Barefoot: A Novel Read online

  “I’m not going,” Vicki said.

  “She’s not going!” Blaine shouted. “She’s staying home!”

  Vicki made no move to shush Blaine or reprimand him for yel ing at his aunt who was, it should be pointed out, just trying to do the right thing!

  The family was going to hel in a handbasket.

  “I’l give you a few minutes,” Brenda said. “But we are leaving at eight-thirty.”

  Brenda left the room, dreading her mother’s inevitable phone cal . How is she? El en Lyndon would ask. And what could Brenda possibly say?

  She’s scared. She’s angry. She hurts. It wasn’t possible to give their mother a dose of that kind of unadulterated truth. She’s fine, Brenda would say. The kids are fine.

  As Brenda was feeling guilty for lies she hadn’t even told yet, she heard the predictable crunch of tires on shel s. Josh. Somehow, Brenda thought, Josh would keep them afloat. Now that Brenda was a regular communicator with God, she believed Josh had been sent to them for a reason. Brenda tiptoed down the flagstone path and met Josh by the gate. She was stil in her nightgown and it was a misty, chil y morning. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  He furrowed his brow. “You’re not throwing rocks today?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

  “Kind of,” Brenda said. “I need your help.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. Brenda saw his eyes brighten. In this, he was like Walsh. Being typical y Australian, Walsh loved to help. “Anything.”

  “I need you to talk to Vicki.”

  Another person might have said, Anything but that, but Josh had no problem with Vicki. He liked her; he wasn’t afraid of her cancer. He cal ed her “Boss,” and each day he teased her about her “non-list list.”

  “Okay,” Josh said. “Sure. What about?”

  “Just talk to her,” Brenda said. “She needs a friend. She’s sick of me.”

  “No problem,” Josh said. “I’m here for you.”

  Brenda was about to lead him into the house, into Vicki’s bedroom, but those words, I’m here for you, even though they were said in a casual, lighthearted way, nearly made Brenda weep with gratitude. She suspected that Josh wasn’t a col ege student at al , but rather, an angel. Brenda placed her hands on his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed him. He tasted young, like a piece of unripe fruit; his lips were soft. She felt him move toward her, he took hold of her waist.

  Immediately, Brenda realized she’d made a mistake. What was wrong with her? Gently, she pushed Josh away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair of me.”

  “You are so beautiful,” Josh said. “You know I think so.”

  Yes, Brenda knew it. She had seen how he looked at her in her nightgown and her bikini, but she had done nothing to encourage him. When they spoke, she was friendly but never more than friendly. If anything, she had worked to keep Josh at arm’s length. The last thing she wanted was for anyone to think . . . But, as ever, her good judgment fled her for one instant. She had kissed him—and it was a real kiss—so now, suddenly, on top of everything else, she was a tease. She had so much on her mind, so many heavy, difficult things, that the idea that there was someone wil ing to help, even a little bit, overwhelmed her good sense. She had made a mess of nearly everything in her life, but she didn’t want to make a mess with Josh.

  “It was unfair of me because I’m in love with someone else,” Brenda said. “Someone back in New York.” She thought of the damn napkin tucked into her book; the ink was smeared now. Call John Walsh!

  “Oh,” Josh said. He looked pissed off. He had every reason to be; he had every reason to leave Number Eleven Shel Street and never come back, but Brenda hoped he wouldn’t. She hoped he was here for reasons a lot more powerful than any crush he might have on her.

  “You’l stil talk to Vicki, won’t you?” Brenda asked. “Please?”

  He shrugged. His eyes were fil ed with hurt and boyish disappointment. “Sure,” he said.

  The bedroom was dim, with the muted morning light peeking in around the edges of the pul ed shades. Vicki rocked on the bed, holding both kids, but Brenda lifted Porter out of Vicki’s arms and said to Blaine, “Come on out now. We have pebbles to throw.”

  “I want to stay with Mommy,” Blaine said.

  “Outside,” Brenda said. “Now.”

  “I need to talk to your mom anyway,” Josh said. “I’l be out in a couple of minutes.”

  This was so unusual that neither Blaine nor Vicki protested. Blaine left quietly, shutting the door behind him, and Vicki fel back on the bed. She was wearing gray athletic shorts and a navy Duke T-shirt that hiked up her midsection. She was a lot thinner than she’d been when Josh first saw her at the airport. She was wearing a bandanna over her head like a rap star; her hair was nearly gone.

  “Brenda told you I don’t want to take my medicine?”

  “Actual y, she told me nothing,” Josh said. “Except that she’s in love with someone else, not me.”

  At this, Vicki made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. Josh was astounded at his own candor. But there was something about Vicki that put him at ease. She was too young to be his mother, though there had been times in the past few weeks when he’d felt like she was his mother, and he had relished it. She was sort of like an older sister might have been, or a very cool older girl best friend, the kind he’d never been lucky enough to have. He cal ed her “Boss” as a joke, though why this was a joke he wasn’t sure; she was his boss. And yet she didn’t come across as his boss, despite the fact that she was always tel ing him what she wanted him to do and she was always asking for a ful report of his and the kids’ activities—their every word and deed and fart—when he got home at one o’clock. Stil , she gave the impression that he was the boss, that he was ultimately in charge—and that was, he supposed, why Brenda had asked him to come in and talk. Vicki would listen to him.

  “She’s in love with someone named John Walsh,” Vicki said. She sat up, plucked a tissue off the nightstand, and blew her nose. “One of her students, back in New York. I can’t believe she told you.”

  “I can’t believe I told you she told me,” Josh said. “I thought I was sent in here to talk about something else.”

  “You were,” Vicki said. She sighed. “I’m not going to chemo.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve had enough,” Vicki said. “It’s not helping. I can feel it not helping. It’s hurting. It’s kil ing me. You know what chemotherapy is, right? It’s control ed poisoning. They try to poison the cancer cel s, but most of the time they poison healthy cel s, too. So the way I feel is that I used to have healthy cel s and now al I have are poisoned cel s. I am a vessel fil ed with vile green poison.”

  “You look the same to me,” Josh said, though this was a lie.

  “I can’t eat,” Vicki said. “I’ve lost twelve pounds, and I’m bald. I can’t cook, I can’t stay awake through a Scooby-Doo, I can’t concentrate long enough to play Chutes and Ladders, I can’t land a single pebble in the damn paper cup. I can’t do anything. What was the point in coming to Nantucket if I only go outside to get to the hospital? I want to go to the beach, I want to swim, I want to drink my Chardonnay on the back deck, I want to feel better. I’m done with chemo. There was never a guarantee it was going to shrink my tumor anyway. It’s just a gamble the doctors take, a gamble with my body. But I’m putting an end to it today. I’m al done.”

  “I’l point out the obvious,” Josh said. “If you don’t go to chemo, your cancer might get worse.”

  “It might,” Vicki said. “Or it might stay the same.”

  “But if they think the chemo wil help, you should take it. You have the kids to think about.”

  “You sound like my husband,” Vicki said. “Which is too bad. One thing I real y appreciate about you is that you’re nothing like my husband.”

  Josh felt himself redden. He had yet to meet Vicki’s husband, Ted Stowe, though he had heard about him in detail from the kids
. Ted Stowe came every weekend, he was some kind of financial wizard in New York, and Blaine had let it slip that Ted didn’t like Josh.

  But I don’t even know your dad, Josh said. We’ve never met.

  Trust me, Blaine said. He doesn’t like you.

  If Ted Stowe didn’t like Josh, then Josh was determined not to like Ted Stowe. Josh understood, however, that whereas he fil ed a certain role, there were other men—Ted Stowe, Melanie’s husband, Peter, and now this guy Brenda was in love with—who fil ed another role, a more important, more substantial role, in their real lives, away from Nantucket.

  Josh sat down on the bed next to Vicki. He felt himself about to become self-referential and he recal ed another one of Chas Gorda’s much-repeated phrases: Be wary of your own story. Josh tried to stop himself, but it was pointless. Just this once, he told himself.

  “My mother died when I was twelve,” he said. “She kil ed herself.”

  Vicki did him the favor of being matter-of-fact. So many women—the girls he met at Middlebury, Didi—met this statement with a gush of sympathy, as useless to Josh as a lace handkerchief.

  “Did she?” Vicki said.

  “She hanged herself while I was at school.”

  Vicki nodded, like she was waiting for the rest of it.

  There was nothing else to say. Josh had bounded off the school bus and headed home just like any other day. Except that day, his father was in the living room sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. There were no police, no sirens or lights, no other people. It was the lack of other people that Tom Flynn chose to address first.

  I told them to wait, Tom Flynn said. They’ll all pour in around suppertime.

  Who? Josh said.

  Josh didn’t remember any other exact words. His father got the story across somehow—he’d come home for lunch as always (this was back when he worked the six-to-three shift) and found that the stairs to the attic had been pul ed down. It was December; Tom Flynn thought his wife was up searching for Christmas decorations. He cal ed to her but got no answer. He climbed the attic stairs and found her dangling. Tom Flynn cut her down and drove her to the hospital, even though it was clear she was already dead. He’d never described to his son how his wife had looked or what she’d used to hang herself or how he’d felt as he cut her down. Was he shaking? Was he crying? These were things that Josh would never know; they were things he’d been protected from. Not knowing if his mother’s face was discolored, or if her head had hung at a funny angle because her neck had snapped, kept Josh from having to relay these details to others.

  “She didn’t leave a note,” Josh said. “So I’l never know why she did it.”

  “Do you hate her?” Vicki asked.

  “No,” Josh said. “But if you stop going to chemo today and your cancer gets worse and you die and leave Blaine and Porter motherless, I’l hate you.”

  Again, the noise, the laugh or the hiccup.

  “No, you won’t,” Vicki said. But stil , she stood up.

  Melanie threw open the lower-left kitchen cabinet, yanked out the only decent frying pan in the house, and slammed it against the largest burner of the electric stove. She was furious!

  For the first time in nearly two months she had woken up early, feeling not only okay but good. She had energy!—and she rifled through her dresser for her exercise clothes. She power walked through the misty, deserted streets of early morning ’Sconset—al the way to the town beach and back—swinging her arms, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, feeling like she had final y, final y turned a corner. Al the pregnancy books described how healthy and vibrant and capable a woman felt while carrying a child, and now, today, Melanie understood. Gone were the sickness and the fatigue—she had blossomed.

  But then she turned a literal corner—from New Street onto Shel Street. She was on her way home, her heart pumping, her blood surging in a way she had missed; she was actual y hungry, craving protein, a couple of eggs over easy on buttery toast. She was so busy thinking of breaking the bright yel ow yolks of the eggs and of the health of the fetus inside of her, grateful for exercise and nourishment, that what she saw taking place down the street inside the white picket fence of Number Eleven didn’t, at first, register. What Melanie witnessed was two people kissing, then embracing. Melanie recognized the people, of course, at least she recognized them separately, but together, as a couple, they made no sense. It was Josh and Brenda.

  Melanie stopped in her tracks. She ducked down behind the neighbor’s Peugeot, which was parked in the street. She could hear Brenda’s voice, though not her actual words. Whatever Brenda said was beside the point; Melanie had seen Brenda and Josh kissing, she had watched Josh grab Brenda’s hips. It was an awful scene, worse somehow than the vision of Peter lying with Frances Digitt in Frances’s early-nineties-model Japanese futon on sheets covered with brown dog hair. At that moment, Peter and Frances seemed very far away, whereas this betrayal by Josh and Brenda was immediate; it was a betrayal in Melanie’s new life, her safe summer life.

  Forget the sense of wel -being. Melanie was going to be sick. She retched by the Peugeot’s front tire. Jealousy and anger bubbled up from the pit of her stomach. It was gross, disgusting, Brenda and Josh together. It wasn’t fair, Melanie thought. She spat at the ground, her knees wobbled.

  She raised her head, ready to catch them in the act, but the front yard was empty. They were gone.

  Melanie took a shorter walk to the ’Sconset Market for a Gatorade, al the time talking to herself in her mind, and occasional y muttering a word or two out loud like a crazy person. Utterly revolting. Unacceptable. Josh was twenty-two. He was the babysitter. And yet there they’d been, in the front yard, like a couple of horny teen-agers, Brenda stil in her stripper’s excuse for a nightgown. Melanie gulped the Gatorade and walked slowly back to the house, nurturing her hatred of Brenda. Brenda was a . . . slut, she was easy, she was after every man she met, she targeted them for sport, like a shameless game hunter poaching elephants for ivory or tigers for rugs. She had no scruples, she’d slept with her student, the Australian who had phoned. Next thing they al knew, she’d be after Ted Stowe—that was only logical with Vicki so sick—Brenda would sleep with her own brother-in-law.

  “Arrumph,” Melanie said. She walked down a side street in search of her favorite pocket garden. Brenda was as treacherous as Frances Digitt, as deficient in honor and integrity. What did she care if she slept with somebody else’s husband? Melanie gazed at the neat patch of iris and bachelor’s button. She closed her eyes and saw Brenda and Josh kissing.

  Josh.

  By the time Melanie got back to the house, the Yukon was gone, which meant Brenda had taken Vicki to chemo. Melanie stormed into the house, flinging open the screen door. Her body was stil craving the eggs, and thus Melanie went rip-roaring through the kitchen slamming doors and surfaces, thinking, Bitch, slut, bitch. It felt like her hair was standing on end, like her skin was going to blister and pop.

  “Are you okay?”

  Melanie whipped around. Josh had emerged from Vicki’s bedroom holding the baby. Blaine stood next to Josh, a mini-Josh, as he now emulated Josh’s every word and gesture; his face held the same look of baffled interest. Melanie swil ed the last of her Gatorade and pitched the empty bottle, with no smal amount of force, into the kitchen trash.

  “I’m fine, ” she said, making sure the word sounded as far from its actual meaning as possible. She turned her back on them. On the stove, the empty frying pan started to smoke. She dropped a pat of butter into the pan then pul ed eggs out of the fridge, flinging the door open and shut so violently that the poor old fridge shuddered. Real y, it was impossible to hate Josh, he was infuriatingly adorable, standing there with the kids. The boys loved him, he loved the boys, it made him irresistible. Damn it! This was awful. Melanie was jealous, as jealous as she’d ever been in her life.

  She wanted Josh to like her, she wanted Josh to kiss her in the front yard. She wanted Josh to look at h
er the way he looked at Brenda. Never mind that he was so young. He was an adult, sort of, a young man, kindhearted and wel raised, as quality a person as a woman could ask for, and with the way Melanie was feeling, she might have been only fourteen herself. I have a crush on him, she thought. So embarrassing to admit, but true. I like him. I love him. This is ridiculous! Melanie cracked the eggs into the pan, where they sizzled. There was no noise behind her and she was afraid to turn around. Let him wonder what was wrong. Let him guess. Melanie salted her eggs and tried to flip them but failed. She was making a mess.

  She dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster. The room was silent and Melanie figured the boys had slipped out or retreated to the safety of the bedroom, but when she turned around to check, the three of them were sitting at the kitchen table, watching her.

  “What?” she said. “Aren’t you going to the beach?”

  “In a little while,” Josh said.

  “These eggs are for me,” Melanie said. “If you want to make your own breakfast when I’m finished, be my guest.”

  “I’m al set,” Josh said. “If you’re eating, you must be feeling better.”

  “I do feel better,” Melanie said. She buttered the toast and slid the jumbled egg mess on top, then sat down.

  “You seem real y angry,” Josh said. “Is it your husband?”

  “No,” Melanie said. “For once, it’s not my husband.”

  “Is it anything you want to talk about?” Josh asked.

  She glanced up from her plate. He was looking at her very intently. He was looking at her the way she wanted him to look at her, or maybe she was just imagining this. Those green eyes. Porter was working his pacifier, his head resting against Josh’s chest. Melanie had hoped that because Josh was young, he would be different. He wouldn’t have taken for granted, yet, his power over women. But clearly he understood it. He knew al of Peter Patchen’s tricks and then some. It came with the territory of being handsome and strong and accomplished and, no doubt, spoiled by his mother. Any which way, he was showing what could only be described as undivided interest in Melanie for the first time ever, when less than an hour before, he’d been kissing Brenda. Was this some kind of parlor game—seduce al the women at Number Eleven Shel Street? Would Vicki be next?