The Exiles (31 page)

“I know.” Nate knew he should hold her, but there was room for only one in her crib. If Emily was numb, it only made sense that Nate would be, too. He physically ached, but his brain felt anesthetized. Sure Nate had expected this news, he’d been looking for exactly this proof. Bingo! He won. So where was the satisfaction? He hated his father. He’d always hated his father, but now having a firm reason for that hate made the revulsion absolute. There was nothing like a tainted gene to remind a man that he couldn’t escape his past. Nate felt DNA skittering through his veins like water bugs, like rats darting beneath the subway tracks planning a siege.

“You might be okay,” Emily said. “It’s a fifty-fifty thing, right? We’re due some odds. It’s our chance to be lucky.” She sniffled and stretched out on the couch, coming out of her crouch. “I feel as if I’ve been crying all day. So who is Philippa Antrim, anyway?”

“Who?”

“Here, on this envelope,” Emily lifted a sealed manila envelope from her lap and handed it to Nate. On the front was a name, Philippa Antrim, in ballpoint pen, and a phone number written in George’s neat print. The area code was in Chicago.

“I don’t know, maybe his assistant? He used to have a woman named Danielle, but I haven’t called his office in years, at least three or four. There was always someone at the firm in charge of George, keeping him in line, getting him to his appointments, reminding him to occasionally leave at night and lay eyes on his family.” Nate turned the envelope over in his hands.

“Do you think we should—” Emily said as he pried open the tin clasp, “—open it?” she finished her sentence while Nate was already pulling the papers from the envelope’s pocket. Everything would have to be put back in place again; they’d leave no
trace. They’d take off for good and start their new life, bringing George’s tainted genes and whatever else Nate had inherited along with them.

Inside the envelope was a will. Like Nate and Emily with the Jeep, George had put all of his important documents in his car. Like Nate and Emily, Nate realized, George was planning to settle here for the long haul. George was expecting to die his father’s death, right down to the location. Nate felt a chill. Ice on his spine.

He called Emily off the couch and, it must have been something in his voice, she jumped up at once. She sat on his lap in the straight-backed chair, barely wide enough for one person, and together they read George’s will.

“His office always seemed to be operating in the red,” Nate said. “He’s always been broke, so it’s not like I’m surprised that he left me nothing.” Nothing except the pittance that was left of Annemarie’s estate, five thousand dollars at most. George’s firm would be handed down to the two current senior associates. It was a bum deal for them. They’d inherit the debt. George didn’t own his apartment in Chicago apparently. It wasn’t in the will and Nate had a hunch that it was small and cheap and a rental. The man never spent time at home anyway. His entire estate consisted of the business and this house and the car that Nate had been driving. And when George passed away, these things—the house and the car—would go to Philippa Antrim of Chicago.

“I told you we shouldn’t move any furniture, or take anything,” Nate said. “It’s not ours. It never will be.”

“You’re also the one who keeps telling me that your father isn’t dead yet. This Philippa comes into her inheritance only after your dad’s heart stops ticking.” Emily was standing now,
had left Nate’s lap. “Maybe she’s a relative on your father’s side. You said you don’t know much about the family tree.”

Nate scanned the room, eyeing all of the possessions that would end up not in the Bedecker family, but with the Antrims. Nate shook his head.

“His will treats me like I’m my mom’s son, not his at all,” he said.

That statement hung in the air and neither Nate nor Emily moved, as if afraid to disturb this pronouncement.

“Could you be?” Emily finally asked, with too much enthusiasm. “People had affairs like mad in the sixties. How would your father have known? He was away so often, he was oblivious to you all, right? You’ve always said that your mother seemed like the kind of woman who should have led a greater life, who shouldn’t have been confined to Cleveland, or whatever. Your mom could have easily had a lover. Your mother probably had a rich, private life that you never asked her about. I mean, you Bedeckers weren’t bred to be big emotional talkers.”

“What we were bred for, according to those medical records, is death,” Nate said.

“You might not be George’s son,” Emily said, more firmly. “You might not have his genes. It’s not impossible.”

“I’m his son,” Nate said. “Fuck, I’d be thrilled to discover I wasn’t his blood relation, trust me.” This wasn’t simply because Nate wished for a clean-gene bill of health. He’d love to know that his mother had had some passion in her life before she checked out. And she might have, later on. After Charlie died and before Annemarie’s leukemia set in, there was a one-year stretch when she’d seemed at peace, resigned to her fate in life. At the time, it seemed so outrageous to Nate, barbarous and inappropriate. Charlie had been in the ground for a short ten
months, and there was his mother, letting her spiritual curiosity roam free, sending care packages to Nate, first-class mailers filled with meaningless aphorisms and bubble-wrapped bouquets of sage and oregano.
I might take a cruise,
she wrote in one brief letter.
I’m feeling the draw of the water.
Nate hadn’t taken her seriously and could only imagine George’s response to his wife taking off on the Atlantic Crown—the old man created houses specifically to give people a refuge from that world. She never went on the cruise. She fell sick a couple of months later and the old, sensibly European Annemarie returned.

“I wish I wasn’t George’s kid, really, give me any other gene pool to fish from. I’m his, though,” Nate said. “We got tested when my mother was ill. She needed bone marrow. It was demented: neither George nor I matched to her, but we were a perfect match for each other. That only means we have the same marrow type, so I’m trying not to read into it. But it feels like an omen, or a curse.” It felt like certain death.

Emily rubbed the back of her neck and tilted her face up to the ceiling, as if still trying to take it all in, trying to make sense, trying to call up an apt quotation from one of her favorite dead philosophers.

“Can we go get Trevor?” she said. Her voice was weak and barely audible. “I need to see you and Trevor and me, all in one place.”

“Okay,” Nate said, because he owed her, and he owed Trevor. For now, they were together and healthy. They had a car and their beds and a new home. For today at least (and maybe only for today, for this present moment), this fragile life of theirs was still in one piece.

CHAPTER
27

Contact with the Antrims

T
HE
J
EEP DIDN
’
T LOOK
so bad. “I think the Audi’s in worse shape,” said Emily. She didn’t see a single new scratch on the Jeep’s body. None of the windows were even broken, though when Nate mentioned to the mechanic who ran the car lot that the door had been locked when the car was stolen, the guy laughed. Apparently modern car thieves were overwhelmingly adept at prying open locked cars without damaging the goods.

“We’re not going to find proof that it was locked. Let it go,” Emily said.

The Audi, on the other hand, was a wreck. Looking at it head-on in the slanted 4:00 p.m. sun, Emily noticed how severely the passenger side had been smashed. With one headlight completely gone, the car looked sinister and bad-ass. Emily had never really liked German cars anyway. They were evocative of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and men who believed that life was hell. Well, life was hell. “The Audi looks like crap in this light,” she said.

“It drives,” said the car lot guy, standing a few feet away. “The Jeep doesn’t. You can leave the body here and take it as a tax write-off. I’ll give you a receipt. It’s better than nothing.”

“Our insurance company will have to come take a look first,” Nate said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the guy responded.

The Jeep had been stripped of its useful parts. All that remained were the two AeroBeds and Trevor’s toys and his car seat, which Nate promptly moved to the Audi, strapping it in next to the seat they’d borrowed from the police and would return tomorrow. “Here, do you mind?” Nate handed Trevor to Emily and she rested him on her hip. The boy’s drool-slicked chin brushed against her cheek and he laughed, a hiccup of a laugh.

On their way to the lot, they’d stopped at the Viking, where they’d reunited with Trevor (he looked so good, Emily noted, hale and healthy and happy to see his parents, bobbing his head up and down as if nodding in agreement, something he’d been doing since he was practically born every time he was happy) and checked out a day early, vowing to return to the hotel first thing in the morning with legitimate money to pay the bill. “The police have your info, so don’t try to run!” joked the manager, the same one who’d dealt with them at their Friday check-in. Now the Audi’s trunk was packed, not only with George’s food and linens—they’d taken sheets and a bath towel from the Narragansett house as well—but with the Bugaboo, too. Tomorrow they would have cash finally, and normal life would return. A new kind of normal. A perverse version of normal. Normal until the NYPD came knocking. The lieutenant had promised to call Emily today to set up an interrogation, but so far her phone had stayed silent.

They’d left George’s file boxes in the Narragansett living
room, stacked neatly beside an empty silverware hutch. They’d slipped all of his papers back into their crates, carefully sliding each leaf into place and then closing the lids tight. They left the house as clean and spare as they’d found it. Outside by the car after the house was closed up, Nate dialed his phone. He punched in the numbers affiliated with Philippa Antrim. As the phone rang through to Chicago, Nate handed his cell over to Emily. It seemed that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make the call. Emily accepted the phone and held it to her ear, hoping that it would ring over to voice mail so she could hang up, putting off whatever was waiting on the other side until another day. She and Nate had been dealt enough for one weekend (even a long holiday weekend). But someone did pick up, and Emily threw her shoulders back and straightened out her wrinkled pants and stood taller, as if the stranger on the other end had walked into her line of sight and was watching her.

“Hello?” It was a guttural man’s voice, not Philippa, not Philippa Antrim.

“I’m sorry, I’m looking for Philippa Antrim?” Emily said, her voice taking on the upward inflection of a question. She sounded like a teenager or a telemarketer, she’d be lucky if this man didn’t hang up. Or, she’d be lucky if he did. At the moment, that was a tough call. “I’m calling from Rhode Island, I’m sorry, really, I think it’s a personal matter, but I don’t know for sure,” she said. There was a silence on the other end. “Are you there? Are you Mr. Antrim?” She longed for the days of the telegraph, when people had time to examine and edit their communications before sending them over the transom.

“I’m her son, Pete. She’s not in. Who’s calling?”

“My name’s Emily Latham, my partner, boyfriend, found your mother’s name in his father’s papers, his dad is George Bedecker? He’s—”

“I know George.” He sounded upset about being disturbed, impatient. Emily looked at her watch. It was 1:00 p.m. in Chicago. “Is everything okay?”

“Not really,” Emily said, and then, with Nate holding her hand, she told the junior Antrim, Pete Antrim, that George had had an accident, that he’d slammed into a guardrail on Route 1, had been in the hospital for a day and a half, that it was critical, that he was in a coma. She spoke quickly and awkwardly, repeating herself and doubling back until she got all of the details out.

For a long time, there was only silence on the other end of the line. Emily was proving to be a disaster when it came to phone calls today.

“My mother’s in Atlanta for the weekend, but she can get a flight out in the next day or so, I’m sure. She’ll want to be there,” he finally said. “I guess I knew that George had a son somewhere, but he never explicitly spoke of family.”

“Sure,” Emily said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “Typical.” Her heart was beating so hard she thought it might explode across the phone line. She continued talking, offering a quick stream of vague details, mentioning that George wasn’t on a respirator, that he hadn’t eaten his eggs this morning. She left out the Huntington’s. It seemed private and not applicable. She also left out the will, since as Nate kept insisting, rightly, George was still alive.

“We found this number, and we’re not much in touch with George,” Emily said, “and he’s not doing well, and we didn’t know if Philippa was his assistant or a relative or what, but it seemed like the thing to do, to call.” The right thing to do out of curiosity, out of need for Nate. On the phone with this stranger, who sounded as if he were Nate and Emily’s age, living his own life in the middle of the country, Emily felt wrong: they’d called
him for answers to their own questions, not because they felt any debt to Philippa Antrim, mother of Pete.

“His assistant? Is that what he tells people?” Pete said, caustic. What Emily had taken for impatience a moment ago was beginning to sound more like dejected weariness. “It’s hard to believe that, really, after eight years together as a couple he’d be portraying her as an assistant. What a conjob.”

“I’m sorry?” Emily said, again a question, again an apology.
Conjob,
that’s one word she’d forgotten to call George Bedecker when she’d screamed at him this morning. Conjob. Shithead. It was all the same. She squeezed Nate’s hand. His eyes were on the water behind the house. He seemed to be holding his breath. “It’s hard for me to believe that after eight years George would barely have mentioned his only child,” Emily said into the phone, her close breath condensing on the mouthpiece, “a son who grew up in his own house, who George lectured on the Bauhaus and Modernist movements from the time Nate was just six years old.”