Barefoot (43 page)

“It’s only two more weeks,” Melanie said. “What’s the point of ending it now?”

What
was
the point in ending it now? Well, for one thing, Josh felt in control right now. Sort of. Peter’s visit was a blessing in disguise, maybe; it gave Josh the impetus to get out while his head was still above water—because the possibility of drowning in Melanie, in his feelings, his love for her, was very real.

Suddenly, Melanie screamed.

Up ahead, Blaine was running through the parking lot toward the sandy entrance of the beach. A car, a behemoth green Suburban with a Thule car carrier and tinted windows, was backing up. There was no way the driver could see Blaine.

Josh yelled, “Blaine!” He dropped his load and handed Porter to Melanie.

Blaine stopped, turned around. The Suburban was still backing up. Josh ran, yelling, “Stop! Get out of the way! Stop! Stop!”

The Suburban bucked to a stop a few feet shy of mowing Blaine over. Josh raced to Blaine, scooped him up. The window of the Suburban went down, and a woman who looked sort of like Vicki poked her head out, her hand to her chest.

“I didn’t see him,” she said. “Thank God you yelled. I just didn’t see him at all.”

Josh was too keyed up to speak. He clung to Blaine for a second, while the vision of Blaine struck in the head by the Suburban’s bumper and Blaine crumpling to the ground before being flattened under the Suburban’s crushing weight played its course, then evaporated with a shudder.
Thank God,
he thought.
Thank God.
There was bad like he was going through with Melanie, and then there was
really bad.

“You have to be careful, buddy,” Josh said. Relief flowed through him so fast, it made him dizzy. “Jesus God, Lord Almighty, thank you. Holy shit. Oh, man, you have to
watch
. You could have been killed. Geez.”

Melanie hurried over to them; Porter’s legs were straddling her. “Thank God you’re okay,” she said. “Thank God you didn’t get hit.”

Blaine looked like he was about to dissolve into tears. He grabbed Josh around the waist. “I was trying to save a spot at the beach, like you told me to.”

“Right,” Josh said. “I know. It’s not your fault. But you have to
watch
.”

“I’m sorry,” Blaine said.

“I shouldn’t have told you to run ahead.” Josh took Porter out of Melanie’s arms. He’d been lucky, this time. He felt like that was some kind of sign. “Okay.” He corralled Blaine into the space beside him. “Stay with me.”

Melanie touched Josh’s arm. “We’ll talk about things . . . later?” she said.

“No,” Josh said. “I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“Good-bye, Melanie.” And without turning back, he headed up over the sand dune with the kids, to the beach.

Vicki’s last dose of chemo should have been cause for celebration. She had seen other patients show up on the day of their final treatment with roses for Mamie or banana bread for Dr. Alcott. But Vicki was too anxious to feel relief about the end of her regimen, and hence, she did nothing to mark it. She was used to doing things correctly, completely, and in a timely fashion—however, in regard to her chemo, she had failed. There was the day she’d skipped, followed by the five days of fever, and the subsequent lower dosage. The most important protocol of her thirty-two years, short of giving birth, and she’d gone at it half-assed. If she went for her CT scan and they found cancer all through her lungs, she shouldn’t be surprised. She would deserve it.

The CT scan was scheduled for Tuesday, and Ted would be there. He had arrived on Friday, as usual, but this time with greater fanfare because he was staying. He was staying for the rest of the summer, until it was time to pack up the Yukon and drive it back home to Connecticut. He seemed different—happier, giddy even, at times. He was in vacation mode. Vicki could only guess how good it felt to leave the pressure of the market and Wall Street behind, along with the concrete blocks of Manhattan baking in the sun, the drudgery of the commute on the train, the confines of summer-weight suits, and, in Ted’s case, the big, empty house. He reveled in being cut loose from all of that; he would finally be able to enjoy summer without the pall of Sunday evening hanging over his head. He walked around the cottage in his bathing trunks and a polo shirt and his flip-flops. He sang in the outdoor shower, he roughhoused with the boys, he suggested they go for ice cream every night after dinner. Vicki enjoyed his good mood, but she was worried by it, too. Because it was evident that part of Ted’s gleeful demeanor was due to his unflagging belief that Vicki was getting better.

You look great,
he kept saying.
God, you look wonderful. You’ve beat it, Vick. You’ve beat it.

Ever since Vicki was diagnosed, she’d been hearing about the power of visualization and positive thinking. But Vicki’s mind had never worked that way. She was
afraid
to imagine herself clean of cancer—because what if she tempted fate? Jinxed herself? What if the CT scan showed her lungs riddled with diseased cells, worse than ever? Or what if the tumor was exactly as it had been back in the spring—stubborn, immovable, straddling the line of surgical feasibility?

Ted’s good mood would not be deterred. He kissed Vicki’s scalp where her hair was slowly but surely growing back in—though the color was darker than Vicki’s original blond, and it was tinged with gray. Ted’s sexual appetite had returned with a vengeance; he basically bribed Brenda with cash to take the kids on Saturday and Sunday mornings so he could lounge in bed with Vicki.
You look great,
he said.
You look beautiful. You’re yourself again. You’ve beat it.

“I haven’t beat it,” Vicki said angrily to Ted on Monday. In fact, when she woke up that morning, her breathing was labored, her chest was tight; she had to suck air in and squeeze it out. The mere fact that she had to
think
about her breathing was a very bad indicator. “Even if the tumor has shrunk, they still have to operate.”

Ted looked at her like she’d insulted him. “I know,” he said. “Baby, I know.”

As the hour of her appointment on Tuesday approached, Vicki grew more and more tense. Her hands shook as she flipped pancakes and turned bacon for Ted’s breakfast. Josh came and took the kids. Josh had been quieter than usual over the past week. He seemed withdrawn, though Vicki didn’t have the time or wherewithal to ask him if everything was all right. Still, Josh made a point of giving Vicki a hug and a kiss before he left with the kids for the beach.

“Good luck today,” he whispered.

“Thanks,” she whispered back.

Later, she spent a long minute locked in an embrace with Melanie, who looked dangerously close to weeping. There should be a handbook, Vicki thought, for the friends and relatives of people with cancer, and in this handbook it should be mandated that the friend/relative be neither too upbeat (Ted) nor too gloomy (Melanie) about one’s chance of survival. The friend/relative, Vicki thought as Melanie clung to her, should act like Josh. Josh had wished her luck. Luck was useful. Luck, perhaps more than anything else, was what she would need.

“I’m going to be okay,” Vicki said. “I’m going to be fine.”
This is just great,
Vicki thought
. I’m the one whose head is on the chopping block and I’m comforting Melanie.

“Oh, I know,” Melanie said quickly, wiping at her eyes. “It’s just all this stuff. The summer. Peter, the pregnancy. You. It’s a lot, you know?”

“I know,” Vicki said.

Brenda insisted on coming along with Ted and Vicki. “I’ve been with you all summer,” she said. “And I am not missing today. Today is the big day.”

Yes, the big day. There had been any number of big days in Vicki’s life: her first day of kindergarten; the opening night of the school play with Vicki in the lead; the night of her first school dance, where she received her first kiss. There were Christmases, graduations, first days on the job, there was the day Duke won the NCAA Tournament, there was her wedding day, the nine perfect days of her honeymoon in Hawaii, there was the day she found out she was pregnant, the day she gave birth, the day she and Ted closed on the house in Darien, there were nights of charity benefits, three of which she had co-chaired, there were nights in New York City at restaurants and Broadway shows. There were days cluttered with commitments (the Yukon serviced, root canal, a field trip with Blaine’s preschool, free box tickets for the Yankees–Red Sox game). All of these were big days, but none as big as today. Today would be the day Vicki looked at her cancer a second time and heard Dr. Alcott, or Dr. Garcia on a conference call from Fairfield Hospital, say,
Better? Worse? Live? Die?

Nothing prepared a person for this,
Vicki thought as she fastened her seat belt. Ted was driving; Brenda was in the backseat. When Vicki checked on Brenda in the rearview mirror, she saw Brenda’s lips moving.

Nothing.

As they pulled into the hospital parking lot, Brenda’s cell phone rang.

“That would be our mother,” Brenda said.

“I can’t talk to her,” Vicki said. “I’m nervous enough as it is. Can you talk to her?”

“She doesn’t want me,” Brenda said. “She wants you.”

“Give her to Ted,” Vicki said.

Ted swung into a parking spot and took the phone from Brenda. That was for the best. Ellen Lyndon would be reassured by Ted’s optimism.

Brenda took Vicki’s hand as they headed for the door. She patted her bag. “I brought the book.”

Vicki raised a questioning eyebrow.

“
The Innocent Impostor.
My good luck charm. My talisman.”

“Oh,” Vicki said. “Thanks.”

“And I’ve been praying for you,” Brenda said. “Really praying.”

“Praying?” Vicki said. And that reminded her. “You know, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Yeah?” Brenda said. “What is it?”

Ted strode up alongside them. “Your mother wants us to call her as soon as we know anything.”

“Okay,” Vicki said.

“I don’t get it,” Brenda said. “Does she think we’ll forget about her?”

“She’s a mother,” Ted said.

“What did you want to ask me, Vick?” Brenda said.

Vicki shook her head. “Later,” she said. Though she was running out of time.

“Later for what?” Ted said.

“Nothing,” Vicki said.

Brenda narrowed her eyes at the front of the hospital, the gray shingles, the white trim, the blue-and-white quarterboard that said NANTUCKET COTTAGE HOSPITAL. “Do you realize this is the last time we’re coming here?” she said. “Strange, but I think I’m going to miss this place.”

For all the anticipation and all the worry, for every strained breath and the eight fitful hours of sleep the night before, Vicki found that the actual CT scan itself wasn’t that bad. The hospital was short-staffed, it seemed, because the person who administered the CT scan was . . . Amelia, from oncology.

“Yeah,” Amelia said in a bored response to Vicki’s excitement about seeing a familiar face. “I cover in radiology when they need me. What can I say? I’m multitalented. Now, everything above the waist comes off, including your . . . necklace.”

The necklace was a piece of blue yarn strung with dried rigatoni that had been colored with Magic Marker, a present from Blaine on Mother’s Day that he’d made in preschool. Vicki didn’t have a good luck charm like Brenda did; the necklace would have to suffice. Vicki removed her clothes, put on the paper robe that Amelia handed her, and clenched the necklace.

Amelia spoke formally, like an operator from a catalog, the ones whose calls were being monitored for customer service purposes. “Would you please lie on the examining table?” she said, indicating the narrow table with a Vanna White–like flourish of her hands.

Vicki complied, adjusting her paper robe. Amelia manipulated the machine into place. “I suggest you take four to five deep breaths in preparation.”

“In preparation for what?” Vicki said.

“I’m going to ask you to hold your breath for twenty seconds,” Amelia said. “Some patients find they like to exercise their lungs before commencing this process.”

“Okay,” Vicki said. She sucked air in and squeezed it out; her lungs felt like faulty bellows.

“In those twenty seconds, this machine will take nearly five hundred pictures of your lungs.” Now, Amelia’s voice was smug; she was obviously proud of the machine.

Could Vicki hold her breath for twenty seconds? She took one look at the ebony and silver stud protruding from Amelia’s lower lip, and closed her eyes. Last night, in bed, Vicki had promised herself that she wouldn’t think about Blaine and Porter, but as she silently counted out twenty Mississippis, they came to her anyway, only they weren’t little boys; they had transmogrified into insects with gossamer wings. They flew, they dove, they hovered over Vicki as she lay on the table. They were dragonflies.

Nothing prepared a person for this. The five hundred pictures from the CT scan were loaded onto Dr. Alcott’s computer, but he said he wouldn’t have a conclusive answer for Vicki until later in the day. He wanted to look the results over; he wanted to think about them. Dr. Garcia would be examining the scan simultaneously in Connecticut, and the two of them would confer by telephone. Discuss the next step.

“How long do you think that will take?” Vicki asked. She had expected the answer to be clear-cut; she had expected an immediate verdict. She wasn’t sure she could wait any longer than a few minutes.

“I really can’t say. Depending on what we see, a few hours to a day or so.”

“Another day?” Vicki said. “So we just can’t . . . go out into the waiting room?”

“I’ll call you at home,” Dr. Alcott said. His voice was serious, businesslike. He was not his usual chummy, fisherman self. Vicki’s spirit cracked and oozed like an egg.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Ted said. They shook hands.

Vicki couldn’t bring herself to say anything, not even good-bye. The delay disheartened her.
It’s over,
she thought.
Palliative care.

They filed out into the hallway, and Dr. Alcott closed his door. Brenda groaned.

“Here comes that girl,” she said.

Vicki was so racked with anxiety that she didn’t ask which girl Brenda was talking about. But then she saw a girl walking toward them, scowling. She was blond and disheveled-looking. Vicki remembered her now, though only vaguely, from their first visit here. The port installation.

“She stopped me in the ladies’ room one day,” Brenda whispered. “And accused me of all kinds of nonsense. I guess she knows Josh.”

Vicki nodded. She could not have cared less. She sucked air in and squeezed air out. Breathing was so difficult, she thought she might flatline right there. And her hand hurt. She gazed down. Ted was squeezing her hand so hard her fingers were turning white. He sensed bad news, too. Palliative care. Hospice. Outside, an ambulance whined, there was a flurry of activity as they walked past emergency. In one of the waiting rooms, the TV news was on
:
The president was cracking down along the Mexican border.

Vicki closed her eyes. Everything around her, absolutely everything, fell on her List of Things That No Longer Matter. Everything except her life, everything except her children. Blaine and Porter would be at the beach with Josh, digging in the sand, enjoying their snack, playing with their summer friends. But when Vicki tried to picture them ensconced in this idyllic scene, nothing came. Her mind was black. She thought about the boys as dragonflies. (To see them as dragonflies had been comforting, but why?) Again, nothing. She opened her eyes and turned to Ted. “Do you have a picture of the boys?”

Ted’s eyes were trained on the girl from admitting; she was approaching them with purpose. She wore a red cotton sundress that was too short and a pair of battered gold ballet slippers with ribbons that laced up her ankles. Vicki blinked—the girl’s bra straps were showing, she wore hastily applied makeup, her blond hair was uncombed. What did she want? Ted absentmindedly handed Vicki a snapshot of the kids from his wallet. Brenda narrowed her eyes at the girl and shook her head. “Whatever you have to say, we don’t want to hear it.”

“I think you do want to hear it,” Didi said.

“No, we don’t,” Brenda said.

“What is it?” Ted asked.

“Josh is sleeping with your friend,” Didi said. “The one who’s pregnant.”

“Whoa-ho!” Ted said. “That’s a pretty big accusation.” He looked at Vicki first, then Brenda. His brow creased. “You’re talking about Melanie, right? Melanie? How do you know this? Did Josh
tell
you this?”

“Go away,” Brenda said. “Please.”

“My brother saw them together,” Didi said. “Out in Monomoy. In the middle of the night.”

“Your brother?” Ted said.

“She’s full of shit, Ted,” Brenda said. “I don’t know what your problem is with our family, but we really need you to leave us alone. We’re under a lot of stress here.”

Stress,
Vicki thought.
There should be another word.

“Fine,” Didi said. She crossed her arms over her chest in a way that seemed diffident. “But I’m not full of shit. They are sleeping together.” She spun on her heels and marched away.

Yes,
Vicki thought. The girl was probably right. Josh and Melanie. Strange, nearly unbelievable, and yet Vicki had picked up on a bunch of clues that made her believe the girl was correct. Josh and Melanie together: It should have been the biggest revelation of the summer, but Vicki threw it into the basket with everything else. It didn’t matter.

At home, the routine went to pot. Josh returned with the kids.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” Ted said. “The doctor is going to call later.”

“Oh,” Josh said. He looked at Vicki quizzically. “You okay, Boss?”

Melanie and Josh, she thought. Possible? She couldn’t waste time wondering.
Palliative care.
A year, maybe two. Blaine would be six, Porter three. Blaine would remember her, Porter probably not. There would be long hospital visits and drugs that put her mind on Pluto. Vicki felt like she was going to faint. She collapsed in a chair.

“Ted, can you take the kids out, please? I can’t deal.”

“Take them out where? What about Porter’s nap?”

“Drive him around until he falls asleep. I can’t lie down. What if the phone rings?”

Josh cleared his throat. “Okay, I’m going to go, then.”

Blaine protested. “What about a story, Josh? What about
Kiss the Cow
?”

“You’re going with Daddy,” Vicki said.

Josh slipped out with a wave; he seemed eager to leave.

“I don’t know about this, Vick,” Ted said. “You’re going to sit here by yourself and obsess.”

“I’ll take the kids,” Brenda said. “That way you can both sit here and obsess.”

Vicki felt like screaming,
We are talking about my health, my body, my life!

“Go,” she said. She hid in her hot bedroom with the door closed. She opened the window; she turned on the fan. She sat on the edge of the bed. All over the world mothers were dying. Palliative care: steps that could be taken to prolong her life. There was a question she needed to ask Brenda, but they never seemed to get a minute alone so Vicki could ask her. Because Melanie was always there? Melanie, twirling outside the dressing room.
Are you sure there’s not something else going on?
Melanie and Josh. But when? Where? And why wouldn’t Melanie have told her? But maybe the answer to that was obvious. She thought Vicki would be mad. Would Vicki be mad? She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor. Her feet, her toes, her body. Ted tapped on the door.

“Come in,” she said.

He handed her the phone. “It’s Dr. Alcott.”

So soon? But when she checked the clock, she saw it was quarter to four. “Hello?” she said.

“Vicki? Hi, it’s Mark.”

“Hi,” she said.

“First of all, let me tell you that Dr. Garcia has scheduled your surgery for September first.”

“My surgery?” Vicki said. “So it worked? The chemo?”

Ted clapped his hands like he might have at a sporting event.

“It worked exactly the way it was supposed to,” Dr. Alcott said. “The tumor has shrunk significantly, and it has receded from the chest wall. The thoracic surgeon should be able to go in and get it all out. And . . . assuming the cancer hasn’t metastasized, your chances of remission are good.”

“You’re kidding me,” Vicki said. She thought she might laugh, or cry, but all she felt was breathless wonder. “You are
kidding
me.”

“Well, there’s the surgery,” Dr. Alcott said. “Which is never risk-free. And then there’s the chance that the surgeon will miss something or that we’ve missed something. There’s a chance the cancer will turn up somewhere else—but this is just my ultra-cautious side talking. Overall, if the surgery works out like it should, then yes, remission.”

“Remission,” Vicki repeated.

Ted crushed Vicki in a bear hug. Vicki was afraid to feel anything resembling joy or relief, because what if it was a mistake, what if he was lying . . . ?

“This is good news? I should feel happy?”

“It could have been a whole lot worse,” he said. “This is just one step, but it’s an important step. So, yes, be happy. Absolutely.”

Vicki hung up the phone. Ted said, “I’m going to call your mother. I promised her.” He left the room, and Vicki sank back down on the bed. On the nightstand lay the snapshot of the boys, the one Ted had handed her at the hospital. It was of Blaine and Porter in a red vinyl booth at Friendly’s. They had been eating clown sundaes, and Porter’s face was smeared with chocolate. Vicki had taken them for lunch one day last winter because it was cold and snowy and she had wanted to get out of the house. It had been just a random day, just one of hundreds she had all but forgotten. Just one of thousands that she had taken for granted.

Looking back, Brenda couldn’t believe she had ever been worried. Of course Vicki’s news was good, of course the tumor had shrunk, of course surgery would be successful and Vicki would beat lung cancer. The woman was the luckiest person on the planet. Her life was Teflon—mess happened, but it didn’t stick.

And why, Brenda wondered, should Vicki be the only one with luck? Why shouldn’t Brenda be able to emerge from her own morass of problems in a similarly exultant way? Why shouldn’t Brenda and Vicki be like sister superheroes, overcoming adversity in a single summer, together?

Ted had brought his laptop with him, but he only used it to send e-mail and check the market in the morning. Sure, Brenda could use it. Of course! Because of the good news of the CT scan, the whole house was in a generous frame of mind. Brenda took advantage of this—she set herself up on the back deck with the laptop and a thermos of coffee and her stack of yellow legal pads and she got to work typing in
The Innocent Impostor,
the screenplay. She was able to revise as she went along, she used an online thesaurus, she referenced a copy of
The Screenwriter’s Bible
that she had checked out of the Nantucket Atheneum. The movie script had started out as a lark, but it had become something real. Was this how Pollock had felt? He’d dripped paint over a canvas in an approximation of child’s play—and somehow it became art? Brenda tried not to think about Walsh or Jackson Pollock or one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars as she worked. She tried not to think:
What am I going to do if I don’t sell it?
Her mind flickered to the phone number she had programmed into her cell phone for Amy Feldman, her student whose father was the president of Marquee Films. To Brenda’s recollection, Amy Feldman had liked
The Innocent Impostor
as much as anyone else; she had turned in a solid midterm paper comparing Calvin Dare to a character from Rick Moody’s novel
The Ice Storm
. Had Amy Feldman heard about what happened to Dr. Lyndon right before the end of the semester? Of course she had. The students were officially told that Dr. Lyndon resigned for personal reasons; the last two classes were cancelled, and Dr. Atela took responsibility for grading the final papers. But the scandalous stories—sex, grade inflation, vandalism—would have been blown up and distorted, told and told again until they reached cinematic proportions. What did Amy Feldman think of Brenda now? Would she pass the screenplay on to her father, or would she throw it into a Dumpster? Or burn it, in effigy, on Champion’s campus?

Brenda typed until her back was stiff, her butt sore from sitting.

Occasionally, the other people in the cottage checked on her. People passing to and from the outdoor shower, for example.

TED

How’s it going?

BRENDA

Fine.