by Allison Lynn
“This box is all work, too,” Emily said, stacking another file on the ground and taking a tiny leather duffel from the back of the trunk. She opened it and after peering inside, said, “It’s clothing, and not much of it. Do you want to go through it? It’s an overnight bag.”
“No,” Nate said. He knew what his father’s clothing looked like, each piece was a repeat of the others. He pulled out the final file crate, this one made of what appeared to be a light birch, and balanced it on the lid of the trunk. After flipping the top open, he lifted a paper from the crest of the stack and gave it a quick scan. He handed it to Emily when he was done, and he watched her face fall.
In the living room, after a period of silence, Nate spoke.
“He could have called me,” Nate said. His gut ached, a sharp, searing ache as if he’d swallowed glass and it was working its way through his system. “If he didn’t want to talk to me himself, he could have had his lawyers call, the guys who handled my mom’s estate. They know how to reach me. Our number in New York was listed, for fuck’s sake.” Fuck it. He’d been so excited to discover, just over an hour ago, that the Jeep had been located and that he and Emily would be able to sleep at their house tonight. He’d actually been happy. He was a fool to have let his spirits rise.
Nate’s father had probably known that Huntington’s was in the family ever since his own father fell sick, ever since at least 1974. Fuck all of Annemarie’s allusions to the disease. It had been George’s responsibility to talk to his sons. If not in Rhode Island three decades ago, then later, when his own diagnosis came. Nate thought he would kill George if the old man weren’t already in a coma. A coma. The man didn’t deserve the balm of unconsciousness. Nate couldn’t believe that just this afternoon he’d thought there was still a chance for reconciliation. “I come from a family of idiots,” he said.
Emily didn’t respond. She was on the couch, crouched in the ersatz crib that Nate had yet to dismantle, carefully analyzing the medical documents as if hoping for a mistake, something they’d overlooked, the April Fool’s notation of a prankster medic. She wasn’t going to find it. George didn’t deal with the kind of people who played practical jokes. George Bedecker had Huntington’s (he wasn’t at risk for it, he wasn’t waiting to see if he’d inherited the gene or if the symptoms would emerge—he had the disease, firmly diagnosed by experts) and hadn’t bothered to call his son, his genetic son, to let him know.
“I don’t think I believed you were actually right about Huntington’s, about George having it,” Emily said as she flipped through the file. “It’s just, I know I’m the one with the doomsday prophesies all the time, but it seemed maybe you’d let your fears get the best of you.” George was experiencing all of the early physical symptoms of the disease, but his head still seemed to be fine. So George’s longtime misanthropic tendencies were his own, they weren’t the illness. And George’s head had been intact and he’d been thinking clearly eight months ago when, according to the medical records, he first went to a doctor complaining of shakes. George’s tremors had become undeniable, it seems, and he’d finally faced up to the fact that his demise would mirror his father’s. History in the family, the medical forms stated.
Nate held his head between his hands and squeezed, hard. He wanted to tear the insides out of his own body in one fast-action movement. In a favorite ghost story he’d told Charlie during their campouts on Bedecker House’s lawn, the ghost of a butcher returned to his former neighbors’ homes to rip out their intestines. The phantom thrust his specter of a hand into townspeople’s abdomens while they slept, grasping their insides the way Dickens-era orphans grasped for pork sausage. That would be a relief right now, having his organs decimated instantaneously.
“I didn’t think your father actually had Huntington’s,” Emily repeated. “Even if your grandfather had it, there was a fifty percent chance George didn’t.”
“You didn’t think my father was real, either. Your track record’s not so good today.” The contents of this birch box, other than the folder that Emily held, were spread across Emily’s lap and on the floor in front of Nate. He sat in a high back chair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“I’m still trying to deal with our move to Newport, the implications—and sudden fact, you know?—of it. And up until yesterday, I thought my worst problem was that I’d transported stolen art across state lines.” That was still a bad problem, Nate had to admit, despite the good face Emily was putting on it. As he’d told her, even if the Barbers didn’t press charges, the authorities weren’t going to drop the case. She and Nate needed to come up with a strategy before she talked to the cops again. “Do you get that? Everything else is like a dream right now, I have nothing to grasp on to.”
“I know.” Nate knew he should hold her, but there was room for only one in her crib. If Emily was numb, it only made sense that Nate would be, too. He physically ached, but his brain felt anesthetized. Sure Nate had expected this news, he’d been looking for exactly this proof. Bingo! He won. So where was the satisfaction? He hated his father. He’d always hated his father, but now having a firm reason for that hate made the revulsion absolute. There was nothing like a tainted gene to remind a man that he couldn’t escape his past. Nate felt DNA skittering through his veins like water bugs, like rats darting beneath the subway tracks planning a siege.
“You might be okay,” Emily said. “It’s a fifty-fifty thing, right? We’re due some odds. It’s our chance to be lucky.” She sniffled and stretched out on the couch, coming out of her crouch. “I feel as if I’ve been crying all day. So who is Philippa Antrim, anyway?”
“Who?”
“Here, on this envelope,” Emily lifted a sealed manila envelope from her lap and handed it to Nate. On the front was a name, Philippa Antrim, in ballpoint pen, and a phone number written in George’s neat print. The area code was in Chicago.
“I don’t know, maybe his assistant? He used to have a woman named Danielle, but I haven’t called his office in years, at least three or four. There was always someone at the firm in charge of George, keeping him in line, getting him to his appointments, reminding him to occasionally leave at night and lay eyes on his family.” Nate turned the envelope over in his hands.
“Do you think we should—” Emily said as he pried open the tin clasp, “—open it?” she finished her sentence while Nate was already pulling the papers from the envelope’s pocket. Everything would have to be put back in place again; they’d leave no trace. They’d take off for good and start their new life, bringing George’s tainted genes and whatever else Nate had inherited along with them.
Inside the envelope was a will. Like Nate and Emily with the Jeep, George had put all of his important documents in his car. Like Nate and Emily, Nate realized, George was planning to settle here for the long haul. George was expecting to die his father’s death, right down to the location. Nate felt a chill. Ice on his spine.
He called Emily off the couch and, it must have been something in his voice, she jumped up at once. She sat on his lap in the straight-backed chair, barely wide enough for one person, and together they read George’s will.
“His office always seemed to be operating in the red,” Nate said. “He’s always been broke, so it’s not like I’m surprised that he left me nothing.” Nothing except the pittance that was left of Annemarie’s estate, five thousand dollars at most. George’s firm would be handed down to the two current senior associates. It was a bum deal for them. They’d inherit the debt. George didn’t own his apartment in Chicago apparently. It wasn’t in the will and Nate had a hunch that it was small and cheap and a rental. The man never spent time at home anyway. His entire estate consisted of the business and this house and the car that Nate had been driving. And when George passed away, these things—the house and the car—would go to Philippa Antrim of Chicago.
“I told you we shouldn’t move any furniture, or take anything,” Nate said. “It’s not ours. It never will be.”
/> “You’re also the one who keeps telling me that your father isn’t dead yet. This Philippa comes into her inheritance only after your dad’s heart stops ticking.” Emily was standing now, had left Nate’s lap. “Maybe she’s a relative on your father’s side. You said you don’t know much about the family tree.”
Nate scanned the room, eyeing all of the possessions that would end up not in the Bedecker family, but with the Antrims. Nate shook his head.
“His will treats me like I’m my mom’s son, not his at all,” he said.
That statement hung in the air and neither Nate nor Emily moved, as if afraid to disturb this pronouncement.
“Could you be?” Emily finally asked, with too much enthusiasm. “People had affairs like mad in the sixties. How would your father have known? He was away so often, he was oblivious to you all, right? You’ve always said that your mother seemed like the kind of woman who should have led a greater life, who shouldn’t have been confined to Cleveland, or whatever. Your mom could have easily had a lover. Your mother probably had a rich, private life that you never asked her about. I mean, you Bedeckers weren’t bred to be big emotional talkers.”
“What we were bred for, according to those medical records, is death,” Nate said.
“You might not be George’s son,” Emily said, more firmly. “You might not have his genes. It’s not impossible.”
“I’m his son,” Nate said. “Fuck, I’d be thrilled to discover I wasn’t his blood relation, trust me.” This wasn’t simply because Nate wished for a clean-gene bill of health. He’d love to know that his mother had had some passion in her life before she checked out. And she might have, later on. After Charlie died and before Annemarie’s leukemia set in, there was a one-year stretch when she’d seemed at peace, resigned to her fate in life. At the time, it seemed so outrageous to Nate, barbarous and inappropriate. Charlie had been in the ground for a short ten months, and there was his mother, letting her spiritual curiosity roam free, sending care packages to Nate, first-class mailers filled with meaningless aphorisms and bubble-wrapped bouquets of sage and oregano. I might take a cruise, she wrote in one brief letter. I’m feeling the draw of the water. Nate hadn’t taken her seriously and could only imagine George’s response to his wife taking off on the Atlantic Crown—the old man created houses specifically to give people a refuge from that world. She never went on the cruise. She fell sick a couple of months later and the old, sensibly European Annemarie returned.
“I wish I wasn’t George’s kid, really, give me any other gene pool to fish from. I’m his, though,” Nate said. “We got tested when my mother was ill. She needed bone marrow. It was demented: neither George nor I matched to her, but we were a perfect match for each other. That only means we have the same marrow type, so I’m trying not to read into it. But it feels like an omen, or a curse.” It felt like certain death.
Emily rubbed the back of her neck and tilted her face up to the ceiling, as if still trying to take it all in, trying to make sense, trying to call up an apt quotation from one of her favorite dead philosophers.
“Can we go get Trevor?” she said. Her voice was weak and barely audible. “I need to see you and Trevor and me, all in one place.”
“Okay,” Nate said, because he owed her, and he owed Trevor. For now, they were together and healthy. They had a car and their beds and a new home. For today at least (and maybe only for today, for this present moment), this fragile life of theirs was still in one piece.
CHAPTER 27
Contact with the Antrims
THE JEEP DIDN’T LOOK so bad. “I think the Audi’s in worse shape,” said Emily. She didn’t see a single new scratch on the Jeep’s body. None of the windows were even broken, though when Nate mentioned to the mechanic who ran the car lot that the door had been locked when the car was stolen, the guy laughed. Apparently modern car thieves were overwhelmingly adept at prying open locked cars without damaging the goods.
“We’re not going to find proof that it was locked. Let it go,” Emily said.
The Audi, on the other hand, was a wreck. Looking at it head-on in the slanted 4:00 p.m. sun, Emily noticed how severely the passenger side had been smashed. With one headlight completely gone, the car looked sinister and bad-ass. Emily had never really liked German cars anyway. They were evocative of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and men who believed that life was hell. Well, life was hell. “The Audi looks like crap in this light,” she said.
“It drives,” said the car lot guy, standing a few feet away. “The Jeep doesn’t. You can leave the body here and take it as a tax write-off. I’ll give you a receipt. It’s better than nothing.”
“Our insurance company will have to come take a look first,” Nate said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the guy responded.
The Jeep had been stripped of its useful parts. All that remained were the two AeroBeds and Trevor’s toys and his car seat, which Nate promptly moved to the Audi, strapping it in next to the seat they’d borrowed from the police and would return tomorrow. “Here, do you mind?” Nate handed Trevor to Emily and she rested him on her hip. The boy’s drool-slicked chin brushed against her cheek and he laughed, a hiccup of a laugh.
On their way to the lot, they’d stopped at the Viking, where they’d reunited with Trevor (he looked so good, Emily noted, hale and healthy and happy to see his parents, bobbing his head up and down as if nodding in agreement, something he’d been doing since he was practically born every time he was happy) and checked out a day early, vowing to return to the hotel first thing in the morning with legitimate money to pay the bill. “The police have your info, so don’t try to run!” joked the manager, the same one who’d dealt with them at their Friday check-in. Now the Audi’s trunk was packed, not only with George’s food and linens—they’d taken sheets and a bath towel from the Narragansett house as well—but with the Bugaboo, too. Tomorrow they would have cash finally, and normal life would return. A new kind of normal. A perverse version of normal. Normal until the NYPD came knocking. The lieutenant had promised to call Emily today to set up an interrogation, but so far her phone had stayed silent.
They’d left George’s file boxes in the Narragansett living room, stacked neatly beside an empty silverware hutch. They’d slipped all of his papers back into their crates, carefully sliding each leaf into place and then closing the lids tight. They left the house as clean and spare as they’d found it. Outside by the car after the house was closed up, Nate dialed his phone. He punched in the numbers affiliated with Philippa Antrim. As the phone rang through to Chicago, Nate handed his cell over to Emily. It seemed that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make the call. Emily accepted the phone and held it to her ear, hoping that it would ring over to voice mail so she could hang up, putting off whatever was waiting on the other side until another day. She and Nate had been dealt enough for one weekend (even a long holiday weekend). But someone did pick up, and Emily threw her shoulders back and straightened out her wrinkled pants and stood taller, as if the stranger on the other end had walked into her line of sight and was watching her.
“Hello?” It was a guttural man’s voice, not Philippa, not Philippa Antrim.
“I’m sorry, I’m looking for Philippa Antrim?” Emily said, her voice taking on the upward inflection of a question. She sounded like a teenager or a telemarketer, she’d be lucky if this man didn’t hang up. Or, she’d be lucky if he did. At the moment, that was a tough call. “I’m calling from Rhode Island, I’m sorry, really, I think it’s a personal matter, but I don’t know for sure,” she said. There was a silence on the other end. “Are you there? Are you Mr. Antrim?” She longed for the days of the telegraph, when people had time to examine and edit their communications before sending them over the transom.
“I’m her son, Pete. She’s not in. Who’s calling?”
“My name’s Emily Latham, my partner, boyfriend, found your mother’s name in his father’s papers, his dad is George Bedecker? He’s—”
“I know George.” He sounded upset about being disturbed, impatient. Emily looked at her watch. It was 1:00 p.m. in Chicago. “Is everything okay?”
“Not really,” Emily said, and then, with Nate holding her hand, she told the junior Antrim, Pete Antrim, that George had had an accident, that he’d slammed into a guardrail on Route 1, had been in the hospital for a day and a half, that it was critical, that he was in a coma. She spoke quickly and awkwardly, repeating herself and doubling back until she got all of the details out.
For a long time, there was only silence on the other end of the line. Emily was proving to be a disaster when it came to phone calls today.
“My mother’s in Atlanta for the weekend, but she can get a flight out in the next day or so, I’m sure. She’ll want to be there,” he finally said. “I guess I knew that George had a son somewhere, but he never explicitly spoke of family.”
“Sure,” Emily said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “Typical.” Her heart was beating so hard she thought it might explode across the phone line. She continued talking, offering a quick stream of vague details, mentioning that George wasn’t on a respirator, that he hadn’t eaten his eggs this morning. She left out the Huntington’s. It seemed private and not applicable. She also left out the will, since as Nate kept insisting, rightly, George was still alive.
“We found this number, and we’re not much in touch with George,” Emily said, “and he’s not doing well, and we didn’t know if Philippa was his assistant or a relative or what, but it seemed like the thing to do, to call.” The right thing to do out of curiosity, out of need for Nate. On the phone with this stranger, who sounded as if he were Nate and Emily’s age, living his own life in the middle of the country, Emily felt wrong: they’d called him for answers to their own questions, not because they felt any debt to Philippa Antrim, mother of Pete.
