The Exiles (34 page)

This was what George was thinking as drove north on Route 1. He glanced down at the odometer again (miraculously he’d inched above the speed limit) and then looked up to find a deer leaping into the road. He slammed his foot on the brake and yanked hard on the steering wheel and the last thing he saw before hitting the ditch, before feeling the improbably slow glide of his wheels from pavement to gravel and down to dirt, was the deer bounding away, the animal’s pliant body rising into the air and off of the road and back into the thicket, unhurt. For a fraction of a second, George wondered if he could save himself,
too—if he rotated the wheel toward the road with a fast and firm jerk, could he bring the car back up to the highway?—but his split-second meditation over whether this was what he wanted, over whether a return to the living was worth it, was interrupted by the crunch of the Audi’s fender as it accordioned against the rock-hard earth at the edge of the ditch. George felt his torso jettison fast forward, and the world went black in an instant.

CHAPTER
29

I’m Your Father

N
ATE CONSIDERED NOT
answering his cell phone when it rang. It was after 11:00 p.m., an hour when phone calls only brought bad news, and the number that popped up on his caller ID was from within Rhode Island. He couldn’t think of anyone in Rhode Island to whom he wanted to speak other than Emily, and she was within shouting distance. And she had a New York phone number. Shit, Nate thought. If he and Emily were going to genuinely commit to their lives here, they’d need to get new cell phone numbers in the 401 area code. And he’d have to start acting like an adult and taking responsibility for his life.

“Hello?” he said, picking up the call. He ducked outside onto their front porch as he spoke. Emily was in the den, stretching sheets across their AeroBed.

“Mr. Bedecker?” said a woman on the other end of the line. “I’m calling from Kent Hospital.” The hospital. Nate hadn’t expected the hospital to call.

“I’m Nate Bedecker.” He stared out into the front lawn, the grass an iridescent black in the dim of the night.

“Mr. Bedecker, I’m the floor nurse on your father’s hall. He’s conscious. He came out of his coma ten minutes ago.”

“He’s awake?” Nate said. He hadn’t thought through the fact that his father might come out of his slumber and be okay
tonight.
The man had shown no signs, earlier, that he had any interest in rejoining the conscious world. He’d been so slack and acquiescent in his slumber. If he’d woken up back then, this morning (before Nate had uncovered the medical documents in the Audi’s trunk) Nate would have had plenty to talk to him about. Now, Nate had no interest.

“Awake’s a relative term. Your father is conscious, but not entirely coherent. He’s heavily sedated. Both his body and his brain have gone through a shock. We have you listed as his next of kin.”

“Which means?” Nate asked.

“The on-call neurologist is driving in and should be here within ten minutes.” Nate heard someone talking in the background. “Fifteen. Fifteen minutes. You, or someone else from the family, should be here, too.”

Nate raised his eyes and noticed an overhead light in the portico above him, a recessed central bulb in addition to the two electric lanterns that were propped on either side of the small porch. It was a nice touch. He’d left the front door cracked open and could hear Emily walking around the living room. Emily and Nate had practically cleaned out George Bedecker’s pantry and linen closet this afternoon, and now the man was awake. Assuming he was still the same inveterate ass Nate had once known, George’s first conscious request would probably be the prompt return of his chickpeas.

“There’s no one else from the family. I’m it,” Nate said. It was a stark truth. Nate was the only other Bedecker and his sole urge was to throttle George, to abuse him and return him to his sleep. And the nurse was inviting him to visit? He shouldn’t, in truth, be allowed to go. He didn’t, in fact, have any reason to. More than anything, Nate had the desire to ignore his father.
That,
Nate understood from experience, was the most stringent form of abuse. “I’m not coming in,” he told the nurse.

“All right,” the woman said. She sounded nonplussed by Nate’s decision. He heard papers rustling. “As I said, your father has only been conscious for a moment and he’s not coherent.” Nate waited for her to try to convince him to drive in. His father was awake, after all, for the first time since his crash, and Nate was the man’s only kin. “In your absence, if medical decisions need to be made for George Bedecker, do you authorize Ms. Antrim to make them?”

“Excuse me?” He pressed the phone closer against his ear, his fingers growing tired from clutching it so tightly. He tried to close the gap between himself, the nurse, the nurse’s station, the hospital, and the whole insane situation.

“Ms. Antrim. She arrived a half-hour ago. She says she’s his partner and his proxy. If you know otherwise, well, now is the time to speak up.” Nate looked at the Audi and its busted headlight and, parked behind it, Jeanne’s gleaming, completely operational rental car. “Mr. Bedecker, if you’re not coming in, someone will need to speak for your father’s needs.”

Half an hour later Nate and Emily pulled into the hospital parking lot in Jeanne’s rental car, with Jeanne at the steering wheel and Trevor in a car seat in the back. It was Nate who’d insisted that Jeanne come along. Jeanne was a doctor, and Nate was sure that he, with his longstanding biases, shouldn’t be the one to
make decisions for George. Neither should Philippa Antrim, a woman whose motives Nate had yet to suss out. Jeanne, however, would make fair and informed choices. There were plenty of instances in the past when Nate had questioned her—the way she tended to storm in and take over a room; the way she dressed, even when she went out for dinner, as if she were on her way to the gym—but she had been Emily’s sounding board since college and, from what Nate had seen, she’d rarely steered her wrong.

As Jeanne turned the sedan into the hospital’s parking lot, Nate gave directions, pointing her toward the only nonhandicapped spots that were within throwing distance of the building’s front door. In the backseat Emily hummed to Trevor, who had been coming and going from sleep during the entire ride. His eyes, when he opened them, were wet and vacant. He’d been roused from a deep slumber in a strange home and then strapped into a car in the dark of the night.

“Do you want me to take him?” Nate said to Emily as they got out of the car. They didn’t have Ollie with them. They’d have to carry the boy. In another month or two, he’d be too heavy to tote long distances. He’d be walking by then, though.

“Thanks,” Emily said, stepping out of the way. The parking lot looked like a theater stage, all black except in the halo-like spots of light thrown down by the high-intensity streetlamps that dotted the pavement. Bugs darted around the bulbs giving the light a murky quality. “What do you think she’s like?” Emily said.

“She?” Nate said. He knew who Emily was talking about.

“Antrim.”

What do you think
he’ll
be like, Nate wondered. Would George be babbling away in his delirious state? Or typically stoic? What would he say to his son after so much time, and with
his life on the line? Nate slowed down his pace as he walked toward the hospital with Trevor. His feet moved with the deliberate weight of an army tank, choking off the progress of time, delaying the moments to come. George was inside the hospital and awake. In the sci-fi comics that Nate and Charlie had traded as kids, traveling in time was as easy as walking from one room of a house to another. Time was an easily manipulated dimension.

Jeanne and Emily walked ahead and were nearly at the hospital’s front door. “Did you lock the car?” Nate said to Jeanne. She nodded.

“Are you okay?” Emily asked, coming back toward him. Nate wasn’t moving at all now. He and Trevor stood in an empty parking space beside the hospital’s front walkway. The blue handicapped sign painted on the asphalt circumscribed Nate and his son, like an accusation.

“I’m fine,” he said, and started walking again, shifting Trevor in his arms and acting as if the boy’s weight was what had hindered him.

Inside the hospital he nodded to the distracted night receptionist at the lobby desk. The woman, portly and strong and wearing a janitor’s uniform, did nothing to halt this foursome even though it was well past visiting hours. Nate continued his glacial march in the direction of the stairs and then paused and backtracked to the elevator bank. It was only one floor up to his father’s room, but the elevator would be slower. It was a hospital elevator, rigged to linger for a significant amount of time on each floor when it stopped. It was geared toward the pokey movers—the crutchers, the wheelchair-bound, the kids with IVs attached to their arms. The men who weren’t quite coherent. What did
that
mean? The nurse had said George wasn’t coherent. Nate couldn’t fathom his father as anything but inexorably
coherent. The elevator arrived on the first floor and the doors opened.

“Would you mind meeting me up there?” Nate said to Jeanne and Emily, who’d caught up with him.

“You sure?” Emily said.

“Yeah.” Nate stepped inside the lift with Trevor and the doors finally closed on them. The space was cavernous. Two gurneys could fit inside, Nate figured. Or a partners’ desk and two chairs. Or an entire kindergarten class, crammed together shoulder to toe like sardines. The car moved up so slowly that Nate couldn’t detect the motion and was taken by surprise when the doors opened on the second floor.

Nate stepped out and listened. His father’s room was just a few doors down the hall and around a corner; if George was raving like a lunatic, Nate would be able to hear it from here, but all was silent. A nurse walked by and the rubber soles of her shoes clung briefly to the floor with each step, a rhythmic squash against the linoleum. Nate and Trevor reached the corner and Nate peered around it. Two men and a woman in pink scrubs were gathered at the nurse’s station at the far end of the corridor, but other than that the hallway was empty.

Nate picked up the pace and crossed the threshold into his father’s room before he could lose his nerve. He wouldn’t be the first to talk; he’d wait for his father to start, even if the wait was endless. Nate steeled his face and clenched his teeth, gritting through the uncomfortable, building pressure of enamel on enamel. If his head exploded right now, he thought, that wouldn’t be the worst thing. He moved his numb, expectant gaze to the bed, worried and excited (not an optimistic excited, but excited in the old-fashioned sense, agitated and manic and likely to jump through a plate-glass window) about the prospect
of meeting his father’s eye. But George’s eyes were closed. Nate breathed out and felt his chest loosen. George was asleep again. Or resting. He’d been through a shock, the nurse had said on the phone. Maybe George had fallen into another coma on his own, without Nate’s help.

Nate was surprised not to see Philippa Antrim lurking in the room. An instinctive picture of her had taken shape in his head. She’d be lean and bony with her hair defiantly white and pulled into a knot at the nape of her neck. She’d be austere and would obviously have to be somewhat deranged, given how much time she’d spent with George. In the picture, she was standing over George’s bed reciting endearments, love poems, the cable TV schedule, shopping lists of life complaints, or whatever it was that old, cold people said to each other.

Except that she wasn’t there. The room was empty. Just three Bedeckers: George, Nate, Trevor. Nate turned so that his half-asleep son could see his grandfather. Trevor looked away, though, and nestled his tired head into the crook of Nate’s neck. The boy smelled fresh, truly clean finally. Emily had bathed him back at their house, after Jeanne returned from her shopping trip a few hours ago.

“I’m your father, Trevor. And this guy, he’s my father. You won’t have to see him again after today,” Nate said, and it felt good. He pried Trevor’s arms and legs from around his body and sat him on the bed, next to George. With what looked like a Herculean effort, Trevor turned his head and peered at the patient, leaned toward him. He looked at George’s face for only a second—just long enough to discern that it wasn’t as alluring as
Baby Beethoven
or a stuffed lamb—before looking away.

After today, after all of the health decisions were decided, if George woke up again, Nate would say his good-byes. Maybe he’d tell the man off first, but it was too late for that, wasn’t it?
An unexpected calm came over Nate. At least this once, Trevor had met his grandfather. As much as Nate didn’t want George to have a role in the child’s upbringing, he owed it to his ten-month-old son to at least let him see where he’d come from. For this single moment, Trevor and his grandfather shared the same space. Trevor deserved that. The room counterintuitively felt more tranquil than it had earlier today, when George was still in his coma.

“I’m sorry,” a voice came from behind Nate, and he turned. A nurse he’d never seen before stood in the doorway. She looked to be in her eighties, at least, as if she’d forgone retirement with the intention of ministering to patients until she herself keeled over. “I’m Dinetta Shelley. I’m the one who phoned you. We had no warning. We had every indication that he was out of danger.”

It was only after the nurse spoke that Nate understood why the room felt more tranquil. The hum of the monitors was gone. The machines next to George’s bed were dark.

A staccato croak escaped from Nate’s throat. He held onto the side of the bed for stability. George was gone. Nate was the only member of his original family left. If he disappeared, too, it would be as if the foursome who’d inhabited that glass and concrete cube so long ago had never existed. The only proof that they’d walked on this earth would be the impersonal monoliths built by George. And someday, perhaps generations from now, those would tumble too.

Trevor pivoted in his seat and reached for Nate as if sensing danger. He grabbed Nate’s sleeve and tried to pull himself to his feet. Trevor. Trevor was proof. Nate lifted the boy in his arms again. Trevor would have to be a survivor, too.