The Exiles (4 page)

At the word
clues,
the officer across the counter glanced up. She shook her head (
it’s nothing!
) and he looked down again and continued sorting through his stack of photocopied forms.

“I need to go,” Emily said to Jeanne. “I’ll call you later.”

Emily smiled apologetically to the cop and felt a wheeze coming on, her chest tightening. “Everything was in the car,” she said again to the cop. Everything was in the car: The statement felt fake as soon as it was out of her mouth. Everything wasn’t in the car. Emily still had her phone, obviously, and her purse, and the ridiculous stash of junk in that purse. Not to mention all their goods that would be arriving in the moving truck next week. “Everything was in the car,” she repeated (again, again!), sounding more idiotic with each regurgitation. She was surprised her words came out at all. The Barbers were probably talking to the cops right now, too. Their stolen artwork was worth more than the Jeep—by a factor of ten, at least. Even when it came to their thefts, Nate and Emily didn’t stack up. Emily choked at the thought.

She needed to focus, to keep her head on straight.
Easier said,
she thought. Even on good days, when their Jeep hadn’t been stolen and when all of New York hadn’t called to gloat over their friends’ stolen Rufino (because, truly, people seemed to be gloating, sad and shocked and gloating), Emily was prone to panic. Day-to-day living had made her head spin so often that she carried a full bottle of beta-blockers in her purse (oh! how easily she’d taken to calling her diaper bag a purse!). Jeanne had prescribed the blockers not in her office at the hospital but over a gossipy brunch during which she’d promised they were low-dose. Inderal was mild, Jeanne had said, recommended for performance anxiety and stage fright, not generalized nerves. That appealed to Emily. She hadn’t wanted Xanax or any of the other usual suspects anyway. She’d seen friends grow dependent on those drugs, swapping them at parties and trading notes. All Emily had wanted was something to take the edge off her need to act the part. “You’ve got to quit carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders,” Jeanne, her most ruthlessly honest friend, had advised. Jeanne had seen Emily through the tumult of college—they’d lived next to each other freshman year and seemed to be the only women in their dorm without eating disorders—and nearly two decades of traumas (all marked by panics, ranging from mild to severe) since. “Emily, you need to relax.”

Relax.
It was the catchword, the common parlance, the impossible to sustain cure-all. Relax. “Relax. At least you have your health,” Emily’s mother used to caution, coaxing Emily to take it easy each time she lambasted herself over her love life or a bad grade as a child. “There’s no excuse for tears when you still have your health,” her mother would say. She had a point. All Emily battled, on most days, was nerves, a small complaint. Everyone suffered from anxiety to some degree. In college
Emily had studied philosophy and religion, historical thinkers and writers of social commentary. She’d immersed herself in Rousseau and Kant and Hegel and spent half of a semester on Thomas Carlyle. Each of these men had been, in his lifetime, little more than a tightly wound nervous disorder with legs—and with a striking talent when it came to the written word. Emily had idolized Carlyle while she was an undergrad and almost went to grad school on a fellowship to study his work. Sure, Carlyle had flaws—he’d spoken out against democracy and treated his wife like a housekeeper—but looking back on it, Emily wondered if perhaps Carlyle was simply ahead of his time. Today, in the new millennium, democracy was coming apart at the seams and young women, even the educated and the criminally overeducated, were choosing housekeeping over career. Oh God, that thought could drive any woman to pop pills.

This evening, though, Emily hadn’t touched her beta-blockers. What she’d felt on the street corner in the absence of their car wasn’t her familiar panic, but rather an elevated sensation. She felt almost free, startlingly unencumbered. Because if moving to Newport was intended to be their escape from New York, why had they tried to bring so much of the city with them? Why had they so forcefully overstuffed the Jeep’s cargo bay? (Why hadn’t she left her purse in the car? she thought, momentarily wishing her bag and its contents were gone as well.) It was apt, wasn’t it, the Jeep being stolen? It was payback. It was a sign that it was time to halt her furious attempts to claw her way to the top. If the Jeep theft turned out to be her only punishment, she’d be thrilled.

“We left the Jeep for only ten minutes. Fifteen at most,” Nate told the cop. “We locked the doors.”

“We did lock the doors, right?” Emily said. Nate had the keys.

It didn’t matter. Locked or unlocked, the car was gone, with everything in it. Yes, they still had their goddamn health. And when it came down to it, Nate and Emily had plenty of
stuff.
The moving truck was packed with their furniture, suitcases of clothing, books, appliances, and Emily’s shoes, or most of them. And Trevor wasn’t in the car. Emily was thankful for that.

Their most private, and damning, financial papers were in the Jeep, though. They’d prepared for a snag in the house-closing process and had brought boxes of documents: tax returns, bank statements, pay stubs (what paltry numbers on those pay stubs!), a credit report, old credit card bills. And there
were
shoes in that car, including at least one brand-new pair of driving moccasins Emily couldn’t afford. Handing over her Visa card at Tod’s last month, she’d looked at the total and thought of all the diapers that this one pair of moccasins could buy, all of the future school lunches. She’d guiltily bought the shoes anyway, full price at $350 plus tax, and when packing for Newport she’d taken them out of the pile for the movers and stashed them in the Cherokee’s backseat. She was sure she’d want them in the week before the movers arrived. She wanted to look good in her new life. Tonight those overpriced Tod’s, along with the small duffels of clothing they’d packed to last the week (the things they couldn’t bear to live without) were driving somewhere in a direction away from here.

As a rule, Emily rarely sank money into high-end shoes. What she coveted, most of the time, wasn’t the footwear and handbags and overpriced artwork that she saw other women of her generation collect with astounding fervor. Emily appreciated good shoes, dreamed about them even (though she’d had nightmares after buying the Tod’s—deep-in-the-night frights about financial insolvency, about landing destitute in a soot-covered rooming house). But what she wanted more than shoes and bags and all
the other material possessions was the kind of financial assurance that friends like Tania Osbourne and Anna and Randy Barber took for granted. The designer shoes, the bags, the Rufinos: Their true value lay in their symbolism, their act as signifiers of that desired economic stability.

Back in the 1970s, Emily had seen her mother, a feminist academic, struggle as a single parent, having to pawn, once, even their outdated TV. Emily had worn hand-me-downs acquired not from same-sex relatives but from yard sales and kiddie consignment shops. Every day, she’d brought her lunch to school from home while her friends ate the mass-produced chow sold in the cafeteria, nuggets of pulverized potato and chicken served on smartly compartmentalized trays. She told her mother that she didn’t mind any of this, that peanut butter trumped tater tots any day. But that hadn’t been true.

A decade later, after her career finally cohered, Emily’s mother began portraying the disintegration of her marriage as empowering. The woman seemed to have no recollection of the financial struggles she and her children had endured. “I don’t wish divorce on you at all, ever,” she had said to Emily and her brother after finally relocating the family to a spacious, if basic, apartment, “but power to the century we live in, replete with options.” As for what options Emily’s father chose for his postdivorce life, Emily never knew. When he died of heart failure, twenty years later, neither Emily, her mother, or brother attended the small memorial service in Albuquerque, where he had been living for more than a decade. He’d completely absented himself from their lives. Even his occasional gifts, mailed by FedEx, had ceased arriving years earlier. And today Emily hardly remembered the man. What she could still picture (and taste) in detail were those generic peanut butter sandwiches. Now that she had a child herself and had achieved at
least the semblance (to the easily fooled observer) of solvency, Emily never wanted to chance landing her own family in that kind of situation.

The hopeful dream of stability was the reason Emily had passed up grad school; a history PhD would never have allowed her the luxury of financial peace of mind. In the end, it turned out that her career in experiential advertising hadn’t afforded her this treasure, either. While working at the agency, she’d earned enough dough to support a small, frugal family in most cities, but in Manhattan her salary was eaten up, in a minute, by day-to-day living. After fourteen years in advertising and nearly a year off raising Trevor, she had no bread in the bank. Nate had none, either, nothing saved up at all. It was this fact that had pushed Emily over the edge.

“All of our financial records were in the car,” Emily said to the cop, reality and defeat setting in. “They’ve got Nate’s computer, too.”

“Shit, and tax returns, two years of tax returns,” Nate said, looking nervous. “Does this sound like a bad joke yet? Honestly, it’s an identity thief’s dream. Do you think you’ll find the car? Will you go through it to see what’s missing if it’s found, or is that left up to us? It’s private stuff, you know, those items in the car.”

“It’s car theft. We see this all the time, don’t worry,” the cop said, presenting them with a stack of forms and a pen.

“But the car, you’re not going to, you know, rifle through it? It’s completely packed with stuff right now. Seriously, it’s private,” Nate said. Emily winced. What was Nate so worried about? Did he think the cops were going to wear his underwear on their heads? Who cared if the police rifled through the stuff, as long as they got it back.

The cop leaned away briefly to answer a ringing phone, putting
the caller on hold. “If we find the car, there’s procedures we follow,” he told Nate. “Whatever’s left in it, if anything is left in it, you’ll get back.”

Nate paused and nodded, then reached for the forms with one arm while balancing Trevor in the other. The boy looked ready to burst again at any moment. If only Emily could see her son’s skewed smile, just once.

“Trevor’s Rasta CD was in the Jeep, in the CD player,” Nate said to Emily without taking his eyes off the papers. The word
Rasta
made the boy look up in anticipation. The kid loved the CD’s conga-beat versions of the Burl Ives classics; some days it was the only thing that could lull him into submission. “We’re going to need to replace that as soon as we can.”

“Or sooner,” Emily said as she continued to steady herself against the counter. Finally she dug into her purse for the bag of dry Cheerios that she’d prepared this morning. Trevor needed to eat, no wonder he’d been putting up such a fuss. Emily rested the food on the counter and took hold of the boy, their boy, as Nate slowly and neatly completed the forms, diligently filling in the blanks, documenting all that had disappeared.

CHAPTER
3

Welcome to the Viking

A
T THE
H
OTEL
V
IKING
, no one was behind the check-in desk. Nate tapped his fingers on the counter and waited, conspicuously leaning across the slab of marble and looking for help. When no one showed up, he resorted to the
Ring for Service
button, lightly depressing its small plastic buzzer.

He couldn’t help but notice the redundancy of the situation: He and Emily were looking for a hotel room in the town where they already owned a house, their first home. That home was a shell right now, though, devoid of furniture and the other comforts that would eventually make it inhabitable. Their original, pre-car-theft plan had been to stay at the house, anyway, during the days before their movers arrived. With that idea in mind, they’d stuffed the AeroBeds, a set of linens, and a few bath towels into the back of the Jeep. They’d even joked about it, gloating over the fact that they would be camping inside their own house. Nate had talked about how he and his brother Charlie had camped out in their family’s front yard a few times as kids,
setting up sleeping bags on the hard ground beneath their living room’s expansive, plate-glass windows. As Nate waited for a check-in clerk to appear, he wondered what Charlie would make of today’s predicament. Charlie would have been able to put a positive spin on it, to infuse their sudden state of carlessness with a sense of adventure. Bad times had never bogged Charlie down, the way they did Nate. Of course, Charlie had never really hit bad times.

Now Nate and Emily’s AeroBeds and provisions were gone. At the police station Nate had suggested that it might be fun to stick to their plan and camp at their home regardless, spreading out on the hardwood floors (they’d conceived Trevor on a floor in Manhattan, if they’d pegged the date right), but Emily shook her head. They had a child now and had to act like adults. They couldn’t sleep on the floor, she’d explained. Trevor, for one, wouldn’t put up with it, and it was too late to buy new beds tonight, since the stores were already closed. Even if stores were open, Nate and Emily had just canceled all of their credit cards and put holds on their bank accounts—all of their financial statements were in the Jeep, after all, putting them at risk for identity theft and credit card fraud. Immediately after canceling the accounts, it occurred to them to hit a bank machine, to stock up on cash, though by then it was too late. So what did Nate expect to buy new beds
with?
All they had, until the weekend was over, was the money in their wallets.

Emily was right and there was no sense in arguing. The night had been stressful enough already. After discovering the Jeep’s theft, Nate and Emily had headed back into Bob Daugherty’s office to call the cops and then followed the lawyer’s directions to the precinct, declining his offer of a ride, “since it’s so close and all.” Emily and Nate took turns pushing Trevor the quarter mile to the station. The boy had remained shockingly quiet
during the walk, except for occasional bursts of dialogue featuring his favorite, and only, word. “Ba!” he’d say, or maybe “bap,” effervescent, bubbling over, as if he were the first man to discover language, as if he were not the same exact child who just moments ago had been screaming like a crazy person.
Bababap!
Nate claimed the word was an attempt at Papa. Emily countered that it could almost as easily be
mama.
Or
barbarian.
Or
bastard.
That last one made Nate laugh, and Emily, too. Trevor, too young to even eat honey, declaring his station in life.