The Exiles by Allison Lynn

one thing Emily’s mother had that Emily herself, as an adult, coveted.
    What would Emily’s outside life be? She had no interest in returning to the soulless world of advertising and had spent countless hours since Trevor’s birth coming up with new, down-home business schemes (artisanal cheese-making, nicotine-infused water, audio philosophy), dozens of ideas, looking for the one single brainstorm that would satisfy her intellect and, she hoped, bring in a paycheck, too. New mothers complainedabout how hard they worked! Yes, Emily was relentlessly tired during those first months with Trevor, when the days and nights bled together, but for so long she’d been subjected to the endless and arbitrary whims of irrational, ego-charged bosses. To suddenly find herself at the mercy of no one but a baby whose impetuous outbursts were age-appropriate? On most days this was a luxury. While Trevor was awake, he was an adorable time-suck, but the minute he went to sleep, or acquiesced to a half hour of
Baby Beethoven,
during those moments of respite Emily’s beta-blockers allowed her to concentrate and devise and plan.
    All of her ideas turned out to be insurmountably flawed. Nicotine water was an FDA-approval nightmare. Cheese-making happened to be more science than art—the humidity and temperature had to be monitored to the fraction of a degree. A philosophy audio library was already in the works out in L.A. She gave up on all of these as tenable plans. On a whim one night in bed, though, tired and limp after she and Nate had managed to find the time and desire to make love, she told him about her now-ditched idea to open her own dairy operation—something in soft goat cheeses, maybe, given that the soft cheeses were so much more forgiving than the hard varieties. When spoken aloud, she began to consider the scheme again. It sounded romantic and viable and appealingly hands-on. Still, she laughed as she described it. She let loose a self-deprecating guffaw, which apparently gave Nate the idea that her whole thing had been nothing but folly, and he laughed, too.
    “Hilarious,” he’d said. “You could also churn butter. We’d buy one of those colonial bonnets for you to wear. I could develop a bonnet fetish like
that.
” He called her Bessie for the next two days. The name stung. Emily had stopped breast-feeding only amonth earlier and was finally beginning to feel less like a cow and more like a woman again. She thought of her mother, a feminist, yes, but one who’d always loved this kind of joke. It was no surprise that Emily’s mother and Nate had taken to each other so easily.
    Since then, Emily hadn’t told Nate about any of her ideas. They hadn’t, honestly, had much time to talk. A few weeks ago, while feeling especially disconnected, for the second night in a row she’d woken up just after midnight to find that Nate wasn’t in bed with her. She could hear him on the other side of the bedroom door, in the living room. She tried to slip back into sleep, but the irregular tap of his fingers on their computer keyboard kept jarring her awake. He had a tendency to pound on the keys with the kind of force most people reserved for slamming the return-change buttons on vending machines. After a few minutes, she called out to him.
    “Nate,” she said in a whisper loud enough, she hoped, to be heard in the living room.
    “Shh,” he said, walking quickly back to the bed. “You’ll wake Trev.”
    “Your typing is going to do that anyway. Can’t you sleep?”
    “I’m not tired. It’s okay.” It was pitch-black in their apartment except for the faint blue glow from the computer screen. Their windows looked out over an unlit courtyard, and after the sun went down, unless the moon was full and bright, the only light that came in was from the lamps of the strangers who lived in the apartments across the way. At this hour, none of those neighbors were still awake. The computer beeped from the living room, a generic