Trick of Light (The Sutton Book Club 2)

Chapter 19

Rod and Renee weren’t fully prepared for the slog of Savannah humidity—the wall-like air that seemed practically impenetrable as soon as they exited the airport, which made it both hard to breathe and hard to laugh. During a walk from the hotel to the corner grocery store, Rod sweated through his T-shirt. He purchased an ice-cold Diet Coke and drank half of it before going back outside, a route that felt more like swimming than walking.

The hotel suite had two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a living room. Felix shared a bed with Renee the night they arrived, while Rod slept alone. Renee and Rod were apprehensive yet pretending to be upbeat and excited, reminding Felix of how brave he was and trying to make the entire experience feel like an adventure. They stayed up late watching cartoons and letting Felix make up stories and bounce on the bed. Rod tried to cherish every sweet thing he said.

Terrible things happened in surgery sometimes. Rod didn’t want to think about them, and he genuinely trusted Bethany with his heart and soul. But even still. Terrible thoughts crept into his head, obliterating his optimism for minutes at a time.

On the morning of Felix’s surgery, Renee and Rod checked Felix into the hospital, where Renee wheeled Felix in a wheelchair down the glossy hallways to his prep room. There, a nurse gave them a hospital gown and checked Felix’s vitals. She told him how brave he was, and Felix rolled his eyes as though he were tired of being told that.

“I love you, buddy,” Rod told him. “I’ll see you as soon as you’re done, okay?”

Rod had assumed he would see Bethany before the surgery, but the nurse explained that “Dr. Sutton was in prep.” As soon as the anesthesiologist put Felix under, Rod and Renee were led to a waiting room with coffee machines and a vending machine filled with chocolate and savory snacks. There were a few other family members—mostly parents and siblings, as this was the children’s wing. Everyone looked like they were having the worst day of their life.

Surgery was supposed to take four to five hours. “I’ve checked the time every two minutes,” Renee said with a nervous laugh. “I need to take a walk or something. I can’t sit still.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Rod asked.

Renee shook her head. “I want to be alone. Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

Renee paused at the coffee machine to order herself a cappuccino. Rod watched as she disappeared around the corner, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum. He glanced around the waiting room, crossed and uncrossed his ankles, then got up, too. He paused at the vending machine, wondering if he could stomach a candy bar, then retreated into the hallway. He walked slowly, not wanting to interrupt Renee. Before he knew it, he was outside, watching as a very soft breeze tickled moss that hung across an ancient tree. On his phone, he googled “Why is Savannah filled with moss?” But his signal was too weak for the page to load.

He tried to be okay with not knowing.

Despite the heat, Rod walked through the area of Savannah around the hospital with his hands in his pockets. He listened to the strange, Southern drawls around him, words that didn’t fully make sense to his Northerneastern ears. Nearby a park was a historical panel that spoke about the history of the Underground Railroad in Savannah, and he read it slowly, trying to take it in. Five minutes later, he couldn’t have told anyone a single thing he’d learned.

Instead, his mind felt completely corrupted with memories of the past.

For whatever reason, he continued to return to the night Bethany had broken up with him. When she’d suggested the breakup over the phone, his knees had collapsed from under him, and he’d nearly thrown up. When he’d hung up, he’d smashed his fist against the wall so violently that he’d left a mark. Nobody else was home, but his mother had commented on the mark, wondering what could have caused it. It remained a secret, one that Rod had kept with him long past his parents’ deaths.

The weekend after Bethany broke up with him, Mike, Rod’s best friend at the time, invited him to a beach party. “You have to get her off your mind,” he said. “There’s still more than a month of summer left. You can’t just moan and cry.”

Rod wasn’t sure about that. “She’s been my girlfriend for years. We’ve been in love since we were kids. I can’t just forget about her.”

“I’m not asking you to forget. I’m just telling you to live a little. It’ll help.”

Rod found himself on a dark beach with sparkling stars overhead and the immensity of the Atlantic before him. A fire crackled between ten teenagers, and a boombox played somebody’s new grunge cassette. Rod felt on the brink of insanity. Sometimes, he imagined Bethany was on her way to the beach and just had to pick up a friend. Other times, the reality of his situation came out of nowhere and hit him over the head like a brick.

That was the night he met Sandra.

Sandra was Mike’s friend’s cousin, a nineteen-year-old freshman in college visiting from Boston. She wore a jean miniskirt and had fiery-red hair and beautiful green eyes. She gazed at Rod from the other side of the fire, seemingly captivated with him, then got up and approached him like a predator to her prey. Rod had never seen anything like it. In retrospect, he’d always been with Bethany; he’d always been off-limits. But word had gotten around, and he was single for the first time ever. And somebody had told Sandra.

“Hey,” Sandra said. “Can I sit here?”

“Sure.”

Sandra dropped onto the sand and then reached for a bag of marshmallows to roast one on a stick. As the marshmallow browned near the flames, she asked him about his summer and if he was a sailor.

“Yeah. I have a boat,” Rod said proudly. It was the one thing he still cared about.

“That’s very cool. I’ve always wanted to learn.”

Mike overheard their conversation and piped in, “Why don’t we go tomorrow?”

“That’s a great idea,” Sandra chirped, her eyes still on Rod. In the fire, the marshmallow caught and singed black.

It wasn’t that Rod fell in love with Sandra. His heart was shattered into a thousand pieces, and he wasn’t sleeping. But after a few days of sailing, barbecuing, and having the summer he’d wanted to have with Bethany, Rod followed Sandra’s lead. They got milkshakes together. She reached for his hand as they walked. Sometimes, when they hung out together, Rod felt jealous eyes upon him, as though he was the luckiest guy in the world for “dating” Sandra. But he felt so lost.

After three weeks of this, Sandra accused him of never making a move. “I don’t know what your deal is,” she spouted in the front seat of his car, where Bethany had sat hundreds if not thousands of times. “I thought you liked me. I thought we had a good time.”

Rod wanted to explain himself. He wanted to scream that his heart was still in Manhattan and had no room for Sandra or this story. But suddenly, Sandra swept across the car and pressed her lips against his. He felt blown over. He kissed her back because he didn’t know what else to do, and he was filled with ache.

And that was the only night he and Sandra ever made love.

Afterward, Rod panicked. He kept a wide berth of Sandra, angry that he’d allowed himself to go so far. He couldn’t love Sandra and genuinely wanted to fix things when Bethany returned in a few weeks. If Bethany ever found out what happened between him and Sandra, she would never take him back—nor forgive him. He had sweaty palms all the time and hardly slept.

Rumor around the island was that Sandra hated him. But it didn’t matter. She was on her way back to Boston. He would probably never see her again.

Just a few days before Bethany was slated to return to Nantucket, Rod went for a long and arduous run. As he panted, he gave himself an internal pep talk, reminding himself of the traumatic stress Bethany was under, of the horrors her family had gone through, of all they could build together once they reconfirmed their love.

Back at home, he was on his way to the shower when the phone rang. “Can someone get that?” his mother called from the living room.

Rod grabbed it just in the nick of time. “Hello?”

“Rod?” Sandra’s voice swam from the darkness.

Rod froze. “Oh. Hey.” He prepared himself to explain why it hadn’t worked between them, why he’d gotten cold feet.

But before he could, she said, “I’m sorry to call you like this. It’s not because I’m hung up on you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s actually way worse,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

Rod couldn’t breathe. He stared at the mark on the wall he’d made with his fist when Bethany had dumped him. He felt his world crashing down.

His first instinct, horribly, was to insist the baby wasn’t his. But that wasn’t the kind of guy he was. He was the kind of guy who stepped up. Who did the right thing. Who loved.

By the time Bethany returned to Nantucket, rumors about Sandra’s pregnancy had gotten in every nook and cranny of the island. Bethany didn’t call, and Rod didn’t call her, either. He respected the distance she needed even though it broke his heart. Once, he saw her from a distance as she walked across the square with her mother. She looked terribly skinny, her cheeks hollowed out, and her hair flew back behind her, scraggly and witch-like. Did she miss him? Was that why she wasn’t taking good care of herself?

In Boston, Sandra’s belly grew bigger and bigger. And when she gave birth to a baby girl, she looked him square in the eye and said, “I don’t want anything to do with her. Or you.”

People told Rod to get a lawyer. They told him he had rights. But the mess of all that had very little to do with the gorgeous baby in his arms. He decided to take her home and raise her, to pour all the love in his heart into her. He never saw Sandra again.

In Savannah, so many years after Renee’s birth, Rod found himself back in front of the hospital, gasping for breath. He took refuge in the shade of the moss-covered tree and stretched his arms over his head.

“Dad!”

A familiar voice called out to him. Rod turned to find Renee tucked up against the tree with a closed book in her lap. Very rarely did Rod think she looked like her mother. Even now, Rod thought she looked more like Rod’s mother than Sandra. She was the collection of so many mistakes, yet she was perfect. She and Felix were his everything.

“How are you?” Rod asked as he approached.

Renee raised her shoulders. “I tried to get an ice cream cone, but it melted all over my hand.”

Rod laughed and sat down beside her. His watch told him they still had at least two hours left before surgery was through.

“I keep wondering something,” Renee said softly. “Do you think Felix is sick because of my mom’s genetics? Maybe something ran in her family. Something we don’t know about.”

It was rare that Renee brought up her mother. Maybe something was in the air.

Rod sniffed. “Funny. I was just thinking about her, too.”

Renee arched her eyebrow. “Really? What were you thinking about?”

“Just about everything that happened that summer. I’ve told you about it,” Rod said.

Renee nodded and dropped her head on his shoulder. “It’s all come full circle, hasn’t it?”

Rod was quiet for a moment. “I could reach out to Sandra if you want. We could ask about her family genes.”

“I just looked her up on Facebook. Not for the first time,” Renee admitted. “But it’s bizarre, looking at photos of her children and her husband and her dog. Like I know I’m related to them. And I know I probably should reach out to them one day. But I don’t want to. And I feel guilty about that.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Renee sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I just want him to be okay, Dad.”

Rod draped his hand over her head, watching as the sunlight sparkled and streamed through the thick moss, straining to be seen in the shadows. He wasn’t sure how to translate how sure he was that Felix would be all right. But he felt it deep in his bones. He hoped he was right.