The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  Fuck.

  She inhaled deeply and held the air in her lungs, trying to bring on the cotton-like calm (a calm that even Jeanne admitted might be mostly placebo effect) that came with an Inderal, tried to visualize those pills migrating from the bottom of the bag that was with Nate to the base of her tongue that was here in the basement of the Elms. She feigned a swallow. Feel the peace, she instructed herself. She felt, instead, an escalating buzz. The subbasement’s air grew heavy and solid. Who? Who saw her go into the Barbers’ study? Who!

  “I went to the back of the apartment, sure,” she said, measuring out her words, trying to keep the pace slow and natural. “There’s a bathroom there.”

  “Sure,” the lieutenant said.

  “Plenty of people went back there during the party.”

  “Yours is the only name that’s come up so far.”

  “I wasn’t the only one.” She sounded angry. She needed to breathe.

  Across the room, the tour group seemed to be planning an insurgency. “You call that a lightbulb tester? Did they even have incandescent lights when this house was built?” a father on the tour with two teens said, defiant. “Edison didn’t get going with electricity until, what, the 1880s?”

  “The Elms was completed well after Edison and his invention,” Kiara shot back. Emily looked up. “This house is only a century old. It’s new,” Kiara said. Emily tried to focus on Kiara’s words, on the fact that while the cops were wasting their time tracking down a useless piece of art, the rest of the world was continuing, in mundane fashion, to tour mansions.

  “Who?” said the lieutenant on the phone.

  “Who what?”

  “Who else went to the back of the apartment during the party?”

  “Who else?” Emily hadn’t actually seen anyone else go to the back of the apartment, but surely someone must have, at some point? She couldn’t be the only person who’d needed to pee while the powder room was occupied. But she blanked: She couldn’t remember the name of anyone who was at the party at all, other than herself and Nate and Anna and Randy. She couldn’t remember a single other person. “Anna,” she said. “Anna Barber wandered back there. I saw her.” Technically, Emily hadn’t seen Anna leave the kitchen the entire night, but at some point, to go to bed at least, she had to have gone back toward the study.

  “She lives in the apartment, ma’am. There’s nothing questionable about her wandering back there.”

  “Are you kidding?” Emily said. She’d spoken more loudly than intended, and the tourers briefly glanced her way. They’d paid fifteen dollars apiece for this walk-and-talk. Emily lowered her voice. “Of course it’s suspicious. I can’t remember ever seeing a hostess—a hostess from this crowd—leave the kitchen area during her own party. Especially Anna. She’s usually camped out at the doorway that separates the kitchen from the living room. First of all, because she likes to lord over the whole affair, anyone will tell you she’s a control freak.” Anna was a control freak. That was true, at least. “Plus, she’s scared shitless that the caterers are going to walk off with pieces of her silver. So yes, it certainly is suspicious that she’d go to the back of her own apartment, out of eyeshot from what’s going on. Trust me.” Emily stopped, listened to her own heart. She was almost proud of her quick save, a sure sign that all of those years in marketing and advertising had paid off.

  “Okay, so Ms. Barber was back there. Anyone else?”

  “Like I said, there’s a bathroom back there. I’m sure other people had to pee, but I didn’t take down names.” She tried to picture the party, exactly who was standing at the bar when she grabbed her first drink, when she went in for a refill, but all she could picture was the Rufino with its glaring swatches of gray and orange, like torn shards of police hazard tape. “You really want me to try to think back to who peed at a party I attended half a week ago? Are you serious? I mean, if Anna was back there, others were, too.”

  “Right.” He paused. “Obviously, as you said, this isn’t a good time to talk. How about I call you tomorrow? We can set up a time for me to see you in Newport on Tuesday.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Emily said, hanging up the phone. She remained against the far wall, reluctant to rejoin the tour, which seemed to have stalled in this room.

  “This house obviously postdates Edison, you’d know that if you’d been listening,” one of the Providence bakers said to the teens’ father. “The house is practically new.”

  “New isn’t a century old. A century old is just that. It’s old,” said the father, squaring his shoulders. “A century ago people weren’t even driving cars.”

  “A century ago we were already in the modern age, buster,” said the second baker.

  The world was being overrun by idiots, and it was Emily who was being hunted by the police? She opened her mouth to talk—the modern age started more than four hundred years ago, with Machiavelli’s push toward progress!—but then Kiara gestured to the crowd and began to lead them back up and out of the room. The modern age is long over, Emily nearly hollered at the departing tour.

  Emily stayed where she was. Why talk, anyway? Who would trust the words that came out of her mouth? Everything she touched turned to crap. After nearly forty years of barely skating by, she was done. No money, no job, no brain cells firing, and the cops on the way. She had to tell Nate about the painting. She clenched her jaw and felt the courage drain out of her. She slid to the ground, her body like dead weight, heavy on the floor. She’d stay here until tomorrow. She’d stay here forever. If the NYPD wanted to take her statement, let them come to the basement of the Elms. Let them arrest her on this soot-stained concrete floor, at rock bottom. It was over. It was over. Like the era of grand mansion living in Newport, Emily’s life as she knew it was over.

  CHAPTER 18

  Trespass

  THE NARRAGANSETT HOUSE WAS BEAUTIFUL. Not George Bedecker beautiful—austerely, intellectually, architecturally impressive—but classic, historic, kick-off-your-shoes-and-smell-the-sea warm. The wide plank floors and oak door frame of the back mudroom showed signs of everyday wear, divots and cracks and damp spots of raw wood where the paint’s seal had cracked. Deeper inside, the home was decked out with the kind of furnishings Nate figured might come from a 1950s department store sale. The living room was filled with conservative, upholstered set pieces, all soft lines and matte finishes—with a few nineteenth-century antiques thrown in.

  After changing Trevor’s diaper, Nate put the boy down for his nap, laying him flat on the living room’s fluffed, floral sofa. He pushed a console table against the front of the couch, caging his child into a makeshift crib. With the sleeping boy securely boxed in, Nate took himself on a full house tour, as calm as if he’d been invited in as a guest.

  The place was noticeably clean and airy, smelling of floor wax and detergent, acerbic and citrus. The rooms were so spotless and dust free that, for a moment, Nate worried someone was currently living here, that he’d actually broken and entered into a stranger’s full-time residence. No, he told himself, the house was vacant and had been for some time. The shades were all shut tight and the refrigerator had been emptied and wiped clean. The kitchen cabinets were stocked but only with canned goods and nonperishables. As if appraising the home’s contents for auction, Nate looked in every drawer and cabinet as he canvassed the space. A tall chest stretched along the edge of a hall that connected the kitchen to the front vestibule. The cabinet’s top-left drawer was practically empty, like George’s buildings. Only a thin, spindly silver pen, barely tarnished, was nestled against the drawer’s side, next to a small blank notepad, white with a barely discernible gray grid. In the right-hand drawer, Nate found merely a square, unmarked gray box containing standard silver paper clips. The house where Nate grew up had been similarly devoid of extraneous matter (of piles of change, skiffs of torn notepaper, clipped coupons), not just to the naked eye but below the surface as well. Even the closets at Bedecker House had been expertly organized and p
ared down to the basics, except for the armoire in Nate and Charlie’s room. The boys had used that closed-door space as the repository for everything they owned, shoving their baseball cards and sweatshirts haphazardly inside, keeping the mayhem out of their father’s sight.

  Each time George left that spare, square house to go on a business trip, though, the place slowly settled into disarray. The situation was only temporary: Nate’s mother could get the abode back up to Bedecker standards in less than a day, which was usually as much warning as George gave before his return. When Nate asked his mother why she didn’t simply leave the place in livable disorder all of the time (the house was only half George’s, the other half was hers), she said, of the hyperorganized abode, “It’s better this way.” When Nate looked unconvinced, she continued, with a patient severity to her voice, as if doling out advice that might save him someday: “To appreciate this house it should be inhabited with a certain aesthetic. It is a joy to live here. Remember, the house breathes life into us, not the other way around.”

  Yet this house, George’s father’s house, was a comfortable New England homestead that seemed to breathe because of its past inhabitants, because of the patterns of daily living. This house, so far on the pendulum swing from the home George had built for his own family in the 1960s, was where George himself had grown up. And he’d clearly returned since Nate last saw him here, thirty years ago, tending to his own father, the elder, elderly Bedecker. If Nate needed proof that his father had been back (proof beyond the barely lined notepad in the hall cabinet’s drawer, identical to the notepads George had kept in the hallway drawers at Bedecker House when Nate was a child, identical to the pads George had had on his drafting table at work), his eye caught on an envelope. It was propped against a riser halfway up the steps from the first floor to the second. Peeking out of the business-size envelope’s clear cellophane window was an address, the address of this house, and above it, in a computer generated font: TO: MR. GEORGE BEDECKER.

  As Nate opened the sealed envelope, two words came to mind: mail tampering. He feared he was adding mail tampering to his list of offenses for the day. He and Emily could end up inhabiting neighboring jail cells, she for art theft (but really, there had to be an explanation for the Rufino in her bag—he’d ask her about it, he would, as soon as he saw her) and he for the triple whammy of breaking, entering, and mail fraud. Then again, since this particular envelope hadn’t been sent through the post office (it was stamp-free and had been hand-delivered to this step, apparently), it didn’t legally qualify as mail, did it? Nate tore through the flap and removed the paper that was inside. As he unfolded it, he kept one ear toward the living room where Trevor remained quiet.

  The letter wasn’t a letter at all. It was a cleaning and landscaping bill. George’s house had been scrubbed and his yard tended to three days earlier. The document didn’t say if this was routine upkeep or a special service to prepare for the homeowner’s arrival. It could easily be routine upkeep. George was fastidious enough to want his place carefully maintained even when he was gone—that had largely been Nate’s mother’s role when she was alive. Now, instead of Annemarie, George had Norman Carlson of West Warwick (as the letterhead announced) picking up the slack for $165 a visit.

  Of course George would have a caretaker: this wasn’t his main residence. He probably came here only once a year. Once every five years. Maybe every ten, for all Nate knew. George didn’t take vacations, after all, and he was headquartered in Chicago now. Nate received yearly assessments from his father’s office, summarizing family transactions, the moving around of the tiny bit of cash that was left from his mother’s estate—not even enough for two months’ rent on Nate and Emily’s New York apartment. The typed-up annual assessment, with no personal note attached, was the only word that Nate had received from his father in the past five years. Five years since they’d spoken. Even longer since they’d been in the same room.

  Nate left the bill on the steps and continued climbing to the second floor, which felt uncannily small, each of the three rooms just big enough for a full-size bed and dresser set. Solid white quilts lay over the beds, straw mats across the floor, roller shades shut tight over the windows. The dressers were empty except for the bureau in the slightly larger master bedroom. That bureau was filled with spare blankets, extra pillowcases, two pairs of pajamas, and, in the closet, a few pairs of pants, shirts, and jackets that Nate recognized as his father’s. The man never varied his wardrobe, dressing in shades of black and white and chalkboard gray—city tones, the hues of stone buildings and slate facades—even, it appeared, while here, in the country and on the sea. Nate rifled through the medicine cabinet, looking for odd vitamins or prescriptions, even as he knew that there was no treatment for Huntington’s. Still, wasn’t lack of any clues a sign in itself? Wasn’t no evidence of a positive diagnosis enough to assume the negative? Nate couldn’t remember. Someone famous once said that you can’t prove a negative, but Nate didn’t know who. Emily was the quotation expert, the walking Bartlett’s, still citing the B-list philosophers from her college seminars.

  Nate felt an unidentifiable gloom, a sense of displacement as he crept through a house that wasn’t his, in a town he didn’t know, looking for clues to something that he’d probably made up. Trespassing. Add trespass to his rap sheet. He thought back to the front porch, where he’d searched for the house key fifteen minutes ago. He’d put everything back in its place, hadn’t he? He didn’t want the caretaker driving by and noticing something off, stopping in to check things out. He didn’t want George dropping in, either, but it was Sunday already, if the old man (who didn’t take holidays, Nate reminded himself) was coming for the long weekend, he’d be here already. Regardless, Nate’s heart beat hard as he quickly and quietly ran down the stairs to check on Trevor (still sleeping soundly, still secure in his makeshift crib) and then ran back up again.

  Finally he headed up another flight to the attic, measuring out his steps on the narrow stairs. His legs were still firm, firmer than they’d been in the Jeep two days ago, as firm as any healthy, appropriately aging guy. His mind was healthy, too, he’d definitely remembered to put everything back in place on the porch.

  He’d also remembered to lock the damn Cherokee on Friday, surely he’d remembered that, and look where it had gotten him.

  The rough-hewn stairs sagged under Nate’s weight. When he reached the top, he was shocked by the light. The attic was bright. He blinked and waited for his tired eyes to adjust. While the shades had been drawn in the rooms downstairs, the windows here, eaves cut deep into the roof, were open to the glare rising up off the water below. The place was teeming with stuff, like the trunk of that stolen Jeep, boxes and garment bags and stacked rickety furniture. Nate slowly navigated around the clutter. On the left side of the room, nudged up against an old dresser, were boxes of clothing. Nate opened the one closest to him and found a pile of wool pants, two waist sizes larger than his own and much larger than the pants that George wore. The architect was always too thin, and Nate remembered his mother gently joking (not to George’s face, of course) that the man practiced the same minimalism with his diet that he adhered to in his designs. Draped next to that box was a frayed overcoat in a deep brown. Nate dug into the pockets, but they were empty. Nate worked his way past a crate of Scientific Americans. Nate’s grandfather hadn’t been in the science world but was a dilettante in everything, Nate’s mother had told him. The man Nate had glimpsed long ago outside this very house hadn’t been much of anything for long, except a dabbler in business and a compulsive drinker, living mostly off his family money until he depleted it, long before his death, and then off Social Security and Medicaid. Everything of value except for this house was gone by the time George was grown and his school tuitions had been paid. Bitter and angry, it seemed, Nate’s father had left this place to make his own way in the world and never looked back.

  But George had, finally, come back. Nate had seen him here that one time in 197
4, and that likely wasn’t the sole visit he had made to check in on his father. Perhaps he’d returned again and again, without his wife and children. During Nate’s childhood, George was gone so often that Nate, as a teenager, stopped asking where he went. And from the neat and stacked look of the packing job in the attic, these boxes had been gathered and stored up here by George himself, probably after his father’s death. George had specifically told Nate, after he sold the Cleveland house, that he was moving his own things here.

  Nate walked toward the windows and stumbled over a metal crate of old train ticket stubs, photographs of George as a kid, ancient postcards to the Bedeckers from people whose names Nate didn’t know. While George had barely given his own sons the time of day, George’s parents had documented their child’s comings and goings in mundane detail. Next to the crate sat a carefully preserved file of papers, clippings, and notes. Nate lifted a heavy bound volume that was wedged into the side of the file—George’s high school yearbook. George’s portrait, smack in the middle of the B section of the senior photos, looked identical to the others on the page. The men all shared the same close-cropped haircut (as if a putting green had lodged atop each of boys’ scalps), the same sports jackets, similar club-striped ties. Diversity had yet to spread to New England. In the casual candids that littered the yearbook pages, the scattering of identical tall, white teenagers looked like an optical illusion. Nate didn’t see his father in any of these candids, and wasn’t sure if it was because the teenaged Bedecker wasn’t in the pictures, or because he was indistinguishable to the naked eye. Or because Nate had wandered so far from his own past that he wouldn’t even recognize it in a still photo.

  The file’s stack of magazine and newspaper clips documented George’s early commissions, the more traditional structures he’d created long before the boxy Cleveland house, a decade prior to Nate’s and Charlie’s arrivals. Nate had seen these pictures only in libraries, in architecture books. At Bedecker House, George had kept no evidence of his early career. Here, though, that career was carefully preserved, most likely by George’s father. George’s mom, Nate knew, died young, just like Annemarie. George would have been in high school at the time, though from the look of him in his senior yearbook picture, where he was smiling and at ease in front of the camera, you’d never know that he’d dealt with death already. You’d never have known it, either, twenty years later when Nate was in college and his own mother died. After Annemarie’s death, George offered Nate no words of wisdom, no sense that he’d been there himself.