The Exiles (25 page)

“I’m okay,” he said. “He’s like a stranger to me.” Looking at George’s inert frame, Nate thought back to his elementary school, where the playground had bordered on a thick patch of woods filled with scurrying beetles and garter snakes.
You touch it,
Nate and his friends would taunt one another each time a wounded squirrel or sparrow fell at the forest’s edge.
No, you touch it first!
The only motion coming from George’s body was the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Neither Nate nor Emily had said much this morning about their conversation from last night. Nate knew that the Huntington’s thing was somehow bigger than Emily’s art caper. They might find a way out of the art thing if they schemed together. There was nothing, however, they could do about the Huntington’s. And Huntington’s, unlike art theft, was deadly. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” Nate had said to Emily this morning. She countered with, “I need to let my head settle.” Finally they ended up in this hospital room after Emily asked, seeming to honestly want an answer, “What do we do now?”

“He looks at peace,” Emily said, her eyes on George. She was studying the old man’s face. “All of that stuff”—she paused and Nate could feel her tense up—“that Huntington’s stuff. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s been wracked with shakes.”

“You can’t tell. They always look peaceful in their sleep. The articles say that the tremors, the chorea, it subsides in sleep. It’s like a return to babyhood, so much unexplained craziness during the day and then a solid crash at night.”

According to the doctors, there had been no change to
George’s prognosis. He was still in a coma, still suffering from brain trauma, still no word on when or whether he’d come out of it. It was fascinating to watch: a completely unconscious body, continuing, at minimum function. All men were simply carbon-based machines when it came down to it. Brain function was purely a bonus.

The door to the room opened and Nate stepped out of the way, separating from Emily.

“Good morning!” chirped a male nurse, carrying a tray. His starched uniform was leaning closer to gray than to white. “Breakfast, if the patient feels up to it.” The nurse set the plastic tray on the table by George’s bedside and Emily started laughing. Her guffaws came out choked, as if she was trying to stop them.

“Oh, come on,” she said to the nurse. She let her laugh grow unbridled for a moment. “Does the patient
look
like he feels up to it?” The nurse glared at her and left the room.

Beneath the tray’s steam-dotted transparent cover, Nate could make out scrambled eggs, dry wheat toast, and a sectioned orange.

“It’s a bummer,” Nate said. “When I was a kid, my father used to request dry toast for breakfast from my mother all the time. Dry and tasteless, it fit his personality.” The word
lifeless
also came to Nate’s mind. The word described his father even before the accident, but it felt tactless today, here.

“You know, I used to imagine what it would be like when I met your dad for the first time,” Emily said, stepping away from the bed. “The great George Bedecker. I imagined him in his gray suit like in all the pictures, but what would I say? ‘I love your work’ or ‘I was astounded by the Prague Art League building’ or ‘I’m the woman who loves your son’? It all felt so loaded, even in my head.”

Nate and she had barely talked about George after their early months of dating, when Nate made clear that he and his father hadn’t much spoken in years. George Bedecker was someone Nate read about in newspapers.
Doesn’t that make you sad?
she’d asked.
I have a full life, a lot of people have less,
he’d told her. It was true, it was a fact that had helped him get through plenty of rough times and financial setbacks. It seemed a small consolation now, though. His father, lying here unconscious (his coma starting to seem sinister and escapist), held all of the secrets to Nate’s past, and maybe his future. If Nate spent any longer in this room he’d lose his mind. Prematurely. Pre-prematurely.

“He’s totally unaware. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go,” Emily said.

“He’s a young guy, Em. He’s not even seventy,” Nate’s voice was hard, chastising. He wanted her to understand. He wanted her to already know all there was to know and to have already synthesized everything she’d heard last night. He was being unfair. He turned away from the bed. “I don’t
think
he’s seventy. Walter Gropius was seventy-five when he started the Pan Am Building,” Nate recited straight from one of his childhood monographs, information he hadn’t known he’d retained. “George can’t die. An architect’s career starts at age seventy,” Nate said.

He can’t die, Nate thought. For so long Nate had assumed that he might never lay eyes on George, in person, again. Now the man was here, in the flesh, and Nate began to see that perhaps what he wanted from his father, what he was owed, was not simply hard answers but amends and restitution as well.

The eggs from George’s hospital tray were cold. Frigid, hard, overcooked, and tasting like cement—even after Emily dressed them up with a shake of pepper and a splash of hot water. Nate didn’t have an appetite anyway, but apparently Emily did. Sitting
next to him in the waiting room, she nibbled on the eggs and the toast, her teeth making half moons in the wheat bread. They’d stolen the tray from George’s room, though it hadn’t felt like theft. George wouldn’t be waking up in time for breakfast, or lunch or dinner, most likely, and the grub would go to waste. And did it really count as theft when the loot was so undesirable? That was probably the Jeep thief’s rationale, Nate thought.
It’s not stealing; this truck is a wreck.
Perhaps the same spin could be applied to the Rufino: it’s not stealing; this art is shit.

The car was of little concern to Nate this morning. What he couldn’t get out of his head were Emily’s words: the old man was real. For years George had been someone Nate saw only in TV documentaries and in books, someone who lived through his buildings. It had been more than a decade since he’d been a real blood-and-guts human to his son, the way he was today. He was real. He was still alive, he was breathing (he wasn’t in need of a ventilator, and the resident on duty this morning assured Nate that this was a good sign), he still had a brain in there, he still had time to mend his fences. He was still Nate’s father. Or, he still had a chance to be Nate’s father. Annemarie and Charlie had lost their futures, but it wasn’t too late for George.

George still had a chance to
apologize,
though Nate hated that word. It had become so vapid, all of the
sorry
s that he and Emily loaded onto Trevor and exchanged with each other every day: sorry I’m late, sorry I didn’t make the dinner reservation, sorry I’m not on the partner track, sorry the best job I could get was in Rhode Island, sorry I’m me, sorry you’re stuck with me, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry I’m an art thief, sorry. It was all so empty. Yet in this situation, an apology would be welcome, Nate thought. He pictured George coming out of his coma, slowly opening his eyes, registering the IVs attached to his arm, the
strange sterile surroundings, the diffuse light coming in the high hospital-room window. He’d fret over the design of the place, the colors and textiles which mimicked nothing in the natural world. As he was trying to make sense of it all, he would turn his gaze toward the side of his bed and he’d see his son, his one surviving son. What would George say to his child? Would he even recognize him? How would he phrase his amends? Nate hadn’t thought that far ahead. There were so many apologies for George to make: for his absent fathering, for completely taking off after Nate’s mother’s death, for possibly passing down his tainted genes, and for not alerting Nate to this possibility before he had his own son.

Emily put down the food and rubbed Nate’s back. He’d expected her to wake up and be distraught, but he’d forgotten that she pulled together when faced with acute trauma—trauma not of her own devising. She could barely function when she misplaced her apartment keys or found herself in possession of stolen art (last night she’d told Nate about the low-level tremors she’d been feeling in her heart ever since grabbing the piece, of her futile attempts to put it out of her mind, not unlike his more successful attempts to deny the Huntington’s), but when she’d discovered that she was unexpectedly pregnant, for example, she’d grown strong and taken control.

“Nate, it’s ten thirty,” Emily still had her hand on his back. “We should go see if the specialist is in.”

Three hours had passed since they’d left Trevor, and Nate missed him already.

They ditched the tray of food on top of the waiting room’s trash can, walked down the hall, took an elevator up to the second floor and, Emily first with Nate close behind, entered a small office. Inside, they faced the doctor with whom Nate had dealt the day before.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you got in,” he said to Nate. “I do rounds in Westerly in the mornings.”

“No, that’s fine,” Nate said.

“Sit.” The doctor shut the office door and motioned to a small couch. He extended a hand to Emily and introduced himself. “I hear you have questions,” the doctor said. There was barely room for the three of them in the office.

“It’s about his father and Huntington’s,” said Emily.

“About having a test done, for Huntington’s, and what that entails. I know there are tests, I don’t know if he’s had them,” Nate said. If there was something to be done, knowledge to be found, he was finally ready for it. He was in a hospital, his father was sick, it was the time for action.

“There is a test, that’s right,” the doctor said. “I don’t know if your father has had it, either, but it’s not something you can request for him. You can’t request it for anyone but yourself.”

“He’s unconscious. He can’t request it himself,” Nate said, though that information seemed obvious. He’d thought it would be easy to have his father tested. Surely the hospital had already drawn plenty of his blood.

“And as long as he remains unconscious”—the doctor again motioned to his couch, and finally both Emily and Nate sat—“his Huntington’s status is of no consequence. To him, at least. Not everyone at risk for the disease wants to know his status. Plenty of people don’t have the capacity to process that kind of news. And you need to be aware that a positive diagnosis can trigger insurance problems. Mundane as that sounds, it is a consideration. As such, it’s your father’s right to deny the test for himself.” The doctor scooted back a few inches in his padded desk chair, as if making room for his words. “And he might not even need a test. From what you’ve told me, you haven’t confirmed that he’s at risk.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t—”

“You don’t want to get tested yourself?”

Nate didn’t know. He only knew that if George were tested, and it turned out he didn’t have the gene, it would mean that Nate had nothing to worry about. If George was tested and he
did
have the gene, it meant there was still a 50 percent chance that Nate was negative. If Nate was tested himself, though, the results would be definitive. There would be no going back.

“Oh, seriously, can’t you just test the man? He’s in a coma. Nate’s his next of kin. Just let Nate request the test,” Emily said.

“Emily,” Nate said, to quiet her down.

“My priority is in treating Mr. Bedecker’s head injury and internal wounds. I’m going to write down the name of a counselor in our hereditary disease department”—he looked at Nate—“and you should speak with her as soon as possible, though there’s a better HD clinic in Providence. It might be worth the trip. If you do decide to get tested, you can’t do it today regardless. We have a counseling protocol. Once you’ve been through the counseling, you’ll decide whether to have the test.” He leaned over his desk and scribbled a name and phone number onto a page from his prescription pad, then handed the paper over to Nate. The doctor’s cursive was precise and unexpectedly neat. “There aren’t many conditions I can think of that are worse than Huntington’s. And there’s no treatment, as of yet, even if you test positive. There’s promising research being done, but it’ll be years before they’re testing on humans, and that’s only if the inhibiting drug proves out its promise. There’s no way for me to sugarcoat this disease.”

Nate understood. The diagnosis wasn’t just a death sentence. It was a sentence to suffer, for a decade or more, prior to that death. To be rendered useless and
then,
after an excruciating wait, to die.

He shouldn’t have had a child in the first place, that’s what it boiled down to. He should have pressed Emily to have an abortion. He looked over to Emily, sitting next to him on the vinyl loveseat. She seemed to think his glance was a cue for her to speak.

“Isn’t it better to know if you have the gene?” she asked. Emily was a firm believer in knowledge. “I think it’s better to know.” She sounded angry. At Nate, probably. He didn’t blame her.

“There’s no treatment,” the doctor said again. He had the patience of a saint. Or of a pediatrician. “Of course, if you two plan to have more children, you’ll want to know if there’s a risk.”

Nate saw Emily glance at him. Would they want more kids? They’d operated on the assumption, in New York, that they’d stop with Trevor. They’d both come from small families. Emily’s only brother lived on the West Coast and was eight years her senior—it seemed like eighteen years, she liked to say. She often referred to herself as an only child. In Manhattan, when Emily and Nate had talked about having more kids, they’d agreed that it seemed financially reckless to try to raise two children when just one had put them in such economic straits. In Newport, they’d have enough space for a second child. Another kid: he couldn’t believe he was even thinking about it. He might have already poisoned their first, and Emily didn’t seem to be a moral exemplar for children these days. The phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” crossed Nate’s mind.

“We should go,” Nate nodded to the doctor. “I need to think.”

“Call the counselor,” the doctor said, opening the door to let them out. “We’ll know in the next few days if your father is out of the deep end.”