The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “Em—” Nate stood. He grabbed her bag from the corner of the room and began digging through it.

  “Hey,” Emily said. “What do you need?”

  He took the Rufino from the bag. “And the nail scissors. Do you still have them?”

  “In the front pocket,” she said, standing and holding out her hand. He brought the bag to her and she found the scissors immediately.

  “You want to make the first cut?” he asked as he unfurled the canvas. It was so small, even when stretched out to its full length. The paint was laid on thick. The idea of completely destroying it made Emily’s chest tense. And yet, the idea of the painting hanging around their new house made her even more uneasy. Tomorrow they’d make a fresh start, absent the traumatic evidence of their life before.

  “It’s all yours,” Emily said, handing him the scissors. Her hands shook.

  “Here goes.” He slid the canvas between the two blades.

  “Wait!” Emily said in a gasp, a burst of air. Nate paused at the sound of her voice and looked up. She wasn’t ready. And then, she was. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  The scissors’ small, sharp blades met little resistance as he cut through the thick paint, following the line of the gray brushstrokes as if trimming the wings of a paper airplane.

  Nate handed the Rufino, now in two halves, to Emily. She took the pieces and the scissors from him and continued cutting, not along the painting’s design, but in a straight path, creating neat, narrow strips less than an inch wide.

  “I cannot believe I’m doing this,” she said. “I cannot believe how effortless it is to destroy the thing.” After the canvas had been reduced to strips, she cut the strips crosswise until, in the end, she was left with a pile of squares the size of postage stamps. She took the square with the bulk of Rufino’s signature on it, and shred that into shards no larger than dots of confetti. Then, with a concentrated precision, she shred each of the other squares in the same way, rendering the artwork unrecognizable. It was no longer the thing it had been a minute ago.

  She dropped the pieces into the plastic bag that had held the laundry detergent, and stood across from Nate, the two of them erect and wordless, the weekend hanging behind them like a disaster scene. They remained motionless, stunned, equally fearful and fearless, like survivors of a flood, the last singed escapees from a fire that had taken down their entire pasts. Emily looked into Nate’s eyes, his face open and blank. The reverberations he’d heard earlier were no longer there. It was now as silent in his head as it was in the house itself. It was so soundless that he could, for the first time in a month, think. Emily moved closer to him, lifting her foot high, as if stepping over rubble.

  “Now what?” Nate said.

  Emily shrugged, shook her head, and almost started to smile, as if to say: Anything is possible.

  Acknowledgments

  In researching Huntington’s I turned often to the smart and unflinching At Risk For Huntington’s Disease blog (http://curehd.blogspot.com/), written by the pseudonymous Gene Veritas, and to Alice Wexler’s excellent books on the subject, Mapping Fate and The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea. I’m also greatly indebted to Natalie Danford, Ruth Gallogly, Ellen Greenfield, Moira Trachtenberg-Thielking, Halli Melnitsky, Ellen Sussman, and Amanda Eyre Ward for reading versions of this novel. I owe continued thanks to the Creative Writing Department at Butler University for giving me a home while I write. There’d be no book at all without my tireless agent, Lane Zachary, and keen-eyed editor, Carmen Johnson—and the entire New Harvest/Amazon Publishing team (including Ed Park, who kindly sent me Carmen’s way). Sincere gratitude goes to the Lynn and Dahlie clans—especially my parents, who provided the occasional emergency rations and on-the-house medical fact-checking. Finally, and always: to Mike and Evan, my rock-star storytellers and partners in crime.

  ALLISON LYNN is author of Now You See It, which won the William Faulkner Medal from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society and the Chapter One Award from the Bronx Writers’ Center. Lynn’s essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, People, In Style, Post Road, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from New York University and currently teaches in the creative writing program at Butler University. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband, the writer Michael Dahlie, and their son.