The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s my housewarming gift,” Jeanne said to Emily. To Nate, she added matter-of-factly, “Emily told me about the Huntington’s. I’ll do some investigating when I’m back at work tomorrow. Shit, I have to be back at work tomorrow, by one p.m.,” she said. “How long’s the drive to New York?”

  Nate looked up, his face flat and expressionless. Emily turned her attention to Jeanne, to Jeanne’s hands, which ran over the shopping list, the fingers as familiar as her own. It amazed Emily that Jeanne was here. Emily had screamed at her, bitter and vengeful screams, and instead of running away Jeanne had left Rhinebeck and driven to Newport and searched them out at the Viking, where the concierge told her that the Bedeckers had checked out. “Thank goodness your phone and address here are listed already,” Jeanne said. She’d picked up a pizza and arrived at the house a mere half hour before the Audi drove up. “And you’re lucky you showed up when you did. Another half hour and I was planning to head back to the Viking to see if the room you left was still open.”

  “You couldn’t afford it,” Emily said.

  “No joke,” Nate added. “I wonder if they’ll end up charging us the full suite rate, or if they’ll take pity and only bill us for a regular room. We’d have taken a standard room if one had been available.”

  “But we sure took advantage of having a suite,” Emily said.

  “After they forced it on us.”

  “Okay,” Jeanne said, rising from the floor in one fluid movement, proving that yoga had given her flexibility and balance, if not inner peace. “I’ll get on the shopping.”

  Emily walked Jeanne to the door. Trevor had crawled onto the empty pizza box, sinking his bare knees into a spot of congealed cheese. They’d give him a bath tonight, get him back into his routine. “Just make sure you pick up baby shampoo, if you see any? And laundry detergent, unscented?”

  “Sure,” Jeanne said, and was out the door. “I’ve got my phone, call if you think of anything else,” she added on her way down the walk.

  When Emily turned around, Trevor was still examining the pizza dregs and Nate was flat on his back, supine on the hardwood floor. His khaki pants blended into the polished bamboo as if he and the house were one already. The wine bottle next to him was empty, a one-time impulse purchase, gone. She could not believe that Anna had taken the blame for the theft. Emily wondered, briefly, if Jeanne might have the story wrong, but she had all of the details, they all fit. Bess Van Rhyn wasn’t a gossip; she was a reliable source. And, in fact, the cops hadn’t called Emily today for further questioning. As Nate would say, holy fuck.

  “It’s crazy, right, Anna taking the blame? Do you think we’re off the hook? I feel like I should confess,” Emily said, though she no longer felt that way. When Nate didn’t respond, she continued, “Nobody’s actually been hurt. Maybe we even helped Anna, if she was looking for a way to crush Randy. And the monetary loss, the cash that was in the painting, they didn’t need it. So why do I feel so guilty?” She wanted Nate to absolve her of the guilt. Then, the only thing left to do would be to get rid of the evidence. They should have bought a house with a working fireplace.

  Nate didn’t move, and even Trevor took a timeout from examining the pizza grease to look at his father stretched along the floor in his grimy pants and a sweat-stained shirt, his hair sticking straight up and a pizza box next to his ear.

  “You told Jeanne about the Huntington’s,” Nate said. He didn’t sound mad, exactly. “I don’t even know if I have it. I didn’t think it was public knowledge.”

  Emily stood at the foot of the stairs, a few yards from him but not moving closer. “She’s a doctor and a close friend. Trusting people isn’t a crime.”

  Nate had bottled up so much inside himself that he—and Emily and Trevor to some degree, too—had become an island. The fact that there were so many boats in this town didn’t help dispel that feeling. Since arriving on Friday, she and Nate hadn’t seen a single face they actually knew, anyone they had genuinely known before they arrived in Newport—until Jeanne showed up.

  “What if I’m dying?” Nate said.

  “If you’re dying, you’re not going to tell Jeanne about it?” It would, in fact, be just like Nate to underplay his own death. That was exactly what George appeared to be doing. “We’re all dying, Nate. It’s just a matter of who gets there first.”

  In the silence that followed, a tree brushed against the house’s side windows, scratching sharply against the glass. It was breezy out tonight. In New York, their apartment looked over the back of the building, into a courtyard. It was a real courtyard with trees and sky, not a New York City airshaft, and in the spring, when they slept with the bedroom window open, noises drifted up from their neighbors’ perches below. A barely discernable voice, the slam of a door, a metal pot dropped onto the unyielding tiles of a kitchen floor. Emily and Nate were renters in the city, but most of their friends had bought apartments in co-ops, where the inhabitants didn’t own their actual apartments, technically, but owned shares in the building itself. And thus share was the word that came to Emily’s mind on those balmy evenings in New York when the sounds of her neighbors (from downstairs in her own building and from the co-op across the yard) rose up and mingled with her own life.

  Here, though, they owned their actual house and the land on which it sat, as well as the small hedge that separated them from their neighbors. There was almost no traffic on their cul-de-sac street. At night in Newport, the only sounds Emily would hear would be Trevor’s fussing and the occasional deep wheeze from Nate and the knock-knock-knock of branches on their windows. The life that they lived here would be their own.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Drive to Narragansett, the Final Leg

  WHO WAS GEORGE BEDECKER? George considered this question as the sun beat down on Route 1 in southern Rhode Island. The highway loomed like his road to the finish line. Who was he? He had no innate pedigree. His parents had been middle-class Methodist drinkers with small goals that they’d accomplished by default. In Europe, this lack of lineage would have been a liability, but in America, in the lowdown trenches of architecture, all George had needed was an unremitting determination and a fail-proof work ethic. All it took was a lifetime of keeping his head down.

  After George left home in the 1950s, and in the years that followed, his father seemed to be proud of him but often mystified, as well. From the start, Hank Bedecker followed George’s architecture career with curiosity. He attempted to make sense of each accomplishment despite his lack of context in which to place it, a situation that caused Hank’s praise of George’s buildings to come across as muted and muddled. And then, Hank lost the brainpower to follow or praise anything at all.

  George witnessed and monitored his father’s decline. He visited Henry Charles Bedecker every six months during his decade of sickness. He watched as Hank lost his facial expression, then his stability, his muscle control, his capacity to feed himself, and eventually his power to swallow entirely. George’s father screamed often, not in pain, but in offense. He seethed with imagined anger and misconstrued jealousy. One spring, he’d lambasted George for stealing and hawking the only thing of value in the Narragansett house, a sterling silver gravy boat. George tried to elucidate the situation, explaining that the gravy boat hadn’t gone anywhere, it remained on the mantel where it had been displayed since the house’s construction (Look, Hank, the gravy boat is right here). In response, Hank hurled a pineapple through the air. The fruit missed George’s head by mere inches and shattered against the whitewashed wall at the back of the room.

  A week later Hank slapped one of his nurses. These outbursts came as a surprise to George. His father had never been a violent man. Yet everything George had known about Hank turned untrue during that final decade. His father became someone else, not gradually but in a single moment. As Hank lost his physical strength and no longer had the power to throw fruit, let alone to stand and walk, his mien took on a fierceness. His face gr
ew taut and angular, frozen at a cocked angle on his neck. In the mirror, George began to examine his own face for signs of gruesome change, but if the transformations were there, they were happening so slowly that he couldn’t detect them. Would he wake up one day to discover that he, too, was someone new? And on whom would his slaps fall? He had done everything he could to make sure that those punches would land far from his own children, his own surviving son.

  A small truck passed the Audi as George navigated the highway’s subtle curves. Without realizing it, he had slowed to a dangerously lethargic pace and now he softly increased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal, easing up closer to the speed limit. The road was beginning to look familiar. Unlike Chicago and Cleveland, the other places that George had called home, this part of the world had changed little since he lived here. The trees still grew thick right up to the edge of the roadway and the air had a blue tinge at mid-morning. It was the sense of history, the ability right here to step out of modern life, that made the place appealing. In Narragansett, no one would come knocking at his door. The neighbors wouldn’t wonder why he wasn’t trudging off to work every morning. Chances were, they wouldn’t recognize him. Eventually, when he hired an at-home nurse, they wouldn’t question it. People might stare, but they wouldn’t talk. He’d be seen as yet another deranged old man who’d chosen to live out the end of his life by the sea.

  His death would differ from his father’s in only one respect: George’s sons would not be flying in to monitor his illness. One son was long dead; the other, George hoped, would live for a long time. Given the distance between them, this son would never have to stand witness to his father’s decline the way that George had to Hank’s.

  Seeing his father’s deterioration (seeing the emptiness in his eyes and the manic insanity of his limbs) had unhinged George. Ever since, he’d had nightmares in which he was his father, nightmares that turned out to be premonitions. Knowing what his future held only made it worse. His boy, Nathan, if he had the disease, would at least be able to sleep in peace until the first symptoms emerged. He wouldn’t have the firsthand images—like war photographs, like multicolor aneurisms—in his head. By absenting himself from Nathan’s life, George had saved his son at least this anguish.

  This was what George told himself, but what did he know? He had lost his other son before bothering to know him. That should have spared George the pain after the boy’s death, but it didn’t. For years—and today, too—George’s heart ached for that son with the constancy of a pulse. If he could live his life over? No matter, a man could not relive the past. A man was given only one chance. George Bedecker’s legacy would not be his children. It would be his buildings, for however long they stood.

  For most of his sons’ childhoods, George had been away from these children, absorbed with his work. More than once, his mind turned to Longfellow: “The architect / Built his great heart into these sculptured stones / And with him toiled his children, and their lives / Were builded, with his own, into the walls.” What George had felt for his family—and, in those early years, he felt strongly, if privately—those feelings were built into the walls. The walls would stand staunch and strong and would bring no harm. Perhaps someday George’s surviving son might look up at one of the structures and think, This is me.

  This was what George was thinking as drove north on Route 1. He glanced down at the odometer again (miraculously he’d inched above the speed limit) and then looked up to find a deer leaping into the road. He slammed his foot on the brake and yanked hard on the steering wheel and the last thing he saw before hitting the ditch, before feeling the improbably slow glide of his wheels from pavement to gravel and down to dirt, was the deer bounding away, the animal’s pliant body rising into the air and off of the road and back into the thicket, unhurt. For a fraction of a second, George wondered if he could save himself, too—if he rotated the wheel toward the road with a fast and firm jerk, could he bring the car back up to the highway?—but his split-second meditation over whether this was what he wanted, over whether a return to the living was worth it, was interrupted by the crunch of the Audi’s fender as it accordioned against the rock-hard earth at the edge of the ditch. George felt his torso jettison fast forward, and the world went black in an instant.

  CHAPTER 29

  I’m Your Father

  NATE CONSIDERED NOT answering his cell phone when it rang. It was after 11:00 p.m., an hour when phone calls only brought bad news, and the number that popped up on his caller ID was from within Rhode Island. He couldn’t think of anyone in Rhode Island to whom he wanted to speak other than Emily, and she was within shouting distance. And she had a New York phone number. Shit, Nate thought. If he and Emily were going to genuinely commit to their lives here, they’d need to get new cell phone numbers in the 401 area code. And he’d have to start acting like an adult and taking responsibility for his life.

  “Hello?” he said, picking up the call. He ducked outside onto their front porch as he spoke. Emily was in the den, stretching sheets across their AeroBed.

  “Mr. Bedecker?” said a woman on the other end of the line. “I’m calling from Kent Hospital.” The hospital. Nate hadn’t expected the hospital to call.

  “I’m Nate Bedecker.” He stared out into the front lawn, the grass an iridescent black in the dim of the night.

  “Mr. Bedecker, I’m the floor nurse on your father’s hall. He’s conscious. He came out of his coma ten minutes ago.”

  “He’s awake?” Nate said. He hadn’t thought through the fact that his father might come out of his slumber and be okay tonight. The man had shown no signs, earlier, that he had any interest in rejoining the conscious world. He’d been so slack and acquiescent in his slumber. If he’d woken up back then, this morning (before Nate had uncovered the medical documents in the Audi’s trunk) Nate would have had plenty to talk to him about. Now, Nate had no interest.

  “Awake’s a relative term. Your father is conscious, but not entirely coherent. He’s heavily sedated. Both his body and his brain have gone through a shock. We have you listed as his next of kin.”

  “Which means?” Nate asked.

  “The on-call neurologist is driving in and should be here within ten minutes.” Nate heard someone talking in the background. “Fifteen. Fifteen minutes. You, or someone else from the family, should be here, too.”

  Nate raised his eyes and noticed an overhead light in the portico above him, a recessed central bulb in addition to the two electric lanterns that were propped on either side of the small porch. It was a nice touch. He’d left the front door cracked open and could hear Emily walking around the living room. Emily and Nate had practically cleaned out George Bedecker’s pantry and linen closet this afternoon, and now the man was awake. Assuming he was still the same inveterate ass Nate had once known, George’s first conscious request would probably be the prompt return of his chickpeas.

  “There’s no one else from the family. I’m it,” Nate said. It was a stark truth. Nate was the only other Bedecker and his sole urge was to throttle George, to abuse him and return him to his sleep. And the nurse was inviting him to visit? He shouldn’t, in truth, be allowed to go. He didn’t, in fact, have any reason to. More than anything, Nate had the desire to ignore his father. That, Nate understood from experience, was the most stringent form of abuse. “I’m not coming in,” he told the nurse.

  “All right,” the woman said. She sounded nonplussed by Nate’s decision. He heard papers rustling. “As I said, your father has only been conscious for a moment and he’s not coherent.” Nate waited for her to try to convince him to drive in. His father was awake, after all, for the first time since his crash, and Nate was the man’s only kin. “In your absence, if medical decisions need to be made for George Bedecker, do you authorize Ms. Antrim to make them?”

  “Excuse me?” He pressed the phone closer against his ear, his fingers growing tired from clutching it so tightly. He tried to close the gap between himself, the nurse, the nurs
e’s station, the hospital, and the whole insane situation.

  “Ms. Antrim. She arrived a half-hour ago. She says she’s his partner and his proxy. If you know otherwise, well, now is the time to speak up.” Nate looked at the Audi and its busted headlight and, parked behind it, Jeanne’s gleaming, completely operational rental car. “Mr. Bedecker, if you’re not coming in, someone will need to speak for your father’s needs.”

  Half an hour later Nate and Emily pulled into the hospital parking lot in Jeanne’s rental car, with Jeanne at the steering wheel and Trevor in a car seat in the back. It was Nate who’d insisted that Jeanne come along. Jeanne was a doctor, and Nate was sure that he, with his longstanding biases, shouldn’t be the one to make decisions for George. Neither should Philippa Antrim, a woman whose motives Nate had yet to suss out. Jeanne, however, would make fair and informed choices. There were plenty of instances in the past when Nate had questioned her—the way she tended to storm in and take over a room; the way she dressed, even when she went out for dinner, as if she were on her way to the gym—but she had been Emily’s sounding board since college and, from what Nate had seen, she’d rarely steered her wrong.

  As Jeanne turned the sedan into the hospital’s parking lot, Nate gave directions, pointing her toward the only nonhandicapped spots that were within throwing distance of the building’s front door. In the backseat Emily hummed to Trevor, who had been coming and going from sleep during the entire ride. His eyes, when he opened them, were wet and vacant. He’d been roused from a deep slumber in a strange home and then strapped into a car in the dark of the night.

  “Do you want me to take him?” Nate said to Emily as they got out of the car. They didn’t have Ollie with them. They’d have to carry the boy. In another month or two, he’d be too heavy to tote long distances. He’d be walking by then, though.