The Exiles (29 page)

For a moment, she had hated him. She’d despised him for his history, for things that were beyond his control. For shutting her out, too. Now that they were talking, though, she found she couldn’t hate him. The mass in her head was equally divided between relief that Nate and she were sharing their fears again (something they’d stopped doing months ago) and overwhelming terror about their unsure future. She wanted Nate to be healthy, Trevor to be healthy, more than she’d ever wanted anything.

“We’re going to be okay,” she said to Nate as they left the Gateway and strapped themselves into the Audi again, in the diner parking lot.

“I’ve created a mess,” he said. “We both have.” He started the car. “Where should we go?”

“I’m tired. We could go to the Viking, let Marietta leave early.” They’d hired her for the full day, until 4:00 p.m. “Though last time we let a babysitter go early, that didn’t end so well.”

“The Barbers’,” Nate said.

Emily nodded. “But lying down on a bed sounds really good right now.”

“Beds are all we have left.”

“Yeah, hotel beds. We don’t even own them.”

“No,” Nate said. “It’s what the officer told me. The carjacker left the AeroBeds, as well as a bunch of Trevor’s toys that you’d put in boxes.”

“In a crate. They were in a milk crate.”

“Right, those toys. I guess they don’t have much resale value.”

While feeding and soothing Trevor, Emily had spent hours in their New York apartment looking at her and Nate’s things, wondering which might go for a prime price on eBay or
Antiques Roadshow
if times got any tougher. It was a disappointing exercise. Their goods seemed so cheap when examined with the eye of an appraiser.

“No value at all,” Emily confirmed.

It felt good to be sitting inside an unmoving car. A moment out of time, like being on a bridge but with a less inevitable destination. “Going back to the hotel, it’s all lost its charm now,” she said. “It’s been a hell of a weekend.”

“We don’t have to stay at the Viking. We have beds again,” Nate said.

Emily leaned forward in her seat. “Nate! We have beds,” she smiled, for real. They hadn’t lost everything. “Let’s sleep at home. Let’s bring Trevor to the place he’ll remember as his childhood home—”

“His
first
childhood home.”

“His first home. Just like we’d planned for our first days here, camping on the floor. We have electricity and water, and beds now, it’s all we need. We can beg a couple of towels off the Viking and return them next week. They seem to trust us there, fools. And we could probably get takeout from the restaurant and charge it to our room before we leave, but damn, it’d be nice to stop charging things there, to have our own cash, legal tender, in our hands again.”

“You really want to stay at the house?”

“Why not?” she said.

“We could make dinner,” Nate said. “I mean, you could, if you want. Leaving Manhattan hasn’t made me a better cook.”

“We’d need food, Nate, ingredients. And pots and pans. These things cost money.” She practically slobbered at the thought. The Viking’s meals were all starting to taste the same, and the hospital toast and diner potatoes had left her wanting.

“If you’re willing to make a feast out of mismatched canned goods, I know where we can get some,” he said, starting the engine.

They were five miles up Route 1 before Emily got around to asking where they were heading. The sun was high in the sky, and they’d flipped the Audi’s visors down, flush against the windshield. It was early afternoon and already felt as if a full week had passed since they’d left Trevor at the hotel this morning. He’d be waking up from his nap right about now, maybe heading out for that stroll. Maybe he’d be putting up a fuss for the sitter, but Emily doubted it. It’s not that she had unusually high expectations for her kid, like those mothers who claimed to have reared angels even as their prodigies were smearing pudding on the wallpaper. It was that Trevor threw tantrums only when he was alone with his parents. Around strangers, he was eerily, naturally easygoing, a trait clearly inherited from Nate. A trait luckily inherited from Nate. Oh God, perhaps Trevor had gotten only Nate’s good genes. She looked over at Nate and tried to see him as transient, as someone who might be gone soon. But he was a solid presence.

“Please tell me you’re not taking me back to the hospital,” Emily said as he slowed the car down to take a sharp curve. She sincerely hoped that Nate’s food plan didn’t involve cribbing another tray of George’s intensive-care rations. She could make a feast out of nearly anything, but rehydrated eggs and Jell-O might not be worth the effort. She turned on the Audi’s air-conditioning and it streamed out of the vent immediately, a clean
white chill. The Jeep’s A/C, on the other hand, usually took a full ten minutes to get up to speed, and even then it arrived as a slow fog, damp and clammy. She tilted the Audi’s vents up toward the ceiling, away from her skin.

“We’re heading over to Narragansett. It’s only about fifteen minutes.”

“They give away free food there? This really is the land of plenty.”

“We’re going to George’s house, his family’s old house.” Nate’s fingers trembled on the steering wheel. He lifted his right hand into the air, steadying it in front of his face for a moment before putting it back in position. He’d already noted that it was only the newness of the car that made driving it—this car that his long-remote father had crashed yesterday, had steered here from the Midwest—remarkably uncreepy. “No one’s there.”

Emily knew that Nate’s father had grown up in Rhode Island, but she’d had no idea—until Nate spewed his truths last night—that there was still a local house in the family.

As if reading her mind, Nate said, “It’s not like anyone’s lived there for years. I don’t know why I never said anything to you about my family having a house here.” He paused and then said, “It seemed silly to mention the old place, it has nothing to do with me. But then once we were here, and we’d spent all this time talking about Rhode Island and plotting out the move, it felt as if I’d lied, by omission, not telling you that my father grew up here.”

“Nate, I knew your father grew up in Rhode Island,” Emily said. “I just didn’t know that your father still owned a house here.”

Nate’s foot let up on the gas, the car started to slow down. “You knew my dad grew up here?”

“Nate, drive.” It would really cap off this holiday if they crashed and left Trevor parentless. Their lives hadn’t been worth so much, or much at all, Emily figured, until they had Trevor.

“I told you that my father grew up here? I usually tell people that he’d spent his whole life in Cleveland, since that’s the way he portrayed it when he stooped to talk about his past. I know nothing about his time here.”

“You never told me. You didn’t have to. His history is pretty much in the public domain.” Emily felt her words drop to the floor of the car like steel pellets. It was the great paradox of Nate’s pain: He acted so encumbered by having a father whose famous structures towered every day over the American heartland, yet never seemed to realize that though George Bedecker had refused to open himself up to his children, he was a completely public figure to the outside world. Emily had known George Bedecker’s name for as long as she could remember, the same way she’d always known of Georges Braque and Aaron Copland. It was only after her first date with Nate, however, when they’d known each other for two weeks, that she’d looked up the details of George’s work. And his history.

“Bedecker believed that the Narragansett house influenced the tone of his earliest designs,” Emily said now, paraphrasing from the hidden recess of her mind where she’d carefully and consciously stored that history. “Oh, not directly the house itself. It was a traditional house, repeating designs seen ad nauseam in the 1930s, but the way the house perched on the landscape and gave the surrounding environment the upper hand. ‘Humans are only the inhabitants of a house, the land owns it,’ he said. ‘The house should thus form a dialogue with the earth on which it sits, not with the people who, on whim, will take up residence for a while.’”

“It sounds almost beautiful, when you say it,” Nate said. The
landscape outside the car was growing greener, more residential. “You knew we were moving to my father’s home state and you didn’t say anything.”

“It was your place to say something. The last time I brought up your father’s name you threw a boot at me.”

“A shoe, not a boot.”

“Well, it was a big shoe.”

“I think this is where he was heading when he had his accident, to the house,” Nate said. He inched over toward the shoulder to let a pickup truck pull past. Nate was driving uncharacteristically slow, as if afraid the maimed car might fall apart if he went over forty-five mph. “The place has been cleaned and prepped. Maybe he’s working on a project in the area and that’s why he was coming, but last time I checked, he wasn’t building anything in Rhode Island. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen evidence of anything he’s working on. It’s like he’s thrown in the towel. Like running into a ditch on Route 1 was the inevitable conclusion to whatever is going on with him.” Nate steered the car closer to the center of the road again, edging away from the narrow shoulder.

“You don’t think—”

“That he was trying to kill himself? It’s not his style, even in the face of Huntington’s. He always believed in accepting life’s hard knocks, on moving forward stoically and without complaint, without emotion at all,” Nate said. “The good news is that his house is well stocked, with a pantry full of nonperishables.”

The place was modest, not the kind of spread Emily expected, given that its design had ostensibly inspired George to build the Treehorn Retreat and the Armistice Library. The library was the only building of George’s that Emily had been in since meeting Nate four years ago. It was a year into their relationship
and she’d found herself in Baltimore for a commercial shoot. Between wrapping the final take and catching her train back to New York, she took a cab over to the library and spent ten minutes wandering the perimeter of its capacious central hall. The entryway was built to maximize the natural light.
Here is your father, Nate,
she thought as she lingered next to the buffed walls, nearly late for her train. She’d assumed that standing in George’s building might help her understand the troubled son, her boyfriend who wouldn’t talk about his family, but it hadn’t helped at all. It had simply made her feel guilty, surreptitious. It had made her feel
wrong:
because as much as Nate despised his father, Emily, while standing inside of George Bedecker’s building, couldn’t deny the beauty in its design. It was breathtaking and awe-inspiring. It was merely a building, but the feeling of standing inside it transcended its dimensions and materials, it brought on a sense of the ethereal. Bedecker may have been no good at maintaining a family, but he’d mastered his work. This Narragansett house, however, was small and oddly traditional. It bore no resemblance to the library.

“I’ll open a window. It’s stuffy in here,” Nate said.

“It’s okay. It smells like fresh laundry.”

“He had the place professionally cleaned. I found the bill.” Nate opened the windows in the dining room and propped the front door open, letting air circulate through the house and back out again. The windowsills were covered in cracked white paint. The panes were framed by linen curtains that hung straight to the floor. Emily took herself on a tour of the first story. This house wasn’t large, but it was bigger than her and Nate’s new home. It had the kind of history, that sense of having been lived in, that their relatively new construction lacked. The oak floorboards in the hallway, leading from the dining room to the living room, sagged slightly as she walked.

“It looks like someone didn’t appreciate the setup in the living room,” she said, standing in the room’s doorway. All of the furniture in the living room was upholstered in broad floral prints, like garden party dresses. In the center of the room, the couch and a console table and an end table had all been sandwiched together, evoking images of a massive furniture love-in. Nate came up behind her.

“Oh, yeah, I tried to make a crib for Trevor, when he was here with me,” he said. “You’d think the son of George Bedecker could have constructed something with a little more style.”

Right, Trevor had been here. Last night, Nate had explained their father-son investigation, the couple of hours he and Trevor had spent checking the place, snooping in the attic until the policeman arrived. The timing was odd, Nate being at his father’s house exactly when police came looking for someone to claim the old man. Well, not
claim
him, like a body, but to claim him as kin, as a responsibility. Nate seemed to see it as an omen, a call to rise to the occasion. Emily felt drunk, woozy with emotional overload. She could only imagine how the hangover was going to feel once all of this sank in.

“Come on,” Nate said. He left the room and Emily followed.

In the kitchen, they rifled through the cabinets—the refrigerator was empty, save for a box of baking soda and four unopened liters of sparkling water, the labels in Dutch. The tall maple cabinets, though, were packed with the kind of food that a paranoid gourmand might stockpile in anticipation of a nuclear winter. Dried beans, canned tomatoes, canned soup, jarred carrots and peas, boxes of rice, tins of sardines, instant oatmeal as well as rolled oats, dried apricots in a vacuum-packed bag, tea, honey, preserved lemons, and one box of graham crackers, which Nate had broken into and was eating his way through.

“Look at all the tuna!” Emily said. “When do you think
these cabinets were stocked?” There were eight tins of albacore packed in spring water. “It’s a mercury overload waiting to happen.” For the past couple of years, ever since the government issued its mercury warnings against tuna and swordfish, Emily had steered completely clear of the species. She’d replaced tuna with chicken salad in her diet, swordfish with swordfish abstinence.

“Some of these cans are recent,” Nate said through a mouth full of graham crackers, looking at the expiration date on a container of processed pumpkin filling. “Though the graham crackers are a little soft.”