Barefoot (25 page)

“Cab?” Walsh said.

“I’ll get my own,” Brenda said. “East Side, you know.”

“You sure? We can still share.”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, then.” Kiss, another kiss. Another, longer kiss. “I’ll see you Tuesday. Brindah.”

“Tuesday?”

“In class.”

Brenda stood up from her beach towel; she felt dizzy. She walked toward the ocean. She had made no progress on the screenplay again today, and tomorrow was Friday, which meant taking Vicki to chemo, which meant Ted instead of Josh, which meant Brenda would be called in as backup to watch the kids and keep the peace. She had agreed to these duties wholeheartedly. (
Repentance,
she thought
. Atonement.
) This weekend they had an excursion to Smith’s Point planned, complete with bonfire and boxed-up lobster dinners, in an attempt to get Vicki out of the cottage, to get her eating, to get her engaged in the summer and family life—and yet what this
really
meant was that no work got pursued again until Monday.

Brenda waded out past the first set of gently breaking waves and dove under. She wondered what the water felt like in Australia. Back at her towel, she scrolled through the previous ten calls to her cell phone, just in case Walsh had called during her three-minute dip, just in case she had missed his number in the hundred other times she had checked her messages. No, nothing. Brenda had left her copy of
The Innocent Impostor
at home in the briefcase, where it would be safe from the sand and salt air, but if she closed her eyes, she could see the smeared note.
Call John Walsh!

She would call him; she would invite him to come to Nantucket. The beach, the swimming, the fresh air—he would love it here. Did Walsh like lobster? Probably. Being typically Australian, he would eat anything (including, he used to tease Brenda, what he called “bush tucker”—grubs, tree bark, snail eggs). But no sooner had Brenda punched the first four digits into her phone—1-212 (
I could be calling anyone in Manhattan,
she thought)—than the second reel started spinning against her will.
The Crash.
Brenda tried to block out the dominant image, but it came to her anyway. The Jackson Pollock painting.

It had taken weeks for Brenda to discover the painting’s allure, but then, in the days when she was falling in love with Walsh, she became entranced by it. She had a favorite blue line in the painting that ran like a vein from a massive black tangle. The blue was a strand of reason emerging from chaos. Or so she had thought.

You will never work in academia again,
Suzanne Atela had said, the harshness in her voice belied by her lilting Bahamian accent.
I will see to it personally. As for the vandalism charges . . .

Vandalism charges: The phrase sounded so crass, so trashy. Vandalism was a teenage girl taking a Sharpie to the bathroom wall, it was hoodlums spray-painting the skateboard park or breaking the front window of a pizzeria. It had nothing to do with Brenda and Mrs. Pencaldron exchanging words in the Barrington Room. But Brenda had been so, so angry, so confused and frustrated; she had wanted to
throw something!
Even as Mrs. Pencaldron shrieked and ordered Augie Fisk to stand in the doorway, lest Brenda try to escape, even as campus security arrived, Brenda could not take her eyes off the painting. The nasty black snarl mesmerized her; it was like hair caught in a drain, like real feelings shredded by a series of bad decisions.

A hundred and sixty thousand dollars, plus legal fees. This was only the monetary price; this did not even begin to address the damage done to Brenda’s reputation. She would never work in academia again.

Call John Walsh!
the note shouted. But no, she couldn’t do it. She shut off her phone.

The first of July came and went—and still there was no sign of the two hundred and ten dollars from Didi. Josh wasn’t surprised; lending money to Didi was as good as flushing it down the toilet. He wrote a threatening letter to Didi in his journal (
You need to grow up! Take responsibility for your actions! You can’t keep jumping in the deep end and then crying out because you’re drowning!
). Writing was cathartic, and Josh decided to count himself lucky for not enabling Didi a second time. When she’d asked for more money, he had said no, and he hadn’t heard from her since. She did not appear in the parking lot of Nobadeer Beach and she had stopped leaving drunk, late-night messages on his cell phone. Josh would have been happy to let the loan fade from his memory, but the problem was that somebody—Josh would never know who—had mentioned the loan to Tom Flynn, and in the world of Tom Flynn, when you lent out money that you’d earned with your own two hands, you should damn well make a point to get it back. Much to Josh’s dismay, the topic came up at dinner.

“You lent the Patalka girl money?”

Josh had started dating Didi sophomore year in high school—so, six years earlier—and Tom Flynn still (and had always) referred to her as “the Patalka girl.”

“She was in a pinch, she said.”

“She always says. Doesn’t she have a job now?”

“At the hospital,” Josh said, though his father knew this.

“Then why . . .”

“Because she was in a
pinch,
Dad,” Josh said. He did not want to be tricked into saying anything more. “I’ll get it back.”

“See that you do,” Tom Flynn said. “What’s yours is yours. You aren’t working to support her. She doesn’t have college bills to pay.”

“I know that, Dad,” Josh said. “I’ll get it back.”

Tom Flynn said nothing else, which was unfortunate because the “I’ll get it back” hung in the air as the final words on the topic, making them into a promise Josh knew he couldn’t fulfill. He would never, in a million years, call Didi up to ask for the money, if for no other reason than she obviously didn’t have it and any exchange with her on the topic would be depressing and pointless.

And so, when Vicki mentioned, a few days later, that she wanted Josh to join them on an evening picnic out to Smith’s Point on Saturday night, he said yes right away, thinking it would mean another hundred dollars that he could tell his father was from Didi. But it quickly became clear that Saturday night wasn’t an invitation to work; it was simply an invitation. The Three were getting lobster dinners from Sayle’s, they were going to build a bonfire and make s’mores with the kids, they were going to light sparklers and locate constellations and, if the water was warm enough, go for a nighttime swim.

“My husband, Ted, will be there,” Vicki said. “I really think it’s time you two met and hung out a little.”

At that point, Josh tried to backpedal. His role at Number Eleven Shell Street was becoming blurry enough without having him join in on family beach picnics. And the last thing Josh wanted to do was meet Ted Stowe. Normally, Josh left Number Eleven at one o’clock on Friday afternoon and Ted arrived around four; Ted left on Sunday night and Josh returned at eight o’clock on Monday morning. With this schedule in place, Josh had hopes of avoiding Ted Stowe altogether—at least until Ted took his vacation at the end of August. Josh feared two things from Ted Stowe—his dislike (already in place) and his judgment. Josh, in one fleeting but beautiful moment, had kissed Brenda, and now he was starting to pick up funny vibes from Melanie. Ted might perceive this; he might, as the only other man in the house, sense a connection between Josh and one or more of the women. Josh didn’t want to get fired, or beat up, by Ted Stowe. And so, a day after he’d agreed to go on the beach picnic, he took the path of least resistance and approached Brenda.

He caught her on his way out to his Jeep at one o’clock. She was returning from the beach with her notebook, her thermos, and her cell phone.

“How goes the screenplay?” he said.

“Don’t ask,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “I won’t. Hey, listen—I can’t make the picnic thing on Saturday night. I just remembered, I have something else. You’ll tell Vicki?”

Brenda gnawed her lower lip. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Vicki really wants you to come,” Brenda said. “I mean, she’s talked about how much she wants you there. To meet Ted. He’s bringing fishing rods so you guys can surf cast.”

“Us guys?” Josh said. “Surf cast?”

“With Blaine,” Brenda said. She took a deep breath; her chest rose and fell. Josh tried not to look. She was in love with someone else. “I’m afraid if you cancel, Vicki will do something funny. Like bag the whole thing. With the way she is now, that’s exactly what she’ll do. Toss the whole night out the window. And it’s really important that we get her out. We have to boost her spirits.”

“Right,” Josh said. “But it’s a family picnic. I’m not a part of your family.”

“Neither is Melanie,” Brenda said. “And she’s going.”

Josh looked at the ground. Thinking about Melanie only confused him further.

“Is there any way you can reschedule the other thing?” Brenda said. “Any way at all?” She lowered her voice. “I’m happy to pay you.”

“No, no, no,” Josh said quickly. He felt like his true motivation had been discovered and it embarrassed him. “You don’t have to pay me. I’ll come.”

Brenda looked so happy and so relieved that Josh thought she might kiss him again. But no such luck. She just smiled in a really nice way and touched his arm. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

T
he high-performance rating of two fishing rods bought from Urban Angler on Fifth Avenue, the Yukon’s tire pressure, four wooden pallets “borrowed” from the Stop & Shop, five adult lobster dinners complete with boiled new potatoes, corn on the cob, Caesar salad, buttermilk biscuits, half a dozen cherrystone clams, and a two-pound cooked and cracked lobster with drawn butter, a cooler full of Chardonnay and Stella Artois, three perfectly whittled roasting sticks, a box of graham crackers, a bag of marshmallows, a twenty-four-ounce Hershey’s bar, a package of sparklers purchased in Chinatown, the National Audubon Society’s
Guide to the Constellations
.

Vicki didn’t care about the beach picnic. Any other year she would have been the organizing force—did they have bug spray? Was the beach permit prominently displayed on the bumper? Did they have jumper cables, just in case, and a tow rope? Were there hot dogs for the kids, and ketchup, and juice boxes? Did they bring baby powder to get the sand off the kids’ feet? Extra diapers? Porter’s bottle of warm milk? Trash bags? A corkscrew and a bottle opener? The camera? Now, Vicki lay back in bed, listening to Ted and Brenda and Melanie trying to cover all this ground in her stead. She didn’t care. She had gone from feeling like her body was a box of broken toys to feeling nothing at all. A week earlier, in response to her complaints, to her tears, to her tantrum, Dr. Alcott had prescribed a new medication—for depression, he said. For six days, the world had come in and out of focus as Vicki’s consciousness nuzzled the ceiling like a lazy balloon. It was a hundred times worse than pain, this loopiness, this numbness, this sense of disconnect from the real world—the island, the cottage, the people in the cottage, the kids. On Thursday, Vicki flushed the pills, which, she understood, was only a precursor to what she would do the following day. What she did on Friday was skip chemo.

It had been a piece of cake because Brenda was Vicki’s gatekeeper, and although Brenda was doing a good job, exemplary even, Vicki knew Brenda inside and out and playing to her sister’s weaknesses was
a piece of cake.
Friday morning they slipped into the car—discreetly, as always, so as not to alert the kids—and Vicki noticed the yellow legal pad and
The Innocent Impostor
crammed into Brenda’s handbag. This was unusual because although Brenda took the yellow legal pad with her everywhere else, she had never once brought it to chemo. Chemo, for whatever reason, was the time Brenda reserved for reading out-of-date
People
magazines.

“Are you planning on writing today?” Vicki asked.

“I’m really behind,” Brenda said.

“You know, you don’t have to stay at the hospital with me,” Vicki said. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a waste of your time. I know the ropes now, and the team takes good care of me. They’ve never needed you for any reason. Why don’t you just drop me off at the door and—oh, I don’t know—go get a cup of coffee and sit and write at the Even Keel? You’d probably get a lot of work done.”

“You’re probably right.”

“You should do it.”

“I should.”

“I mean it, Bren. It’s two free hours. Come back and get me at eleven.”

Brenda bit her bottom lip and said nothing further on the topic, but Vicki knew her sister. There was no chance that Brenda, after so many years devoted to quiet work—graduate school, dissertation, lecture prep, research—would be able to turn down this offer. Vicki’s heart galloped at the thought of sweet escape. It would be just this once, like a single day of school skipped. There would be no needles, no poison, no Ben or Amelia or Mamie, no ESPN, no antiseptic hospital smell, and—for one summer weekend—no side effects. By next Tuesday, Vicki’s resolve would return; she would store up strength and courage and she would walk back into the Oncology Unit, cheerfully even—if only she could get away with today.

Brenda pulled into the parking lot. She was still gnawing her lower lip, debating maybe, if it would seem selfish to . . .

“Just drop me off,” Vicki said.

Brenda sighed. “Oh, Vick, are you
sure?
”

“Sure I’m sure. Go write. I’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You’re worried about missing your update on Britney Spears?”

Brenda laughed. “No.”

“Come back at eleven,” Vicki said.

Brenda pulled up to the hospital entrance and Vicki hopped out. She caught a glimpse of Brenda’s face as she drove away; Brenda looked like she felt as happy and as free as Vicki now did.

Vicki had spent her two stolen hours lounging in the shade of the Old Mill. Although it was a short walk from the hospital—a good arm could hit it with a baseball—it was as far as Vicki could get, and by the time she made it to the top of the hill, she was close to hyperventilating. She lay in the grass, hidden from passing traffic, and stared up at the sky, at the arms of the windmill slicing the sky into pieces of pie. For two hours she did nothing—and how long had it been since she did
nothing?
Even the hours spent in bed in the cottage felt like work; she was busy recovering, willing her body to fight, and she always kept one eye on the activity in the house—Brenda and Melanie, Josh and the kids. She was always trying to summon the energy to read a page of her book or a section of the newspaper so that her day wasn’t a complete waste. But here, on Prospect Hill, in the shadow of what was still a functioning windmill, Vicki was set free from the rigors of recovery. No one knew where she was, and hence, it was as if she had ceased to exist. This was hooky, plain and simple. She harbored the singular delight of getting away with something. Mamie might call the house, but no one would be home to answer the phone. On Tuesday, Vicki would say she forgot (forgot chemotherapy?) or the car broke down or one of the kids got sick. Or maybe she would admit that she just didn’t want to come. She needed a break. A personal day.
You know what they say about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer,
she would tell Mamie.
It feels good when you stop.