The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  He wasn’t even curious enough to have glanced around the Viking and noticed her in the café. Trevor hadn’t noticed her, either. Trevor’s eyes were fixed on the miniature bulbs that circled the chandelier above, probably as beautiful as fireflies to him. He loved lights, sparkles, staring.

  She knew she should rise up and run into the lobby, tap Nate on the shoulder, alert him to her presence, but she hesitated. He and Trevor looked so fine as a twosome. They rarely spent time together without Emily hovering nearby. And she rarely got a chance to spend time by herself. In the weeks leading up to Trevor’s birth, late last fall, she’d imagined her postpartum world turning more internal. She’d thought that the loneliness would eat away at her and so, from the start, she insisted to herself (and to her mother up in Cambridge, and to Nate, to Jeanne, to the cashier at the chain coffee shop on their corner in New York) that she’d return to the workforce as soon as her son was a few months old.

  Confounding her expectations, life with a baby was as bustling as office life had been, if significantly more mind-numbing. Her schedule was packed with playgroups and dates at the baby gym (kill me now! Emily thought every time she entered the place) and swim lessons starting at six months. At night, too, she and Nate fielded nonstop invitations from friends—friends who also had kids. There were cocktail parties and dinners and overpopulated fund-raisers for the Himalayan museum whose name she could never remember and the Lower East Side community garden. Everyone, or everyone else at least, had help at home, women who took the subway in from Queens in order to watch other people’s children, both day and night. When Emily needed help, she relied on a roster of college students and friends of the intern at Nate’s office who happily babysat for twelve dollars an hour. That’s what freedom cost. Most of the time, Emily thought it was worth it, but when she and Nate stayed out too long, past the eleven o’clock news and into The Tonight Show, she felt guilty. She worried that she was trying to negate her child’s existence (at a whopping twelve dollars an hour) by returning to the era before he entered her life, before he announced himself out of the blue with a missed period and Emily’s swollen breasts.

  This morning, though, she didn’t feel that particular guilt as she lingered over her breakfast while Nate handled their child. Father and son looked so unexpectedly natural together. From this distance they appeared whole, secure, of a piece. They were better people than she was.

  She kept an eye on Nate and Trevor in the lobby, but she didn’t stand up from the breakfast table. She did nothing to announce her presence. She peeled the crisp outer layer off the croissant in front of her and took a small bite. As she swallowed the pastry, a tiny nibble, barely more than a crumb, she watched as Nate and Trevor exited the hotel.

  CHAPTER 16

  Hitching

  NATE HAD HITCHHIKED ONLY once before. That first time, the prospect of crawling into a car with a stranger had seemed less foolhardy—probably because Nate was barely fifteen then, and because in his family’s contained Cleveland suburb there was little risk of being picked up by anyone he didn’t already know. And because that time he didn’t have an infant Trevor on his hip and a paint-slopped stolen masterpiece in his bag.

  That time, on the side of the Ohio road, Nate had only Charlie with him. Both boys were out of school on Thanksgiving break and had spent the afternoon swimming laps in the chemically fried waters of the town’s indoor pool. The exercise was dim and monotonous, back and forth from one side of the pool to the other, crawl stroke and butterfly and the embarrassingly named breaststroke, so much bodily exertion that got a boy nowhere except back where he started. After an hour in the water, Nate and Charlie dried off and waited outside the Y’s front entrance, a few minutes early for their pickup. “Towel dry your hair after you swim,” their mother had told them when she dropped them off. “I’ll retrieve you at three.”

  She wasn’t there at three and still hadn’t arrived half an hour later, when Nate reentered the Y and called home to see what was wrong. No one answered. It wasn’t like their mother to forget them completely, and the boys walked back outside to look for her again. Once it was clear that she wasn’t coming, they wandered down to the road fifty yards from the Y’s entrance and thrust their arms out toward traffic, their thumbs extended. “Like this, chico,” Nate said to his brother. “Stop looking so dangerous.”

  “I’m a threat, my man,” Charlie said, shifting his weight to his right hip in imitation of a TV-movie pimp. Charlie was anything but intimidating.

  “Fuck,” Nate said under his breath only five minutes into the experiment. He dropped his hand to his side and slapped Charlie’s down, too. Betty Heirly was approaching in her electric-blue pickup. Betty was the landscaper who came to their square home three times each summer to monitor the impatiens and trim the shrubs. She was an unfailingly earnest woman, a Beatrix Potter bunny come to life, and Nate had no doubt that she’d report the Bedeckers to their mother if she saw them hitching. Their mother’s punishment would be strict. “Act cool,” Nate told Charlie. The boys made fake conversation with each other (Charlie reciting the last ten presidents in order backward, Nate listing the Indians’ starting lineup, complete with each player’s earned run average) until the Toyota was out of sight.

  The next driver who passed was recognizable as well: Craig Simon’s father. He drove a Mustang, a ’67 convertible, sand-colored and perfectly rust-free and achingly coveted by Nate and the rest of Craig’s friends. Mr. Simon was a sleazebag, undeserving of the car and not the guy you wanted to bum a ride off. Nate withdrew his arm again, and again Charlie followed suit.

  A dozen more cars passed and didn’t stop, didn’t even glance at the young teens who must have looked lost and harmless in their corduroys and unfortunately matching fisherman’s sweaters. Their hair dripped onto their backs; their shoes lay fashionably untied. Nate’s book bag hung heavily on his shoulder as the minutes dragged. The surplus canvas tote was filled with soaked swim clothes and towels, and just as he dropped it to the pavement, a Buick wagon eased over to the breakdown lane.

  From the driver’s seat, a boy leaned toward them. He was an eleventh grader, a popular-around-town guy with blond hair that swung in front of his eyes like a curtain. He would have been two school years ahead of Nate, if Nate had stayed local for his education instead of going away. Nate recognized him, though he didn’t know his name.

  “Hey,” the boy said to Nate. “You live on Wainscott, in the see-through house?”

  “Yeah,” Nate said. Looked at from the right angle, the Bedecker home was invisible.

  “It’s on my way.” The kid motioned for the boys to get in. Charlie looked frightened and excited by the adventure and didn’t speak a word. He bounced almost imperceptibly on the balls of his feet.

  “This is my brother, Charlie, the family mute,” Nate said while crawling into the front seat. Charlie, still quiet, sat in the back. “You should see him mime, he’s brilliant,” Nate said. Charlie smiled, always happy to play along.

  “No problem, talk is cheap,” the driver responded. After ten minutes of silence the boys were home and out of the car.

  In his head, during the car ride, Nate had worked up the story they’d give their mother, the explanation of how they’d gotten back from the pool. She’d crucify them for hitching, and the Y was too far away for them to have walked. Nate settled on the fib (a fabrication he relayed to Charlie as they entered the house) that they’d caught a ride from someone else’s mom, someone their mother didn’t know. Nate could make up a name, she’d never check. There was a time, a few years ago, when his mother wouldn’t have believed that her son had local friends she’d never met. Over the past semester, though, while Nate was away at school, he’d grown more independent. Charlie lived at home and was still a child, but Nate, far away in Pennsylvania, bunking in a dorm for the second year in a row, believed that he’d finally grown into himself and out of his mother at the same time. He’d told himself that this distance was appropriate. Matu
re. Nate’s roommate still spoke to his own parents every evening, just before making the trek across the soccer field to dinner in the Hill School’s cavernous, wood-beamed dining hall. He shared every precalculus grade and each unrequited crush with his folks. It was juvenile and excessive.

  “Hello?” Nate called out as he and Charlie entered the Bedecker house. A full hour had passed since they finished swimming. “Hello?” he said louder the second time, heaving the home’s heavy side door all the way open, peering through the entryway and then into the kitchen before heading for the open expanse of the living room. The space was empty. His father’s Eames chair had been cleared of the stack of magazines that usually lay piled on its cracked leather seat. The house even smelled uninhabited. It was the scent of something wrong, of catastrophe, maybe their mother had been gassed and was lying lifeless in the basement, maybe there’d been a nuclear war that affected only neo-Bauhaus structures made of glass and concrete. When Nate called home from the Y, he’d let the phone ring ten times before accepting that no one was there to pick up the extension.

  “I bet she’s sitting outside the Y wondering where we are,” Charlie said as Nate walked a square around the living room’s perimeter. “She probably got there right after we left. She’s going to go loco when she gets back and sees our wet hair.” Except, Nate noticed, they’d been out of the pool for so long that their hair was bone-dry.

  Charlie went to his and Nate’s bedroom and turned on the radio.

  Nate was still standing in the living room twenty minutes later—too scared to go down to the basement, straining to hear Charlie’s Top 40 broadcast through the wall, wondering what kind of fate had befallen Annemarie Bedecker, a woman who seemed able to withstand the strongest of disasters, or used to seem able—when he heard the low moan of the outside door opening. He turned around to face his mother, but there, in the entryway to the living room, was his father. The man cut a dark, stooped figure in his customary gray suit. He moved toward Nate, who had grown in the three months while away at school this fall. At five feet ten inches, Nate now stood two inches taller than his economically sized father.

  George glanced at his son and then sat in the Eames chair and closed his eyes. The late-day light streamed in through the room’s glass walls and fell directly on the man, deep into the creases of his face and the folds of his suit jacket. George reached up and pointed one finger behind him into the house. “She’s in the kitchen,” was all he said.

  “Where were you?” Nate asked his mother, just a minute later. She was unloading carrots from a grocery bag and piling them in the stainless steel bin next to the sink.

  She looked at the boy as if unsure of his question. “Your father has chosen to come home for the holiday.” George hadn’t been expected, but he frequently returned to Cleveland with little warning. “I retrieved him at the station. He’s tired, Nate, he’s here for a rest. We’ll have veal for dinner.”

  Nate nodded and raised his hand to his hair, buffed soft from the chlorine, proving to himself that he really had been swimming with Charlie and really had been expecting his mother to pick them up. Three months away at school, and already the house was a different place.

  It would be another two years before Annemarie installed the Buddha in the foyer, two years before her distancing act was complete. But that one incident—her small neglect of her children over a chilly November break—that was the minor moment that Nate returned to when looking for early signs of his mother’s derailment. Lately the same moment had come to serve, in Nate’s mind, as confirmation that even the best of parents slipped up on occasion. He’d long feared that rearing kids was one massive nerve-racking opportunity to fuck up someone else’s life. That was even before he knew about his potentially toxic genes—an even better reason to have forgone fatherhood. It was also before he fully understood how just when you thought you knew a woman, it could turn out that she was in possession of a piece of steaming-hot artwork.

  Maybe Emily didn’t know the Rufino was in her bag. Nate hadn’t known (it wasn’t his bag, after all). Maybe she, like Nate, had been duped. Because, he thought, she couldn’t have taken it herself. Could she? On Wednesday night, she’d drank the Barbers’ booze and pretty well cleaned them out of cheese. She wouldn’t betray the people who’d filled her glass, would she? Someone could have snuck the art into the bag when she wasn’t looking. Sam Tully, in a true act against character, might have ripped the Rufino from its frame and, in a panic, slipped it into Emily’s purse. That would be a perfect scheme for smuggling it out of the state, come to think of it, in the bag of an unsuspecting woman about to drive to Rhode Island. But then, how would the painting get so far into the purse, so surreptitiously zipped into the pocket? And how would Sam reclaim it once it was across the border? And what the hell would Sam Tully want with a Rufino? He had Hockneys in his family, at least one actual David Hockney piece (personally Nate would prefer a Rufino to a Hockney, and he didn’t think much of Rufino). Tully wasn’t the Rufino type. He hadn’t put the Rufino in Emily’s bag. The simplest explanation was that Emily had put it there herself. She had to have put it there herself. Nate tried to make sense of this, to find a way into understanding it. Emily had taken the Barbers’ ridiculously overpriced trinket and, over the past three days, had said nothing to him about it.

  She hadn’t told him.

  Nate, for his part, hadn’t suspected a thing. He’d been so agonizingly mesmerized by his own Huntington’s bullshit that Emily had stolen a work of art by one of the most in-demand contemporary artists in the world, and he hadn’t even noticed. No, actually, his Huntington’s fears weren’t bullshit. Art theft, that was bullshit.

  If Emily could hide the Rufino, what else was she concealing? Maybe she had an accomplice in the theft, Nate thought, but he couldn’t imagine who. If Emily were going to conspire with anyone, wouldn’t it be Nate? Shouldn’t it be? They had a child together, for fuck’s sake. And he’d thought he was the potentially damaging parent? Screw her. Screw her: This was his initial thought, like the knee-jerk riposte of a spurned adolescent (though, in fact, he had the sense that he was the one being screwed).

  Screw her, he thought from the side of the Newport road, where he was attempting to hitchhike with Trevor. Let her lie and steal, he was going to investigate his own secrets. Who needed to be dragged down by hers? He lifted Trevor, who lay slumped in his aching arms, higher onto his shoulder. Yes, he knew it was an objectively stupid idea to hitch with a kid. This whole plan to thumb it to Narragansett and back was absurd. Of course, absurd was starting to seem like Nate’s norm. Two days without money and he’d lost his mind. As had Emily, clearly. She’d fucking stolen a work by one of the most renowned artists under age fifty. Nate understood nothing about contemporary visual art, yet even he knew Rufino’s name.

  A compact yellow Hyundai pulled over to the side of America’s Cup Avenue. A waiflike girl in a cardigan sweater and braids leaned from the driver’s side, across the passenger seat. Innocent was the word that crossed Nate’s mind.

  “Car trouble?” she said to Nate, through the open passenger side window. She looked and sounded as if she were in high school, at most.

  “I guess so,” Nate said with a lack of confidence. He felt bereft when he thought about the loss of the Jeep. Everything he’d taken for granted was now gone. Even if he got the Jeep back, it would be tainted with the knowledge of how easily it had been taken from him, by the fact that ever since it had been stolen, Nate’s life had gone to pot. The car that had hit Charlie two decades ago had been brand-new, two weeks off the lot. A Honda. Nate remembered obsessing over that fact for years after Charlie’s death, using these petty details as a distraction from his searing grief. He’d asked himself what it meant, that his brother had been hit by a car so new, a car so affordable and reliable. He’d wondered if the driver of the car (a man Nate could imagine only as an everyman) had immediately sold the Honda, or perhaps returned it to the lot, unable to get back behind the wh
eel of a vehicle that had so casually thumped down a teenaged boy. He wondered if that man grieved for Charlie, too, or if he grieved only for himself, for the way the accident had stripped him of his own courage. For years after Charlie’s death, Nate couldn’t keep himself from staring down every navy-blue Honda he saw in Ohio, trying to avert his eyes but being unable. Once, in upstate New York during his senior year in college, he’d been driving with a girlfriend when they’d passed an accident on the side of the highway, a blue Honda (a steel blue, but blue still) that had rear-ended a Mercedes. The damage looked minimal, but Nate gasped and stifled a sob. His grief—so well suppressed most of the time—could surge with no warning, like a knife plunged in his side from behind. The pain was acute and physical. Charlie, as his only sibling, had been a part of him. Their lives, in so many ways, had been one and the same. When the girlfriend asked what was wrong, Nate only shook his head. A week later he broke up with her.

  “Are you looking for a ride or something?” the girl in the Hyundai asked now.

  Nate nodded. He’d had his thumb out and was walking backward down the breakdown lane. It certainly seemed that he was looking for a ride. Or something. “We’re going across the bridges. Hoping to, at least.”

  “I can’t believe my eyes, a hitchhiking dad. Outrageous.” She unlocked the doors and made a welcome motion with her hand. Her wrist looked barely thicker than Trevor’s. “Over the bridges is where I’m headed. Just tell me how far to take you.”

  Nate hesitated, but the girl and her car looked safe. She’d been driving slowly and carefully as she approached, and she was pointed in the right direction. Nate wouldn’t be hitchhiking at all if there were any other way (besides a taxi, a financially ridiculous idea given his current situation) to get across the harbor without a car of his own.