The Exiles (21 page)

Each time George left that spare, square house to go on a business trip, though, the place slowly settled into disarray. The situation was only temporary: Nate’s mother could get the abode back up to Bedecker standards in less than a day, which was usually as much warning as George gave before his return.
When Nate asked his mother why she didn’t simply leave the place in livable disorder all of the time (the house was only half George’s, the other half was hers), she said, of the hyperorganized abode, “It’s better this way.” When Nate looked unconvinced, she continued, with a patient severity to her voice, as if doling out advice that might save him someday: “To appreciate this house it should be inhabited with a certain aesthetic. It is a joy to live here. Remember, the house breathes life into us, not the other way around.”

Yet
this
house, George’s father’s house, was a comfortable New England homestead that seemed to breathe
because
of its past inhabitants, because of the patterns of daily living. This house, so far on the pendulum swing from the home George had built for his own family in the 1960s, was where George himself had grown up. And he’d clearly returned since Nate last saw him here, thirty years ago, tending to his own father, the elder, elderly Bedecker. If Nate needed proof that his father had been back (proof beyond the barely lined notepad in the hall cabinet’s drawer, identical to the notepads George had kept in the hallway drawers at Bedecker House when Nate was a child, identical to the pads George had had on his drafting table at work), his eye caught on an envelope. It was propped against a riser halfway up the steps from the first floor to the second. Peeking out of the business-size envelope’s clear cellophane window was an address, the address of this house, and above it, in a computer generated font:
TO: MR. GEORGE BEDECKER.

As Nate opened the sealed envelope, two words came to mind:
mail tampering.
He feared he was adding mail tampering to his list of offenses for the day. He and Emily could end up inhabiting neighboring jail cells, she for art theft (but really, there had to be an explanation for the Rufino in her bag—he’d ask her about it, he would, as soon as he saw her) and he for
the triple whammy of breaking, entering, and mail fraud. Then again, since this particular envelope hadn’t been sent through the post office (it was stamp-free and had been hand-delivered to this step, apparently), it didn’t legally qualify as mail, did it? Nate tore through the flap and removed the paper that was inside. As he unfolded it, he kept one ear toward the living room where Trevor remained quiet.

The letter wasn’t a letter at all. It was a cleaning and landscaping bill. George’s house had been scrubbed and his yard tended to three days earlier. The document didn’t say if this was routine upkeep or a special service to prepare for the homeowner’s arrival. It could easily be routine upkeep. George was fastidious enough to want his place carefully maintained even when he was gone—that had largely been Nate’s mother’s role when she was alive. Now, instead of Annemarie, George had Norman Carlson of West Warwick (as the letterhead announced) picking up the slack for $165 a visit.

Of course George would have a caretaker: this wasn’t his main residence. He probably came here only once a year. Once every five years. Maybe every ten, for all Nate knew. George didn’t take vacations, after all, and he was headquartered in Chicago now. Nate received yearly assessments from his father’s office, summarizing family transactions, the moving around of the tiny bit of cash that was left from his mother’s estate—not even enough for two months’ rent on Nate and Emily’s New York apartment. The typed-up annual assessment, with no personal note attached, was the only word that Nate had received from his father in the past five years. Five years since they’d spoken. Even longer since they’d been in the same room.

Nate left the bill on the steps and continued climbing to the second floor, which felt uncannily small, each of the three rooms just big enough for a full-size bed and dresser set. Solid
white quilts lay over the beds, straw mats across the floor, roller shades shut tight over the windows. The dressers were empty except for the bureau in the slightly larger master bedroom. That bureau was filled with spare blankets, extra pillowcases, two pairs of pajamas, and, in the closet, a few pairs of pants, shirts, and jackets that Nate recognized as his father’s. The man never varied his wardrobe, dressing in shades of black and white and chalkboard gray—city tones, the hues of stone buildings and slate facades—even, it appeared, while here, in the country and on the sea. Nate rifled through the medicine cabinet, looking for odd vitamins or prescriptions, even as he knew that there was no treatment for Huntington’s. Still, wasn’t lack of any clues a sign in itself? Wasn’t no evidence of a positive diagnosis enough to assume the negative? Nate couldn’t remember. Someone famous once said that you can’t prove a negative, but Nate didn’t know who. Emily was the quotation expert, the walking
Bartlett’s,
still citing the B-list philosophers from her college seminars.

Nate felt an unidentifiable gloom, a sense of displacement as he crept through a house that wasn’t his, in a town he didn’t know, looking for clues to something that he’d probably made up. Trespassing. Add trespass to his rap sheet. He thought back to the front porch, where he’d searched for the house key fifteen minutes ago. He’d put everything back in its place, hadn’t he? He didn’t want the caretaker driving by and noticing something
off,
stopping in to check things out. He didn’t want George dropping in, either, but it was Sunday already, if the old man (who didn’t take holidays, Nate reminded himself) was coming for the long weekend, he’d be here already. Regardless, Nate’s heart beat hard as he quickly and quietly ran down the stairs to check on Trevor (still sleeping soundly, still secure in his makeshift crib) and then ran back up again.

Finally he headed up another flight to the attic, measuring out his steps on the narrow stairs. His legs were still firm, firmer than they’d been in the Jeep two days ago, as firm as any healthy, appropriately aging guy. His mind was healthy, too, he’d definitely remembered to put everything back in place on the porch.

He’d also remembered to lock the damn Cherokee on Friday, surely he’d remembered that, and look where it had gotten him.

The rough-hewn stairs sagged under Nate’s weight. When he reached the top, he was shocked by the light. The attic was bright. He blinked and waited for his tired eyes to adjust. While the shades had been drawn in the rooms downstairs, the windows here, eaves cut deep into the roof, were open to the glare rising up off the water below. The place was teeming with stuff, like the trunk of that stolen Jeep, boxes and garment bags and stacked rickety furniture. Nate slowly navigated around the clutter. On the left side of the room, nudged up against an old dresser, were boxes of clothing. Nate opened the one closest to him and found a pile of wool pants, two waist sizes larger than his own and much larger than the pants that George wore. The architect was always too thin, and Nate remembered his mother gently joking (not to George’s face, of course) that the man practiced the same minimalism with his diet that he adhered to in his designs. Draped next to that box was a frayed overcoat in a deep brown. Nate dug into the pockets, but they were empty. Nate worked his way past a crate of
Scientific American
s. Nate’s grandfather hadn’t been in the science world but was a dilettante in everything, Nate’s mother had told him. The man Nate had glimpsed long ago outside this very house hadn’t been much of anything for long, except a dabbler in business and a compulsive drinker, living mostly off his family money until he depleted it, long before his death, and then off Social Security and Medicaid. Everything of value except for this house was
gone by the time George was grown and his school tuitions had been paid. Bitter and angry, it seemed, Nate’s father had left this place to make his own way in the world and never looked back.

But George had, finally, come back. Nate had seen him here that one time in 1974, and that likely wasn’t the sole visit he had made to check in on his father. Perhaps he’d returned again and again, without his wife and children. During Nate’s childhood, George was gone so often that Nate, as a teenager, stopped asking where he went. And from the neat and stacked look of the packing job in the attic, these boxes had been gathered and stored up here by George himself, probably after his father’s death. George had specifically told Nate, after he sold the Cleveland house, that he was moving his own things here.

Nate walked toward the windows and stumbled over a metal crate of old train ticket stubs, photographs of George as a kid, ancient postcards to the Bedeckers from people whose names Nate didn’t know. While George had barely given his own sons the time of day, George’s parents had documented their child’s comings and goings in mundane detail. Next to the crate sat a carefully preserved file of papers, clippings, and notes. Nate lifted a heavy bound volume that was wedged into the side of the file—George’s high school yearbook. George’s portrait, smack in the middle of the B section of the senior photos, looked identical to the others on the page. The men all shared the same close-cropped haircut (as if a putting green had lodged atop each of boys’ scalps), the same sports jackets, similar club-striped ties. Diversity had yet to spread to New England. In the casual candids that littered the yearbook pages, the scattering of identical tall, white teenagers looked like an optical illusion. Nate didn’t see his father in any of these candids, and wasn’t sure if it was because the teenaged Bedecker wasn’t in the pictures, or because he was indistinguishable to the naked eye. Or because
Nate had wandered so far from his own past that he wouldn’t even recognize it in a still photo.

The file’s stack of magazine and newspaper clips documented George’s early commissions, the more traditional structures he’d created long before the boxy Cleveland house, a decade prior to Nate’s and Charlie’s arrivals. Nate had seen these pictures only in libraries, in architecture books. At Bedecker House, George had kept no evidence of his early career. Here, though, that career was carefully preserved, most likely by George’s father. George’s mom, Nate knew, died young, just like Annemarie. George would have been in high school at the time, though from the look of him in his senior yearbook picture, where he was smiling and at ease in front of the camera, you’d never know that he’d dealt with death already. You’d never have known it, either, twenty years later when Nate was in college and his own mother died. After Annemarie’s death, George offered Nate no words of wisdom, no sense that he’d been there himself.

Nate worked his way through the clips from the bottom up until he reached the final newspaper story, the most recent of them, published nearly four decades ago, a few months after Nate was born. It was a
Boston Globe
feature about Bedecker’s commission to design Worcester’s Human Rights Museum, a building that was never erected—though whether its failure stemmed from George’s design (impossible to build on any level of civic budget, the article pointed out) or the city’s inability to secure support was never determined. Stapled to the top of the
Globe
story was a faded photograph of Nate himself, a picture Nate had never seen but which wasn’t so different from the blown-up images Nate’s mother had propped in the one bookshelf along Bedecker House’s front hallway. The baby in the picture, two months old or so, lay on a bedsheet in the small clearing
beside the glass-and-stone house—the same clearing where Nate would later camp out with his brother. In the picture, Nate was on his stomach, eyes to the camera, one ear to the ground. On the white border beneath the image, in George’s unmistakable, crisp writing (the photo had seemingly come from George; he’d thought to send his father a photo), it said only, “Here is Nate.”

It could almost be Trevor in the picture. Nate thought back to Trevor eight months ago, lying on their living room floor in the city.

A screech came from down below, from the first floor—Trevor. Shit. Nate had been in the attic at least half an hour. The boy could easily be awake. Or hurt. Or
scared.
The screech came again and Nate ran quickly toward the stairs and was halfway down to the second floor when he realized it wasn’t Trevor. It wasn’t the boy at all. It was the old-fashioned three-note clang of a manual-chime doorbell. Nate scrambled down the rest of the flight, taking the steps two at a time, from the attic to the second floor where he froze on the landing.

Images of that caretaker came to him. Pictures of a nosy neighbor. A full-on feature film of his own deceit. He had nothing to gain by answering the door. No one except the teenaged Nicole knew he was here. He’d sit tight and quiet until whoever it was drove away. As long as the person outside—Norman Carlson or that neighbor or a knee-socked Girl Scout—didn’t go around the house and see the window carnage by the back door, there’d be no sign that Nate had broken inside. He would sit still and wait out this episode, everything would be fine, he was sure of this—and his plan would have worked, he was certain, except that right then, with the third clang of the doorbell, Trevor broke into a screaming wail from the living room. His cover
blown, Nate bolted from the second floor to the first, where he scooped the boy into his arms and then walked as innocently as he could toward the front vestibule. Through the door’s frosted window, he saw the shadow of a man: pencil-thin, stooped, and dark. The stooped and dark posture, Nate realized as he reached for the door handle (time suddenly slowing down as he wished he could make it stop entirely), of George Bedecker.

On the other side of the door stood a uniformed cop, lanky and leaning over. His badge sat high on his shoulder, more name tag than chest decoration.

“I’m sorry,” Nate said, standing on the threshold, taking a deep breath of the outside air. The man at the door wasn’t George Bedecker. It took a moment for this realization to set in. This was either the first stroke of luck Nate had had in a month, or a catastrophe waiting to happen.