Chapter 2
Chapter Two
F ar across the continent, it was already midnight. Alex Garland was stationed at the front desk of his family’s inn, The Rooster, desperately trying not to stare at the clock. It seemed to tick forward just one second per minute. The old injury in his left leg was spiky and strange tonight due to the ominous rainstorm that surged across the island. It never failed to make him remember what had happened. It never gave him a break.
The Rooster welcomed older clientele and families, which meant most everyone was fast asleep by now. Nobody would need the front desk till morning. But Alex would be gone back to his one-bedroom cabin in the woods near the water by then. His mother had called it a loner’s paradise. Alex hadn’t corrected her. He guessed he sort of was a loner these days and wasn’t willing to do anything to fix it. He’d even volunteered to take this late-night gig even though he felt it was unnecessary. But having twenty-four-hour reception service made guests feel safer. Alex’s parents needed someone there, and it might as well be him.
Alex was editing videos on his laptop to kill time. It was a consistent side hustle and a way to generate extra cash. Extra cash for what? He didn’t know. He didn’t take vacations. He didn’t buy anything he didn’t need. But he advertised himself online and via friends and ex-clients and said he filmed just about everything Nantucket-related: weddings, birthday parties, family reunions, sailing adventures. A few years back, a guy had urged him to film his hikes across Nantucket for his social media channel @HikeWithNateSmith. He’d even done a few music videos for midtier bands and solo artists. Alex genuinely enjoyed every gig. “I just like making memories for people,” he’d told a journalist last year who was interviewing artists in Nantucket.
“Why not feature films? Why not fiction?” the journalist had asked.
Alex had hated the question. Wasn’t it obvious that he’d much rather be a famous director in Los Angeles than filming baby showers on a little island floating in the middle of the Atlantic? Wasn’t it obvious that things hadn’t exactly gone the way he’d planned? But whose life had ever gone to plan? Who could honestly say they hadn’t been surprised (both good and bad) along the way?
The current video Alex edited was a wedding he’d filmed on Martha’s Vineyard. The man and woman were both in their seventies, but their faces glowed with the kind of innocence and wonder and goodwill you associated with weddings between twentysomethings. They were Wes and Beatrice Sheridan, ready to take on the last chapters life had to throw at them. It had captivated Alex to hear their vows. He wondered if he was too pessimistic to ever get married again, let alone in his seventies. Alex had just turned forty years old, so half of his life was over. What did he want the second half to look like?
At forty, more than twenty years ago, his parents had already raised Alex and his little sister and were preparing to be empty nesters. Alex had been dreaming about Los Angeles. He couldn’t have imagined how desperately awful things would go in his life.
Suddenly, he heard a creak on the middle step of the wooden staircase. Alex jumped out of his skin. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but the inn so often groaned and creaked with the wind and the rain, and it did something to his imagination. “Hello?” he called out.
A boy of about eight or nine leaped into the foyer. He was long-legged and long-armed, gangly as a monkey, and wore soft blue pajamas. His eyes were frantic, catching the light from the chandelier overhead. He giggled and pointed at Alex.
“I scared you!”
Alex’s heart pumped with surprise. He walked around the side of the counter, crossed his arms, and frowned at the kid.
He could be Joel. He’s the spitting image , Alex thought.
The idea transported Alex back thirty years. He shook it out and reminded himself to stay here, at The Rooster; he needed to stay in the moment. I can’t go back.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Alex asked.
The kid giggled and ran down the rug, then landed on his knees and played air guitar. “What are you doing out of bed?” the kid sang, making up a song on the spot.
Alex snorted. This kid was something else. “Do you remember your room number?”
The kid continued to sing Alex’s lyrics. “Do you remember your room number, baby? Uh, uh, uh!” He sounded vaguely like a kid version of Mick Jagger.
Alex stepped around the front desk and searched the computer for their listed families. There were only three boy children: Peter, Kaylen, and Zade.
“What’s your name?” Alex asked.
But the kid just sang back. “What’s your name, huh? Bop, bop, bop!”
A smile twisted across Alex’s lips. Outside, the Nantucket wind crashed against the window, rattling the door hinges.
“You’re going to get in trouble for being out of bed at this hour,” Alex pointed out.
But again, the kid sang.
Alex rolled his eyes, double-checked he’d saved his work on the wedding video, and considered what to do. He could always knock on every door in the entire inn and see where the kid belonged. But that behavior did little for online reviews, which his mother and father were perpetually worried about. Last year, a lady hadn’t liked the texture of her towel, and when she couldn’t track down anyone immediately at the front desk, she’d left a one-star review calling The Rooster “the worst place I’ve ever stayed in Nantucket. Avoid at all costs.” Alex’s mother had cried for a week.
Alex’s parents Fred and Nancy had founded The Rooster when Alex was a baby, which meant it was nearly forty years old. To prepare, they’d transformed an old Victorian home into a seven-suite bed-and-breakfast with an emphasis on delicious and hearty breakfasts that you often needed to take a nap after. Alex avoided the breakfasts now because his metabolism had screeched to a halt two years ago and swelled his stomach out of his jeans. Sometimes he caught himself gazing with longing at the guests’ breakfast plates piled high with bacon, sausage, and French toast.
The kid still hadn’t told him his name, and it was as though his energy doubled and tripled the more time he spent in the lobby without a parent. He was unstoppable. He leaped onto the foyer couch and jumped up and down so the springs screamed. Alex might have yelled at him to stop if he didn’t remember doing exactly that with his best friend from elementary school, the boy’s doppelg?nger, Joel Sutton. Joel had always managed to jump higher than Alex. He’d always been more athletic, taller, faster, with better hand-eye coordination. Every baseball game had Joel as its hero. Every gym class. Every race down the beach. Joel had been the very best and fastest and strongest kid until leukemia had come out of nowhere and taken Joel’s life.
It was the first time I realized you couldn’t count on anything. That life would inevitably let you down.
But this kid hasn’t learned that yet. And I won’t be the one to teach him.
“Aren’t you going to yell at me?” the kid asked. He was deflated, and he stopped jumping and stared at Alex.
Alex had the sensation that he was doing everything wrong. He couldn’t even manage the front desk of his parents’ inn. He couldn’t even yell at this kid enough to make the kid feel reckless and wild.
But suddenly from upstairs came a blood-curdling scream. Alex leaped to the other side of the desk and hurried to the stairwell to peer through the inky darkness. It must be the kid’s mother, he decided. She’s worried about him. The kid wore a confused smile and stepped down from the couch cushions. But then a door burst open upstairs, and a woman screamed, “Get here quickly! Please!” Next came the sound of her slapping the walls, searching for the light switch. It came on a second later.
“Excuse me?” Alex called. “Can I help you?” Never in his years of twenty-four-hour late-night service had anything like this happened.
The woman was frantic. “My husband! I think he had a heart attack!”
Alex sped upstairs with the boy hot on his heels. The mother cried out, “Zane!” and the little boy wrapped his arms around her thighs and scream-cried into the white fabric of her sleep T-shirt. It had Blondie’s face on it. Alex appeared in the doorway of the hotel room and found her husband unconscious and losing color. Alex’s knees quaked, and his thoughts scrambled with a thousand different ideas of what to do. The little boy, Zane, wept powerfully, torrentially, as a lightning bolt crackled across the sky outside. A moment later came the sound of the sirens. The man’s wife pushed Zane toward Alex and said, “Keep him away,” then hurried back to her husband’s side, took his hand, and whispered in his ear. Alex felt frozen until the hotel door burst open, and EMT workers barreled inside. That was when Alex picked up Zane— the spitting image of Joel— and took him downstairs and put him on the sofa in the back room. Zane sobbed into his thighs.
Alex had never had children although he’d wanted them. Although he’d tried for them. He was unpracticed in the art of calming children down. Most days, he still felt as frightened as a child himself. But now, he sat on the sofa next to Zane, wrapped his arms around him, and did his best to find the words that would secure Zane, reminding him he was still on this planet and making him believe he was safe. Alex didn’t believe anyone was safe; not after Joel; not after what had happened in California; not after forty years of heavy pain in his heart. He would have given anything to keep Zane from that pain. He would have given anything to preserve his innocence.