Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Z ane’s mother didn’t contact The Rooster with news until four in the morning. Alex was still behind the front desk, jittery after three cups of coffee, unfocused on his wedding video and rehearsing how he would explain what had happened to his parents when they arrived at seven that morning. Zane was finally asleep on the cot in the back room. Alex had stretched clean sheets over it and fluffed up a pillow. Pretending to be the father I was never allowed to be. He’d even made Zane some hot cocoa and hugged him again while he cried. Even at forty, Alex had never seen his father go through something that traumatic. But because he’d watched Joel die, he knew what this kind of trauma did to such a little boy. Don’t end up like me, he wanted to beg.
“He just got out of minor surgery,” Zane’s mother said. “It was with a surgeon named Bethany Sutton. A Nantucket local, I’m told. Do you know her? Is she good?”
Alex’s heart pumped. He’d heard Bethany was back from Savannah and getting divorced; she’d become head surgeon at the Nantucket Hospital. But he hadn’t yet seen her around, perhaps because his schedule was upside down. His mind’s eye filled with Bethany as she’d been at thirteen, the same year Joel had died. Back then, a confused ten-year-old, Alex had a crush on all the beautiful Sutton sisters. That, or he’d just wanted to be a part of the family. The Sutton family had been so close, so kind, so fun, and so creative. And Alex had frequently been in their midst, soaking it up. With Joel gone, Alex had lost all of them.
“I know Bethany,” Alex assured the nervous mother. “She’s an incredible surgeon.”
The woman breathed a sigh of relief. “They said he won’t wake up till later today. I don’t know what to do with myself. How is Zane?”
“He’s asleep,” Alex assured her.
“Good. Good.” Her voice was erratic. “He’s only forty-three, you know? I thought we had more time before all this happened.” She sputtered.
Alex wanted to say, we always think we have more time, but we don’t.
Instead, he said, “Zane is safe here. I’ll feed him breakfast when he gets up and bring him to the hospital.”
The woman took a breath. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. Do you need anything from your room?” Alex knew she wouldn’t want to leave her husband behind to tend to her personal needs. She wanted to be there when he woke up.
“No. No, I have everything,” she said.
Alex knew she didn’t. He also knew it was too awkward for her to ask him to ruffle through her things. A change of underwear; a phone cable; a diary. It was too much to admit to a stranger what you needed.
“Just tell him we’re safe,” the woman asked. “Tell him we’re going to be okay.”
Alex promised he would and said goodbye.
Alex walked to the doorway of the little room in back where Zane was fast asleep and thought, for the first time in many years, that it would be much easier to take drugs right now than live through this chaos. He was sober and had been since the age of thirty-three. But his addiction found ways to poke holes through his psyche. It found ways to remind him of just how small he often felt.
During one of his first meetings at Narcotics Anonymous, Alex had told the story of Joel. It wasn’t clear to him then that it was his origin story. That was the first time he’d realized life had a way of whipping you from one emotional level to the next. That life didn’t stop to ask if everything was all right on your end before proceeding to ruin you.
“We were just boys,” Alex remembered saying to his NA circle back in California. “We liked to collect baseball cards. We always had skinned knees. We didn’t even know to dream about being anything but firefighters or basketball players. And then a minute later, my mom was getting me fitted for a tiny suit to wear to my best friend’s funeral.”
Gina and Timothy Garland woke up every morning at five forty-five and were dressed and out the door by six thirty. Their house was just a ten minutes’ walk away from The Rooster. It was just a right turn and a left turn and across from the bakery with the sign that said “Open since 1932” hanging out front. That house was where Alex and his little sister were raised: a little three-bedroom they’d never been able to afford to leave because owning an inn was expensive, and Timothy never trusted the following summer to be as good as the current one. Things were always a bit tight.
Gina always entered The Rooster through the front door, and Timothy went through the back, brewing a big pot of coffee and greeting the head chef as he prepared for seven o’clock breakfast. Already, the inn smelled of oil and syrup and coffee. The morning light filtered through the low-slung clouds. The storm had cleared after a torrential night of thunderclaps and lightning-filled skies. The weather forecast for later today said it would be eighty degrees and sunny. Like a miracle.
Alex felt raggedy and fragile. Gina picked up on it immediately when she walked through the front door.
“Don’t panic,” Alex said to her with extended hands. “But we had a crazy night.”
Gina looked at him warily, just the way she had when Alex had explained he was an addict and that he was getting help. Her eyes had read: This cannot be. Not my son.
Alex explained what had happened with the man, his wife, and the little boy named Zane. Gina pressed both hands over her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears.
“The little boy is still here?” she rasped.
“He’s still sleeping,” Alex said. “I told his mom I’d take him to the hospital after he wakes up and eats.”
Gina tiptoed to the edge of the back room and peered through the shadows at the little boy nestled up in bed. “What a traumatic episode. Poor kid.”
Timothy swept in from the dining area and stopped short at the sight of his weeping wife. Gina updated him, and Timothy went into action mode after forty years of being in the service industry. There wasn’t a lot he hadn’t handled himself. But despite his eagerness to solve the situation, there was nothing to be done. Zane was asleep, and his mother and father were at the hospital. Guests had begun to wake up and wander downstairs to grab food and discuss the “chaos” they’d heard last night. Many paused to talk to Timothy and Gina, asking about the ambulance.
“We’ve been informed that the guest is recovering at the hospital,” Timothy explained. “It was a scary night, but everything is all right now.”
The guests’ worried brows smoothed out, and they sat at the breakfast tables in the sunny side room and feasted on scrambled eggs and French toast and sausage. Their chatter was like birds waking up in a forest.
Alex suddenly felt enormously tired. The fatigue pressed against his shoulders. But he couldn’t burrow himself in bed back home quite yet. Zane needed him.
Gina didn’t waste a moment before calling the hospital to check on the guest. She paced the office with her phone pressed hard against her ear. Alex heard her say, “I know I’m not family, but he’s a guest at The Rooster, Jim. You have to understand how worried I am.”
Alex and his father made silent eye contact that meant: she’ll stop at nothing to find out what she can. Gina was stubborn. It was part of her charm.
It reminded Alex of when he’d returned to Nantucket from California, and Gina had balled up her fists and said, “You’re going to be all right. We’re all going to be all right.” And she’d worked diligently, every day since then, to ensure it. She even frequented Al-Anon meetings, which were meant for family members or close friends of addicts. The meetings helped her understand how best to ensure Alex was all right. She had numerous friends in Al-Anon, and they relied on her to make her island-famous chunky-chocolate-chip brownies.
Alex adored his mother. She was his savior.
Zane stirred at eight thirty for the first time, then pulled himself up and rubbed his eyes of sleep. Alex was still behind the front desk with yet another cup of coffee, and his heartbeat drummed in his ears. He leaped for the back room to say hello to Zane. He didn’t want him to be frightened.
“Hey, buddy?” Alex sounded weak. “How did you sleep?”
Zane’s face twisted up with surprise. Last night when he’d leaped into the foyer, he’d been spry and alive, toying with Alex with unearned confidence. This morning, he was just a little boy who’d nearly lost his father.
“Your dad is in the hospital, but he’s okay,” Alex hurried to say.
“And my mom?” Zane warbled.
“She’s up at the hospital, too.”
“Is she okay?” Zane demanded.
“She’s just fine. Healthy as ever. She just wanted to be with your dad so he wasn’t alone,” Alex said.
Zane furrowed his brow. “But I’m alone.”
“You aren’t,” Alex said. “I’ve been here the entire time.”
“You’re a stranger.”
Alex winced and felt his smile melt just a bit. Finally, he stuck out his hand and said, “My name is Alex Garland.”
Zane stared at his hand for a long time before slipping his tiny hot hand in his and shaking it. “Zane Gibbons.”
“We’re not strangers anymore.”
Zane’s jaw stiffened, and his hand dropped from Alex’s. There was a pregnant pause. Alex tried to imagine what he would want to hear if he was in Zane’s position. What did I need after Joel died?
But he knew now what the adults had known back then. Words couldn’t help. Not in the face of such reality. Not in the face of death.
“I’m going to get you some breakfast,” Alex said. “Does that sound good?”
Zane nodded and got out of bed. “I have to pee.”
Alex led Zane to a little bathroom down a private hallway the guests didn’t usually have access to. In his little blue pajamas, Zane looked delicate and breakable. After the door closed, Alex turned and hurried back to the kitchen to fill a plate with every available breakfast item. He even put a leftover cookie from yesterday’s bakery run on the edge of the platter. Wasn’t the way to a kid’s heart through sugar? Or was that the reason for the sugar epidemic in this country? He thrummed with confusion and wondered if he would have made a decent father at all. He couldn’t even decide whether or not to give the boy a cookie. It was probably best he’d never become a dad.
Alex set up the breakfast plate on a little table in the back room and then hurried to fill a glass with orange juice. Kids loved orange juice. At least that was what commercials would have you believe. As he arranged everything, Zane sat cross-legged on the bed and watched. His gaze was steady and powerful.
Alex remembered when he and his ex-wife were trying for a baby. Alex had been thirty-five at the time and just two years into his addiction recovery. Some people in NA had said it was too fast. That he wasn’t ready to be a father and needed to focus on himself. But his love for his wife had grounded him. At least that was what he thought. But that was when the nightmares had begun. Nightmares in which his future children had cancer like Joel. Nightmares in which they were plagued with horrible diseases that destroyed both their lives and his. Always in the dreams his wife was scream-crying at him and saying, “What did you make us do?”
Alex had told his NA group at the time, “It’s like I left my addiction nightmare only to have more nightmares. Nightmares about the future.”
His NA sponsor had said, “Addiction was always a way to escape yourself and your life. And now your psyche is trying to invent ways to help you escape the pain by making you too frightened to do anything real.”
Alex had been too frightened to tell his wife what was going on.
Zane took a few slow bites before speeding up and wolfing down the plate in ten minutes flat. Alex’s stomach groaned. Midway through the boy’s feast, Timothy came in and asked how everything was going. His eyes glinted knowingly, and Alex wondered if he was thinking about how much Zane looked like Joel. Or is it all in my head?
“Do you want to get changed?” Alex asked Zane when he finished. “Maybe we could get your clothes out of your room.”
But Zane was resistant. He didn’t want anything to do with the room where his father had nearly died.
“It’s a comfort thing,” Timothy explained to Alex quietly as Zane padded to the counter to inspect the old iron keys. “Kids love to wear their pajamas when they feel bad. You were the same way.”
Did I wear my pajamas all the time when Joel died? Alex wondered. He couldn’t remember many specifics from that time, save for grief like a storm cloud in his chest and an addiction to the cartoons on television. He remembered his mother urging him to eat more. He’d probably lost weight. Maybe he hadn’t grown to his full height due to the stress of that time. At five-ten to his father’s six-foot-three, he wondered if something went wrong.
“Maybe I should wear my pajamas more often,” Alex said.
“Maybe we all should.” Timothy touched Alex’s shoulder and asked, “Are you doing okay? It must have been a stressful night.”
“I’m fine. I’m just glad everyone is okay.”
Timothy seemed to consider saying something else, then finally squeezed his shoulder and said, “Let us know how it goes.”
Zane looked so small in the passenger seat of Alex’s truck. Alex watched him buckle in and then realized with a jolt that the kid didn’t have shoes on. Of course! His little pale feet jumped up and down and didn’t reach the floormat. It was probable the hospital wouldn’t let him in without shoes. But what could Alex do? He didn’t want to leave Zane alone in the truck to go fetch his shoes from upstairs. He checked his phone for shoe stores in the area, but they didn’t open till eleven, and Alex didn’t want to wait that long.
The only thing he had in the truck was a pair of size eleven flip-flops. They would have to do.
Alex drove to the hospital, parked out front, and said, “I need you to wear these.” He flapped the flip-flops through the air until a smile broke out on Zane’s face.
Joel would have thought this was hilarious, too.
Zane put the flip-flops on and slapped his way from the truck to the hospital's front door. Once there, Alex texted Zane’s mother to say they were here. She instructed them where to go, which wing and which room. Zane led the charge, the sound of his flip-flops echoing down the halls. When they reached his parents’ hall, his mother stepped out to show a face tomato-red from weeping and hair like a tumbleweed. She was approximately Alex’s age, he realized now. But she’d lived so much more than he had. She’d had a child. She’d taken her husband to the hospital and waited in horror as Bethany Sutton sliced into him and put him back together again.
I’m sure you’ll get married again; Alex’s mother had said when he’d returned to Nantucket with his tail between his legs. And Alex had begged her, Don’t tell anyone I was married. Don’t bring it up. I don’t want to think about it.
Gina was true to her word. She never brought it up. But thoughts of his failed marriage swallowed him up so often that it was almost as though he relived the entirety of their relationship once a week. It was a nightmarish television station he couldn’t turn off.
“Thank you again,” Zane’s mother said, lifting her chin to look Alex in the eye. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”