The Exiles Read online

  “Just in time. Get the hell inside,” he said, waving Nate, Emily, and the stroller through the entryway. He was all kinetic energy, not the calm rock he’d been the few times Nate had spoken to him previously.

  “It’s good to be here,” Nate said. He followed Bob past the reception area, where the secretary’s seat was deserted. The staff must have been sent home already for the holiday weekend.

  In the inner office, Bob sat behind the desk and Nate lowered himself into a chair in front of it. The desk was ornate, constructed from traditional heavy mahogany, with worn leather accents. The walls of the office—other than the narrow sliver by the door, which was adorned with Bob’s framed diplomas (Bates, UConn)—were erratic, crammed with Japanese silk screens and odd oversize watercolors of Chinese lanterns.

  “Hey, Em?” Nate called to Emily, who sat in the empty reception room with Trevor. “Come in here.” She and Nate were equal owners of the house, both names on the deed. They might not have a marriage license, but now they had a kid and a house to bind them. It was the real thing.

  “Hey,” Emily said as she slunk into the office. “Everything set?”

  “Everything’s fine. Glad you made it in. Holiday traffic can be a bitch in this town,” Bob said. Nate relaxed.

  “It feels like we spent hours on that bridge,” Emily said. “We pretty much eased our way into Newport, but we’re here, at least. We hit a bird.”

  “It’s beautiful, though, that view coming in,” Nate said, giving Emily a brief glance. Bob didn’t need to know about the bird. The bird was fine. “We could have timed it better than Friday at five, for sure,” he said.

  “For sure,” Bob repeated with a tight grin. He passed a folder across the desk and leaned forward, sharp elbows on mahogany. “It’s all in there. Your copies of the paperwork, two sets of spanking-new keys. I’ll be heading away for the weekend, immediately, to be frank, so if you have questions, ask now. Give it all a good read.” On the two front corners of Bob’s desk sat sprawling bonsai trees. Miniature, shrunken topiaries, like Charlie Brown Christmas trees, hopelessly stunted.

  Nate slid the papers out of the envelope and palmed the keys. The papers were warm, but the keys were cold and light, as if crafted from a space-age alloy. He quickly eyed the contract (they’d already combed through it carefully) and then handed it to Emily, who gave it her own compulsory once-over. If the sellers had snuck an insidious clause into the text, Nate and Emily weren’t going to catch it today.

  “I think we’ve already got this; it looks great,” Nate said. “Shit, the house is ours.”

  Bob nodded. “You own a home, kids. Newport’s newest residents, for what it’s worth. That and a quarter will get you, well, nothing.”

  Nate laughed, halfheartedly. Ferguson and Neiman had worked hard to sell Nate on the town, as well as the job. Though both partners lived in Newport only on the weekends, they’d lauded the local school systems (public and private), the summer boating season, the audacious diversity of the year-round residents, and each had said to Nate, separately, “You, of all people, will be impressed by Newport’s architecture.” They hadn’t mentioned Nate’s father by name, never stated outright that the thrill of possibly working with George Bedecker’s son had perhaps, maybe, spurred them to interview Nate in the first place, but Nate understood. He was the son of a heavyweight. Ever since Frank Gehry completed the Guggenheim in Bilbao and Santiago Calatrava torqued his first skyscraper, architects had become rock stars again. They unabashedly lusted after the awe that Frank Lloyd Wright had inspired more than fifty years ago, and when that awe proved elusive they each settled for popular acclaim, instead. Nate’s father had been raised in Rhode Island, not far from here. Yet when he first hung out his shingle in the 1960s, he claimed Cleveland as his home base. From there (and later Chicago), he’d spent the last half century designing structures that were minimalist and industrial and dateless—though some critics argued otherwise—and functional. For a time he’d been well known for this. He’d spawned the short-lived neo-Bauhaus movement, erecting angular university libraries and stacked-box office buildings through which tens of thousands of anonymous businessmen continued to pass each day. But what had George built lately? Nate hadn’t seen much.

  Nate hadn’t, in truth, been looking. He worked hard to keep his eyes averted from the architecture scene, but with that one line, “You, of all people, will be impressed by the architecture,” George’s presence entered Nate’s new work life the way it entered all of his relationships, the same way that the senior Bedecker’s buildings were specifically designed to cast imposing shadows over their neighboring constructs. In contrast, Nate and Emily’s new house was small and compact and not showy at all. Any decent architect would dismiss it out of hand. It was too real life. It was derivative. It was derivative of derivatives. Nate loved it.

  It was in this new home that tonight, after Nate and Emily stepped over the threshold for the first time, Nate was going to talk to her about his history. He’d promised himself that he would finally open up to her about the way he checked his body for shakes every day. He’d talk to her about how, last week, he’d briefly felt his emotions grow irrationally out of control. The movers had been in the apartment at the time, tossing his stereo components through the air. So Nate’s outburst might simply have been a rational response. Or it might have been a sign that he was sick. Sick. He liked the word’s implications of not merely physical ailment but psychological perversion as well. It felt like a joke. A laugh: that was something Nate could handle.

  Nate took the contract back from Emily and returned the papers and keys to the envelope. He opened his mouth to say something insignificant, anything, to Bob. “Hey,” he said, like a dimwit. “Okay.”

  “Ready to move in?” Emily said.

  Nate nodded and stood. He said to the lawyer, “Thanks so much. That was easy.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Bob. “Really, my pleasure. It’s my job. You need anything, just call. Not this weekend, of course,” he grinned, and Nate noticed a packed suitcase in the corner of the office. A canvas tennis bag with the racket handle poking out of a pocket was balanced atop the luggage. “It’s hell over Columbus Day around here, frankly a carnival. Tourists will be leaching out of the woodwork for the next three days. I’ll be back on Tuesday when the commotion dies down.”

  As they left the office, Nate tried to focus on only the simple tasks in their immediate future (get to the Jeep, strap Trevor into his car seat, drive to their house) rather than their intermediate future (reaching that house). He kept his eyes on the steady tread of his running-shoe-clad feet, fixating on the sneakers’ soles, on the spots where the tawny rubber splayed beneath his toes. He barely noticed his surroundings as Emily pried open the building’s front door and pushed the stroller ahead of her, as they walked outside, as he helped her carry Trevor and his Ollie down the stoop and strode another fifty feet to where they’d left the car. By the time Nate looked up and refocused, he saw with a dull thud that the street outside Bob’s office was empty.

  “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

  EVERYTHING 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 strap
ping 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.