Barefoot (2 page)

When Vicki was diagnosed with lung cancer, the lists came to a halt. This was her doctor’s suggestion, though Vicki initially protested. Lists kept her world in order; they were a safety net that prevented important things from falling through. But Dr. Garcia, and then her husband, Ted, insisted. No more lists. Let them go. If she forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, so what? She would undergo two months of intensive chemotherapy, and if the chemo worked as it was supposed to—shrinking her tumor to a resectable size—it would be followed by thoracic surgery in which they would remove her left lung and her hilar lymph nodes. Chemotherapy, surgery,
survival
—these things were too big for any list. And so, the lists had all been thrown away, except for the one Vicki kept in her head: the List of Things That No Longer Matter.

A brother and sister running across the street, late for their dentist appointments. A pretty skirt worn with the wrong shoes. Peterson’s
Shorebirds. (There was a group of retired women in Darien who wandered the beach with this exact volume in hand. Vicki hated these women. She hated them for being so lucky—they didn’t have cancer, thus they had the luxury of spending precious minutes of their lives tracking an oystercatcher or a blue heron.)

Unfortunately for Brenda and Melanie, there were things about this summer on Nantucket that had initially been placed on Vicki’s List of Things That No Longer Matter—such as whether Brenda and Melanie would get along, or whether all five of them would be comfortable in Aunt Liv’s summer cottage—but now it seemed like they might matter after all.
Vicki’s so organized, she never forgets a thing.
But the fact was, Vicki had forgotten the physical details of Aunt Liv’s cottage. When Vicki made the radical decision to come to Nantucket for the summer, her only thought had been of the comfort that Aunt Liv’s cottage, and Nantucket, would give her. Every summer growing up she had stayed in the cottage with her parents and Brenda and Aunt Liv. It was her favorite place, it defined summertime, and Vicki’s mother, Ellen Lyndon, had always sworn that any ailment in the world—physical or emotional—could be cured by a little Nantucket sand between your toes. Everyone else thought Vicki was crazy to go away for the summer, endangering herself even, but another thing that Vicki put on her List of Things That No Longer Matter was what everyone else thought.

Inviting Brenda to come along had been the obvious choice. Vicki needed help with the kids and getting back and forth to chemo, and Brenda, fired from Champion in a blaze of scandal with attendant legal trouble, was desperate to escape the city. It was summer, salvaged for both of them. In the harrowing days following Vicki’s diagnosis, they talked about reliving their memories from childhood: long beach days, catching fireflies, bike rides to Sesachacha Pond, corn on the cob, games of Monopoly and badminton, picking blackberries, twilight walks up to Sankaty Head Lighthouse, which spun its beacon like a cowboy with a wild lasso, picnics of bologna-and-potato-chip sandwiches, spending every day barefoot. It would be just the two of them, creating memories for Vicki’s own kids. It was a chance for Vicki to heal, for Brenda to regroup. They would follow their mother’s advice: Nantucket sand between the toes. It might cure anything: cancer, ruined careers, badly ended love affairs.
Just the two of us,
they said as they sat under the harsh hospital lights awaiting a second opinion. It would be a sister summer.

But how, really, could Vicki leave her best friend behind in Darien—especially with the monstrous news of Peter’s affair followed by an even bigger stunner (whispered, frantically, at three in the morning over the telephone). Melanie was—after all this time, after so many costly and invasive procedures—pregnant!

Come to Nantucket,
Vicki had said immediately, and without thinking (and without consulting Ted or Brenda).

Okay,
Melanie had said just as quickly.
I will.

As the taxi pulled up in front of Aunt Liv’s cottage, Vicki feared she’d made a mistake. The house was smaller than Vicki remembered, a lot smaller. It was a shoe box; Blaine had friends with playhouses bigger than this. Had it shrunk? Vicki wondered. Because she remembered whole summers with her parents and Brenda and Aunt Liv, and the house had seemed, if not palatial, then at least comfortable.

“It’s darling,” Melanie said as she stepped out of the cab. “Oh, Vicki, it’s all that I imagined.”

Vicki unhinged the front gate. The landscapers had come, thank God. Melanie loved flowers. Pale pink New Dawn roses cascaded down a trellis, and the front beds had been planted with cosmos and blue delphiniums and fat, happy-faced zinnias. There were butterflies. The postage-stamp lawn had been recently mowed.

“Where’s the sandbox?” Blaine said. “Where’s the curly slide?”

Vicki produced a key from her purse and opened the front door, which was made from three rough-hewn planks and sported a brass scallop-shell knocker. The doorway was low. As Vicki stepped through, she thought of her husband, Ted, a hale and hearty six foot five. He had told her from the beginning that he was
vehemently against
her going to Nantucket. Did she really want to spend all summer with her sister, with whom her relationship was spotty at best? And Melanie Patchen, who would be as needy as Vicki, if not more so? And did she really want her chemotherapy—the chemo that she was asking to save her life—to be administered at the Nantucket Cottage Hospital? Wasn’t that the equivalent of being treated in the Third World?
What the hell are you thinking?
he asked. He sounded confused and defeated. Ted was a hedge fund manager in Manhattan; he liked problems he could fell like trees, problems he could solve with brute strength and canny intelligence. The horrifying diagnosis, the wing-and-a-prayer treatment plan, and then Vicki’s wacko decision to flee for the summer left him confounded. But Vicki couldn’t believe she was being asked to explain herself.

It was, quite possibly, the last summer of her life, and she didn’t want to spend it in stifling hot Darien under the sympathetic scrutiny of her friends and peers. Already, Vicki’s circumstances were being repeated like the Song of the Day:
Did you hear? Vicki Stowe has lung cancer. They’re going to try chemo first and then they’ll decide if it’s worth operating. They don’t know if she’ll make it.
A steady stream of food and flowers arrived along with the offer of playdates.
Let us take Blaine. Let us take the baby. So you can rest.
Vicki was the new Darien charity. She couldn’t stand the casseroles or the calla lilies; she couldn’t stand her children being farmed out like they were orphans. The women circled like buzzards—some close friends, some friends of friends, some women she barely knew. Ted didn’t get it; he saw it as outreach by a caring community.
That’s why we moved here,
he said.
These are our neighbors, our friends.
But Vicki’s desire to get away grew every time the phone rang, every time a Volvo station wagon pulled into the driveway.

Vicki’s mother was the one who had suggested Nantucket; she would have joined Vicki herself but for an ill-timed knee replacement. Vicki latched on to the idea, despite the fact that her mother wouldn’t be coming to help. Aunt Liv’s estate had been settled in March; the house belonged to her and Brenda now. It felt like a sign. Brenda was all for it. Even Vicki’s oncologist, Dr. Garcia, gave his okay; he assured her that chemo was chemo. The treatment would be the same on Nantucket as it would be in Connecticut, or in the city. The people in Vicki’s cancer support group, all of whom embraced holistic as well as conventional medical treatment, understood.
Enjoy yourself,
they said.
Relax. Play with your kids. Be outside. Talk with your sister, your friend. Look at the stars. Eat organic vegetables. Try to forget about fine-needle aspirations, CT scans, metastases. Fight the good fight, on your own terms, in your own space. Have a lovely summer
.

Vicki had held Ted hostage with her eyes. Since her diagnosis, she’d watched him constantly—tying his necktie, removing change from his suit pocket, stirring sugar into his coffee—hoping to memorize him, to take him with her wherever she went.

I’ll miss you,
she said.
But I’m going.

The cottage had been built in 1803—back, Vicki thought, when life was both busier and simpler, back when people were shorter and held lower expectations. The cottage had originally been one room with a fireplace built into the north wall, but over the years, three “warts” had been added for bedrooms. All of the rooms were small with low ceilings; it was like living in a dollhouse. That was what Aunt Liv had loved about the cottage—it was life pared down, scaled way back. There was no TV, no answering machine, no computer or microwave or stereo. It was a true summerhouse, Aunt Liv used to say, because it encouraged you to spend most of your time outside—on the back deck overlooking the yard and garden, or down the street at ’Sconset’s public beach. Back in 1803 when the woman of the house had cancer, there were no oncologists or treatment plans. A woman worked right through it—stoking the fire, preparing meals, stirring the laundry in a cauldron of boiling water—until one day she died in bed. These were Vicki’s thoughts as she stepped inside.

The cottage had been cleaned and the furniture aired. Vicki had arranged for all of this by telephone; apparently, houses that sat dormant for three years were common stuff on Nantucket. The house smelled okay, maybe a bit too optimistically like air freshener. The living room floors were made from wide, buttery pine boards that showed every scratch from a dragged chair, every divot from a pair of high heels. The plaster-and-wood-beamed ceiling was low, and the furniture was old-ladyish, like something out of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast: Aunt Liv’s delft blue high-back sofa, the dainty coffee table with a silver-plated tea service resting on a piece of Belgian lace. There were the bookshelves bowing under the weight of Aunt Liv’s summer library, there was the fireplace with mismatched andirons. Vicki moved into the small kitchen, appliances circa 1962, silver-threaded Formica, Aunt Liv’s china, which was painted with little Dutch girls in wooden shoes. The caretaker’s bill was secured to the refrigerator with a magnet advertising a restaurant called the Elegant Dump, which had been defunct for years.

The west bedroom was sunny. That would be Melanie’s room. Twin beds were made up with the pink-and-orange-striped sheets that Vicki remembered from her childhood. (What she remembered most vividly was staining the sheets during her first period. Aunt Liv had sensibly pulled out the hydrogen peroxide while Ellen Lyndon had chirped with over-the-top sentimentality about how “Vicki is a woman now” and Brenda glowered and chewed her cuticles.) Vicki would take the largest bedroom, with the king bed, where she would sleep with the kids, and Brenda would sleep in the old nursery, a room just slightly bigger than Vicki’s walk-in closet at home. This was the room Aunt Liv had always occupied—it was called the old nursery because both Aunt Liv and Vicki and Brenda’s grandmother Joy had slept in cribs in that room alongside the family’s baby nurse, Miss George, more than eighty years earlier. Once Aunt Liv had arthritis and every other old-person ailment, Vicki’s parents suggested she take the big bedroom—but that didn’t suit Liv. She stopped coming to Nantucket altogether, and then she died.

There was a flurry of activity as everyone piled into the house, dragging luggage and boxes. The cabbie stood by the car, waiting to be paid. That was Vicki’s department. She was going to pay for everything all summer. She was summer’s sponsor. She handed the kid twenty bucks.
Enough?

He grinned.
Too much.
“Thanks, ma’am. Enjoy your stay.”

As the cab pulled away, Blaine started to cry. Vicki worried that all the change would traumatize him; there had been a scene at breakfast when he’d said good-bye to Ted, and then he’d knocked Melanie off the airplane’s steps. He was acting out. It was three o’clock, and although he was outgrowing his nap, Vicki knew he needed some quiet time. She herself was bone weary. Just picking up her bag and walking five feet to the bedroom made her feel like she’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Her lungs were on fire. She hated them.

Suddenly, Brenda made a noise even worse than Blaine’s whiny cry. She was moaning in that
Oh no, oh no, no,
the-world-is-ending kind of way
.
What was it? A dead animal in the old nursery? A family of dead animals? Vicki lowered her bottom onto her bed’s squishy mattress. She didn’t have the energy to move, so she called out, “What’s wrong, Bren?”

Brenda appeared in the absurdly low doorway of Vicki’s bedroom. “I can’t find my book.”

Vicki didn’t have to ask which book. This was Brenda, her sister. There was only one book: Brenda’s two-hundred-year-old first edition of Fleming Trainor’s
The Innocent Impostor
. This book, a little-known novel of a mediocre Early American writer, was the foundation of Brenda’s career. Brenda had spent six years getting her master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Iowa, she had written a dissertation and had part of it published in an obscure literary journal, and she’d landed the job at Champion University—all because of this book. The first edition was an antique, worth thousands of dollars, Brenda claimed. She had owned it since she was fourteen years old, when she bought it for fifty cents at a flea market. The book was, for all intents and purposes, Brenda’s pet. She wouldn’t
consider
leaving it in Manhattan, where the subletter could get at it. It had traveled with them in a special briefcase—temperature and humidity controlled, the whole nine yards. Now it was missing.

“Are you sure?” Vicki said. “Did you check everywhere?” Despite the fact that Brenda’s missing book fell squarely onto Vicki’s List of Things That No Longer Matter, she tried to summon sympathy in the interest of getting things off to a good start. And crises of this nature were Vicki’s specialty. With the kids, her day was spent hunting for things: the other shoe, the ball that rolled under the sofa, the pacifier!