Page 45 of Trick of Light

Rod had assumed he would see Bethany before the surgery, but the nurse explained that “Dr. Sutton was in prep.” As soon as the anesthesiologist put Felix under, Rod and Renee were led to a waiting room with coffee machines and a vending machine filled with chocolate and savory snacks. There were a few other family members—mostly parents and siblings, as this was the children’s wing. Everyone looked like they were having the worst day of their life.

Surgery was supposed to take four to five hours. “I’ve checked the time every two minutes,” Renee said with a nervous laugh. “I need to take a walk or something. I can’t sit still.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Rod asked.

Renee shook her head. “I want to be alone. Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

Renee paused at the coffee machine to order herself a cappuccino. Rod watched as she disappeared around the corner, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum. He glanced around the waiting room, crossed and uncrossed his ankles, then got up, too. He paused at the vending machine, wondering if he could stomach a candy bar, then retreated into the hallway. He walked slowly, not wanting to interrupt Renee. Before he knew it, he was outside, watching as a very soft breeze tickled moss that hung across an ancient tree. On his phone, he googled “Why is Savannah filled with moss?” But his signal was too weak for the page to load.

He tried to be okay with not knowing.

Despite the heat, Rod walked through the area of Savannah around the hospital with his hands in his pockets. He listened to the strange, Southern drawls around him, words that didn’t fully make sense to his Northerneastern ears. Nearby a park was a historical panel that spoke about the history of the Underground Railroad in Savannah, and he read it slowly, trying to take it in. Five minutes later, he couldn’t have told anyone a single thing he’d learned.

Instead, his mind felt completely corrupted with memories of the past.

For whatever reason, he continued to return to the night Bethany had broken up with him. When she’d suggested the breakup over the phone, his knees had collapsed from under him, and he’d nearly thrown up. When he’d hung up, he’d smashed his fist against the wall so violently that he’d left a mark. Nobody else was home, but his mother had commented on the mark, wondering what could have caused it. It remained a secret, one that Rod had kept with him long past his parents’ deaths.

The weekend after Bethany broke up with him, Mike, Rod’s best friend at the time, invited him to a beach party. “You have to get her off your mind,” he said. “There’s still more than a month of summer left. You can’t just moan and cry.”

Rod wasn’t sure about that. “She’s been my girlfriend for years. We’ve been in love since we were kids. I can’t just forget about her.”

“I’m not asking you to forget. I’m just telling you to live a little. It’ll help.”

Rod found himself on a dark beach with sparkling stars overhead and the immensity of the Atlantic before him. A fire crackled between ten teenagers, and a boombox played somebody’s new grunge cassette. Rod felt on the brink of insanity. Sometimes, he imagined Bethany was on her way to the beach and just had to pick up a friend. Other times, the reality of his situation came out of nowhere and hit him over the head like a brick.

That was the night he met Sandra.

Sandra was Mike’s friend’s cousin, a nineteen-year-old freshman in college visiting from Boston. She wore a jean miniskirt and had fiery-red hair and beautiful green eyes. She gazed at Rod from the other side of the fire, seemingly captivated with him, then got up and approached him like a predator to her prey. Rod had never seen anything like it. In retrospect, he’d always been with Bethany; he’d always been off-limits. But word had gotten around, and he was single for the first time ever. And somebody had told Sandra.

“Hey,” Sandra said. “Can I sit here?”

“Sure.”

Sandra dropped onto the sand and then reached for a bag of marshmallows to roast one on a stick. As the marshmallow browned near the flames, she asked him about his summer and if he was a sailor.

“Yeah. I have a boat,” Rod said proudly. It was the one thing he still cared about.

“That’s very cool. I’ve always wanted to learn.”

Mike overheard their conversation and piped in, “Why don’t we go tomorrow?”

“That’s a great idea,” Sandra chirped, her eyes still on Rod. In the fire, the marshmallow caught and singed black.

It wasn’t that Rod fell in love with Sandra. His heart was shattered into a thousand pieces, and he wasn’t sleeping. But after a few days of sailing, barbecuing, and having the summer he’d wanted to have with Bethany, Rod followed Sandra’s lead. They got milkshakes together. She reached for his hand as they walked. Sometimes, when they hung out together, Rod felt jealous eyes upon him, as though he was the luckiest guy in the world for “dating” Sandra. But he felt so lost.

After three weeks of this, Sandra accused him of never making a move. “I don’t know what your deal is,” she spouted in the front seat of his car, where Bethany had sat hundreds if not thousands of times. “I thought you liked me. I thought we had a good time.”

Rod wanted to explain himself. He wanted to scream that his heart was still in Manhattan and had no room for Sandra or this story. But suddenly, Sandra swept across the car and pressed her lips against his. He felt blown over. He kissed her back because he didn’t know what else to do, and he was filled with ache.

And that was the only night he and Sandra ever made love.

Afterward, Rod panicked. He kept a wide berth of Sandra, angry that he’d allowed himself to go so far. He couldn’t love Sandra and genuinely wanted to fix things when Bethany returned in a few weeks. If Bethany ever found out what happened between him and Sandra, she would never take him back—nor forgive him. He had sweaty palms all the time and hardly slept.

Rumor around the island was that Sandra hated him. But it didn’t matter. She was on her way back to Boston. He would probably never see her again.

Just a few days before Bethany was slated to return to Nantucket, Rod went for a long and arduous run. As he panted, he gave himself an internal pep talk, reminding himself of the traumatic stress Bethany was under, of the horrors her family had gone through, of all they could build together once they reconfirmed their love.

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