Page 20 of The Hotel Nantucket
“I do,” Adam says. He sings out “Welcome to the Hotel Na-antucket!” to the tune of “Hotel California,” and everyone except Alessandra smiles. He has a great voice, a Broadway voice—just like his former GM said in the e-mail.
“I’ll put that on my list,” Lizbet says. She looks around the room. “Does anyone else have hidden talents?” She pauses. “Or perhaps a secret to share in this safe space?”
She watches every face in the room tense up.
Lizbet smiles. “Just kidding, guys. Thank you for a terrific first day.”
Lizbetisn’tkidding. She wants to nurture intimacy and trust. During her fifteen seasons at the Deck, Lizbet was a vault for all sorts of sensitive information. She was the first call when Goose’s brother got arrested for a DUI; she sat with Juliette in the restaurant office while Juliette cried about accidentally getting pregnant. However, Lizbet kept boundaries in place—she was 90 percent boss, 10 percent big sister. Her staffers were a little afraid of her, but that meant she was doing a good job. She wants to create that same atmosphere here; it’s herstrength. She scrutinizes her staff. If they’re hiding anything—as she suspects Kimber Marsh is—she wants to know about it now.
Chad Winslow leaves the staff meeting and drives his brand-new Range Rover back to his parents’ summer house on Eel Point Road.
Secrets?he thinks. There’s no way Lizbet could have heard what happened back in Pennsylvania, but the question made him uncomfortable.
He checks his phone only long enough to see that it’s clogged with texts and snaps from his summer friends, but there’s nothing from Paddy, which is both agonizing and a relief. Chad has texted Paddy every day since he arrived on the island but he’s heard nothing back. Paddy is finished with Chad, hates his guts, will never speak to him again. And the thing is, Chad can’t blame him. As Chad rumbles down the dirt road past the grandest beachfront homes on the island, he recalls Ms. English’s words:I happen to believe, Chadwick, that even the biggest disasters can be cleaned up, and I’ll teach you to believe it too.Chad wants to believe it. He wants to think that if he works hard and keeps his eyes straight ahead, he’ll be able to scour the ugly stain from his life.
Ms. English and Chad spent all day in room 104, which was already impeccably clean. She stripped the sheets off the emperor-size bed and he started from scratch, pulling the fitted sheet tight around the corners.Nothing worse than a rumpled bottom sheet,Ms. English said. She showed him how to arrange the pillows; she made him take a picture of the finished product as though it were an art installation. They spent two hours in the bathroom alone, going over all the places on a toilet where bacteria hides, how to find and dispose of stray hairs and clipped nails, how to get water stains off the drinking glasses, and how to fold a towel, which was harder than it looked; Chad folded the same towel sixty-two times, starting over if the edges weren’t straight. They ran through the one hundred points on the checklist, including the tiniest details that Chad never would have thought about—the number of hangers in the closets, whether all the light bulbs worked, and the temperature of the minifridge. Ms. English gave Chad strict instructions about which of the guests’ belongings it was okay to touch; he was to fold discarded clothes and place them on the surface closest to where he found them. (The guests will always leave their underwear draped over the telephone, Ms. English told him, which made him laugh. He hoped she was kidding.) He was never to touch jewelry, watches, or cash unless it was a checkout and the cash had been left as a tip. He was never to go into the drawers, the closet, or a suitcase.
Obviously, Chad said, and Ms. English had given him a pointed look. Did she think he was a thief? He hadn’t told her how he’d “messed up,” so it was possible she thought he’d stolen something.
That was practically the only thing he hadn’t done.
When Chad pulls into his driveway, he sees his friend Jasper’s Porsche Cayenne parked there, and Jasper, Bryce, and Eric are standing on the front porch.
Chad aims the air-conditioning vents straight at his face and wishes he could disappear.
“Where you been, bruh, snapping you all day, we finally decided to storm the castle but your sister said you weren’t home, and when we asked her where you were, she said she hoped you were bleeding in a ditch.”
“Ouch,” Chad says, though this comes as no surprise. Leith hates him now.
“She’s cold,” Bryce says.
“And yet so hot,” Eric says.
Chad doesn’t have the energy to flip Eric off for that. He’s more concerned about the sweet green miasma hanging in the air above his friends.
“You guys smoked up on my porch?”
“We werewaitingfor you, man. We’re hitting the brewery. You have to come.”
“I can’t.”
“Whaaaaa?” Eric says. “Band is back together, bruh, come on. Didn’t you miss us?”
The answer is no. Chad is still friends with these guys—the young princes of Greenwich, Connecticut; Mission Hills, Kansas; and Fisher Island, Florida—only because of their shared past. They threw sand at one another on Children’s Beach, sneaked into R-rated movies at the Dreamland Theater, showed up late to steak night at the Sankaty Head Golf Club with their oxfords half untucked and their eyes bloodshot because they’d smoked out of an apple pipe at Altar Rock. But thanks to his friendship with Paddy, Chad has gained a modicum of self-awareness. He realizes that the Chad stereotype—passing out in public (like Jasper in front of the Gazebo on Figawi weekend) or stranding a car on the beach (like Eric in his father’s Mercedes at Fisherman’s)—is not only privileged and elitist but also ridiculous and pathetic.
What do you call a group of Chads? An inheritance.
However, this self-awareness, of which Chad is secretly proud, was tragically lacking on May 22.
Chad is amazed these guys haven’t heard what happened back in Radnor; he half expected his sister, Leith, to spill the beans, even though their parents swore both children to silence “for the sake of the family name.” Still, Chad knows that gossip flows fast along tributaries slicked by money and privilege. How did news of the party not reach these three?
Or maybe it did, and they just don’t care.
The brewery sounds like fun. They can have a couple of cold Whale’s Tales, get some lobster sliders from the food trucks, check out girls, listen to live music, pet other people’s golden retrievers. (No,Chad thinks,no dogs.)
He’ll go for an hour, he thinks, to appease them.
But then he recalls how an hour or two at the brewery can easily turn into drinks at the Gazebo, which will then become the four of them lined up in the front row of the Chicken Box, pumping their fists in the air to some cover band singing Coldplay before spilling out onto Dave Street and puking out the back of a cab.
