The Exiles (3 page)

“Please,” he heard Emily say softly, as if afraid of her own voice. It was dead silent, a sudden ghost town in front of them. Even the trees stood motionless in the evening air. The yard surrounding their lawyer’s office was littered with small elms and one full-grown maple that towered strong over the bare street. What happened to all that holiday traffic? Tourists leaching out of the woodwork?
What happened to their car?
Nate looked back up at the office building and then, with his eyes, traced the path to where they stood now. They were less than twenty yards from Bob’s door.

“Please, Nate,” Emily said, her voice nearly inaudible. “Tell me this is not where we parked the Jeep.”

The space in front of the curb was empty, a gasp where the Cherokee had been. On the corner of the block, a few car lengths away, a standard steel mailbox rose up from the grass on the tree belt. Nate hadn’t noticed a mailbox when they parked. It occurred to him that this wasn’t where they’d left the Jeep after all. They’d parked on the next block or around the corner. Maybe they’d left the car in the narrow alley behind the lawyer’s office. Wasn’t there an alley back there? Nate couldn’t remember. No, he
could
remember, his memory remained intact; this was the one thing he knew for sure and held onto. His brain was still running on all cylinders. This gape of pavement was exactly where they’d left the car. They’d parked right here and loaded Trevor into his Ollie and together they’d walked from this space to the office and back again. Except that now there was no car, not right here, not in front of Nate. Holy fuck.

“What the
hell?
” he said, barely louder than Emily. He rubbed the ignition key between his thumb and his forefinger, feeling its tangible weight, and then scanned the air by the curb
one last time, willing the car to actually be there “Fuck. Are you kidding me?”

“Watch it,” Emily caught her breath and nodded toward the Bugaboo. Trevor was finally at an age where he seemed to understand the things they said, including the filth that occasionally spewed from Nate’s mouth when, for example, Nate found that his car had up and disappeared. The car, gone. Nate’s skull felt crushed.

“Sorry, chief,” he said, crouching to the stroller’s height, trying to erase all trace of his profanity from Trevor’s memory.
Shit,
it seemed he was always apologizing to his son. Ten months of apologies and counting. “Okay, little one?” Nate’s six-foot-plus body was coiled to the ground, his voice thin. “Nothing for you to worry about.” Trevor, silent, looked terrified, on the verge of tears. Sweat stuck his fine dark hair to his forehead in strips. From birth, the boy had been timid, appeared to flinch from the world around him. Even his smiles (and he did smile, all the time) had a knowing edge, a hint of doubt. Other people called this demeanor sweet, but it worried Nate. He tried to sanitize the world for his son, to ensure that the boy wouldn’t have cause to retreat even further.

Nate took a deep breath and nearly gagged. The air smelled like suburban mulch.

“Didn’t you lock the car?” Nate said, rising to his feet. Emily was standing on the pavement, in the space where the car had been.

“You’re the one with the keys, Nathan. Did
you
lock the car?”

Nate winced at the
Nathan.
And at the fact that he
was
the one with the keys. Come to think of it, he remembered locking the doors, really, hearing the locks catch and the alarm activate. He could hear it as if it was just a few minutes ago. It
was
just a
few minutes ago. They’d been in Bob’s office for less than half an hour.

Behind them, the lawyer’s office remained lit. It wasn’t yet 6:00 p.m., but the sun was already dipping below the horizon, turning the evening’s air a flush blue-pink. Nate thought of their attorney’s digs in New York, the sterile steel conference room, the hush of the carpeted hallways, the paralegals drinking coffee out of recycled paper cups in the law library. A guy would get there via cab or subway and there’s no way he’d walk outside to discover that his car had been stolen. Nate instinctively missed those offices—he missed New York.

“Maybe it’s an optical illusion,” Nate said.
Maybe the car is still right here.
Maybe he could will it.

Emily spread her arms in the air, deep into the space where the car had been. “No car,” she said softly. “No car at all.”

There were no
cars:
Other than a scattering of parked vehicles, the entire street was empty. Just a space where they had left the Cherokee, carefully checking the distance to the curb as he parked, measuring, mentally, the correct distance (this was it, he’d parked perfectly in one shot), before they unloaded the Bugaboo and dutifully locked the doors (they
had!
Nate was sure of it) and made their way inside to meet with the lawyer and take possession of their house.

Emily stepped back up on the grass and stood next to Nate, as if waiting for a bus. Her hand brushed his and he gave it a quick squeeze, a Pavlovian response. Her face was so pale and blank, as if this was simply too much for her to take in, and Nate wanted to fix it, to make it all okay. But how? Their car was gone and they were living in Newport where they had not a single friend and it was about to be off-season and Nate couldn’t even offer her a toke from his pot stash because the pot was hidden
under the Jeep’s front seat, stolen with the car, and he didn’t want Emily to know that he still smoked, anyway, since he’d sworn to give it up when she was pregnant—and now, suddenly, breaking the street’s eerie stillness, a deep-throated scream came from below, from deep within Trevor. Like ash from a volcano, the boy erupted.

Trevor’s face turned red and tears welled in his eyes and saliva slipped in a steady stream out of his wide-open hollering mouth. “Please Trev, please,” Nate pleaded. He bent down and unbuckled the Bugaboo’s straps.

“Take a breather, captain,” he said, picking up his son. He clutched Trevor tightly to his chest and, after only a minute, the screams slowed and then stopped. The boy was a sucker for the human touch. “Everything’s okay, just a minor glitch in the plan,” Nate said. Trevor looked poised to let loose again but Nate clutched him tightly, reining in the child’s wiry limbs.

Nate had bought the Jeep new six years ago. It was his first car since high school, his first adult car. He’d paid extra for the custom foot rugs, leather seats, seat warmers, snow tires, and just ten months ago a new addition: the highest-end, safest car seat on the market. The Cherokee itself hadn’t won any safety awards, but that hadn’t bothered Nate when he picked it out, when he was barely into his thirties, before he knew Emily and before he thought he’d ever, even in old age, have a child. He’d loved the size of the machine. He called it a
car
or sometimes even a
truck,
afraid to say
SUV,
to be
that guy.
It used to be that the careful choice of the right word was all it took to make Nate feel secure.

Now the truck was gone. He looked down the street to his left, almost expecting to see its taillights pulling around the corner, making an escape. Or its headlights, sheepishly returning. It was just a vehicle, Nate told himself as Trevor held off on his intermittent
banshee act and Emily stared hopelessly into the open air. It was just a car, but it was the one thing he’d bought and paid for outright, with cold hard cash, and outfitted to his specifications, detail by detail, until it performed as promised, no surprises, completely reliable and, in a pinch, family-friendly.

“Sorry. About the dig. Saying you hadn’t locked the doors,” Nate said to Emily, taking her hand, putting all three of them in human contact, Trevor to Nate to Emily. “This is just—” but what was left to say? “I didn’t mean to lash out.”

Across the street a yield sign stood tall and firm and sunny in its bold yellow affirmation. Emily squinted down the street. It was hot today, hot for October, hot for evening time, and the air waved above the pavement.

Then a car, so new that its glare hurt the eye, pulled up, drove past the space, and began to back into it. The compact hot rod had high-performance wheels and rust-proof weather stripping, features from the future. Its engine was nearly silent, emitting only the muted electric purr of a hybrid. The driver shut off the ignition and got out, locking the doors, Nate noted, before glancing at Nate and Emily and Trevor as if maybe he knew them. Then he turned and made his way down the sidewalk. When he was out of earshot, Emily motioned to the silver sedan. “You want me to hotwire it?” Her voice had its strength back and she appeared to be on the verge of smiling. “It seems we’re owed a car.”

“And then some,” Nate said. Because honestly, he thought as he held Emily’s hand tighter and pulled her close, the car was the least of their problems.

CHAPTER
2

The Tally

E
VERYTHING IS IN THAT
Jeep,” Emily Latham said. She leaned toward the cop and strained to be heard over Trevor’s cries. The boy’s deep wails cut through the police station’s surrounding din with the sporadic ceaselessness of a jackhammer. It was all too much: the wails, the buzz of the intercom overhead, the ringing of distant phones, the brush of Nate’s arm against hers, the patient grin of the uniformed officer across the counter. The officer was strapping but soft, like a high school baseball coach who hadn’t run the bases himself in at least a decade. Emily felt light, nearly high. “We’d packed all of our things in that Jeep.”

Nate was quiet beside her. A month ago, his reticence would have surprised Emily. But now? She wasn’t sure. Over the past month, Nate, who had always been so good with talk and so eager to take the lead, had gradually begun to go mute, to burrow deeper inside himself. He’d adopted a noiseless diffidence, as if he had shifted slightly, like a door off only one of its hinges. Finally, in the past week, he’d completely stopped looking
Emily in the eye. She blamed stress. The move. The new job.

“Nate?” Emily pleaded as Trevor continued to wail. The boy arched against the Bugaboo’s slick nylon chest restraints and screamed. The precinct’s hard surfaces (linoleum on the floor, cement on the walls) amplified the noise. “Hey, Nate.” Nate was the free one. Emily was fully engaged with the officer.

“You bet.” Nate leaned down and lifted the boy from the stroller.

Everyone in the building was in a rush, sporting crisp uniforms and insistent tones of voice. When Emily had entered through the precinct’s heavy glass front door, two uniformed cops sped past and shoved her out of the way, hard. A full arsenal hung from their belts and narrowly missed clocking the stroller and the helpless Trevor within it. Oh God! Emily had held her breath. At least she still had her child. She’d seen all the headlines, nearly weekly, it seemed.
Carjacking in Supermarket Parking Lot, Toddler Still Strapped in Backseat.
It was the epoch of public fear: carjackings, avalanches, suicide bombings, tsunamis, subway fires, lightening strikes, hurricanes. In the years since 9/11 (three years, enough time for the world to feel both semi-recovered and still tremendously perilous—enough time for Wall Street to be hitting record highs again, trumpeting the survival of capitalism with each day’s closing bell) it seemed that history—both man-made and geological—was aiming to prove that survival was merely a matter of luck.

“Really, all of our things were in the car,” Emily said to the cop behind the counter.

“We need to document your belongings specifically,” the cop said, nodding.

“Sure,” Emily said—while grabbing her ringing phone from her pocket. Instinctively she flipped it open.

Jeanne’s number scrolled across the display. Nine times out of ten, when Emily’s phone rang it was Jeanne. They were best friends the way people were best friends back in high school, gossiping on the phone at regular intervals as if e-mail still didn’t exist. Even now, with Jeanne deep into her medical residency, the friendship hadn’t suffered. It turned out that Jeanne’s schedule as a resident was grueling but irregular, mirroring Emily’s as a full-time mom. While Nate was at work, Emily and Jeanne had spent hours together over coffee and wine and tubs of hummus from the deli, talking about Nate and Emily’s Newport move, their new house, their launch into small-city living.

“Hey,” Emily said into the mouthpiece. Nate shot her a look. She shouldn’t have answered her phone while dealing with the cops.

“I just got a call from Taryn Carver,” Jeanne said, sounding breathless, enthused. “You heard about the Barbers?”

“Yeah,” Emily said.

This morning Emily had gotten voice mails from three separate friends announcing that Anna and Randy Barber were missing a Matt Rufino painting, an oil-covered canvas the size of a square dinner plate. According to Tania Osbourne’s message, the painting had been missing at least since the Barbers’ party on Wednesday night, maybe earlier.

Each of the messages made Emily flinch. The Barbers’ was the last party she and Nate had attended before leaving the city. The last time, for a while at least, they’d be in a room full of people they knew, in a neighborhood they could instinctively navigate, eating the kinds of thoroughbred meats and cheeses and feta-stuffed olives that had become so endemic to Manhattan. Jeanne hadn’t been at the party—she was in upstate New York for the week, and for this weekend, too, at yoga camp. Jeanne wasn’t in the Barbers’ usual social loop, anyway, though
she and Anna had plenty of friends in common, through Emily and Nate and a short-lived book club to which all three women had once belonged.

“You heard about it upstate?” Emily said into the phone. Her head throbbed but at least Trevor was quiet for the moment.

“Art-theft gossip travels fast. It’s pretty unbelievable.”

“I guess.” But was anything really unbelievable anymore? Scientists had discovered evidence of water on Mars. Grandmothers were giving birth to their own grandchildren. People spoke to one another on phones that were plugged into nothing. Anna and Randy Barber left a quarter-million-dollar painting leaning unwatched against a wall in their study. How stupid could the Barbers be? “It might not have been taken at the party.” Emily said. “Cath Oberling says there aren’t any clues.”