by Allison Lynn
They’d been doing research on cancer for fifty years. And where was that cure? Research? What did Jeanne actually know? She wasn’t a neurologist, she was an ear, nose, and throat doctor. And a resident, at that. Jeanne hadn’t even majored in the sciences in college. She’d studied American history.
“I’m sorry I asked,” Emily said. “Forget it.” The acerbic bathroom air was making her dizzy. She’d have to get used to it, wouldn’t she? Used to the muted, tarnished colors of the hospital decor, to the fake-stone walls painted a creamy Mylanta blue, to the toilets that were so high they might as well be bar stools. She could easily be spending the bulk of her future in medical centers (assuming she wasn’t in jail), pacing their waiting rooms and hiding out in their bathrooms.
“I can’t believe that I fucking thought moving to Newport would rid us of our problems,” she said. She looked at the sanitary napkin receptacle screwed to the wall of the stall and thought of stuffing the Rufino into it, no one would know. The hospital cleaning staff surely didn’t dig through the bloody mess before tossing it in with the rest of the trash. “Our getting a leg up, that was a stupid fantasy. What the hell was I thinking?”
“Your move sounded good to me,” Jeanne said. “What was your option? Staying in New York and continue trying to climb your way to the top? I mean, it’s not getting any easier to make a million. Even my father finally left the city.” A father. Jeanne had a father. She often complained about him and his propensity toward right-wing soapboxing in inappropriate situations—usually when he was bombed on manhattans. He’d moved from Park Avenue to somewhere dry and sunny in Arizona last year. But at least she had a father. That was something neither Emily nor Nate had ever honestly been able to claim, until now.
Jeanne had encouraged Emily to look at this move in a positive light. Jeanne had even given Emily a list of pediatricians in the area, so that Trevor would have a doctor as soon as they moved in. She’d helped Emily and Nate pack up in New York, actually acting jealous that they were going off on an anti–New York adventure. She’d told Emily that everything would be great up here, in Newport. Yet Jeanne herself was still happily calling Manhattan home.
“Emily, you’ll either love Newport or you’ll hate it, but it’s too soon to tell, obviously, especially—shit, especially with this Huntington’s stuff to figure out.”
“You are like a fucking enabler, telling me not to fight Nate over this move, telling me it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s already a disaster.” Emily’s voice ricocheted off the bathroom’s slick, tiled walls and heavy metal door. An image of Trevor’s face came into her head, the boy wailing, his too-big ears flaring and red. “Thanks, Jeanne. Trevor could die tomorrow and I spent the past three weeks virtually ignoring him so I could pack up for a move that you tell me, now, I might hate.”
“Trevor is not going to die tomorrow,” Jeanne said. Her tone was no longer sympathetic.
“You can’t prove that. Anyone could die tomorrow.”
“Right, that’s an intelligent point, isn’t it? You don’t know for sure if George Bedecker has Huntington’s. Are you sure it’s not Parkinson’s, anyway?”
“It’s Huntington’s,” Emily said. It was a bad sign when a Parkinson’s diagnosis would be good news. Emily almost cackled over the idea. “Oh, if only it were Parkinson’s!” she spat the words out. “If only it were cancer! If only it were a field full of bunnies and rainbows! Bring on the rainbows!” How about some clowns, too? “I’m not a moron,” she said. “I can tell diseases apart.”
“Take a deep breath. Seriously, you need to get a hold of yourself. Huntington’s is unbelievably rare,” Jeanne said, a stony evenness to her voice.
Emily felt ashamed. Even in front of her closest confidantes, she wasn’t accustomed to losing her cool. “Yes, Huntington’s,” Emily repeated firmly.
“If Nate’s dad in fact has Huntington’s, there’s still a fifty percent chance Nate didn’t get it. Did you know that? Look, I’ll talk to people when I’m back at work,” Jeanne said, overenunciating her words and speaking slowly, as if consoling a halfwit. “I’ll corner one of the neuros. We have a decent department. You might want to find a way to chill in the meantime. Nate probably needs your support.”
When Emily was first falling in love with Nate a few years ago, she’d briefly pitied Jeanne with all of her one-night stands and no one permanent to count on. Jeanne hadn’t had a serious relationship since things fell apart with Austin. But look how achingly simple Jeanne’s life had become! Here she was, griping about yoga, sleeping with the van guy, living in a studio apartment next to New York Presbyterian Hospital’s east-side campus, saving just enough money to eat out every night, and spending her days researching other people’s health problems. Today, Jeanne would hang up the phone and go to her midday Ashtanga session and then curl up with the strange young Vassar grad (who was inevitably hot and shaggy and painfully innocent). Maybe she’d even call her father, just to shoot the shit. And, eventually, tomorrow afternoon at the very earliest, she’d do what she could for Emily and Nate and George, which might amount to nothing. It would almost certainly amount to nothing.
“I can’t believe you spent eight years with Austin,” Emily said, the words coming out brittle and petty, shaming Emily even as she spoke them. “He was screwing Tania Osbourne, you know. They were going at it during the whole last two years you were dating him. He tried to sleep with me once. If you weren’t so blind you’d have seen it.” Emily didn’t know if the Tania Osbourne bit was true, but there had been rumors, and it felt good to say it. Austin had hit on every one of Jeanne’s friends—always when Jeanne was far beyond earshot—and no one ever told her. Not even Emily, who was supposed to be her closest confidante. “You’d have to be an idiot to have dated that shithead for so long.”
The bathroom was still empty and Emily listened for voices outside the door or the sound of water running through the pipes, but what she heard, instead, was only the click of the phone as Jeanne hung up without a word. The electronic smack came across the airwaves like an admonition from another century, like Carlyle unable to reach the modern audience. Intelligence, wisdom, words to live by. Poor Carlyle, no one in the modern world gave a shit about what he had to say. Poor Emily. Poor Nate.
Emily hadn’t planned to peek in on George again, but his room sat directly on her path from the bathroom to the elevator, and the door was open, and the situation—George languishing—seemed so much less loaded without Nate by her side. It began to seem, to Emily, remarkably straightforward. This man lying in Kent Hospital, this bundle of Bedecker genes, was the devil.
She stood for a moment at the door to room 207B. George Bedecker was still out cold. He was the evil one, not Emily. She was embarrassed about how she’d laid into Jeanne, but it wasn’t her fault. It all came down to George. It was as if George were infecting her merely by his proximity. Oh God, that word, infect. George may have infected, down the family line, Trevor. Just the thought of that nearly killed Emily. She had the sense that everything bad—not just in the future, but in the past as well—was George’s fault. Merely by existing as a cold bastard he’d damned them all.
She took one step inside the room, listened for a reaction, and then took a second step. The space appeared smaller without Nate in it. Even though the patient was unconscious, his room’s overhead lights were on bright, illuminating the cracks in the floor and the nicks in the wall paint. The phone next to George’s bed was heavy and square, from the era before cordless. The shades were pulled down over his windows. She took two more steps forward until she was standing directly next to the bed. Below her, George’s body seemed to have sunk even further into his mattress since an hour ago. He was a small man, a fraction of Nate’s size. She could probably crack him in half with her hands. She saw his chest rise, barely, with his breath. This was the man Emily had been encouraging Nate to reunite with, a man she’d never met and had truly known nothing about. This was a man she’d misj
udged from the start. She’d thought that since he’d helped conceive Nate once, and since his buildings were so beautiful, he must have had a heart. She was wrong.
She gripped the bed’s metal side rail and leaned closer over George Bedecker, but he didn’t move, he didn’t flinch. She knew that he was unconscious, technically, but shouldn’t her presence, her face just a foot from his, stir him in some way? Didn’t he feel anything? Didn’t he feel? Or had that been his problem all along: a consummate lack of humanity, an absolute severance from the populated world?
Before she could stop herself she tightened her grip on the bed and screamed, “My name is Emily and I’m in love with your son—you have a son and his name is Nate Bedecker—and you’re a coward, a sleeping selfish coward and an egomaniac asshole and a derelict, and all your big indestructible buildings, they’re no excuse, fucker!”
Only after her voice stopped did she realize how loud she’d been. She’d gone at the man full force; it was a wonder she hadn’t blown him out of his bed. For a moment, she stood stone still beside him, stunned. She heard a clock tick from somewhere on the other side of the bed. “Fuck you,” she said under her breath.
Then she spun toward the door and ran out of the room and bolted down the hall, past a gaping orderly, not slowing until she was safely around the corner, out of view, where she abruptly came to a stop and began to walk purposefully, innocently, as if she had nothing to hide. The hallway was wide and empty and buzzing with fluorescent light. Someone had left a tray of empty coffee cups on the floor and she was tempted to take one, to smash it against the sterile cement wall. Instead, she pushed the down button for the elevator and, as she waited for it to come, she broke into a wide, unrestrained smile.
CHAPTER 24
The Route
NATE IDLED IN THE AUDI outside the hospital’s main entrance. George’s car was like his homes, clean and nearly empty. The glove compartment contained nothing except the Audi’s instruction booklet, the registration, and a pamphlet to mark with the vehicle’s regular checkups (there hadn’t been any yet, since the car was only two months old). Apparently all that George Bedecker needed was GPS. Well, GPS and comprehensive insurance, since it would cost a bundle to fix the damage he’d done to the front of the car. Nate knew what it took to repair a Jeep, and a foreign car’s repairs had to be at least double.
Nate fiddled with the controls and glanced at the clock. What time had it been, precisely, when he’d separated from Emily outside the doctor’s office? He had no idea. It had taken Nate longer than expected to fetch the Audi. He’d had trouble with that GPS. The minute he started the ignition, it began harping at him. No, not it. She. Loud and husky like a middle school gym teacher, telling him that he had strayed from the set route. Every time he moved an inch she repeated her reprimand, so he stopped the car just a few spaces from where he’d started. GPS systems had off switches. Nate knew that, but couldn’t find one on this machine. That’s when he’d popped open the glove compartment, fished around the nearly empty little space for the user’s manual, and silenced the audible command option. A car shouldn’t be so difficult to control.
Now it was 11:05 a.m. The clock was accurately set, but the radio buttons weren’t preprogrammed for favorites yet—Nate had fiddled with those, too. His father never used to listen to albums or the radio, if Nate remembered correctly. Occasionally, when his parents were both in Cleveland at the same time, they’d gone out to the symphony, but Nate thought it was just for special performances, an annual benefit and the like. Nate turned the radio on and then off again and then glanced up at the hospital’s facade. Emily was inside phoning the babysitter, a smart idea. Usually it was Nate who worried when they left the kid at home and Emily who insisted that children were resilient. So what was taking her so long?
Nate shut off the ignition. He took the keys with him and carefully locked the car—something he’d never forget to do again, ever, for the rest of his life, however long that would be—and walked toward the doors of the hospital. The glass entryway automatically slid open as he approached and entered. The receptionist at the front desk looked at Nate blankly, apparently not recognizing him as the same guy who’d been in and out of this doorway three times over the past twenty-four hours. A huddle of old women, in their eighties or nineties from the looks of them and all wearing navy housedresses, congregated in a corner of the lobby. The floor of the entryway was carpeted, wall-to-wall lint. That couldn’t possibly be sterile.
“Have you seen my girlfriend?” Nate said to the receptionist, “Five-foot-six, wearing tan corduroys and a white shirt?” She hadn’t worn her jacket today. “Her hair’s dark blond, or light brown—I don’t know what you call it, it’s in between, you know?—and shoulder-length?” He couldn’t think of anything else to add. Emily was always Emily to Nate: corduroys, five-foot-six, sharp and eager to please, often nervous, a pro at problem solving, and beautifully unaware of her own allure. Today, she was going through emotional hell.
“Maybe?” the receptionist said. “Is she a patient or a visitor?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Nate reached for his phone, but he’d left it in the car. No worry, Emily was probably right where he’d left her. Nate took the fire stairs up one flight to the ICU. He looked into his father’s room. The old man was still out, the only sound a constant series of beeps from the machine that stood next to his bed. No Emily. Nate paced the hallway between George’s room and the doctor’s office. This was where he’d last seen Emily, but she was no longer on the scene.
He took the stairs back down to the cafeteria. She’d probably stopped in for a coffee. They hadn’t had any caffeine this morning and she’d be craving a cup by now, but she wasn’t there, either, and Nate realized that she didn’t have any money. The thirty-five dollars that they hadn’t yet spent was in his wallet. Unless she’d found a way to pawn off her stolen painting for cash, she had to be somewhere in this hospital. He walked quickly back to the lobby and, as he strode by, he caught the eye of the receptionist.
“Haven’t seen her!” the woman said and smiled. Nate smiled back as if this were good news.
Nate half-convinced himself that Emily would be waiting for him outside, by the car (illegally parked, but locked at least), but as he walked out the hospital’s front door again, he discovered that she wasn’t there, either.
Nate lingered in the parking lot—an expanse of chalky asphalt bordered by a row of Dumpsters and what looked like a defunct soccer field—and considered the possibility (the paranoid, deluded, yet not entirely illogical possibility) that Emily really had actually left him. I’m leaving! It wasn’t unthinkable. He’d probably leave, too, if he were her. And she’d already proven, with her felonious art activity, that she was acting on impulse this week.
Her life would be better without him. Her life and Trevor’s. Nate assumed that if she left she’d take Trevor with her (and probably leave the Rufino with Nate, implicating him if the painting were found). That was probably why she was calling the hotel, to arrange her getaway. It was the right decision. After all, what had she gained from being with Nate? He’d failed as a provider, and come up short in the emotional area as well. She and the boy would set up a new life somewhere, maybe even back in Manhattan if Emily could land a windfall or a willing partner, and they wouldn’t have to witness Nate’s painful decline. He’d read that it was common for Huntington’s sufferers to leave their families, preferring to spare them the horror of having to watch the painful onslaught of the disease, spare them having to change the diapers of an angry, paranoid middle-aged man for years upon years. It would make sense if Emily had chosen to leave. The worst part for Nate, really, would be not seeing the little guy every day, not waking up to his cries, not trying to silence the wails, not hearing him happily screech every time the microwave’s timer beeped. It would kill Nate not to see his son. It would also kill him to see the boy—and in time become a burden.
“You have strayed from the
set route,” the GPS said. Nate had unwittingly reactivated the gym teacher. Fuck. “Return to the set route.”
A parade of vehicles—compacts and SUVs and two bicycles and one gaunt, attenuated sedan, a relic from the 1970s—began to file into the parking lot. Nate watched as the drivers (men and women wearing scrubs and lab coats and rubber-soled shoes) parked and locked their cars and bikes. The shifts were changing. It had been at least half an hour since Emily promised to meet Nate outside. She could already be in Newport, packing Trevor’s things, dumping the Rufino in the harbor. In the end, Nate would ruin no one’s life but his own. Emily would find happiness, for once. Trevor would grow up to be a sailor and a poet and a statesman and maybe even a healthy boy. A healthy man. It was all for the best, Nate reminded himself as he laid his head on the steering wheel and contemplated dialing Emily, on the off-chance she’d pick up his call. He’d be like George. He’d die alone, estranged from his loved ones. He’d be his father’s son, after all.
The passenger side door clicked open.
Nate spun his head and saw Emily sliding into the car. Emily, with her tan corduroys and her white top and her nervous energy. She smiled wanly at him. Her eyes were red.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” she said. “Trevor’s fine. Marietta says he went down for his nap without a fuss. I think she was eating her way through our minifridge when I called, the little that we left in there.” Emily stopped talking just long enough to buckle her seat belt and adjust her seat. “We should keep Marietta in mind, in case she does non-Viking babysitting. We’re going to have to start over here. New babysitters, new dentists, the whole shebang.” She didn’t say new doctors, but it was implied.
Nate continued to stare at her, at her earnest concern, her nervousness pouring off her sleeve, almost but not quite concealed by her attempt at confidence, her dire need to project confidence.