The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  The cops drove them into town—Nate and Emily in the cruiser’s backseat with Trevor between them, nestled in a police-issue baby seat—and left them on the Viking’s doorstep. If any of the big four-stars had a cancellation and would be willing to take in this family without credit cards, it was the Viking. Nate was already in their customer database. He’d stayed at the hotel twice while interviewing for his job.

  Finding a room here tonight, though, didn’t look promising. The Viking’s lobby was buzzing with guests who’d already checked in. A bellhop struggled to fit two rolling luggage carts into one elevator, shoving a soft duffel atop a bulging suit bag. The hotel was teeming. It wasn’t merely Columbus Day weekend, it was also the final weekend of the season in Newport—the city’s last hurrah. Still, there could be a vacancy. People canceled hotel rooms all the time, just as the innkeeper said. Nate had friends who were so accustomed to welshing on plans that they didn’t even bother to void their reservations. They simply didn’t show up to claim the rooms they’d booked and, on a regular basis, forfeited the one-night security deposit.

  And Columbus Day wasn’t really a holiday anymore. It had fallen out of favor and been replaced by Martin Luther King Day and other more appropriate celebrations, celebrations that didn’t commemorate the cannibalization of a pristine continent by white men in tall ships. Lately, all across the United States, accountants and schoolteachers and other hardworking folk had seen Columbus Day excised from their days-off schedule as if the great Italian navigator never existed, as if the Europeans in North America had simply materialized from the earth in a late-breaking act of Darwinism: the great 1492 mutation in which, with one time-lapse generation, tadpoles wandered onto dry land and quickly evolved into men, women, and children with pale skin and a strange proclivity for eating their food with forks.

  “Can I help you? Reservations?” A uniformed clerk appeared behind the counter, a lanky twenty-year-old with prepster hair and epaulets on his shoulders. Reservations, Nate had plenty of those.

  “Actually, we don’t have a room booked,” Nate said.

  The clerk raised his hands, palms to the air. “And you’re looking for? A room?” the kid asked. Nate had the feeling that this guy was trained as a car valet, pressed into desk duty because of the holiday crowds. Either that or anyone could get a promotion in Newport these days. Nate smiled.

  “The thing is, we hadn’t expected to need one, or we’d have made a reservation,” Nate said. “Our car was stolen tonight with all of our financial papers inside, and so we’ve had our credit cards canceled and holds put on our bank accounts. The police thought you might be able to help us out with a room.” When the clerk still didn’t respond, Nate continued, “I stayed here last month, so you should have my name in your system. I’m a loyal customer. You should have a record of me being an upstanding guy and all.” Nate’s tone was sweet and accommodating. If this didn’t work they’d be out on the street.

  “You don’t have credit cards?” The kid gave Nate a once-over. He’d probably never met anyone without a credit card before. He’d probably never met anyone without an iPod and an Xbox, either. Meet Nate, Mr. Suddenly Unencumbered. His iPod had been stolen with the Jeep. He’d forgotten to mention that on the police report.

  “I have a copy of our police report; you can confirm the theft for yourself. You can even make imprints of our cards. I mean, we have the plastic, it’s just that they’ve been canceled.” Nate didn’t even know yet if this hotel had a room vacant. His whining might be for naught in the end. “On Monday we’ll have new cards, and our bank accounts will be activated again. You can call the banks yourself to verify that we have legitimate accounts.”

  “On Tuesday,” the clerk corrected, his voice flat. “Monday’s a bank holiday.”

  Banks, the last great champions of white colonialism, keeping Nate from his money for one extra day. “On Tuesday,” Nate agreed. “We’ll need a room until then anyway.”

  They’d need a room until their accounts and cards were unfrozen, allowing them to purchase the few necessities that would make their empty home livable. Or maybe their car would be found tomorrow, with their belongings still miraculously jammed inside. Nate hadn’t been able to get a straight answer from the cops as to whether the officers would go through the luggage if the car were found. Nate hoped not, half-wished that the car would be discovered empty. It’s not as if he was an actual criminal. It was just a little illegality—one tiny dime bag of pot under the seat, his just-in-case stash. He hadn’t smoked for more than a year until a month ago, when suddenly he needed a release, needed to free his mind for a time. His car stash was so small that the cops probably wouldn’t care. Emily would, though.

  “I’ll get a manager,” the kid said. He shrugged before turning away and added, “Good luck, man.”

  Emily approached carrying Trevor. She had a hopeful smile on her face—her shoulder-length hair tucked behind her ears, her face open, keen—and Nate understood that he wouldn’t be having his soul-baring talk with her tonight as planned. He had to talk to her eventually, he knew that, but maybe his timing had been wrong all along. Even if they had made it to their home tonight, would it have been fair to lay so much heavy information on her right now, to bring her farther down only hours after arriving in a strange city? A city she hadn’t wanted to move to in the first place? She’d be in a better emotional place in a week or a month or a year, once their life here was tangibly underway. Or perhaps he should have had this talk with her already. A month ago.

  “All clean,” she said, motioning to the boy’s diaper. “Next one’s yours. I’ve got my head back on, ready to roll with the punches.” She really did seem ready to roll, unnaturally so. Was she on something? Nate knew she had habits, even if she didn’t admit to them. Emily lifted the boy, sat him on the marble check-in counter, and followed Nate’s gaze to where the Bugaboo was parked in the corner of the lobby. “What? You think I forgot to lock Ollie, too?” she said. Then, “Sorry, bad joke.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nate said.

  “Are they going to give us a home here? I think I could get used to this.”

  “No word yet. I was just thinking about your college studies, of the ancient brainiacs. There’s something Darwinian about this whole escapade.” He looked at Emily and Trevor, and then past them, at the small expanse of the lobby.

  “Sure. But I wouldn’t call the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ancient.”

  It was squarely nighttime now. Over Emily’s shoulder Nate saw older couples drift into the lobby. The men wore navy blazers and lightweight slacks. The women, in cinched-waist dresses and pale pantsuits, clung to the men’s arms. Coming in from dinner, it looked like. A cluster of younger women, younger than Emily, ran through the lobby in stilettos and halter tops, sherbet-colored wraps draped over their shoulders like ballasts. Two men in badly pleated pants and surf T-shirts wandered out of the bar. Nate reached for the waist of Emily’s low-slung corduroys. She moved closer to him.

  “Excuse me,” an older man got their attention from behind the counter. He was in his fifties or so, distinguished-looking, wearing a suit with a name tag instead of a uniform with cheap tassels. When homeless, this was the sort of man you could count on. Nate smiled for real. The older man continued, “Why don’t you give me the name and number of one of your canceled credit cards and we’ll at least have that on file for you. On Tuesday you can give us a new number and we’ll transfer the charges. You’ll be checking out on Tuesday?”

  “Great,” Nate said. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and slid a card to the manager.

  “And you have no reservation, yes?”

  “No reservation,” Emily said.

  If they had made a reservation, it wouldn’t be for a stay here. They’d be at one of the motels they’d passed on the drive in, and they’d have booked months ahead at an early-bird Internet rate. But Nate had a track record with the Viking—and it seemed that the hotel actually had a room f
ree. It might be the only vacancy in Newport.

  “We’ve had two cancellations. You can take your pick,” the manager said, glancing down into a recessed screen in the counter below him. “Both are upper-floor suites.”

  “Perfect,” Nate said, not asking the price. “That sounds great. Either suite, and if you could have a crib set up, we’d appreciate it. The little guy has a thing for sleeping in cribs.”

  The manager grinned and took a good look at Trevor, still propped on the counter and tiredly sucking on Emily’s cell phone, his eyes only half open. The boy loved technology, preferred to teethe on the nearest TV remote even when he had brightly colored toys within reach.

  “Can’t that thing give him cancer?” Nate asked Emily, eyeing the boy. Behind the counter, the manager typed furiously into his computer terminal.

  “It’s turned off. He’s safe,” Emily said. “You forget that kids are nearly indestructible.” She fumbled through her bag while Nate accepted two card keys from the manager. When he looked back at Emily, she was pulling Trevor’s sweater from her bag and tugging it over the tot’s sleep-lolled head. Safety, as Nate saw it, wasn’t something so easily guaranteed.

  CHAPTER 4

  Settling In

  SECURITY? PEACE OF MIND? Was that so much to ask? Emily felt the weight of her wants as she and Nate and Trevor settled into their suite. They couldn’t afford this room. They couldn’t even afford the tax on it. Sure, she’d once stayed in luxe hotels frequently, for work. She’d traveled regularly to Chicago, L.A., Miami, Denver. She’d stayed in rooms stocked with complimentary champagne and pillow-top mattresses, all on the company’s Amex. Those overnight trips had felt like fractures in time, as if she’d stepped through a portal into a world where she was herself, only glossier. The trips were one of the few things she truly missed about her career. Recently she’d also begun to miss the simple act of being skilled at something. Though she’d never planned to be in experiential advertising—she fell into the job after declining grad school—it turned out she was good at the work, often great. For a time, she’d even convinced herself it was worthwhile. Until it wasn’t. It fell apart in a single moment.

  She’d been perched on the edge of her creative director’s desk, leading the team through her concept for a client’s new potato chip—a toasted, canola-oil version of their market leader. The director’s office was large but cramped, filled with a menagerie of blow-up toys, rubber monsters, movie posters, presidential bobbleheads, an electronic keyboard, and the requisite Magic 8 Ball. Despite the distractions, the team appeared entirely focused on Emily. Her concept involved positioning the new chip as a niche product, rolled out slowly (first in only the top five markets, mimicking the typical rollout of a gourmet offering), with interactive street booths manned by actual chefs who’d hand out samples and suggest (seriously? seriously) beer and soda pairings. Once they’d solidified those elite markets, they’d launch nationally with a sponsored chip-dip competition, revealing the winners in a six-part commercial series, TV spots with an ongoing narrative. At the same time, they’d roll out commercials for the commercials, meta-ads. The idea was cheeky, especially for a low-market national company, a company that sold snack foods available primarily at minimarts. The idea mocked the current trend toward small-batch gourmet goods, even as it lured in that exact consumer demographic. Emily’s concept was both novel and (could it be?) brilliant. Brilliant not merely in her own eyes—she could sense that the rest of the five-person team felt it, as well. While she spoke, they remained hushed but jittery, as if carbonated. Other snack-food brands had done almost nothing in the experiential realm. Nobody had even thought small, and here was Emily thinking big. As her team’s excitement grew, Emily, too, turned giddy. She’d leaped from a ledge with this idea, and she was flying. Nina Searle, the creative director, leaned in toward Emily, grinning.

  “We’ll present it as is. Friday,” she said.

  “Tom Bascombe’s group can produce the street booths,” said Aaron Nielson, the man who made things happen. “Shit, Emily. We could fast-track it.”

  “Maybe not Bascombe this time,” said Nina.

  The room hummed. They’d nail this account. They’d make inconceivable amounts of money for the conglomerate that owned the toasted chips. They’d make money for the umbrella corporation that held the strings of their own ad agency. They’d sign other emerging food accounts. They’d soar, for a while at least. And who, in this industry, cared about the long-term anyway?

  “So no Bascombe, fine. I’ll get Cal Tomlin,” Aaron said. “I owe Tomlin a favor. He’ll love us for this. Everyone wins.”

  “Oh, Emily, the commercials for the commercials,” Nina flipped through the account memo. “Awesome.”

  Oh, Emily! To use a figure of speech from Nate’s playbook, Emily had hit one out of the park. We’ll present it as is! Even Maggie Yen, the group’s assistant, was caught up in the thrill, nodding in quick bursts, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Oh, Emily! Emily was on a high, her chest inflating with the helium of a job spectacularly done. It was inebriating (even more so than the beta-blockers she’d taken to calm her premeeting nerves, even more so than the four cups of coffee she’d drunk in gulps that morning). She wanted to remember this moment. The creative director touched her shoulder in apparent blessing. Oh, Emily! She was buoyant, aloft. And then—wait! what’s that!—from her new vantage point, Emily understood something that she somehow hadn’t fully grasped before.

  It was a potato chip.

  So much glorious thought, all to promote a potato chip.

  Bit by bit—first her head and then her gut and then the perpetual-motion machine of her heart—Emily began to deflate. She’d knocked herself out for a potato chip. It wasn’t even her potato chip. She had neither conceived nor produced it. She had simply come up with a campaign. For a fried, processed runt of a root vegetable. A nothing. They were all nothings: the chip, the energy water she’d promoted last month, the breakfast pastries she’d guerrilla-marketed at the beginning of the year. None of these products were actually hers. And even if they had been? They were insignificant. When had she started to believe that these things mattered? She couldn’t remember. It had happened without her noticing.

  She’d had two dreams when she graduated from college: financial security and the chance to play some small role in making the world a better place. This job was helping her accomplish neither. On the financial front, she’d seen where the creative directors lived—apartments only marginally more spacious than her own. Their walls were hung with cheap lithographs, reproductions or pieces done by their friends. (None of these creative directors had ever seen a real Rufino in person, Emily was sure of this! They’d certainly never owned one.) Their jobs were deemed creative and cutting-edge (the experiential being a new realm in advertising), as if creativity was the payoff, making the salary moot. These directors had reached the summit yet still lived paycheck to paycheck. After they had kids, they moved so far into the boroughs that they might as well have relocated to Delaware. And slowly their intellect was dying. This job had thoroughly entertained Emily, until she saw it for what it was: a derailment. Carlyle, Schopenhauer: Sometimes she imagined them as her contemporaries. They’d be ashamed of her.

  The week after presenting the chip campaign, she lost interest halfway through storyboarding a corporate video for a whole-grain cereal. Three months after that, the act of monitoring client conference calls had become unbearable. Two weeks later, she found herself pregnant. Finally, hardly a month into her maternity leave, she gave notice. She was long gone from the office by the time the potato chip campaign debuted—and received high praise from both consumers and industry analysts. Emily would go back to work, sure, but only when she found work that meant something. She thought hard about what that work might be, and she thought often of her mother’s career. Her mother had never made significant money (her mother had never, in her entire life, stayed in a top-flight hotel), but she’d been granted tenur
e, earned respect, and she’d put the bulk of her lifetime energy into researching, publishing, teaching. Despite her shaky start, her life’s work had meant something.

  “Hey! There’s a DVD player,” Nate called to Emily from the living room of the Viking’s suite. “And a library of black-and-white classics.”

  “There’s a DVD in here, too,” Emily said as Nate walked into the bedroom.

  For work, Emily had once stayed in a room with an in-bathroom DVD player, nestled conveniently next to the bidet. The Viking’s suite wasn’t quite so high-tech, but aesthetically it was sumptuous, grand, beflowered. Expensive. It had a living room, a foyer, two couches. Emily tried to reframe the fact that there were no cheaper rooms available as good news. This was the last luxury they’d see for a long while. More important, nobody would suspect they were here. That was a bonus. Emily didn’t want to be found.

  “His-and-hers media systems?” Nate said.

  “That sounds almost dirty,” Emily said. Nate smirked.

  Trevor lay sprawled across the bedspread, asleep. Next to him, Nate and Emily’s cash was haphazardly piled like the take from a roadside bake sale. Emily counted $84.16 total. It was all they had until Tuesday.

  “Trevor’s beat,” Emily said.

  “Me, too. And starving.” Nate picked up a menu from the nightstand. “Room service? We can do it up. It’s—”

  “Free dinner,” Emily finished the thought. Free, meaning they could charge it to the room and it wouldn’t come out of their meager stack of greenbacks. Free, meaning the shock of the bill would be delayed for a week, at the least.

  “Too bad we can’t charge diapers from room service,” Nate said. They’d counted eight diapers in Emily’s bag, enough to last them a day and a half. “They’ve got lobster lyonnaise, that’s an apt culinary introduction to Newport for Trevor. Oh, shit.” He looked at Trevor, and at the pile of money next to him, and paused. Then he continued, quietly. “I had a brand-new hundred that I left in the glove compartment. It’s sitting there in the Jeep.”