Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
I t wasn’t so long after Valerie lost the baby that Alex burst into the apartment in the Mission District and announced his film career was over.
Valerie was sprawled across the dark blue sofa they’d picked up at a vintage shop in the Haight-Ashbury, working on an event for Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s as-then-unknown sister. The sister described the party as “ Game of Thrones meets Jane Austen meets rave music,” meaning that Valerie had a lot to throw together. Don’t make an Olsen sister angry was her joking mantra. She had a pen in her mouth and a half-eaten bagel on the end table. She hadn’t been expecting Alex home for another six hours or more.
Alex looked frantic. His eyes were rimmed red, and his beard was shaggy looking as though he’d spent all day tugging at it with distress. Valerie’s first suspicion was that he was fully realizing the horror of the miscarriage. It had finally occurred to him that they were still childless in their late thirties. Will it ever happen for us? Will we ever be really happy? As happy as everyone else? Or are we cursed?
Valerie experienced a strange memory of Victor Sutton in the months after Joel’s death. Nobody dared talk to or reach out to him when he was in one of his moods. It was as though the tragedy was only allowed to affect him that much. As though he carried the true burden because he was the patriarch of the family.
Alex staggered to a halt by the sink and filled a glass with water. Sweat billowed on the back of his neck. Valerie popped up and frowned, watching him inhale the water and fill the glass back up again. She considered asking what was wrong, but she was also terrified. It had been a long time since anything had felt normal between them (and it begged the question if things had ever felt normal between them). Blue Days had consumed their lives, as had their quest to get pregnant. Meanwhile, their rent had gone up four hundred dollars a month—an insanity that was hard for Valerie to wrap her mind around and one she planned to fight in court.
The world seemed dim. But Valerie wasn’t yet under the suspicion that everything was lost. Marriage took work; it was a mantra drilled into you from an early age.
And then Alex said, “They’re cutting my funding. I can’t finish the film. Not the way I want to.”
Valerie’s knees were jelly. She flailed and reached for him, wrapping her arms around him. He shook violently. The film was the last good thing Alex had besides her. This was what he’d decided to live for in the wake of his recovery from addiction.
“They can’t just do that,” Valerie said. “He can’t just do that. Can he?” She always forgot the name of his investor. To Valerie, he was a nameless and faceless multimillionaire with money to throw around. He could have been anyone.
“He called and said he’s not sending the last few payments.”
“Did you ask him why?” Valerie asked. “I mean, he’s seen the footage, right? He’s seen how good it is?”
Valerie felt she’d never seen a more essential and beautiful short film in her life. Alex hadn’t just brought the script to life. He’d exhumed something essential about the human condition. He’d brought purpose to his years of drug addiction. He’s a true artist, she’d told her friends. Her friends who still didn’t know Alex was also a part of her past. Joel’s best friend. Their little secret.
Alex collapsed on the sofa and hung his head between his shoulders. “He’s seen the footage,” he said quietly. “He said he liked the footage. I believe the word he used was transcendent. ” He smashed his thigh with his fist. “I feel like a fool.”
Valerie sat beside him and splayed her hand across his back. She was performing mental gymnastics, remembering how little money they had in their joint bank accounts. Without the final bulk of funds from Alex’s promoter, plus the money they’d expected from Alex shopping the film around at film festivals across the world—how would they survive?
Alex could film a few commercials. I could plan an extra wedding this year. We can make it work.
“It’s going to be okay,” Valerie breathed, rubbing his back, trying to find the knots and work them out. “We’ll come up with the money to finish the film. Maybe we can even come up with enough to enter some of the festivals.”
Alex shook his head violently. “It’s too much. It’s all too much. And even if we come up with just enough to finish the film, what if it dies? We need marketing. We need the name out there. And all of that requires so much more money than an average filmmaker has just lying around.”
When he turned to look at her, Valerie swung back, petrified of the look on his face. She’d never seen him like this. The baby. The film. What next?
And then she thought, I’m not strong enough to handle this.
It was the first time it had fully occurred to her that maybe, just maybe, they’d rushed into a marriage they didn’t fully understand. For the first time, it made sense why people dated for a couple of solid years before getting engaged. She and Alex had been so cavalier in joking about their timeline. Who said you couldn’ t skip over all the boring parts and jump straight into marriage? But now she wasn’t so sure.
Suddenly, Alex was on his feet. He bucked for the door, grabbing his keys along the way.
“Alex! Where are you going?” Valerie rushed after him. But he swirled down the stairwell of the apartment building and ran out the door. Valerie knew better than to follow him. He needed time to think. Time to regroup. Surely, when he got home tonight—in an hour or two—they could sit together and talk reasonably about steps forward. Valerie was a planner, for goodness’ sake. She could clear the distance between them and Alex’s future film career.
Valerie couldn’t work on her Olsen sister event, not with Alex roaming the streets and doing God knew what. She decided to crunch the numbers—what they had in their accounts, what they could reasonably earn before the end of the year, and what they really needed to enter the Berlinale Film Festival or Sundance. Time fled past, and it was already night by the time she finished. She levitated with hope.
She decided to send a text to Alex to lure him back.
VALERIE: Hi! I looked into it, and I think we can swing it—all of it. The film. The festivals. The travel to and from the festivals. It’ll be tight, but we'll be fine if I do two extra weddings this year and ask for a raise around October. Audrey owes me anyway.
VALERIE: Why don’t you come home? I can make some dinner and show you everything I have planned.
VALERIE: I love you so much, Alex. You don’t have to do any of this by yourself.
It was why they got married. They needed to lift one another up.
Valerie started making dinner, chopping onions and garlic, and boiling water. She was so sure Alex was on his way home. She could practically feel him charging across San Francisco and back into her arms. But eight thirty turned to nine, and the pasta was ready, and then it was nine thirty, and the pasta was cold, and then it was ten fifteen, and Valerie pulsated with worry.
Valerie and Alex had been in a honeymoon bubble, which meant they hardly met with anyone as a couple and preferred to be together—alone—as much as they could. That meant Valerie didn’t have many of Alex’s friends’ phone numbers. It meant their joint network didn’t extend very far.
But weirdly, she did have Rowan’s, the lead actor in Blue Days.
Feeling frantic, she decided to call him up. She clutched her knee and gazed out at the dark night, disallowing herself to think the worst. Maybe he lost his phone. Maybe he got stuck somewhere.
“Val, hey!” Rowan always sounded chipper and easygoing. Valerie could feel his handsome smile through the phone. “This is a surprise.”
Valerie shot up and paced in front of the window. “Hey. Yeah. Any chance you’re with my husband?”
Valerie and Alex were still saying “husband” and “wife” as much as they could. They couldn’t get enough of it.
“Oh. No, I’m at home with Nadine and Zane,” Rowan said. “Is something up?”
“No. Nothing’s up.” Valerie made her voice bright and false. “I think his phone is dead, and I want him to pick up something from the store.”
The lie was as easy as a San Francisco breeze.
“I hope everything’s okay.” Then Rowan asked, “He mentioned the film might not have as much longevity as we thought?”
Valerie’s face crumpled. “Where did you get that idea? We’re ready to roll.” She promptly hung up on him, then clapped her hand over her mouth. She felt on the verge of throwing up.
Such a clear sign of how “ready to roll” you are. You hung up on him.
Valerie paced from one end of the living room to the other and tried to figure out where Alex had gone. She began to make deals with herself. “If he doesn’t call in the next hour, I’ll go out looking for him. If he doesn’t text by midnight, I’m going to call his mother in Nantucket. I don’t even care anymore!” But by the time one thirty and then three o’clock in the morning rolled around, Valerie was sick and shivery. She collapsed on the couch and fell into horrible nightmares—all of which revolved around Joel.
In the dreams, Joel was as he was during his final weeks. He was sickly and pale, hardly able to talk due to the pain. He couldn’t keep up with Alex and Valerie’s conversations or care less about playing cards or making up stories. He’s slipping through our fingers, was what dream Alex told her. Strangely, Alex’s voice in the dream was his adult voice, but it came from his child mouth. When Valerie spoke back, she spoke in her adult voice, too.
In the dream, Joel gazed out the window of his hospital room with the air of a very old man who’d lived a very long life. “But you’re ten!” Valerie cried to him in the dream. “You have so much time left!”
Valerie woke up with a cold the following morning. Her head felt as heavy as concrete. She called in sick to work, donned one of Alex’s thick winter coats from his Nantucket days, and paraded into the street. She had to stop herself from screaming his name like a fool. She checked the coffee shop with the brilliant English muffins, decadent and fluffy and buttery. She checked the bar on the corner with the Bloody Mary’s. She checked the cinema, the record shop, and the place that sold twenty-five-dollar sandwiches that, unfortunately, were to die for. It’s highway robbery, Alex had joked, and I’ll go every week for the rest of my life.
The thing that she couldn’t have realized as this was happening was that Valerie had clear abandonment issues. Alex had them, too. But the fact that Alex had just walked out on her like that without a word—so soon after the miscarriage—did something to Valerie. It was a bit like poison, enveloping every cell in her body.
It was as though the poison laced the love she’d brewed for Alex.
She searched for him all morning, taking frequent breaks to blast back up the staircase to their apartment to see if he’d come home. Feeling more frantic than ever, she called the police that afternoon, but they said they couldn’t do anything about it until he’d been missing for seventy-two hours. They couldn’t take a young married couple seriously. Did you get into an argument? These things happen. Valerie wasn’t sure she would have either.
Valerie considered reaching out to someone in the San Francisco area. Someone who cared about her. A friend. A colleague. But every one of her friends had told her that her marriage to Alex was rash, and she didn’t want to see the “I told you so” expressions they would inevitably give her. She felt so alone. Helpless.
Alex slunk back in fifty-seven hours after he stormed out of the apartment.
By then, Valerie’s cold had escalated to new bounds. She had a fever of one hundred and four and shivered violently on the sofa as reality television played on the screen. It wasn’t clear at first if Alex was real or something her fevered mind had concocted to make her feel better. Surprisingly, Alex looked much worse than she did. He was ghastly pale, and it looked as though he’d lost ten pounds in just a couple of days. His hair hung in strings along his ears, and he was unwashed and reeking. Valerie sat up and took his face in hers. This was the face she loved more than anyone’s face. This was the man who’d made her feel like a human again—only to rip that away by disappearing.
“Did it happen?” Valerie asked. Her heart felt as though it thudded twenty feet underwater.
What she meant was, did you use again? Did you relapse? But she couldn’t use the proper terms.
Alex grimaced and raised his phone. “I just called my sponsor.” His voice was shaky.
Valerie knew that his addiction was an illness. That he couldn’t help it. She also knew they were both so damaged, so outside of themselves that she couldn’t fully blame him for what had gone wrong. But she was also startlingly clear about where her life needed to go. Valerie needed things to return to how they were before Alex appeared like a ghost in that karaoke bar. She needed safety. She needed stability. Alex needed those things, too. And maybe they just couldn’t give them to one another.
Alex listened while she talked, sniffled, wept, and talked some more. She told him that she loved him; that she probably wouldn’t love anyone else ever again in her life. He agreed with her. But he said, “Something in me feels so broken. I don’t know how to fix it.”
“I don’t think anything about California can fix you,” Valerie told him. “It seems to just make everything worse.”
They held hands until the clock ticked to morning and pink light spilled across San Francisco. Valerie collapsed in bed while Alex packed his things and arranged a taxi to the airport. Valerie didn’t ask where he was going, but she knew there was only one answer to the inevitable question of what came next. Sometimes you had to go back to your roots.
“I’m sure your mother would love to see you,” Alex said before he left. Was he trying to convince Valerie to go, too?
“You know I can’t go back there,” Valerie murmured into her pillow. And then she added, “You’re going to talk to your sponsor every day?”
“Every day.”
“And you’re going to make sure you have a network? A community?”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
Valerie let out a low moan like that of a dying animal. Her mind flashed with images of their wedding in Vegas. She remembered Elvis telling them they were a couple made in heaven. Why had she been so quick to believe fake Elvis? Nothing lasts forever. Alex and I learned that almost thirty years ago when we buried Joel.
Alex rubbed her back and kissed her gently on the ear, forehead, and lips. He tiptoed out of the apartment, taking his bags, then disappeared. Through the crack in the window, Valerie could hear the taxi roll away and take her love to the airport.
That was years ago now. A lifetime since Valerie and Alex had ended their relationship.
Valerie sat upstairs in her childhood bedroom and tried to imagine what Victor Sutton and Alex Garland were saying to one another. Victor entered into it thinking Alex was a relic from a distant past; a past they’d all mythologized and carried with them for thirty years. But Alex was so much more than that. He was a fact of Valerie’s life—something she’d strained to forget since he’d left California. A secret she’d never planned to tell her family.
Alex knew she liked secrets. But did he respect her wishes anymore? Or were they just two strangers floating on a rock in the middle of the Nantucket Sound?