The Exiles Read Online Free

conference room, the hush of the carpeted hallways, the paralegals drinking coffee out of recycled paper cups in the law library. A guy would get there via cab or subway and there’s no way he’d walk outside to discover that his car had been stolen. Nate instinctively missed those offices—he missed New York.
    “Maybe it’s an optical illusion,” Nate said.
Maybe the car is still right here.
Maybe he could will it.
    Emily spread her arms in the air, deep into the space where the car had been. “No car,” she said softly. “No car at all.”
    There were no
cars:
Other than a scattering of parked vehicles, the entire street was empty. Just a space where they had left the Cherokee, carefully checking the distance to the curb as he parked, measuring, mentally, the correct distance (this was it, he’d parked perfectly in one shot), before they unloaded the Bugaboo and dutifully locked the doors (they
had!
Nate was sure of it) and made their way inside to meet with the lawyer and take possession of their house.
    Emily stepped back up on the grass and stood next to Nate, as if waiting for a bus. Her hand brushed his and he gave it a quick squeeze, a Pavlovian response. Her face was so pale and blank, as if this was simply too much for her to take in, and Nate wanted to fix it, to make it all okay. But how? Their car was gone and they were living in Newport where they had not a single friend and it was about to be off-season and Nate couldn’t even offer her a toke from his pot stash because the pot was hiddenunder the Jeep’s front seat, stolen with the car, and he didn’t want Emily to know that he still smoked, anyway, since he’d sworn to give it up when she was pregnant—and now, suddenly, breaking the street’s eerie stillness, a deep-throated scream came from below, from deep within Trevor. Like ash from a volcano, the boy erupted.
    Trevor’s face turned red and tears welled in his eyes and saliva slipped in a steady stream out of his wide-open hollering mouth. “Please Trev, please,” Nate pleaded. He bent down and unbuckled the Bugaboo’s straps.
    “Take a breather, captain,” he said, picking up his son. He clutched Trevor tightly to his chest and, after only a minute, the screams slowed and then stopped. The boy was a sucker for the human touch. “Everything’s okay, just a minor glitch in the plan,” Nate said. Trevor looked poised to let loose again but Nate clutched him tightly, reining in the child’s wiry limbs.
    Nate had bought the Jeep new six years ago. It was his first car since high school, his first adult car. He’d paid extra for the custom foot rugs, leather seats, seat warmers, snow tires, and just ten months ago a new addition: the highest-end, safest car seat on the market. The Cherokee itself hadn’t won any safety awards, but that hadn’t bothered Nate when he picked it out, when he was barely into his thirties, before he knew Emily and before he thought he’d ever, even in old age, have a child. He’d loved the size of the machine. He called it a
car
or sometimes even a
truck,
afraid to say
SUV,
to be
that guy.
It used to be that the careful choice of the right word was all it took to make Nate feel secure.
    Now the truck was gone. He looked down the street to his left, almost expecting to see its taillights pulling around the corner, making an escape. Or its headlights, sheepishly returning. It was just a vehicle, Nate told himself as Trevor held off on his intermittentbanshee act and Emily stared hopelessly into the open air. It was just a car, but it was the one thing he’d bought and paid for outright, with cold hard cash, and outfitted to his specifications, detail by detail, until it performed as promised, no surprises, completely reliable and, in a pinch, family-friendly.
    “Sorry. About the dig. Saying you hadn’t locked the doors,” Nate said to Emily, taking her hand, putting all three of them in human contact, Trevor to Nate to Emily. “This is just—”