Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
V alerie was on the plane from San Francisco to Boston. It was her unfortunate luck to be seated next to someone who wanted to get to know her—a woman in her seventies who peppered her with questions. It was only eight in the morning, and Valerie was exhausted after her heinous week. Just in the past six days, she’d thrown a Negroni on a client, nearly gotten fired, and signed a publishing contract to write her side of the story regarding the Sutton family drama. She wanted to plan her next steps on the plane. She wanted to get the kind of perspective that came from being so high up in the clouds.
“Tell me, dear,” the woman beside her said, “what brings you back East?”
Valerie sighed and drew her nails down her thighs. She couldn’t be rude. “My family lives in Nantucket.”
“Oh! How wonderful. Nantucket is like paradise.”
Not for me. “People like it. Yes.”
“And your boyfriend?” the woman pressed. “Will he join you?”
What makes her think I have a boyfriend?
“I’m single,” Valerie told her. Her tone was icy.
The woman furrowed her brow. “Really? A beautiful woman like you?” She paused for a beat and smoothed the wrinkles between her brows. “And you’re how old?”
Valerie flared her nostrils. “I’m forty-one.”
“Forty-one! But you must have been married before.”
Valerie turned to look deeply into this woman’s eyes. She wanted to understand what made her the way she was. Why did she think she could say such casually cruel things to strangers?
“You must have children,” the woman went on. “Children are the best things in the world.”
Valerie felt tears spring up, and she hurriedly blinked them back down. Suddenly, there was a jolt to the plane, and turbulence rippled down the aisles. The woman went deathly pale and took Valerie’s hand in hers. The feel of her hand shocked Valerie. She realized she hadn’t touched anyone in a while. Not on purpose.
“My husband passed away,” the woman rasped, squeezing with more strength than her string-bean arm should have allowed. “I don’t know quite what to do with myself sometimes.”
Valerie couldn’t speak. Minutes later, the turbulence lifted, and the airline flight attendants swept down the aisles to make sure everyone was all right and pass out snacks. The back of Valerie’s neck was thick with sweat.
The woman’s grief loosened, and she dug through her purse to find a bar of chocolate and a book. She looked both embarrassed and lost in her thoughts. Valerie wanted to apologize. But for what? It was awful that the woman’s husband had died. It was awful that she had to live this life alone.
In the hazy silence post-turbulence, Valerie couldn’t help but think about her wedding day.
Valerie spotted Alex Garland at the karaoke bar just a few days after getting into a horrible and unprofessional argument with Audrey and nearly losing her job. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) Valerie was jittery and unsure of herself. But when Alex turned and gazed into her eyes and said, “Valerie? Valerie Sutton? Is that you?” something hard and cold inside her melted.
This is the man who sat beside me and held my hand as Joel faded away, she’d thought at the time.
Alex’s eyes were as big as saucers. He ran away from his friends with hardly a goodbye and followed Valerie to a cozy bar down the road. At the time, he was smoking cigarettes because he’d just been through recovery from drug addiction and “needed something to do with his hands.” He quit soon afterward. Valerie didn’t even have to demand it. It was as though their sudden and unexpected relationship forced him to want things for himself—including his good health.
Valerie had been out West for years at that point and had met many people like him. Addicts. Kind, lovely, creative addicts. It was remarkable to her that he’d just come right out and told her the truth about his addiction like that. He was honest. Open. Perhaps it was because of what they’d already gone through with Joel.
Around this time was when Alex got the funding for his film Blue Days. Valerie had never seen anyone more excited. As per her request, he sent her the script via email the morning after their meeting at the karaoke bar, and Valerie read it during her lunch break and wept. Audrey walked past her desk and invited her into her office.
“You’re invaluable to this company,” Audrey had told her, perhaps because she thought Valerie’s tears were a result of Audrey’s harsh words. “I don’t want to fire you. I will never want to fire you. You just have to get ahold of your temper.”
Valerie promised she would. But at the same time, she thought, I don’t care about event planning. I just want to see Alex again.
Valerie met Alex after work that evening. They spent all night talking and eventually held hands over the table. She craved his skin against hers. Alex told her that he’d come to Los Angeles at age twenty-five and fallen on hard times almost immediately. “I worked every job I could find and made short films when I could.” He told her he knew she was out West but thought she was in Seattle. That’s the story going around Nantucket right now. He told her he never stopped thinking about Joel. Not ever. That the fact of Joel’s death had defined Alex’s life. Valerie understood.
Before long, they looked at their phones and realized it was half past one in the morning. They hadn’t stopped talking for seven hours. Valerie had the sudden sensation that she didn’t want him to leave her side. Not ever. “This is the closest I’ve felt to ‘coming home’ since my dad left Nantucket,” she said, surprising herself. And then she asked him to come home with her to her apartment in the Mission District.
They were inseparable. If someone asked Valerie if she was in love that night, she would have said, “Of course I am. Isn’t it obvious?”
The idea to elope came not long after that. Valerie was thirty-five, and Alex was thirty-four, and neither of them had ever been serious with anyone else. It felt as though they’d been waiting to meet at that karaoke bar all their lives. “We should just do it,” Alex announced one morning over breakfast in bed. “We should just go to Vegas and get married.”
Valerie didn’t hesitate when she said yes. She threw herself over him and nearly spilled their orange juice, covering him with kisses. Throughout her twenties and early thirties, she’d been involved with horrible, arrogant men who’d ripped her around emotionally and left her weeping in bed afterward. But Alex saw right through her and didn’t pause to wonder who she was. He wanted all of her. He wanted the mess of her.
Alex and Valerie didn’t tell anyone their plan. Alex was set to start filming Blue Days in two weeks, so Valerie took a Friday off from work, and they flew to Vegas. That afternoon, in a flurry of chaos, they bought Alex a suit and Valerie a white dress and waited in line for Elvis to marry them. In front of them was a nineteen-year-old couple who explained to them that their parents “hated” the other, but that nothing could come between their love. They’d driven all the way from Missouri to make it legal. The couple behind them was in their sixties. Both of them had been married three times before to other people. “But this is real,” the woman explained serenely.
Valerie was smitten.
When it was their turn, Valerie and Alex stood near the ordained Elvis as he walked them through their vows and sent them on their way. The sixty-something couple served as their witnesses. They signed the wedding certificate, then had a night out in Vegas before collapsing with wonder in a little bed at a cheaper hotel off the Strip. “When I’m a famous director, we’ll stay in the Bellagio,” Alex promised.
And Valerie joked, “Isn’t it funny? I’m an event planner and didn’t even want to plan my wedding!”
When she returned to San Francisco, Valerie told her friends and colleagues about her rash wedding. Everyone was surprised. Most of them didn’t even know she had a boyfriend, let alone a husband. Her girlfriend at that time, Nicole, asked, “Didn’t you just meet that guy a few months ago?”
Valerie was cagey about how she and Alex had really met. She’d never told anyone in California about Joel and didn’t plan to. It tainted his memory. So she said, “When you know, you know,” and laughed internally at herself. Nobody could understand. She didn’t want them to.
Valerie and Alex agreed not to tell their families about the wedding. Valerie wasn’t eager to rehash old memories with her family, and Alex's parents were both quite hurt that he hadn’t wanted to stay in Nantucket to help with The Rooster.
“We’ll have to tell them eventually,” Alex had said.
And Valerie had asked, “Why?”
Still, nobody in Valerie’s family knew she’d gotten married at all.
Valerie often wondered if Alex had ever told his parents or sister about his marriage. She supposed he hadn’t. Otherwise, the gossip would have found its way across Nantucket and into her mother’s ears by now. Valerie would have fielded messages and calls. She would have had to answer for herself, for a private decision she’d once made with the only man she’d ever really loved.
Is he in Nantucket?
The plane landed in Boston a little after three in the afternoon East Coast time. Valerie turned her phone on and was met with a smattering of text messages from her mother and sister. The fact that she’d agreed to come home to “help save the Sutton Book Club” with a fundraising event thrilled them. They saw her as the final piece in the “get the family back together” puzzle. In reality, both she and Victor were ticking time bombs. Who will destroy the family first?
A wave of guilt crashed through her, and she shoved her phone into her bag and rubbed her temples. Beside her, the woman who’d held her hand through the turbulence was speaking French on an ancient cell phone. It’s impossible to know anything about anyone by sight alone.
Valerie hadn’t expected all three of her family members to pick her up. (The family members who mattered, at least.) But there they were at the exit: Esme, Rebecca, and Bethany. Valerie’s heartbeat tripled in time. For a moment, she was transported through so many eras and back into the early days of her life—when she’d adored her older sisters, when her mother had been her queen, when her father had been so mighty and sure of himself, and when her brother Joel had been her partner in crime.
“Val,” they cried in unison and wrapped their arms around her. Valerie felt protected. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she recovered quickly. Rebecca grabbed her suitcase, and Esme took her backpack. Bethany squeezed both of her hands in one of hers and looked her in the eye.
“We’re just so thrilled,” she said.
And at that moment, Valerie wondered if she’d betrayed all of them by signing the publishing contract.