Barefoot: A Novel Read online

  Vicki and Ted put the kids in the double jogger and headed up Baxter Road, past the grandest of the island’s summer homes, homes they had long fantasized about owning and now could probably afford, toward Sankaty Head Lighthouse. Ted was pushing the kids, Vicki was trying not to let on how much the simple walk winded her.

  “Do you remember the poker game?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “It was like a lifetime ago,” she said.

  “I’l never forget you in those leather pants,” Ted said. “Taking everyone’s money.”

  “I’ve been thinking about al those cigars I smoked,” she said. “One cigar a week for two years. You don’t think . . .”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  She was quiet. A white-haired man wearing madras Bermuda shorts strol ed by, walking a golden retriever. Vicki smiled at him.

  “Beautiful family,” he said.

  That was how they appeared to others, she knew. Blaine was asleep in the strol er, Porter was sucking on his pacifier. A man walking a dog on a mild summer afternoon would never know that Vicki was sick, and he would never know that Ted couldn’t handle it.

  But here they were on Nantucket, walking along the bluff with Sankaty Head Lighthouse like a giant peppermint stick in front of them, its flashing beacon steady and predictable. Being here made Vicki feel better. Beautiful family, the man walking his dog said, and whereas he was wrong, he was also right. They would gril fish for dinner, boil early corn, walk to the market for ice cream cones. After the kids were asleep, Vicki and Ted would try again in bed.

  No sooner had these thoughts soothed Vicki, no sooner was the man with the dog past them and out of earshot, than Ted cleared his throat in a way that made Vicki nervous.

  “I want you to come home,” he said.

  One of the things Vicki loved about her parents, Buzz and El en, was that they were stil married; they had been married for thirty-five years. Vicki appreciated this more than Brenda did because she herself was part of a marriage, she was tied to Ted Stowe in a thousand ways—the children, the house, the friends, the community, their church, the ten years of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, bil s paid, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, dinners out, movies, parties, plays, concerts, the countless conversations. It seemed when they were first together that their conversations had been about other things—worldly matters, politics, books, ideas—and now the conversations were only about themselves. Did that happen to every couple? These endless discussions of schedules and logistics, squash games and Junior League lunches, of Blaine’s fine-motor skil s, his bowel movements, the amount of TV he watched, of Porter sleeping or not sleeping, of should they have a third child, go for the girl, of Ted’s career, of their investments, their taxes, the warranty on the Yukon, of Vicki’s involvement with the neighborhood association, of which day for what kind of recycling. Was everyone so inward-looking? Or was it just their family, the Stowes, and especial y now, with Vicki’s cancer?

  A few years earlier, El en Lyndon had said something curious to Vicki. Your father and I have been having the same argument for fourteen years, she said. Different manifestations, but the same argument.

  Vicki was both grateful and disturbed to discover that she didn’t know what this argument between her parents might be about. She hadn’t lived at home since the summer after her sophomore year in col ege, true, but it unsettled her to think that she didn’t know her parents wel enough to be privy to the subject of their one and only argument. And yet she understood, because she was married, that her parents’ marriage was its own thing, an entity separate even from the children it produced; it was mysterious, sacred, unknowable.

  Vicki’s marriage to Ted had its own nooks and crannies, false starts and dead ends, with its own arguments, repeated and repeated again. I want you to come home. Ted didn’t have to say another word—Vicki had the rest of his speech memorized. I love you, I miss you, I miss the kids, I hate coming home to an empty house, I’m sick of Chinese takeout and frozen waffles. The house is too quiet. Porter’s just a baby; he’ll forget who I am—he already cries when he sees me. I want you to come home so you can have chemo in the city, let’s not mess around, let’s get serious, let’s kill these cells, smug fuckers, get the best doctors, so what if the drugs are exactly the same, administered the same way? I want you at Sloan-Kettering so I can sleep at night, knowing you have the best money can buy, no second-guessing.

  But what Ted was also saying was, I want you to come home because I’m afraid I’m going to lose you. Afraid like a little kid, Vick. Scared shitless. I’m going to lose you in September on the operating table, or at some point after that if the surgery doesn’t work, if the tumors aren’t resectable, if the cancer metastasizes to your brain or your liver, if they can’t get it all out.

  I want you to come home, Ted said, because he had no faith. And that was what real y stood between husband and wife, that was what had turned him into milquetoast, that was what caused Vicki’s anger and Ted’s impotence: He thought she was going to die. And, too, he didn’t understand Nantucket the way Vicki did, he hadn’t grown up in the house on Shel Street, he didn’t feel the same way about the ocean, the sand, the reliable beacon of Sankaty Head Lighthouse. There were so many things that no longer mattered, but these things—this ocean, this air, this ground under her feet—did matter.

  “I am home,” Vicki said.

  Vicki made it crystal clear: The most important thing when caring for children was to establish a routine. Especial y when those children’s mother was sick. “The kids sense a change,” Vicki said. “They sense uncertainty, they know something is wrong. Your job is to keep them calm and secure.

  Be consistent. Promote sameness.”

  “No problem,” Josh said. “I’m al over it.” He nearly went on to describe life with his father: dinner at eight-thirty, the beer, the iceberg salad. Josh knew al about routine, he knew al about sameness.

  And so, the summer started: Monday through Friday, Josh’s alarm went off at seven-thirty. It took him thirteen minutes to brush his teeth, shave, comb his hair, apply sunscreen, get dressed, and towel the dew off the seats of his Jeep—and anywhere from eleven to fourteen minutes to get from his house in Miacomet out to ’Sconset, depending on traffic by the high school. He pul ed up to the cottage on Shel Street right before eight and invariably found Brenda and Blaine on the front step throwing pebbles into a paper cup. Brenda was always in a short nightgown—she had two, he’d learned, one pink and a white one with flowers. Josh was convinced she stayed in her nightgown to torment him. When Josh arrived, she stood up and said, My work here is done, and disappeared into the house, into her room, where she changed into a bikini. Josh was on board with establishing a routine, but he couldn’t help appreciating variation—such as which nightgown Brenda was wearing, which bikini Brenda chose to put on, and the substance and duration of their conversations about her work. Because what Josh had learned early on, the first or second day on the job, was that Brenda was writing a screenplay. There had been one kid in Chas Gorda’s writing workshop who aspired to write a screenplay, a sophomore named Drake Edgar. Drake Edgar had the distinction of being the most earnest student in the class; he handed in scene after dreadful scene and wrote down everyone’s criticism, verbatim. Chas Gorda himself—though his first and best-known novel had been made into a film which could now most generously be described as “cult”—suggested early on to Drake Edgar that the writing workshop was a place for pursuing serious fiction rather than scripts for horror films or thril ers. The other students, including Josh, dismissed Drake Edgar, considered him eccentric, borderline maniacal—though every conversation about Drake Edgar ended with the disclaimer that he would “probably laugh himself al the way to the bank.”

  Why not take screenwriters seriously? Josh thought. Everyone loved the movies. And movies had to be written.

  “A screenplay?” Josh said to Brenda. “That’s fascinating. I’m a writer, too. Wel ,
I’m studying writing at Middlebury with Chas Gorda. You know of him?”

  “No,” Brenda said.

  “He’s great,” Josh said. “He wrote this novel cal ed Talk when he was only twenty-six.”

  Brenda smiled knowingly. “Oh, he’s one of those. You know, prodigies who peak early and then never write another thing worth reading. God, I could teach an entire class on those people alone.”

  Josh felt uncomfortable hearing Chas Gorda insulted, and he considered defending his professor, but he didn’t want to argue with Brenda.

  Instead, he said, “What are you working on?”

  “Me?” Brenda said. “Oh, I’m trying to adapt this thing . . .” Here she stroked the gold-leaf lettering of her old book, The Innocent Impostor. “But I don’t know. It’s not going that wel . It’s like this book doesn’t fit the screenplay formula, you know? There is no car chase.”

  Josh laughed—too loudly, probably, and with the unsettling eagerness of Drake Edgar. Stil , what were the chances? He was a writer, sort of, and so was Brenda. Sort of.

  “I can help you if you want,” Josh said. “I can offer my opinion.” ( That’s our currency here, Chas Gorda was always reminding the class.

  Opinions. ) “I can give it a read.”

  “It’s nice of you to offer,” Brenda said. “But who knows if I’l ever finish. Are you writing a screenplay, too?”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “I’m more interested in writing short stories, you know, and novels.” The way Brenda stared at him made him feel ridiculous, as though he’d just told her he was dressing up as Norman Mailer for Hal oween. “But I could read your screenplay if you want feedback.”

  “Maybe,” Brenda said. She tucked The Innocent Impostor back into its nest of bubble wrap and closed and locked the briefcase. “Maybe when I’m further along.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. She was humoring him. He was a child to her, and yet he couldn’t stop himself, each and every morning, as they helped Blaine pick the pebbles up off the flagstone walk, from asking how the screenplay was going. Some days she said, Oh, fine, and other days she shook her head and said nothing at al .

  Another variation of Josh’s day-to-day was what Vicki made for breakfast. Every morning it was something elaborate and delicious: blueberry pancakes, applewood-smoked bacon, cheddar omelets, peach muffins, eggs Benedict, crispy hash browns, cinnamon French toast, melon and berry salad. Josh and Vicki were the only ones who touched the breakfasts. Melanie was too queasy, she said, especial y first thing in the morning.

  Al she could handle was ginger tea and dry toast. Brenda didn’t eat in the mornings, though she was a prodigious drinker of coffee and fil ed a thermos of it, doctored with a cup of half-and-half and six tablespoons of sugar, to take to the beach. The kids didn’t eat the breakfasts because they were respectively too smal and too picky. Vicki fed Porter pureed carrots or squash while Blaine ate Cheerios at the kitchen table. So the morning feasts were left to Josh and Vicki.

  At first, Josh protested. “You don’t have to go to al this trouble for me,” he said. “I can grab something at home. Cereal, you know, or a bagel.”

  “You’re doing me a favor,” Vicki said. “I need to keep my strength up, and I would never make any of this for just myself.” For Vicki, every forkful was an effort. She had no appetite, she felt specifical y un-hungry. She gazed at the tiny portions on her plate and sighed. She picked a blueberry out of a pancake, she considered half a piece of bacon or a single cube of fried potato. “Here goes,” she said. “Down the hatch.”

  Josh couldn’t say how long it had been since someone had made a meal just for him; it was, he realized, one more part of having a mother that he missed. Vicki and Melanie watched him eat with appreciation, or maybe envy. They loaded his plate with seconds. Melanie nibbled her dry toast in the seat across from Josh; Vicki ate as much as she could, then she did the dishes, lifted Porter from his baby seat, washed his face and hands, changed his diaper, slathered him with lotion, and put him in his bathing suit. Blaine liked to dress himself—always in the same green bathing suit and then, as the days passed, in a shirt the same color as the shirt Josh was wearing. Yel ow shirt for Josh, yel ow shirt for Blaine. Green, red, white.

  Blaine cried the day Josh wore his Red Sox jersey.

  “I’l have to buy him one,” Vicki said.

  “Sorry,” Josh said.

  “It must be tough being his hero,” Vicki said.

  Josh ruffled Blaine’s blond hair, uncertain of what to say. There was no point denying it. Blaine hadn’t given Josh a single bit of trouble since the first night of babysitting; he was resolutely wel behaved, as though he were afraid that if he did something wrong, Josh would leave and never come back. Most days, Josh took the kids to the town beach right there in ’Sconset and sat in the shadow of the lifeguard stand (at Vicki’s insistence).

  Josh and Blaine would dig in the sand, building castles, looking for crabs, col ecting shel s and rocks in a bucket. Porter spent time in his pack ’n’

  play under the umbrel a chewing on the handle of a plastic shovel or chugging down a bottle or taking his morning nap. Blaine clearly liked it best when Porter was asleep; he wanted Josh al to himself. Other kids sidled up to Josh and Blaine with varying degrees of confidence, peering in the bucket, sizing up the sand castle. Could they play? Blaine shrugged and looked to Josh, who always said, Sure. And then, in the interest of fostering good socialization skil s, he said, This is Blaine. What’s your name? Josh had learned to be careful, though, not to show anyone more attention than Blaine—otherwise Blaine would skulk off and sit under the umbrel a, surreptitiously slipping rocks and shel s of chokable sizes into his brother’s playpen. Being with Blaine, Josh decided, was like being with a jealous and possessive girlfriend.

  Babysitting was harder work than he thought it would be. It wasn’t the hundreds of times Josh had to throw the Wiffle bal ; it wasn’t the half hour side by side eating the sandwiches that Vicki had packed talking about Scooby-Doo; it wasn’t the fifty-seven items on Vicki’s nonlist list, none of which could be forgotten (such as: never leave the house without a pacifier, make sure the milk stays cold, Blaine must finish his raisins before he has a pudding, sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen!, medicine for Porter’s poison ivy to be applied every ninety minutes, shake the towels out, rinse off the Boogie board, stop by the market on the way home and pick up some Fig Newtons and some Bounce sheets, here’s the money . . .). Rather, what drained Josh’s energy was the emotional load of caring for two little people. From eight until one, five days a week, Blaine and Porter depended on Josh Flynn to keep them safe. Without him, they would dehydrate, drown, die. When viewed in this way, the job was really important.

  Despite the sort of flukiness of his taking this job, the oddness of it, and the suspicious nature of its beginning (his lust, plain and simple, for Brenda), Josh felt himself becoming attached to the kids. Hero worship? He loved it. At some point during the second or third week, Blaine took Josh’s hand and said, You’re my best friend. And Josh felt his heart grow three sizes, just like the Grinch in Dr. Seuss. A little kid affecting him this way? No one at the airport would have believed it.

  Tom Flynn occasional y asked over dinner, How’s the new job going?

  Josh answered, Good. Fine. And left it at that. There was no use explaining to his father that he was making progress—he could now tel the difference between Porter’s cries (hungry, tired, pick-me-up-please) and he was teaching Blaine to keep his eye on the bal . He would never admit that he had memorized entire pages from Horton Hatches the Egg and Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man, which Blaine liked to read upon their return to the cottage in the minutes before Josh left for the day. He couldn’t articulate the tenderness he felt for these kids who were in danger of losing their mother. If Vicki died, they would be just like him—and although Josh would say he was wel adjusted by anyone’s standards, this made him sad.

  Every time Josh saw Vicki, he thought, Don’t die. Please.r />
  So with his father, he tried to stay noncommittal. The job is good. I like it. The kids are a hoot.

  At this, Tom Flynn would nod, smile. He never asked what the kids’ names were or anything else about them, and Josh, for the first time in his life, didn’t feel compel ed to explain. His job, the routine, his relationship with the kids and the Three—these were things that belonged to him.

  Josh was so immersed in his new life that seeing Didi in the parking lot of Nobadeer Beach came as a very rude surprise. Josh had taken to swimming nearly every day at six o’clock, after most of the crowds had packed up and gone home, after the heat had dissipated but the sun was stil mel ow and warm. It was a fine hour of his day, and Josh usual y toweled off and sat on the beach a few extra minutes watching the waves or tossing a piece of driftwood to someone else’s dog, feeling fortunate, and smart, for taking control of his summer. So on the day that he climbed the narrow, rickety stairs from the beach and spied Didi sitting on the bumper of his Jeep, he fil ed with an old, familiar dread. There was no use pretending this was a happy coincidence; she was waiting for him. Staking him out. Josh thought back to the previous summer and the summer before that—Didi had surprised him every once in a while in this same way, and back then he had counted himself lucky. But now he felt creeped out. If her eyes hadn’t been trained on him, he would have tried to sneak away.

  As it was, he barely concealed his disgust. “Hey,” he said. He whipped his damp towel into the open back of his Jeep.

  She made a noise. At first he hoped for a snicker, but no such luck. She was crying. “You don’t love me anymore,” she said. “You fucking hate me.”

  “Didi—”

  She sniffed and swiped at her nose with the heel of her palm. She was wearing her old cutoff jean shorts from high school, the ones with white strings dangling down her thighs, and a pink T-shirt that said Baby Girl in black cursive letters. She was barefoot; her toes, painted electric blue, dug into the dirty sand of the parking lot. Josh did a quick scan; he didn’t see Didi’s Jetta.