The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “The doctor is still here, somewhere. He’s flighty, a rat, you wouldn’t know that his VIP patient had just passed, but you should talk to him. And we have to make arrangements with the hospital, as you can imagine. I’m happy to make the arrangements, I can’t go to my hotel, it’s too sad. I’ve been here an hour and already I feel rooted in place. You have a son. Talk to the doctor and get that child home to sleep. Call me in the morning,” she scribbled the name of her hotel on a small bit of paper she took out of her pocket. “We can talk tomorrow. We’ll need to talk, and now, obviously, now is not the time. It’s certainly been a long day for all of us. I’m just”—her tears started again—“bless me, I’m just glad I got here to see him one last time.”

  “He was awake when you got here?” Nate asked.

  “He woke up when I was by his bedside,” she said. “He was only alert for fifteen minutes before he died.”

  “Did he say anything?” Nate asked.

  Emily saw the look in Nate’s eyes, the hope that his father had explained the meaning of life—the meaning of Nate’s life—before collapsing into the great unknown.

  “He was disoriented.”

  “The nurse told me,” Nate said.

  “You should be thankful that you didn’t see it. It’s not the way to remember your father. Remember him as he was.”

  Was when? When he was an embryo? Emily wanted to ask. Because Nate hadn’t told a single story involving his adult father in which he was a character worth memorializing.

  “But he said something?” Nate asked again.

  “He said something.”

  “What?” Nate said.

  “It was barely a sentence. He wasn’t himself. There was no George there. He was delirious and could only manage a few words.”

  “Just tell me what my father said.”

  “You know, no matter what, that he loved you, Nate.”

  “But what did he say?” Nate said.

  “Please,” Emily pled to Philippa, if only to end the agony. “What did he say?”

  “Emily is a cocksucker,” Philippa said. “He said, ‘Emily is a cocksucker.’”

  Nate laughed, hysterical hyena laughter, as he sat behind the wheel of the rental car. Trevor and Jeanne were both asleep in the back. Next to Nate, Emily assumed the classic subway straphanger position, gripping the handle above the passenger side door. She’d just finished explaining to Nate how she’d ranted at his father this morning. “My name is Emily!” she’d screamed before calling the guy an asshole. Apparently coma patients were like infants, you had to watch what you said in their presence. They took in more than you knew. Emily now clung to the car in case Nate tried to eject her.

  The light had turned green but Nate didn’t move the vehicle. He paused his laughs to catch his breath, and just as Emily thought he was done with the hysterics they started again.

  “It’s—” he said, and then the cackles rose in intensity, sounding like chokes as he tried to get a breath into his lungs. “Okay,” he said, after the light turned red again. At nearly 2:00 a.m. on the back roads of Rhode Island at the tail end of a long weekend, the streets were empty. The air was dead, the atmosphere recouping for the day and the season ahead. “Okay, my father called you a cocksucker.” He got one final laugh in. A small, tired guffaw to end the tirade. “It’s true, Em. You are a cocksucker. I’ve seen you suck cock.” He wiped a tear away from his eye. He’d laughed so hard that he’d cried, more tears than he’d shed over his father’s body. “You know, George was always a stickler for the truth. There was no small talk with George Bedecker. And calling you a cocksucker, it’s as honest as calling Trevor a bastard. Even his insults were ultimately fact-checkable.” Nate wheezed, the last bit of laugh he had left, and then inched the car forward as the light changed.

  “Fuck you,” Emily said, looking straight out the window at the narrow band of road illuminated by their headlights.

  “Lighten up. It’s funny.”

  “It’s not funny. I’m sorry that I ruined your father’s last minutes on earth.” If she’d known he was about to die from a crushed spleen, she probably would have held her tongue. Spleen, on its own, seemed like an appropriate way for George Bedecker to be done in. In Machiavelli’s era, after renowned misers died, their spleens were burned by those they’d wronged. Emily looked over at Nate, who had stopped laughing. His face was grave now. “I destroyed his final day alive,” she said.

  “If you had known my father at all, you’d know that no one but he himself had the capacity to ruin his day.”

  “Come on.”

  “Okay, maybe I. M. Pei. Pei could ruin George’s day. But you? He’d swat you like a mosquito. Or maybe he’d even give you credit for your defiance. He was strong-willed himself, or used to be, at least.”

  “I’m serious,” Emily said.

  “I’m serious, too.” Nate slowed down the car and looked at Emily. “And thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For calling him out. Someone had to. Even if he’d woken up, even if he’d walked out of that hospital bed and continued his life, padding around that empty family house until his genes nailed him, I don’t know if I could have done it. I’m an emotional coward. And it would have killed me if he’d gone to his grave before anyone had a chance to give him flack for the lives he trashed. Cocksucker,” Nate said, turning off the car’s brights as they merged onto the Jamestown Bridge where, for the first time, they were joined by a smattering of other traffic, “Cocksucker, you have my sincerest gratitude.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Home

  NATE HADN’T SLEPT WELL since the moment he’d stumbled onto the clip about his father, more than forty days ago. He’d lain awake in bed each night, with his eyes closed, concentrating on keeping his breaths steady so that Emily would think he was out cold. He’d spent weeks like that, every night, breathing with the rhythm of a metronome as he parsed the details of his day until Emily was asleep, and then lightly thrashing and imagining his own doom for the next few hours—finally getting up to go online when the conjectured terrors became too real to handle.

  Tonight, in their new home, he and Emily were both awake. She sat next to him on the AeroBed in their downstairs den, folding their tiny pile of laundry—the clothes they’d been wearing for four days straight. She was wearing nothing but Jeanne’s T-shirt again, as if she and Nate had never left the house to go to the hospital. Nate was in his boxers. He took his wallet from the floor and removed the money from the billfold.

  “Fourteen dollars left,” he said.

  “Seventeen,” Emily said, adding three crumpled bills to his stack. On leaving the Elms, she’d stuffed fifteen dollars into the donation box, her entry fee, leaving her with only these three singles. “I guess we don’t have big needs, when it comes down to it.”

  “Huh. We could have afforded a second, cheap bottle of vino with this cash.”

  “Or something stronger.”

  “Like arsenic,” Nate said and then forced a laugh, because he was joking, it was a joke, he wanted Emily to know he wasn’t serious. “Or, you know, rum.”

  The night had started with Barbaresco and ended with a thud. Its reverberations rang in Nate’s ears like the lingering echo of a struck gong. He and Emily both breathed softly, slowly, barely.

  “If I ever turn into George, keep Trevor away from me,” Nate said between measured breaths.

  “Huntington’s is not a scapegoat for the way he treated you,” Emily said. “You’re not going to turn into that. It’s who he is as a man.”

  “Who he was.”

  “Who he was,” Emily said. “There’s a chance that you inherited his disease, okay, but you didn’t inherit his character.” She laid the last of the laundry—Trevor’s sweater—atop the pile. “And you can lament that you never reconciled, but no car accident or genetic disease was going to make him a better person. So maybe you got the disease. Even so, you could have another thirty years left,” at this Emily stopp
ed, fought to regain her own strength. Thirty years, looked at in some lights, wasn’t long at all. “Another fifty years, even. Don’t go fucking those years up by planning your own death.”

  Nate nodded. “His buildings were beautiful,” he said after a moment of quiet.

  “Are beautiful,” Emily said.

  One of George’s most prominent qualities had always been his steadfast refusal to change. Even his buildings catered only to his own whims, not the prevailing currents of their particular era. In architecture, over the long term, this was a strength. There was nothing faddish or facile about his work. The buildings were the best of him—as far as Nate knew. He was coming to understand that maybe the George of his childhood wasn’t the only, or the best, George Bedecker. So what was the best part of Nate? Until last month, he’d always assumed that his greatest accomplishments, other than Trevor, were yet to come.

  And now? He reminded himself (and tried to believe it) that there was a chance he was healthy. He could have a future, the kind of future he often caught Emily dreaming about: They’d move to a larger house after this one, somewhere with more land. They’d have two SUVs in the driveway, one that would be Trevor’s eventually, and a slate roof and a side door falling off its hinges from overuse. They’d have neighbors who’d wander over for potlucks, and a crappy lawnmower that worked a quarter of the time if they were lucky. They’d forget about New York. They’d forget about the month before the move when he’d slowly come to doubt all that was good, when he and Emily had lost their sight. He’d tell Trevor about their Huntington’s risk as soon as the boy was old enough to understand, and someday, if Trevor wanted to know for sure if he had the disease—and if Nate was still healthy at that time, still unaware of his own Huntington’s status (and still untested, because tonight Nate couldn’t predict how he’d feel tomorrow or next month about being tested, and that was fine)—they could get tested together. Trevor would not have to go through this alone. They would have one another, all three of them.

  “What do you think Philippa will do with the old house?” Nate asked.

  “She won’t want it. She’s not the old beach house kind of broad.”

  “She didn’t seem like my father’s kind of broad, either.”

  “I sort of liked her,” Emily said.

  “You can’t be serious.” From what Nate saw at the hospital, Philippa was bossy and outrageous, a tough woman for Nate to get his head around. “It’s so incongruous, the whole idea of her. She seemed so harsh.”

  “Maybe hard people are the only ones to whom George could relate,” Emily said. “If you could call what they had relating. Maybe she was right for him. It seems they needed each other, somehow.”

  “She said my father loved me.”

  Emily nodded.

  “Do you think she’d lie about that?” Nate said.

  “I don’t think she’s the type who lies to make nice.”

  Maybe there really had been another George, a parallel George to the one Nate had imagined for all of these years. That was a thought Nate could hold onto.

  Emily moved closer to Nate, the inflated mattress shifting under her weight. “She doesn’t know the house is hers yet, you know,” Emily said. “We’ll have to show her the will tomorrow. She’ll see it eventually anyway.” Nate didn’t speak, and Emily continued, “We could buy the house from her probably, if you want to keep it in the family. We could put this place on the market and move the money over to that house. We could live there.” Emily tucked her hair behind her ears and looked at Nate, intent, waiting.

  “We couldn’t live there,” Nate said. “My grandfather died there. My father tried to die there, from what I can tell.” He could feel the threat of his own death, in a primeval way, but even that, tonight, was a sign that Nate Bedecker was alive. Nate would live in his own, new house.

  Now, that new house was silent, a fallow silence reminiscent of Bedecker House with its heavy walls and thick plates of glass, materials that all those years ago had kept the outside world at bay and deemed even the workings of the structure itself—the water, the heat—almost noiseless. Nate hadn’t referred to an actual house as his home since then. He’d shuttled between dorm rooms and condo sublets and rental apartments, packing light and alone. He’d never refinished floors or skim-coated walls on his own dime. Here, they’d talked about doing a bit of work: built-in cabinets in Trevor’s room, a new color, something earthy, in the master bedroom, and maybe, when they had the money (if they had the money), new tile and countertops for the kitchen and bathrooms. Feeling the sturdy silence of this home at night, he understood why people built their own residences from the ground up. An expression of self in a structure that would long outlive you: There was an appeal to this. He and Emily would do their small part. Someday, he hoped, Trevor would bring his own kids, his own healthy kids, back here and they’d see the cabinets that Trevor’s parents had conceived and the tiles they’d laid. That was the best-case scenario. A house, a family history. This was Nate’s future. A tentative future, certainly. But a possible future, for sure. Here.

  No footsteps came from the guest bedroom, which sat directly on top of the den. Jeanne must have already fallen asleep up there, on the bed they’d inflated for her. Trevor was in the hallway, conked out in the Bugaboo, where they’d deposited him when they returned from the hospital. It wouldn’t hurt him to sleep one night in his stroller, would it? He’d holler if he needed them, he always did. He always hollered. He always needed them.

  Emily was thinking about Trevor, too. She bent over and lay her hand flat on the wood floor and felt its warmth. The last time she and Nate had slept on a floor was right after they bought their new mattress, less than two years ago. They’d thrown their old one out after it got wet and mildewed thanks to a leak from apartment 10J, above them. Together they hauled the rank bedding down to the trash room in their building’s basement, and then, to replace it, ordered a Serta Aviator, a superfirm queen, at a discount directly from a North Carolina distributor. The catch was that it took three weeks to arrive. In the twenty-one days that they were bedless, Nate and Emily slept on the floor, atop the couch’s rearranged cushions and their spare blankets.

  On the day that their new bed was expected, Emily went to her annual doctor’s appointment and fumbled when her gynecologist asked the standard question, “When was your last period?” Emily couldn’t place it. “It was supposed to be last week, I think, but I missed it. I’ve been out of whack. We’ve been sleeping on the floor,” she said. Could you be pregnant, her doctor wanted to know, and Emily laughed. She’d been on the pill for so long that she probably wasn’t even fertile anymore. And she was so old! All of her friends who’d gotten pregnant at this age, well into their late thirties, had managed it only with the help of fertility drugs and, for so many of them, full-on in vitro. To get pregnant without trying, while on the pill? “I’m sure it’s just the floor thing,” Emily said. When her doctor gave her skeptical look, she agreed to a pregnancy test.

  She’d waited another two and a half weeks to tell Nate the results—it was like divine intervention, the positive test at this age with no high-tech help, especially after she and Nate had spent so many nights talking about the idea of having a family and his insistence that he couldn’t handle it. He hadn’t wanted a child. He’d been vehemently skittish when it came to the subject of parenthood. So for more than a fortnight she kept the baby news to herself, questioning whether she would have this child at all. She didn’t want to lose Nate. But as her breasts grew tender and she felt increasingly lightheaded every afternoon while sitting at her desk at work, she came to realize that she didn’t want to lose the child, either. She wanted this child. When she finally presented Nate with the news after the fact, after she had already made peace with the truth of her unplanned motherhood, Nate, it turned out, wanted a child, too—he simply hadn’t known it. She wouldn’t have to live without either of them. She had felt so lucky.

  She’d loved Nate entire
ly in that moment. She’d drifted since. She’d felt space between them—he and his Huntington’s, she and her anxiety, her desperate grasp that turned literal when she took the Rufino—but she wouldn’t let it happen again. She wouldn’t let herself lose him.

  If she’d known four years ago, during her initial moments with Nate atop the Third Avenue Bridge—before the pregnancy and their move to Newport and all that had happened in between—if she’d known back then that the man next to her was never going to earn enough money to keep them in Manhattan, that he had grave hesitations about becoming a parent, that he harbored deep-seated father issues and might die a disfiguring, early death (and could doom his own child to the same), Emily would never have agreed to go out with him. She’d turned down plenty of men for so much less. Nate was everything she hadn’t been looking for, but tonight, she was okay with that—even as she felt the weight of the hard truths they would have to work through in the months and years to come.

  A sliver of light from the slim moon came in through the den’s windows. In the morning, the sun would wake them up first thing, long before Trevor’s earliest cry. They would all be all right. He and she and Trevor. Emily breathed the house’s air: two floors and a basement and an attic, no furniture, no belongings, not even a TV. Just a couple of AeroBeds and a stroller and two thousand square feet of possibility, waiting to be filled, and one small boy on the verge of taking his first steps. Everything would be okay, even if it wasn’t. She monitored the soft, satisfying in and out of Nate’s breath as he sat beside her. If she found herself, next week or next year or three decades from today, having to survive without him, having to suffer without their son—if Nate got sick or Trevor fell ill or she lost her mind or her wallet or her health—if everything went downhill from here, if the world ended in a bang tomorrow and took all of her dreams with it, at least, she thought, she will have had this.