The Exiles
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
CHAPTER 3 Welcome to the Viking
CHAPTER 5 The Drive from Chicago
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
CHAPTER 13 The Drive to Narragansett
CHAPTER 15 Breakfast at the Viking
CHAPTER 17 Where Emily Goes When She’s Alone
CHAPTER 19 The Drive: Prelude, Two Days Ago
CHAPTER 21 The Things Nate Knows, Reprise
CHAPTER 26 History in the Family
CHAPTER 27 Contact with the Antrims
CHAPTER 28 The Drive to Narragansett, the Final Leg
CHAPTER 30 Remember Him as He Was
How wild are our wishes, how frantic our schemes of happiness when we first enter on the world!
—
THOMAS CARLYLE
I
T
’
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 bridge. The sky is growing pinker. It is almost day’s end. It is nearly time to start over.
PART I
Friday
CHAPTER
1
Loser
N
ATE
B
EDECKER 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.