin on the table, flattening out the creases, pressing it into the surface. “The Huntington’s, that’s the real issue, right?” she said. “That, and the fact that you didn’t tell me about it. And that I didn’t know to ask.” She looked down into her cup, as if to read the coffee grinds. “I miss talking, really talking,” Emily said. “We used to talk, you know. Before.”

  Before having the baby, was what she meant.

  “I was trying to protect you. And Trevor,” Nate said.

  “We don’t need protection. We need to know what’s going on. Don’t you wish your father had told you what was going on? It’s a cycle, Nate. You’ve been continuing his cycle, like an animal on one of those spinning wheels.”

  “I know that now, believe me.” Nate knew it in an instinctive way. He couldn’t relive his father’s history, that fact was paramount. “I think we both need to talk more.”

  A customer entered the restaurant and the bells above the front door chimed. Nate thought of Trevor, who loved electronic buzzes and computer-generated alert sounds but often wailed at the tinny clang of old-fashioned bells. Come Christmastime, Nate figured that his son would be the only kid running away from department store Santas and their jingling, permanently grounded sleighs.

  “Do you ever think Trevor would be better without us?” Nate said. The idea that Trevor would be better without him was something that Nate thought about every day.

  “Oh, come on,” Emily said. “Someone has to change those diapers, wipe the congealed drool off his chin.”

  “Right,” Nate said. He and Emily were Trevor’s parents, just as Annemarie and George had been Nate’s. Despite George Bedecker’s detachment, he had fathered Nate, in his own way. “Do you think I have a complex?” he asked.

  “From being overloved by your parents?” she laughed. “You’re safe from that. You and the Europeans. All of those regimented European children, kept on strict schedules, sent to boarding school at age eight. To their credit, it’s probably the last continent with complex-free kids.”

  “That’s why you dated so many Euros before we met?”

  “Just one,” Emily shrugged. “And you fixed that pretty fast.”

  The morning when Nate and Emily first met, outside the Delta baggage claim exit at JFK, she was on her way home from Los Angeles. She’d spent the week with a French TV producer whom she’d been seeing for a couple of months. It wasn’t until she started dating Nate that it hit her, hard, that she had no future with the Frenchman. “Marriage is un-nec-ess-aire,” the Frenchman had told her the one time she tried to ask him where their relationship was heading. “Freedom is the essence of humanity.” She’d told Nate about all of this later, when she was pregnant with Trevor and they were still unmarried and made the decision, for their own reasons, that they wouldn’t wed. It seemed patently silly, the rush to marry because they were pregnant, she’d said. They were together, a couple, with or without the vows. She’d laughed at the time, joking that the Frenchman, named Jonah, had turned out to be a prophet. Nate couldn’t imagine being any more together, any more fatally linked, than he and Emily were now, today, here.

  “No more secrets?” Nate said.

  “No more secrets,” Emily answered.

  If they survived the Huntington’s and the Barber crime, they’d owe each other their lives. They’d owe each other, but gladly.

  “It’s your phone,” he said. A faint ringtone was coming from under the table. They’d given the babysitter Emily’s number in case of emergency. They told her to call in case of nonemergency, too, if she felt like it. The NYPD also had Emily’s number.

  Emily reached under the table and yanked her bag onto her lap. She rustled through it and pulled out her phone, dark. “It’s not me.”

  “It’s not me,” Nate said. His phone had a sharper ring, but from the look on Emily’s face, he could tell he was wrong. He reached into his jacket pocket, and there was his phone, muffled by the layers of his clothing, one ring away from rolling over to voice mail.

  As Nate flipped the cell open, Emily said, “We gave the hospital your number.”

  “The Newport cops, too,” Nate said as he heard the officer on the other end of the line.

  CHAPTER 25

  Pilfering

  THE CAR?” EMILY ASKED. Nate said it was the Newport cops on the phone, not the NYPD. She prayed that the call was about the car, and not the art. Cops from different states surely worked together. The NYPD could easily have tipped off the Newport police that they had two fugitives in town. In this new light, the theft of their Jeep might even look suspicious, like a decoy crime she and Nate had arranged to throw the police off their scent, though Emily
couldn’t imagine how that kind of scheme would work. She leaned toward Nate and tried to hear the voice on the other end of his cell, a hint of the conversation he was having, but he kept the phone tight against his ear and she couldn’t pick up a thing.

  “The car,” Nate mouthed to her and kept talking on the phone. The car! Thank God.

  The waitress came and slid a plate of home fries, ordered by Nate a few minutes ago, onto the table. Emily spit the wad of Nicotine gum she was chewing into a napkin. The gum was a free sample, compliments of a nurse in the hospital’s addiction center, which was conveniently located on the same hall as the bathroom where Emily had launched into her crying fit. She tucked the napkin-encased gum under her plate, picked up a fork, and started eating the potatoes. The stress of the cop calling had made her suddenly hungry.

  “Find out what’s left in it,” Emily said through bites of fried starch. “Is it officer, what’s his name, Eric?”

  “All of our tax statements were in the car,” Nate said into the phone. He was turned away from Emily, crouched against the restaurant’s noise. “Right, but it would be great if no one rifled through the car until we got there, just so, you know, our papers aren’t handled.” He paused. “Sure, I know, but if there are any—” He got up from the table and approached the cash register, where he grabbed a pen and started writing on a napkin.

  “They have the Jeep?” Emily said when Nate sat back down, his phone call over. “I thought that eighty-five percent of the time, if they didn’t find it in the first twenty-four hours, it wouldn’t be found. Maybe it’s a sign that we’re lucky.”

  “I think the eighty-five percent is an abducted kid statistic, not stolen cars,” said Nate. “And don’t get too excited. The car’s been stripped of its parts and there’s almost nothing left inside.”

  The Jeep was being towed to a police lot in Middletown, but it wouldn’t get there for another hour. The vehicle had apparently been bastardized. One of the few relics of their pre-Newport existence, and it had been trashed. They still had the stroller, Emily reminded herself, though perhaps they should trash that, too. A secondhand harbinger of a longed-for life, the Bugaboo was at the Viking with Trevor. Emily hoped the babysitter would think to take the boy outside.

  According to the cops, almost none of their belongings were left in the car. Losing a few pairs of her favorite shoes seemed appropriate penance for Emily’s way of life, if nothing else. “Glittering misery,” Kant said of modern civilization. The phrase seemed hilariously arch to Emily when she was in college, but struck her as uncomfortably canny now.

  Last night, unable to sleep and scared to look head-on at the tangled load of information taking root in her brain, Emily found herself thinking about the empty expanse of their new house. She and Nate had pored over the floor plan after making their offer, trying to determine how many pieces of furniture they’d have to buy to make the space look inhabited. Back then, weeks ago, Emily had joked about telling their new neighbors (or friends? wouldn’t there be new friends, eventually?) that they were minimalists. Nate hadn’t even smiled. Minimalism was a sore subject with him. Last night, though, awake and confused, she couldn’t imagine furnishing the house at all.

  Emily had been dreaming up her and Nate’s future from the moment Trevor was born, auditioning scenarios inside her head—how would their future look if she never worked again? How would it look if she started her own company? How about if they had to file for personal bankruptcy? If they stayed in New York? If they moved to Paris? San Francisco? Baltimore? Newport? A minimum-security prison? How would they manage with a second child? With a dog? With a cheese factory in the garage? She’d been imagining her own future ever since she was a child, furnishing her nonexistent future town house and buying imaginary gifts for her imaginary Prince Charming. But now? The picture in her head was blank. She had no clue what the coming years would hold.

  At two o’clock last night, buzzed and jittery, she’d gotten up from bed and taken an Inderal with a swig of a minibar Heineken. Would they have to move a hospital bed into their new house if Nate got sick? She didn’t know how a person cared for a Huntington’s patient. Would she be expected to look out for George while Nate was at work? No. No, Nate wouldn’t do that to her. Nate wouldn’t want George to be a hindrance to anyone, even to himself. As she’d slid back under the covers, Nate stirred from his sleep and said, with his eyes closed, “Do you hate me?” She’d shook her head, but he was already asleep again.

  For a moment, she had hated him. She’d despised him for his history, for things that were beyond his control. For shutting her out, too. Now that they were talking, though, she found she couldn’t hate him. The mass in her head was equally divided between relief that Nate and she were sharing their fears again (something they’d stopped doing months ago) and overwhelming terror about their unsure future. She wanted Nate to be healthy, Trevor to be healthy, more than she’d ever wanted anything.

  “We’re going to be okay,” she said to Nate as they left the Gateway and strapped themselves into the Audi again, in the diner parking lot.

  “I’ve created a mess,” he said. “We both have.” He started the car. “Where should we go?”

  “I’m tired. We could go to the Viking, let Marietta leave early.” They’d hired her for the full day, until 4:00 p.m. “Though last time we let a babysitter go early, that didn’t end so well.”

  “The Barbers’,” Nate said.

  Emily nodded. “But lying down on a bed sounds really good right now.”

  “Beds are all we have left.”

  “Yeah, hotel beds. We don’t even own them.”

  “No,” Nate said. “It’s what the officer told me. The carjacker left the AeroBeds, as well as a bunch of Trevor’s toys that you’d put in boxes.”

  “In a crate. They were in a milk crate.”

  “Right, those toys. I guess they don’t have much resale value.”

  While feeding and soothing Trevor, Emily had spent hours in their New York apartment looking at her and Nate’s things, wondering which might go for a prime price on eBay or Antiques Roadshow if times got any tougher. It was a disappointing exercise. Their goods seemed so cheap when examined with the eye of an appraiser.

  “No value at all,” Emily confirmed.

  It felt good to be sitting inside an unmoving car. A moment out of time, like being on a bridge but with a less inevitable destination. “Going back to the hotel, it’s all lost its charm now,” she said. “It’s been a hell of a weekend.”

  “We don’t have to stay at the Viking. We have beds again,” Nate said.

  Emily leaned forward in her seat. “Nate! We have beds,” she smiled, for real. They hadn’t lost everything. “Let’s sleep at home. Let’s bring Trevor to the place he’ll remember as his childhood home—”

  “His first childhood home.”

  “His first home. Just like we’d planned for our first days here, camping on the floor. We have electricity and water, and beds now, it’s all we need. We can beg a couple of towels off the Viking and return them next week. They seem to trust us there, fools. And we could probably get takeout from the restaurant and charge it to our room before we leave, but damn, it’d be nice to stop charging things there, to have our own cash, legal tender, in our hands again.”

  “You really want to stay at the house?”

  “Why not?” she said.

  “We could make dinner,” Nate said. “I mean, you could, if you want. Leaving Manhattan hasn’t made me a better cook.”

  “We’d need food, Nate, ingredients. And pots and pans. These things cost money.” She practically slobbered at the thought. The Viking’s meals were all starting to taste the same, and the hospital toast and diner potatoes had left her wanting.

  “If you’re willing to make a feast out of mismatched canned goods, I know where we can get some,” he said, starting the engine.

  They were five miles up Route 1 before Emily got around to asking where they were headin
g. The sun was high in the sky, and they’d flipped the Audi’s visors down, flush against the windshield. It was early afternoon and already felt as if a full week had passed since they’d left Trevor at the hotel this morning. He’d be waking up from his nap right about now, maybe heading out for that stroll. Maybe he’d be putting up a fuss for the sitter, but Emily doubted it. It’s not that she had unusually high expectations for her kid, like those mothers who claimed to have reared angels even as their prodigies were smearing pudding on the wallpaper. It was that Trevor threw tantrums only when he was alone with his parents. Around strangers, he was eerily, naturally easygoing, a trait clearly inherited from Nate. A trait luckily inherited from Nate. Oh God, perhaps Trevor had gotten only Nate’s good genes. She looked over at Nate and tried to see him as transient, as someone who might be gone soon. But he was a solid presence.

  “Please tell me you’re not taking me back to the hospital,” Emily said as he slowed the car down to take a sharp curve. She sincerely hoped that Nate’s food plan didn’t involve cribbing another tray of George’s intensive-care rations. She could make a feast out of nearly anything, but rehydrated eggs and Jell-O might not be worth the effort. She turned on the Audi’s air-conditioning and it streamed out of the vent immediately, a clean white chill. The Jeep’s A/C, on the other hand, usually took a full ten minutes to get up to speed, and even then it arrived as a slow fog, damp and clammy. She tilted the Audi’s vents up toward the ceiling, away from her skin.

  “We’re heading over to Narragansett. It’s only about fifteen minutes.”

  “They give away free food there? This really is the land of plenty.”

  “We’re going to George’s house, his family’s old house.” Nate’s fingers trembled on the steering wheel. He lifted his right hand into the air, steadying it in front of his face for a moment before putting it back in position. He’d already noted that it was only the newness of the car that made driving it—this car that his long-remote father had crashed yesterday, had steered here from the Midwest—remarkably uncreepy. “No one’s there.”