Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
A lex couldn’t believe what Rowan was telling him.
“All eyes are on Victor Sutton at the moment,” Rowan said, his breakfast forgotten and shoved to the side. The low-sugar maple syrup glinted in the sunlight. “If you grew up with Bethany, you must have heard his story. His youngest son passed away from leukemia many years ago. It was a tragedy. Nobody is saying it wasn’t. But after that, Victor snapped up his possessions and abandoned his family with his secretary. A classic story.”
Alex took a long sip of coffee and waited. It had been a long time since he’d had a conversation about anything that wasn’t “things to do on Nantucket” or the logistics of something at The Rooster. It felt unlucky that this first conversation plunged him into the depths of something he knew so much about.
“A couple of years back,” Rowan said, lowering his voice, “Nadine and I went to a family therapist. After the movie came out, fame came after it. I traveled a lot to support it and met people from all over the world while she was back in California with Zane. She felt unsupported and alone. For a little while, she even considered leaving me. I was surprised when she dropped that bomb. I felt high as a kite. Like nothing could get me down. But I begged her to go to a therapist, and she agreed.” Rowan’s nose twitched. “Wait a second. Weren’t you married when you made Blue Days ?”
Alex shifted uncomfortably on his chair and wiped his already clean hands with his napkin. “I was.”
Rowan’s face fell. “I remember her.”
“It’s okay,” Alex said. “I prefer not to talk about it.”
“Right.” Rowan set his jaw. “Nadine and I started therapy with a guy who’d trained with Victor Sutton. He had all his books on the shelf and parroted everything he said. He even assigned us workbooks Victor Sutton had written that guided us through conversations and helped us express ourselves better. It might sound hokey, but it worked.” He clasped his hands together. “I grew to really respect and like Victor Sutton. I put all my trust in him. I listened to his podcasts and watched him on television. I thought wow, this guy gets it. But a couple of months back, an article was published about him. An article ‘exposing’ him as a fraud, basically. It got me thinking about why we trust certain people when they tell us to trust them. It made me ask, Is there anything about Victor Sutton of value? Or should we throw him away now that we know he treated his first wife and three daughters the way he did?” Rowan leaned forward. “What do you think? Do you think there’s any merit in a doctor of psychiatry who treats people the way he treated his family?”
Alex cleared his throat. What could he say?
“I think people are complicated,” Alex said finally, feeling lame. “I think there’s probably a lot more to the story. And I don’t necessarily think people are ever unworthy of forgiveness.”
Rowan took a breath. At that moment, Alex thought Rowan would sneer and ask him to leave. Maybe Rowan would say I thought you were the genius who wrote Blue Days, but you’re a dumb idiot.
Rowan clapped his hands, and Alex flinched.
“That’s exactly it,” Rowan said. “Who is worthy of forgiveness? Why? And when? And how does that play into our cultural conversations surrounding family and fatherhood and so on?”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “It’s a complicated documentary, then.”
“And I haven’t fully decided how to approach it.”
“Have you asked Victor?”
Rowan raised his eyebrows. “He says he has a book coming out soon. A tell-all. His side of the story. I don’t want this documentary to be a sympathetic piece on why Victor Sutton is always right. I want it to be much more complicated than that. But I haven’t fully explained that to Victor.”
“He thinks you’re on his side.”
Rowan raised his hands. “I haven’t decided what side I’m on. Maybe I’m on nobody’s side. Or maybe I’m just on the side of the truth.”
“The truth is always subjective,” Alex said. He was starting to feel like his old self again. His filmmaker self. He’d thought he’d left that self back in California.
“Then I have to find my subjective truth through the making of this documentary,” Rowan went on. “I don’t want to leave anything out. I’ve even talked to Nadine about including portions of our story. Our marital struggles. Our worries about Zane.” He furrowed his brow. “I want you to help me find that subjective truth.”
Alex’s heart pumped. He hadn’t made a movie in years. He was beginning to question everything. What had he once known about this career? What could he bring to the table? What if Rowan was disappointed in him?
“You’re also free to share your own story,” Rowan added, “if you feel comfortable doing that.”
Alex knew he meant the story of his ex-wife. But Alex knew that was far too close to home.
Alex knew he needed to tell Rowan the truth right now. That Victor Sutton wasn’t just the acclaimed and now shamed family psychiatrist from Nantucket Island. He wasn’t just Bethany Sutton’s father.
Victor Sutton was Alex’s ex-father-in-law.
Yet Victor himself didn’t even know that.
“Say you’ll do it. Say you’ll jump back into the film industry with me,” Rowan said. “You gave me a leg-up all those years ago. It’s my turn.”
Alex took a sip of coffee and felt his consciousness splitting with exhaustion and fear. The last time he’d made a film, everything in his life had filtered through his fingers. It had driven him to burnout. It had driven him back to Nantucket Island and into the dark hours of all-night shifts at The Rooster. But it wasn’t as though he had anything to lose. His upcoming film projects involved a fiftieth-anniversary party for Nantucket locals and a sweet sixteen party on a yacht. He’d fade into the background. He’d shoot pivotal moments of other people’s lives while his own faded away.
He had nothing to lose.
“Can I think about it?” Alex said instead. “I was up all night. I’m beat.”
Rowan bowed his head and closed his eyes, like a cult leader or a Buddhist. “Of course.”
Nadine returned to the veranda with a bowl of yogurt dotted with technicolor fruit. She gazed at Rowan adoringly. Alex imagined how awful it must have been for her to wake up with her son out of his bed and her husband writhing with a minor heart attack. After all the therapy they’d been through to make amends.
“How’s it going?” Nadine asked.
“He says he’s going to think about it,” Rowan announced.
Nadine raised her eyebrows and laughed. “You’re usually more persuasive than that, my love.”
“Maybe that heart attack took it out of me,” Rowan said with a laugh.
Zane appeared at the edge of the veranda, tanned and long and glistening with sweat. The dog shot up beside him and burrowed his head against Rowan’s legs beneath the table. He shook so that droplets of salt and sand flashed across Alex’s legs. Zane remained captivated with Alex.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Alex remembered the little songs Zane had invented that first night. Everything had sizzled with creativity before it had cratered in on itself.
“We wanted to talk about the movie business,” Rowan explained before Alex could think of an answer.
“Do you make movies too?” Zane asked.
Alex laughed. “No.”
He didn’t bother to add not anymore. Because it didn’t matter.
Rowan tilted his head curiously. “Why do you sell yourself short?” he asked, with open-eyed wonder that came with fame and money.
Maybe now that Rowan had had his first brush with death, he wouldn’t understand anyone who didn’t grab onto life and take advantage of all of its wonders. Maybe to Rowan, Alex’s “problems” would seem so minor. So silly. And perhaps they were. But they were all Alex had.
Alex ignored the question and raised his chin. “I’d better get going.”
“Sure,” Rowan said. “I want you to sleep on it or so the expression goes.”
Alex put on a fake smile and thanked Nadine for breakfast.
Zane asked, “Are you going to come over again?” He let the question hang, then added, “We need more people for baseball.”
Rowan laughed, got out of his chair, and walked over to pick Zane up. But as soon as he put his hands around his little torso, Nadine cried, “Rowan! Stop.” Rowan’s face fell at the memory of what he’d recently been through. He turned and smiled. “Sorry. I know.” He ruffled Zane’s hair and said, “I have to take it easy.”
Nadine locked eyes with Alex and muttered, “You’d think he’s unstoppable. But that’s why you have to help him. He needs to make this film. He won’t leave Nantucket without it.”
Alex drove back to his tree-surrounded cabin on the edge of a cliff-lined beach and sat on the back porch with a glass of beer and his shirt off. In the rocking chair his mother had threatened to throw out—the same one where she’d rocked Alex and his little sister—he shifted back and forth and considered Rowan’s offer.
His thoughts dragged him deep into the past.
Alex Garland met Joel Sutton at daycare when the two were terribly two and in diapers. That meant that realistically, Alex didn’t remember the first memory he had of Joel. It probably involved eating crackers in front of a television show. It probably involved crying. However, Alex's first real memory of Joel Sutton was when they were four or five years old. They rode tricycles in front of the daycare, racing up and down a street closed to cars for a Nantucket holiday. It was hot, and they were laughing and sweating. Alex felt that this was his brother, and they belonged to one another.
Alex and Joel were inseparable after that. Alex’s parents were always up at The Rooster, handling guests and putting out small metaphorical fires, and they got into the habit of letting Alex stay with the Suttons instead of bothering him. Who knows where his sister ended up. Thinking of it now, Alex wondered if Esme and Victor were bothered by it. But they’d never made him feel anything but welcome. And it wasn’t like Alex blamed his parents for abandoning him or anything. They were up to their ears in stress. They didn’t know how to manage the inn.
When Alex and Joel were six or seven, they started baseball. Alex didn’t know his way around a baseball bat or a catcher’s mitt, but Victor took Alex and Joel into the rolling grassy hills that lined the white-silver beach behind the Sutton House and taught Alex everything he knew. Joel had the hand-eye coordination and the speed, but Alex was patient with himself and with others and ended up back there for hours on end with Mr. Sutton and Joel, playing catch and hitting balls. Sometimes the baseballs dove into the surging waves. They never found their way back up onto the sand, and Joel and Alex liked to imagine where they’d ended up. Their best idea involved an underground baseball game between octopuses and sharks and stingrays.
Alex still remembered clear as anything the day Esme Sutton had called his mother and told her about Joel’s leukemia. Alex was reading comic books in the back room of the inn, the same one where Zane had crashed the night of Rowan’s heart attack. Esme came in with red-tinged eyes and told him something was wrong with Joel. “You have to be strong for your best friend. You have to make him feel how much you love him.”
So began the strangest months of Alex’s life up till that point. Frequently, his mother drove him to the hospital to sit at Joel’s bedside, where they read comic books and talked about superheroes and baseball players. More often than not, Valerie was there too.
Alex put his face in his hands and breathed in and out, in and out.
He’d indeed spotted Valerie in Nantucket a couple of months back.
Gossip about the family swirled. Esme’s second husband, Larry Gardner, had passed away that year. Esme had run away to who-knew-where, just when Victor and Rebecca Sutton returned, looking for Esme. They then discovered the Sutton Book Club was on the brink of collapse. Not long after that, according to some sources, Bethany had come up from Savannah to see what all the fuss was about. Nobody knew where Esme was!
Apparently, Esme had fled Nantucket and sought refuge with Valerie in San Francisco. Valerie herself had brought her back. She’d spent time with her family, then returned to California.
But it was difficult for Alex to imagine what had gone on between Valerie and her family during her brief stint in Nantucket. Back in California, Valerie had spoken endlessly about her anger toward her father. She’d hardly spoken to her mother. And she hadn’t even emailed or texted with her sisters in years. Had so much changed since the last time Alex saw her? Had Valerie had a change of heart?
Another memory sparked through the others in Alex’s mind’s eye.
During those blissful summer days with Joel, Valerie eventually joined them. She’d run faster than even Joel, her brunette curls whipping out behind her, her long legs like a gazelle. She’d once hit a ball so far out over the Nantucket Sound that even Victor Sutton had wolf whistled. And he wasn’t easily impressed.
Being a confused little kid, Alex had been mildly in love with all of the Sutton sisters: Rebecca, Bethany, and Valerie. But in his heart of hearts, he’d only really known and loved Valerie. Valerie, who was a tomboy. Valerie, who was competitive with Alex for Joel’s love. Valerie, who insisted Joel was her best friend and not his.
It was remarkable that Alex had been allowed to grow up and marry her. It was less than remarkable that she never wanted to see him again.
Alex finished his beer and went into the cabin to cook a bowl of pasta. It was nearly eleven in the morning, which was past his usual bedtime, but he was suddenly wired and jittery. Something told him not to close the curtains and block out the light. Maybe tonight, he could call their sometimes-employee Roger and ask him to take over the front desk at The Rooster. It was rare that Alex ever gave his shifts away, but today felt different. The universe was off.
The water heated in the pot. Alex tugged his hair and pulled out his laptop. It didn’t take long to find the YouTube video of Blue Days , which had garnered only six hundred views since its publish date six years ago. “This is going to blow open your career,” his investor had told him. “This is going to change everything.”
Alex watched the fifteen-minute short with bated breath. He didn’t even hear the boiling water until it threw itself over the side of the pot and spread out across the stovetop.
There, on the screen of his computer, was Rowan Collins. Just as Alex had written him, his character was handsome, rugged, and very sad. The tragedy of his life was that he’d never been able to find himself and had taken refuge in drugs. Just like Alex. Just like Alex before Valerie stormed back into his life.
Alex watched the video. His throat was tight. This is the best thing I’ve ever made. The best thing I’ve ever done. He thrummed with a mix of anger and adrenaline the likes of which he hadn’t experienced in many years. When the video was finished, he pressed his fists against his eyes until he saw spots. This should have been the beginning of my career. It shouldn’t have been the end.
The final credit was particularly cutting. It read: I’d like to thank my beautiful wife, Valerie.
A sob crept up his throat and burst out. Alex jumped back to his feet, cleaned the stovetop of foam from the overflowed pot, then reheated the water and started again. Memories from that frantic time of filming Blue Days flowed through him. He could feel the California sun on his face. He could feel the optimism that bubbled through him when he woke up every morning. He could feel Valerie’s breath in his ear when she said, “Go get ’em, tiger. I love you.” Sometimes she added, “Joel would be so proud of you.”
He always told her, “Joel would be proud of you, too.”
It was something they’d told each other frequently when they’d first met up in California. “I want to live well because Joel wasn’t allowed to. I want to live a beautiful and powerful life because Joel’s was taken away.”
Alex drained the pasta, slathered it with store-bought pesto, and added a layer of parmesan that would have made his doctor wrinkle his nose and ask, “Really, Alex?”
Alex sat down at his kitchen table and stared at the final credit of Blue Days as though it were a sign. Live for Joel. Live because he couldn’t. Before he could stop himself, Alex grabbed his phone and called Rowan.
“Hello?” Zane’s little voice answered.
Alex’s heart thumped. “Hey, Zane.” He remembered how foolish he’d felt that night at The Rooster. How he’d wanted to make Zane feel safe. How this had made Alex realize he hadn’t felt safe in many years.
“Do you want to talk to my dad?” Zane asked.
“I would like that,” Alex said.
“He wants to talk to you too.” There was a hint of laughter, proof that Zane had stolen the phone and was keeping it away from his father.
Alex felt a smile play out across his lips. It was exactly the kind of stint Joel would have played on Victor Sutton.
What would Joel think of me working on a documentary about his father?
Would he want me to leave his family alone?
Alex teetered on the brink. He wasn’t sure what was right and what was wrong. But anything was better than stasis at the front desk of The Rooster.
So when Rowan finally stole the phone back from Zane, who screeched with laughter, Alex announced, “I’d like to help you. Let me know what I can do.”
“Excellent,” Rowan said. “You won’t regret this.”
Alex thought, What a strange choice of words.
And then he thought, I’m sure I will regret it. But I regret almost everything else. It’s the nature of being myself.