The Exiles Read Free Page B

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 curbone 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 afew 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