The Exiles (24 page)

Emily nodded and sat next to him, his serious tone startling her. They should go back to the hospital. Whatever their relationship, Nate should be by his father’s side. Emily could bundle Trevor up and they could bring him along. It would throw the boy off schedule, but who cared? If nothing else, maybe this weekend would finally train the boy to be adaptable. And then tomorrow, or Tuesday, she’d find a lawyer. She’d actually prepare for her interrogation by the cops.

Nate reached out and grabbed Emily’s hand and she felt his fingers touch hers, lightly, as if testing them for flexibility. Or testing his own.

“My father, it’s not just the accident,” he said.

She nodded. The couch was soft and deep and, when it came down to it, she didn’t want to go to the hospital, she didn’t want to bundle Trevor up and drag him away, and Nate didn’t seem to want that, either.

“Talk to me,” she said.

Nate nodded and then, in a tone so even that it sounded rehearsed, he said, “In 1974 I came to Newport with my father. I saw his father, who was sick. I think it was Huntington’s disease. I think my father has it now. I think I may have it. I think I could have passed it on to Trevor.”

“Your father, George?” Emily didn’t understand. “You said George had a car accident, not Huntington’s disease.” Nate had never mentioned any disease in his family other than his mother’s
leukemia. Huntington’s couldn’t be a major disease, Emily told herself. It couldn’t be that harmful if she’d never heard of it. “You found out your father has Huntington’s? At the hospital?”

“Oh God, I’m sorry.” Nate paused, looked away from Emily. “My mother tried to warn me, before she died, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to know, and it was just me then, it didn’t matter. But now with Trevor—”

“But he’s okay. He’s healthy,” Emily said. He’d passed every genetic test in utero, and aced all of his doctor’s appointments since then. He was perfect! Oh, he had his idiosyncrasies. There were his ears of course, which stood out like nautilus shells from his head. And that unwavering gaze, staring at strangers with the rudeness of a social neophyte. But he was in perfect health! He was perfect to Emily. “The doctors say he’s fine, Nate. He’s okay.”

“Looking fine doesn’t mean anything,” Nate said. And then he laid out for Emily the facts of the disease, its ability to hide for decades, for most of a lifetime. And then, the way it emerged and slowly killed its carrier. “I convinced myself I didn’t have it, that it wasn’t in the family at all, until a month ago. My dad was in the
Times
and they said he was drunk, but he doesn’t drink. He hates to drink. The staggering, it’s a Huntington’s symptom.”

Emily thought about the last month, week after week of Nate wandering through their life in a haze. All of the conversations they’d had about the move, about restaurants to hit before they left the city, about his new job. She thought about his surprising joy (surprising, it seemed, even to himself) when she told him, eighteen months ago, that she was pregnant with Trevor. Of his ridiculous reluctance to talk about his parents and acknowledge that he had any kind of past.

“You and your fucking avoidance,” she said. “You can’t will away a disease by not thinking about it.”

Nate took the newspaper clip out of his wallet and handed it over to Emily. She glanced at it. “It doesn’t matter, does it, if your father was actually drunk or not? Your mother blatantly told you the disease is in his family—what, you thought she’d lied?”

“I’m an imbecile.”

“Is there a chance your mother was wrong? That you misunderstood? That I’m misunderstanding?” Emily said. “Are you saying this disease is in our family now? Or are you just bouncing the idea off me? Because I need facts. You can’t come at me with this hazy theory and expect me to be okay with it.”

“I don’t know,” Nate said. “All I have so far are theories. I’m sorry, I’m just sorry.”

The night had grown dark outside and they hadn’t switched on any lights and in the pale doom Emily listened and asked questions and gradually she realized how deep the gulf had become between Nate and her, how many secrets they’d kept. Nate was the closest person in the world to her, and she was (she believed, truly believed) the closest to him. Yet still they’d been occupying spaces secluded from each other. Nate was telling her that he might be dying, and that he’d known this for some time.

After he finished explaining in detail Huntington’s disease and his fears, Nate got off the couch and strode to the window, turning his back as if to give Emily an out, a moment to flee for her life. Slowly, she rose up from her seat. She held her breath and walked the short distance to the bedroom, to the side of the Pack ’n Play. Trevor looked intact and at peace. His breath was sleepy and even, while Emily’s was speeding up. Her head grew light and her eyes moved up and down the boy’s body. He was lying on his back with his limbs splayed flat and long across the thin mattress beneath him, intertwined with the sheet’s brightly
silk-screened ducks and swans. “Trevor,” she said, testing his name in the air. She leaned down and spread a hand flat across his chest. “Trevor,” she said reminding herself that the boy had special powers. He was superhuman. He would be okay. He could beat DNA. He had to beat the DNA. In his short life, he’d hurt no one. She raised her hand off his body and sat down on the ground where she was eye level with her son. Through the mesh wall between them, she watched Trevor sleep. She heard footsteps behind her. Nate.

“You should have told me,” she said, not taking her eyes off the boy. She clenched her muscles, holding her body as firm and still as possible, in hopes of keeping her anger contained. Unleashed, it would be uncontrollable. This, she understood as her insides froze, was what real fear felt like.

“I should have told you,” Nate said from behind her. Emily nodded.

If he’d told her a month ago, though, when his own suspicions reached their full height, what could she have done? According to Nate’s sequence of events, by the time he discovered that newspaper clip, that iota of ostensible proof, not only had Trevor been conceived, but he’d already been born and was more than eight months old. It was already too late. So what would Emily have done if she’d known this news a month ago? Two months ago? She’d have hoped. She’d have spent the past two months pinning her hopes on Trevor and his future and the health of her family instead of wallowing in her own petty dramas, convincing herself that her own dreams—her shoe purchases and her passion for the pills—were the most important thing in the world. She wouldn’t have stolen the Rufino in a momentary delusion that it could help her achieve some sort of greatness. Who cared?
Who cared
about Emily’s dreams? Trevor had to beat the odds. All this time that Emily had been telling Nate
that children were nearly indestructible? It turned out she was talking about other people’s children, not her own.

Emily, the Rufino, their fiscal distress. None of it mattered any more.

“While we’re making revelations,” she said still looking at Trevor, pausing to reconsider what she was about to say, “I stole the Barbers’ painting. I stole the Rufino. It’s in the diaper bag.”

She expected Nate to laugh, to say, “good one, Em” or “very funny” or “this isn’t a time for jokes.” When he didn’t say anything, she continued, “The painting, the one that Jeanne and Trish and Sam Tully can’t stop talking about. I have it. I have it, Nate. You were walking around with it all day today. I stole the Barbers’ precious Rufino and it’s here in Newport with us. It’s in the diaper bag.” She looked up. Nate was standing next to her. “I stole a Rufino.”

“I know,” he said. “I saw it.”

PART IV

Monday

CHAPTER
22

Morning in the ICU

G
EORGE LOOKED EXACTLY
as he had the day before, connected to tubes, withered, lifeless, and wrapped in a hospital gown. Nate couldn’t remember ever having seen his father’s bare arms before. The thin skin, bunched at the elbows, was pale and pockmarked. Nate felt wrong and voyeuristic as he hovered at George’s bedside, yet Emily, who had met Nate’s father only five minutes ago—the meeting being one-way, given that George was still in a coma—was already taking him in with no apparent unease. Emily (an actual art thief, Nate had confirmed last night, upending everything he thought he knew about her) stood at the head of George’s bed, her arms folded lightly across her chest.

“He’s real,” she said.

“You thought—?”

“I don’t know, that he was a figment of your imagination? You’ve done a pretty good job, historically, of portraying yourself as an orphan.”

“He’s real.”

“Should I leave? I’m not sure he’d want me here,” Emily said, making no motion to exit. “Your father is pretty much naked. It’s weird. Isn’t it weird?” She rested her hand on a monitor next to the bed, then quickly removed it, as if afraid she might break something. “I haven’t been in a hospital since Trevor was born.”

The air in the room smelled like toothpaste, disinfectant. Emily, too, seemed sanitized this morning, watching her words and softening her edges, reining herself in, the aftereffect of last night’s conversation. She’d lashed out at Nate last night. He’d deserved it. They were both in the wrong, that’s how things shook down. So while he wanted to hate her (not for stealing the painting, but for spending days face-to-face with him, hours in the car talking nonstop, and never mentioning the thing, not even when the topic came up), he couldn’t. She’d seemed as shocked by her own thievery as he was. Emily had walked straight out of a packed party in front of dozens of friends, acquaintances, and rich fucks, and done so with a world-class work of art under her arm. First the beauty of that action struck Nate, then the obliterating disaster of it.

“What the hell did you do?” he asked her last night after she confessed to the theft and told Nate that the cops had called her.

“I didn’t mean to take it,” she’d said. “It happened.”

“It happened?”

“Something inside me had to have it. I didn’t mean to take it.”

“You did take it. You
took
it.” Impulses were the bane of the human race, that’s the motto Nate had lived by for as long as he could remember. “Holy shit, Em. Why? Why the fuck couldn’t you have just left it there?” Trevor was in the suite with them, playing with his own toes in the Pack ’n Play.

“You’ve got to give the painting back. I’ll go with you. The minute we have credit cards, we’ll rent a car. You stole the fucking
Rufino?” he said. Until the moment she’d confessed, some small part of Nate still believed that there was another explanation, that she hadn’t taken the art, that she hadn’t even known it was in her purse. He’d wanted to believe that, he’d been willing to suspend his disbelief. “You’ve been holding on to it all this time? You didn’t think I deserved to know?”

She started wheezing, quietly, like an asthmatic in denial. “We can’t return it now,” she said softly. As he looked again at the painting, he understood: Returning the piece was impossible. She’d killed its value when she cut the canvas and rolled it. Even from a few feet away, the buckling of the paint and fraying at the edges, right along the border of the paint itself, was discernable.

“Your fingerprints must be all over that empty frame, and the Barbers’ study,” Nate said. “I cannot believe you didn’t feel the need to tell me that you had the Rufino.” He wondered if Sam Tully suspected anything, and if that was why he’d called Nate and left a message about the theft. No, Tully would have told Nate if he had any hunches. Tully, unlike Emily, wouldn’t try to pull one over on him.

“I wiped down the frames with the hem of my sweater,” Emily said, sounding like someone who’d premeditated her crime. “It was instinct. I’m sure I was sloppy. I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
I can’t believe you didn’t say anything to me,
is what Nate thought.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. He couldn’t imagine that she—and now he—could possibly get away with this. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He couldn’t talk any further until he had an answer to that question.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t
know?
” He’d thought he was the dishonest one of the two of them, yet his subterfuge had a pure motivation. He
hadn’t wanted to hurt her unless he was sure of his hunch. She, on the other hand, had no excuse at all.

“I wasn’t thinking. I was ashamed.”

“There’s no way you wiped off all of your fingerprints with your sweater. A sweater?”

“Would they know the prints are mine, anyway?” Emily said. “I mean, I don’t think my prints are on file anywhere, are they?” she said.

Of course not. For the police to get Emily’s prints, they’d have to come up to Newport to see her in person—which is exactly what they were planning to do on Tuesday. Couldn’t she see that? He and Emily would have to devise an out before then. George’s comatose state was starting to look like an appealing way to live. If it weren’t for Trevor, that is. Nate and Emily had to get their lives together for the sake of the boy.

Today they were free of Trevor. Before falling asleep last night—exhausted, mentally worn, all cried out (Nate hadn’t expected tears, but they’d come—his first and then Emily’s small dry sobs)—Nate had called the front desk and asked about the babysitting service they’d seen mentioned on the room-service menu. Within a minute they were signed up for a full day of sitting, charged to their room, and at seven thirty this morning an off-duty maid showed up at their door. She was stout, in her fifties, bilingual, and trained in CPR. She possessed all of the attributes most coveted in Manhattan nannies, Emily noted once they were in the elevator and out of the babysitter’s earshot. Emily had tried to give instructions (“He takes a nap at eleven; he’ll eat anything, but I like him to stick to oatmeal before noon”) but the babysitter merely nodded and said “okay” and “I sit many, many times” and confidently picked up the boy and easily soothed his cries, remarkably easily, while Nate and Emily slunk away.

It was starting to seem like a waste of good babysitting money. There was nothing Nate or Emily could do, or wanted to do, for George. He showed no signs of regaining consciousness. Emily put her arm around Nate’s waist, and he turned his attention to her, to the genuine sympathy on her face.