The Exiles (16 page)

“Bah!” The boy said, reaching an arm into the air and smiling at nothing. The kid was happy this morning. Oblivious and happy. Nate held him down with one arm and continued looking through the sack, the unrecognizable detritus of Emily’s life. Lipstick tubes and vitamins and coupons gobbed together with old lotion of some sort. He felt something soft and pliable in the inside zipper pocket. That was another thing women had over men: secret pockets. Zipper pockets in their purses, button pockets inside their coat linings, lockets around their necks that held the keys to their pasts.

Nate reached into the pocket and pulled out a tube of rolled fabric, held tight by a nylon hair band. Not a T-shirt, for sure. More like a diaper-changing pad. Emily had kept a diaper pad stashed in the bag for Trevor when he was a newborn, Nate remembered, but by three months the tot had grown too large to lie on it. Nate took the band off the tube and unrolled it, slowly, taking his spare hand off Trevor’s stomach to lay the fabric flat on the ground.

The swatch was covered in slick colors, like vinyl, like a placemat. Frayed white threads fuzzed at its edges. Its colors, a deep copper-orange and industrial gray, were unexplainably appealing. Trevor rolled onto his stomach and took a look, as well.

Nate’s eyes drifted over the piece the way he read a newspaper, from the top corners to the bottom, and that’s where, in the lower right, in barely legible print, his eyes locked on a name.

Rufino.

He drew away from the cloth quickly, as if from a flame, and then leaned closer in. Rufino. It said, Rufino. He was looking at the Barbers’ Rufino.

Naked, stripped from its frame, it resembled nothing more than an attractive shard of upholstery fabric. Nate, breathless and dazed, was stunned by how different a thing could look when shorn of its context.

CHAPTER
15

Breakfast at the Viking

E
MILY WOKE WITH A
start: light in her eyes, silence in the air. It was 9:30 a.m. and the only trace of Nate and Trevor in the room was a note on the pillow. They were out for a walk, giving her a break. From the sound of it, they’d be gone for a while. She lay back down but couldn’t sleep. As with yesterday morning, in new daylight the shock of their situation hit her with a fresh smack. They had no car, no home, no money, nothing but a useless work of art. In their escape from Manhattan, they’d already sunk several rungs below where they started out. She hadn’t meant to steal the Rufino.

The entire seriousness of her action hadn’t hit her until the theft was a fait accompli. And even then, none of it seemed real. She’d pushed it out of her thoughts over the past couple of days. It felt like someone else’s misstep (because, truthfully, how could Emily Latham commit an actual crime? She wasn’t competent enough to pull off a felony!) until Celeste mentioned, with such surety, that the cops would be questioning the Barbers’ guests. It
hadn’t seemed real until that moment. At the time of the theft, four days ago, she’d been in a stupor.

She’d been alone in the Barbers’ study, at the far end of their apartment, barely able to hear the party. The only noise that reached her was the occasional shrill laugh and the knock of platters against one another in the kitchen. As she held the Rufino, she looked back toward the study’s door, which had shut behind her. She gazed up at the books arranged not by author or year but by color of the spines, and she ran her fingers along the flat wool of the carpet, and before she understood what she was doing, she reached into her bag and took out a pair of nail scissors. She lay the Rufino flat on the floor (yes, she’d made fun of his work in the past, but she could understand that there might be a bit of beauty in this piece, in its effortlessness and simplicity—effortlessness and simplicity being qualities that Emily was learning to deeply appreciate) and, as if slicing tape with a box cutter, she used one of the scissors’ sharp tines to cut the canvas from its heavy frame. She replaced the empty frame to the back of the stack and then rolled the liberated canvas into a baton with the painted side in. She secured it with a hair band that had been at the bottom of her purse. Instinctively she wiped down the edge of the frame with the hem of her sweater. Finally she stuffed the canvas, now a ten-inch-long roll the width of a banana, into the inside pocket of her purse.

And now, in Newport, the Rufino was still in her bag, zipped inside a practically hidden pocket that she never used. She wasn’t sure if it was a stroke of luck or a curse that the painting hadn’t been taken with the car. It was luck. It had to be. Much as she’d like to be rid of the piece (in the light of day, she understood that there was no power in possessing an easily identifiable, and identifiably stolen, work of art), at least she could keep
an eye on it. It wouldn’t turn up at a pawnshop as incriminating evidence, linked to their vehicle.

The horror that she wouldn’t allow herself to acknowledge, the detail that had helped her push the entire theft to the deep reaches of her brain, was this: If she were caught with the Rufino and jailed (she tried to convince herself that Anna and Randy would never press charges—that they’d tell the cops it was just a misunderstanding—but that was a stretch, she knew) Trevor would be motherless. She couldn’t let herself get caught. She couldn’t get caught. She was fine, she told herself. There were no clues, that’s what everyone had said. There was no evidence. Emily simply had to maintain her composure.

In the moment when she’d first laid eyes on the Rufino, just before cutting it from the frame, she’d thought that perhaps the painting could buy her an intellectual life again, bringing her back in line with Nate. At minimum, it could give Emily a small bit of the financial security she’d always craved. Of course she’d been deluded about this. In Emily’s hands, the painting lost its worth. She had no idea how to unload the thing and turn it into cash. She didn’t have those kinds of connections. Or those kinds of guts. More than a criminal, she’d been a fool.

It was too much to acknowledge, so for the past three days, she’d willfully avoided the situation, told herself no one would ever know. She was beginning to understand, though, that moving to Newport hadn’t nullified the theft. It hadn’t negated the crime but had amplified it.

She should have dumped the Rufino in a rest-stop bathroom. She should have thought about her son before yanking a Rufino from its frame.

Wired on her own idiocy, Emily got out of bed, pulled on her crusty clothing, and settled into breakfast at the café downstairs, just off the hotel’s lobby. Barely ten minutes after her coffee
arrived, she spotted her two men standing beyond the check-in desk. Nate was on the in-house phone and Trevor, the tired trooper, was perched once again on a marble hotel counter.

She hadn’t mentioned her crime to Nate. Well, she’d tried to say something several times, but it—her spontaneous proclivity to steal and the ensuing legal jeopardy in which she’d placed herself—was too humiliating to acknowledge even to her so-called life partner. How could she explain herself? Every time she attempted to bring it up, she stammered and went silent, and Nate, all caught up in his own head, hadn’t seemed to notice.

The lobby where Nate and Trevor stood now was bright with the morning sun, but the restaurant where Emily sat, some thirty yards away, was dark as a cave, illuminated solely by the large-screen TV behind the bar. Nate’s back was turned. Emily’s eye fell on the diaper bag slung over his shoulder—he had her bag. He had the Rufino! Emily caught her breath and felt a wince stick in her throat. Then she understood that he wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly, stumble upon the artwork. It was in the bag’s interior zip pocket, a pocket that a person would need a flashlight and foreknowledge to find. Nate, in all of his ten months of helping carry the bag, had never had to use that pocket. The diapers, cream, everything he would need was in the main pouch. He was a man, he wasn’t curious enough to explore a woman’s purse further. He wasn’t.

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

N
ATE 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.