The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “Thanks,” Emily said, stepping out of the way. The parking lot looked like a theater stage, all black except in the halo-like spots of light thrown down by the high-intensity streetlamps that dotted the pavement. Bugs darted around the bulbs giving the light a murky quality. “What do you think she’s like?” Emily said.

  “She?” Nate said. He knew who Emily was talking about.

  “Antrim.”

  What do you think he’ll be like, Nate wondered. Would George be babbling away in his delirious state? Or typically stoic? What would he say to his son after so much time, and with his life on the line? Nate slowed down his pace as he walked toward the hospital with Trevor. His feet moved with the deliberate weight of an army tank, choking off the progress of time, delaying the moments to come. George was inside the hospital and awake. In the sci-fi comics that Nate and Charlie had traded as kids, traveling in time was as easy as walking from one room of a house to another. Time was an easily manipulated dimension.

  Jeanne and Emily walked ahead and were nearly at the hospital’s front door. “Did you lock the car?” Nate said to Jeanne. She nodded.

  “Are you okay?” Emily asked, coming back toward him. Nate wasn’t moving at all now. He and Trevor stood in an empty parking space beside the hospital’s front walkway. The blue handicapped sign painted on the asphalt circumscribed Nate and his son, like an accusation.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and started walking again, shifting Trevor in his arms and acting as if the boy’s weight was what had hindered him.

  Inside the hospital he nodded to the distracted night receptionist at the lobby desk. The woman, portly and strong and wearing a janitor’s uniform, did nothing to halt this foursome even though it was well past visiting hours. Nate continued his glacial march in the direction of the stairs and then paused and backtracked to the elevator bank. It was only one floor up to his father’s room, but the elevator would be slower. It was a hospital elevator, rigged to linger for a significant amount of time on each floor when it stopped. It was geared toward the pokey movers—the crutchers, the wheelchair-bound, the kids with IVs attached to their arms. The men who weren’t quite coherent. What did that mean? The nurse had said George wasn’t coherent. Nate couldn’t fathom his father as anything but inexorably coherent. The elevator arrived on the first floor and the doors opened.

  “Would you mind meeting me up there?” Nate said to Jeanne and Emily, who’d caught up with him.

  “You sure?” Emily said.

  “Yeah.” Nate stepped inside the lift with Trevor and the doors finally closed on them. The space was cavernous. Two gurneys could fit inside, Nate figured. Or a partners’ desk and two chairs. Or an entire kindergarten class, crammed together shoulder to toe like sardines. The car moved up so slowly that Nate couldn’t detect the motion and was taken by surprise when the doors opened on the second floor.

  Nate stepped out and listened. His father’s room was just a few doors down the hall and around a corner; if George was raving like a lunatic, Nate would be able to hear it from here, but all was silent. A nurse walked by and the rubber soles of her shoes clung briefly to the floor with each step, a rhythmic squash against the linoleum. Nate and Trevor reached the corner and Nate peered around it. Two men and a woman in pink scrubs were gathered at the nurse’s station at the far end of the corridor, but other than that the hallway was empty.

  Nate picked up the pace and crossed the threshold into his father’s room before he could lose his nerve. He wouldn’t be the first to talk; he’d wait for his father to start, even if the wait was endless. Nate steeled his face and clenched his teeth, gritting through the uncomfortable, building pressure of enamel on enamel. If his head exploded right now, he thought, that wouldn’t be the worst thing. He moved his numb, expectant gaze to the bed, worried and excited (not an optimistic excited, but excited in the old-fashioned sense, agitated and manic and likely to jump through a plate-glass window) about the prospect of meeting his father’s eye. But George’s eyes were closed. Nate breathed out and felt his chest loosen. George was asleep again. Or resting. He’d been through a shock, the nurse had said on the phone. Maybe George had fallen into another coma on his own, without Nate’s help.

  Nate was surprised not to see Philippa Antrim lurking in the room. An instinctive picture of her had taken shape in his head. She’d be lean and bony with her hair defiantly white and pulled into a knot at the nape of her neck. She’d be austere and would obviously have to be somewhat deranged, given how much time she’d spent with George. In the picture, she was standing over George’s bed reciting endearments, love poems, the cable TV schedule, shopping lists of life complaints, or whatever it was that old, cold people said to each other.

  Except that she wasn’t there. The room was empty. Just three Bedeckers: George, Nate, Trevor. Nate turned so that his half-asleep son could see his grandfather. Trevor looked away, though, and nestled his tired head into the crook of Nate’s neck. The boy smelled fresh, truly clean finally. Emily had bathed him back at their house, after Jeanne returned from her shopping trip a few hours ago.

  “I’m your father, Trevor. And this guy, he’s my father. You won’t have to see him again after today,” Nate said, and it felt good. He pried Trevor’s arms and legs from around his body and sat him on the bed, next to George. With what looked like a Herculean effort, Trevor turned his head and peered at the patient, leaned toward him. He looked at George’s face for only a second—just long enough to discern that it wasn’t as alluring as Baby Beethoven or a stuffed lamb—before looking away.

  After today, after all of the health decisions were decided, if George woke up again, Nate would say his good-byes. Maybe he’d tell the man off first, but it was too late for that, wasn’t it? An unexpected calm came over Nate. At least this once, Trevor had met his grandfather. As much as Nate didn’t want George to have a role in the child’s upbringing, he owed it to his ten-month-old son to at least let him see where he’d come from. For this single moment, Trevor and his grandfather shared the same space. Trevor deserved that. The room counterintuitively felt more tranquil than it had earlier today, when George was still in his coma.

  “I’m sorry,” a voice came from behind Nate, and he turned. A nurse he’d never seen before stood in the doorway. She looked to be in her eighties, at least, as if she’d forgone retirement with the intention of ministering to patients until she herself keeled over. “I’m Dinetta Shelley. I’m the one who phoned you. We had no warning. We had every indication that he was out of danger.”

  It was only after the nurse spoke that Nate understood why the room felt more tranquil. The hum of the monitors was gone. The machines next to George’s bed were dark.

  A staccato croak escaped from Nate’s throat. He held onto the side of the bed for stability. George was gone. Nate was the only member of his original family left. If he disappeared, too, it would be as if the foursome who’d inhabited that glass and concrete cube so long ago had never existed. The only proof that they’d walked on this earth would be the impersonal monoliths built by George. And someday, perhaps generations from now, those would tumble too.

  Trevor pivoted in his seat and reached for Nate as if sensing danger. He grabbed Nate’s sleeve and tried to pull himself to his feet. Trevor. Trevor was proof. Nate lifted the boy in his arms again. Trevor would have to be a survivor, too.

  “Dr. Nilchek arrived just before your father died and was with him, as was Ms. Antrim,” the nurse said. Nate looked at her and nodded, stupidly and instinctively, and she continued, “It was his spleen. The doctor can explain it. He’s in the waiting room whenever you’re ready. Feel free to take your time.”

  “Thanks,” Nate said. He felt a gaping nothingness in his heart. A deep and dark hole where he’d been full before. The threat of George—of him reappearing, disapproving, looming either as a flesh and blood figure or in his buildings—had perpetually, subconsciously been a part of Nate. In its place, he now felt nothing. In this room (between the
se chalky blue walls and the pockmarked and paneled ceiling, beneath fluorescent lights and the glow from a call button that hung precariously low beside the head of the bed) on a night when the last mosquitoes of the season were biting and the stars and the moon were hidden by a dense fog, at a moment when Nate’s own life felt remarkably tenuous, this was where it all came to an end.

  CHAPTER 30

  Remember Him as He Was

  EMILY LOOKED ON FROM the doorway to George’s room. It was wrong, spying on Trevor and Nate, but she’d felt even more displaced biding her time down the hall. There, in that waiting room, the neurologist (not the no-nonsense doctor they’d met with this morning, but a younger colleague, one junior enough to still be saddled with overnight call on holiday weekends) was consoling Philippa Antrim. Emily had felt like an imposter. She wasn’t a blood relative and she’d never met George while he was awake.

  George was dead. That’s what the doctor said. Emily’s first reaction was guilt. She’d called George Bedecker an asshole. If anything could cause a notoriously reticent blowhard’s heart to stop, that was it. He was an icon and she’d sworn at him in a high-pitched scream mere inches from his comatose face. She’d killed the man.

  “I’m sorry,” Emily said to the doctor, her voice timid and quiet, “but do you know exactly what caused his heart to stop?” She tried to feign ignorance, sure that her culpability was obvious, trickling out of her pores and percolating under her words. She was a thief and a murderer! George deserved her strong reprimand, but she hadn’t meant to shock him into death (into submission, yes, but not death). If Emily had been patient (Emily, who had never been patient) he’d have died on his own. Between the car crash and Huntington’s, he can’t have had many years left.

  “His problem wasn’t cardiac,” the doctor said, and Jeanne translated (pausing to offer Emily a pill from her purse; Emily said no without even asking which particular sedative the capsule contained) explaining how it happened, how George had sustained abdominal trauma during the crash that hadn’t been detected. He’d died from an undiagnosed ruptured spleen. The doctor continued to talk, apparently covering his tracks, trying to fend off a malpractice suit against the hospital. Emily was focused on the diagnosis. His spleen had ruptured yesterday, and hadn’t bled out until today when he’d died. It wasn’t Emily’s fault.

  Her second reaction was shameful: She felt relief. Not over the fact that she hadn’t murdered the seminal American architect, but relief that he was dead. Nate would be free of the weight of his father. The thought wasn’t just shameful. It was also incorrect, she saw now from her perch in the doorway of room 207B. Nate had been denied closure, and it could be a long time before he reckoned with the ghost of his father. And if Nate turned out to be carrying the Huntington’s gene, it would be as if his father had never died at all. His father would be inside of Nate, a part of him.

  Emily could already see the change in Nate. He looked older. His shoulders were rounded in the posture of a man well past middle age. His knees were bent as if shirking from the heft of Trevor, who was in his arms. He looked down at the body in the bed and rocked back and forth, as if steadying himself against an ocean tide. Emily walked into the room.

  “Nate,” she said tentatively, putting a hand on the low of his back.

  He passed Trevor to her and then laid his own hands on his father’s arm. “He’s still warm,” Nate said. “I’ve never thought of my father as warm before.”

  “He looks exactly as he did this morning.”

  “I know.”

  “The doctor and Philippa both want to talk to you. They’re in the waiting room.”

  Nate nodded and for the first time turned his attention from George’s body. “You’ve met her?”

  “I didn’t talk to her, but I’ve seen her. She looks harmless. She’s what I expected from a Philippa, I guess. She’s like a Midwestern Oompa Loompa. Short and round with a shock of red hair.”

  “That’s what you expected?”

  “Minus the roundness.” There was a boldness and brashness to Philippa, an unapologetic frankness to her look, which Emily respected. The woman was wearing a kimono-style silk dress that would have looked wrong on anyone else, especially anyone else her height—five feet flat, if Emily estimated right—but which gave her an appearance of fierce confidence even in this milieu, the monotonous environs of a hospital waiting room, a place that drained even the thickest skinned fighters of their strength.

  “Let’s go then, I want to get this over with.” Nate took his hands off his father’s arm and then lightly touched the man’s forehead, as if feeling for a fever. He made no motion to leave the room.

  “I’ll be down the hall. It’s the waiting room right past the nurse’s desk,” Emily said.

  When Nate rejoined Emily a few minutes later, the hunch was gone from his shoulders. He caught her eye and she got up, leaving Trevor asleep on a bench next to Jeanne, who was leafing through a tattered copy of Fit Pregnancy.

  The doctor had left to see another patient, but Philippa Antrim was still in the room. Her head was bent over an open book, a cheap mass market mystery with a scythe on its cover and fake blood dripping off the letters of the author’s name. Emily had been watching her glare into the book, unmoving, not flipping the pages. Emily had been tempted to prod her, to toss a chlamydia prevention pamphlet in her lap just to get a reaction.

  The woman didn’t stir until Nate had fully entered the room. Then, she rose from her seat and carefully laid her book on the chair next to her.

  “Fuck,” Nate said when he saw her, the expletive slipping out just loud enough for Emily to hear as she came to his side. “My mother must be rolling over in her grave.” Emily understood. Philippa couldn’t be any less European if she was wearing an American flag. And she was the only clue left to who Nate’s father had become over these past few years. As Philippa neared him, Nate opened his mouth to speak.

  “Hi, I—” was all that Nate got out before Philippa interrupted.

  “Nathan, yes?” she said. She barely came up to Nate’s shoulder. When she reached out her hand to him she extended it up, instead of out. Emily was jarred by the motion. She’d thought perhaps the two would hug. Nate was George’s only living progeny, the remnant from his old family; Philippa was the closest thing he had to kin today. Some form of affection must be called for. Emily focused her attention past Nate, down the hospital hallway. The doctor said he’d be right back, but he’d been gone for forever, it seemed, and the hallway was empty.

  “I’m Philippa,” the woman said and without warning she started to bawl, fat bulbs of water dribbling down her face, leaving track marks across her makeup like the cracks in a fossil. Oh God, Emily thought, this woman really loved George. She must have. Emily reached into her pockets for a tissue but had none. Nate looked dazed, as if he were having an out of body experience that had taken him to Morocco or Mumbai, somewhere far from here.

  “Hold on,” Emily said, and ran back to Trevor and the diaper bag. She returned with a moist wipe and handed it to the woman. Nate eyed Emily suspiciously. George had just died and Emily was offering a butt-wipe to the man’s grieving lover. The woman took it and swiped her cheeks, removing a swath of her makeup along with her tears.

  “Whoo!” Philippa said faking a smile, a wan smile. “Whooee!” Her voice was airy and drained. “I was hoping to save the crying until I got back to the hotel. I hadn’t expected to be at George’s deathbed today. No one prepared me for this.” She shook her head and wiped her nose with the same wipe she’d used on her face. “I’m glad you called me, Nate. I need to thank you for that.”

  “We didn’t know you’d make it out here so soon,” he said. “Your son, he didn’t say you’d be getting here tonight.” Nate turned to Emily, “Did he?” Nate, after all, wasn’t the one who had spoken to Pete Antrim. “We didn’t tell him it was urgent. We didn’t know. My father looked as if he could linger for a long time.”

  “Well, he’s always
been one for surprises. But what would you know?” she said. Nate only shrugged. Philippa’s tears started up again. “Eight years with a man, and this is what it comes to.”

  Eight years. If George had been with Philippa for eight years, that meant the two were already dating, Emily figured, when Nate and George last spoke. Yet according to Nate, George had never mentioned her. Nate looked sad, but Emily was sure that he never mentioned his lovers in their father-son talks, either. Nate had conceived and born a child with Emily, and never even tried to tell his father about it. The wall had been built up and cemented from both sides.

  “Eight years?” Nate said.

  “Ever since he consulted on the annex.”

  “The annex?” Emily asked.

  “At the library. At Loyola.”

  When Emily continued to look at her expectantly Philippa went on gently, as if reminding Emily of something she should already know, “I archive the rare books and academic papers? That’s how we met? Great Lord, I’m glad I flew here in time to see him today.” Philippa’s tears, which had barely abated, were overpowering in the face of Nate and Emily’s lack of them. Emily knew she would cry later, when they were home. Not over George, but for Nate.

  “He’d told you he was going to a conference? That’s what your son said,” Nate said.

  “Well,” she finished with the wipe and handed it back to Emily, as if Emily were a bathroom attendant, “that’s what he said. I don’t ask questions. He lives—lived—his life. I led mine. And when we were lucky, they intersected. We were alike in that way. Habitual companionship is a shackle. Who needs it?”

  “Me!” Emily burst out before she could stop herself. It came out more like meep, like a chirp, a call for attention. Nate might die young, but while he was here, she would shackle herself to him. There would be no part-time love in Emily’s life. She wrapped her hands around Nate’s arm while Philippa kept talking.