The Exiles Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Allison Lynn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little a

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  eISBN: 9781477850527

  For Mike

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  IT’S 5:10 P.M.…

  PART I Friday

  CHAPTER 1 Loser

  CHAPTER 2 The Tally

  CHAPTER 3 Welcome to the Viking

  CHAPTER 4 Settling In

  PART II Saturday

  CHAPTER 5 The Drive from Chicago

  CHAPTER 6 Wake-up Call

  CHAPTER 7 Newport, 1974

  CHAPTER 8 Small City, Big Ideas

  CHAPTER 9 The Drive through Pennsylvania

  CHAPTER 10 Nate Faces the Truth, the Half Truths, and the Possible Truths

  CHAPTER 11 Where Do You Think We’re Going?

  CHAPTER 12 Here Are the Things Nate Knows

  PART III Sunday

  CHAPTER 13 The Drive to Narragansett

  CHAPTER 14 On Faith

  CHAPTER 15 Breakfast at the Viking

  CHAPTER 16 Hitching

  CHAPTER 17 Where Emily Goes When She’s Alone

  CHAPTER 18 Trespass

  CHAPTER 19 The Drive: Prelude, Two Days Ago

  CHAPTER 20 Head Trauma

  CHAPTER 21 The Things Nate Knows, Reprise

  PART IV Monday

  CHAPTER 22 Morning in the ICU

  CHAPTER 23 Emily Calls Out

  CHAPTER 24 The Route

  CHAPTER 25 Pilfering

  CHAPTER 26 History in the Family

  CHAPTER 27 Contact with the Antrims

  CHAPTER 28 The Drive to Narragansett, the Final Leg

  CHAPTER 29 I’m Your Father

  CHAPTER 30 Remember Him as He Was

  CHAPTER 31 Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  How wild are our wishes, how frantic our schemes of happiness when we first enter on the world!

  —THOMAS CARLYLE

  IT’S 5:10 P.M. AND the bay is a hazy blue, the sky a hint of orange, the land full of promise, promise, promise. Cars creep across the bridge as if pulled by the force of that promise itself. Look, sailboats! Hark, a resort hotel. Ho there, bloated gulls line up along the bridge’s side rails and point their beaks toward the traffic, guiding the way. In three days the high season will be over and Newport’s ice cream vendors, trinket traders, and yachtsmen will crawl deep into their off-season dens to hibernate. Off-season: the beach’s sand will turn gray and flat overnight; the historic mansions will offer tours only two days a week; boats will be pulled from the water.

  Atop the bridge’s crest, a Jeep Grand Cherokee—an all-American car, a New World fortress-on-wheels—begins its slow tumble toward the far shore. The Cherokee is jam-packed. File boxes, duffels of clothing, a Snickers wrapper on the floor, two deflated AeroBeds in the wayback, the remnants of a vitamin drink spilled on the dashboard, a sleeping child stashed in a car seat behind the driver. Nowhere is promise felt like inside this mobile homestead. The Jeep’s high-gloss grill nearly crushes against the slow-moving Saab ahead.

  Emily leans her elbow against the Cherokee’s passenger-side window and watches the mast of a smooth-sailing sloop cut through the crisp harbor below. Two lightweight kayaks follow in the sloop’s wake, the kayaks’ narrow hulls reflecting the sunlight like viperfish. Emily knows that this day isn’t so bright elsewhere. Further down the coast, where the Cherokee began today’s journey, the landscape is overcast and downcast with smog and dust and oppression. Down there, autumn smells metallic and stale.

  In the other direction, up the coast and deep into New England, the fall stings: They’ve already had a first frost this year, and it’s only two weeks into October.

  But here there are colors on the trees and a stillness to the water and land up ahead.

  And this bridge! Emily loves bridges. The view from the top; the moment spent not here nor there, indebted to neither coast. It is almost four years to the day from the first time she drove over a bridge with Nate. The Third Avenue Bridge, in a taxi with scratched and foggy windows. Nate and Emily were fresh off separate red-eye flights and both reeked of airplane. Emily had grinned and shuddered and said, her voice groggy, “Man, I love bridges.”

  “Especially the Third Avenue,” Nate replied, “cheap bastard-child of the Triborough.”

  They were strangers then.

  Today, safe in the air-conditioned tank-of-a-Jeep, Nate breathes easily behind the wheel. He pushes his sunglasses to the top of his head, alternates his foot from brake to gas to brake, and steals a glance at Emily and at the boy in back.

  In front of Nate, to the left, on the north side of the shore, painted wooden residences stand erect against the harborfront. He, too, is thinking about the Third Avenue. He’d saved twenty bucks by sharing that cab with a stranger—albeit an attractive, youngish female stranger toting world-weary luggage and a coffee—and has gained a son by her in the years since. Not a great financial trade, he smiles now. He has the kid’s college tuition to pay down the line and plenty of expensive toys the tyke will want even sooner. Nate watches enough TV to know that the erector sets of his own childhood have been replaced by high-tech gaming systems and $700 snowboards. He’ll deal with those issues when the time comes, if the time comes. For now, the boy himself is like a gift. Precious and beautiful, completely unexpected and easily broken.

  “Hey. Hey!”

  Emily’s voice and a brief thud come at the same instant.

  Nate slams his foot on the brake only to realize that the car is already at a standstill, given the nonexistent pace of the bridge’s traffic.

  “Oh my god,” Emily says softly.

  It takes Nate a moment to place the commotion. He follows Emily’s gaze to the hood of the car, directly in front of her. A warbler, tufted gray and no larger than Nate’s fist, lies still. His beak is an inch from the windshield.

  Nate and Emily both take their eyes off the bird and whip their heads around to the backseat. The boy, Trevor, is safe. Oblivious, he continues to sleep.

  Emily finds her voice again. “Did you see it?” she asks. “Oh my god.”

  “I didn’t see a thing. I was looking at the shore. I was in a daze, I think—”

  “It came straight for the windshield. Right at it like a bullet. Like he’d been shot out of a bird cannon. Imagine if we’d been moving.” She begins to lower her window, as if she might reach out to the bird, summoning it. But, then, the warbler slowly stretches his wings, the feathers stiff, laden down with the salt air. Hesitantly, and then with more confidence, he takes flight. The bird is gone. Traffic slowly starts moving again.

  Nate steers with one hand and reaches out past Emily with the other. He touches the inside surface of the windshield, feeling the spot where the bird must have crashed. The impact hasn’t even left a mark. “Did that really just happen?” he asks.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Emily says with a nervous laugh. Outside her window, the gulls, stiff on their perches, seem to be looking right at her. She is guilty; she has maimed one of their own. Nate lowers his window, too, and lets the smell of the outdoors waft through the front seat. Salt and dirt and those turning leaves. Steadily now, without stopping, the car is moving forward. They are just about to the far end of the bridg
e. The sky is growing pinker. It is almost day’s end. It is nearly time to start over.

  PART I

  Friday

  CHAPTER 1

  Loser

  NATE BEDECKER STUMBLED as he stepped out of the Jeep. He briefly, embarrassingly (though no one was looking—he’d checked with a quick sweep of his eyes) tripped over the reedy thatch of grass that bulged above the Newport curb. Three hours of driving and he’d forgotten how to use his legs. It was like old age, being thirty-eight: His muscles had no staying power anymore; the first steps he took after rising from bed each morning were a chore, his knees cracking and his ankles turning. Should he be worried? That question hovered each time his muscles strained beyond their comfort zone. He was fine, he told himself. He was normal. As proof, he had only to glance at his friends, a ready control group of hipsters and sad sacks, singletons and proud poppas, travel addicts, hedge fund honchos, and workaholic captains of industry who happened to be Nate’s own age. Every single one of them was showing signs of wear. En masse, they were losing their stamina, their hair, their ability to digest dairy.

  It was inevitable, these slow-motion side effects of aging. What Nate worried about, instead, was the onset of more acute ailments. He was on the constant lookout for sudden muscle twitches and the wham-bang of a memory lapse, symptoms of a deeper physiologic flaw waiting to emerge. So far, Nate appeared to be okay. His handshake remained strong. He usually held firm footing when he walked. Today’s stumble, he told himself, was simply a product of the long drive.

  “Whoa boy, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Emily said, walking around the car to where Nate stood. Her eyes were on the shingle (Robert Daugherty, Esq.) jammed into the lawn to their left. This was as close to downtown as a person could get in Newport, and yet the square, clapboard office building had a shingle hung outside. And a picket fence. Around Nate, the town loomed in various shades of elm and weathered brick.

  “He’s a solo operator?” Emily asked.

  “He’s got a secretary and an intern,” Nate said, shaking out his legs. Ferguson and Neiman, the two senior partners at Nate’s new office, had used Daugherty for their own house sales and recommended him unconditionally. “Ferguson and Neiman say he’s the best.”

  Ferguson and Neiman also said, insistently, that Nate wouldn’t regret this move, this complete upending of his and Emily’s life from high-rise Manhattan to scenic Rhode Island, a place that Nate hadn’t, ever, expected to call home. He hadn’t honestly expected to leave Manhattan. Not yet, at least. New York had become a security blanket, wrapping him and Emily in tight, keeping them close to their friends, to reliable restaurants, twenty-four-hour emergency services, and a top-notch gym on their block. Security was the wrong word for it, though, given the price that it all cost. Their life savings and then some. Last year, rent for their apartment passed the $5,000-a-month mark, and the cramped two-bedroom didn’t boast any luxuries. No washer-dryer, no fireplace, no outdoor space, no second bathroom. They were thankful simply to have an elevator in the building and a daytime doorman to help lug in the baby supplies.

  It was staggering when Nate thought about it, though he tried not to: Post-tax they were paying more than $60,000 a year in rent and had no equity to show for it. Other than the Jeep, which he’d spent $300 a month to park in a bargain lot by the East River, he and Emily owned nothing except an expensive New York lifestyle in which even the simple pleasure of eating out with friends—something they’d given up finally, making pathetic excuses every time they were invited to a restaurant—could cause a significant crater in their bank accounts. For the past two years they’d been skating just above disaster, putting on a good face at parties, trying not to eye their neighbors’ effortless lives with envy. “Do you know how much Okite countertops cost?” Emily remarked to Nate, in a stunned whisper, when they’d spent the weekend at his officemate’s beach house in June. The bungalow’s kitchen had two separate wine refrigerators and an induction cooktop that had been shipped in from Denmark.

  “Normal people can’t afford to live here anymore,” Sam Tully said last winter at the Belkins’ awkward, tepid Christmas party. “Unless you’re making $600K a year, you’re priced out of the real-estate market. You’re better off living in Jersey.”

  The proclamation hit Nate with a thwack, as if he’d been found out. On Wall Street, there were only heroes and also-rans, and after fifteen years in M&A, Nate was clearly not one of the anointed. He was hundreds of thousands of dollars a year behind ($450K to be exact, but who was counting?) the guys in his class who were earning that $600k, the guys who would eventually make managing director. Some of them already had. Nate, meanwhile, was pulling in a base-level salary and negligible bonus—not quite enough to maintain a lifestyle that got more expensive by the week. The goal then, as he saw it, was to get out before he turned into a joke, a poverty-ridden hanger-on. He’d seen the older also-rans, the smart ones, leave Wall Street for in-house positions at reputable corporations or for smaller banks, in Chicago and Houston. Each year there was an international crew, too, affably unexceptional associates who transferred to Venezuela or Singapore. Word had it that anyone could make managing director in Singapore—but the title didn’t mean much there. It was like grade inflation in college.

  In truth, it didn’t matter where you went. The aim for the middle-feeders was simply to get out of their dead-end Wall Street jobs while they still had something to offer. “Choose the path of least embarrassment,” Nate’s father, George Bedecker, used to tell his sons on the rare occasion that he happened to be in the room with them. “Guard your reputation and flaunt your skills,” he’d tell the eight-year-old Nate. “They’re your only valuable assets.”

  What about your family? Nate always wanted to ask. What about valuing the people you live with? On the nights when George was home, young Nate went to bed with his radio on, sports scores and play-by-plays, so that the last voice he heard before falling asleep wasn’t his father’s. If Nate died in his slumber, if a nuclear winter or an alien invasion or a fatal mystery virus hit the Bedecker house during the night, he’d die with the sound of a Cleveland Indians home run in his head, not his dad’s misplaced aphorisms. Thirty years later, though, it was the old man’s voice that resonated when Nate got the call about an opportunity in Newport. His was the advice that Nate followed when he chose to save both his reputation and his bank account by jumping ship from Manhattan and taking the position.

  The job was with a young fund being run by two older, established money managers whose flagship was in Boston. They’d needed a new associate, preferably with Wall Street experience, to man their Newport satellite office. Nate was an ideal candidate. He had the experience (he was decent at his work, simply not the best in New York) and the incentive to move into a smaller pond. Halfway through the interview process he began to truly covet the job, knowing in his heart that it was his chance to leave the rat race, to lay down roots in the kind of place where he’d be ahead of the game from the start, where lawyers protected their interests with nothing but kind words and a picket fence. He and Emily would be able to live large, or at least respectably, in Rhode Island. If nothing else, they’d be able to pay off their bills every month. That was the goal, Nate realized, a modest goal yet nearly impossible to attain in New York City. So now he stood outside a Newport real-estate lawyer’s office, watching his legs for spasms (none, he was fine) and preparing to fetch the keys for his own first home: a ’60s-era faux-Victorian that sat wedged on a postage-stamp lot with a wonky plastic swing set in the backyard.

  Emily stepped closer to the lawyer’s squat office building, just a door down from where they had parked. “This looks like the saltbox my grandfather lived in when I was a kid,” she said.

  “It probably way outdates your grandfather. We’re in the historic district, I think.”

  Nate opened the back door of the Cherokee. He leaned in, unhooked Trevor from the car seat, and hoisted the boy into the New England air. Trevor squi
rmed silently, compressing his body into a small ball, still waking up from his ride-long nap. When he finally opened his eyes, he quickly closed them again and held one of his small, tight fists up against his face, apparently unsure of what he was seeing. All that grass! Trevor had spent his entire ten-month childhood in the city and was most at ease in small, enclosed spaces. He was already detail-oriented, more captivated by the tiny than the grand, more entranced by the wisps of yarn that frayed from his baby blanket than by sweeping vistas. So while other parents dreamed about moving to the country for their children, Nate worried that this relocation would traumatize his son. The boy had just learned to navigate their apartment, crawling from the kitchen to the living room (stopping to ponder each crevice in the wood floor) without scraping his knees on the high molding. Occasionally Nate himself lay on the hardwood floor of their now-gone Manhattan home, trying to get his own glimpse of Trevor’s perspective, but instead all he ever saw was his own childhood, his own skewed outlook.

  “Hold on—” Emily came to Nate’s side by the Jeep’s back door. She fished the car keys out of his pocket and popped open the hatchback, revealing all of their goods to the Newport street. They’d densely stuffed the trunk with everything they’d need until the movers arrived in a week, squeezing their belongings into the car and the air out as if preparing their property for pickling. Emily slid Trevor’s stroller—a Bugaboo they’d nicknamed Ollie, as if it were their other child—from its tight spot at the top of the pile.

  “Goddamn!” Emily said as the stroller thudded loudly to the pavement. High-tech didn’t mean lightweight. “This thing is going to kill us one of these days.” She slammed the trunk shut. Trevor continued to squirm in Nate’s arms as Emily propped Ollie open. Straightening the wheels, snapping the seat into the chassis—it was all second nature to them by now. Emily slipped the car keys back into Nate’s pocket as he lowered the boy into the carriage.

  Bob Daugherty stood in the door to his office.