Barefoot (46 page)

“What’s wrong?” Josh said.

The three of them looked up—Josh looked at Ted’s face and Brenda’s face, both of which communicated dire happenings. Josh could not look at Melanie. And where was Vicki? The door to her bedroom was closed.

“It’s nothing,” Brenda said. “Vicki just has a headache.”

“Oh,” Josh said. A headache? That was the cause of the dolorous communion around the table like the three of them were government officials of a country that was collapsing? A headache? For this the kids had been either punished or bribed with unsupervised time in the fraught-with-peril backyard?

“She’s in a lot of pain,” Ted said. “She can’t tolerate the sunlight. She can’t stand the kids’ voices.”

“Oh,” Josh said. “Did this just come about out of the blue?”

“Out of the blue,” Ted said. “We called Dr. Alcott for some pain pills. He wants to see her.”

“See her?” Josh said.

“He wants to do an MRI,” Brenda said. “But Vicki, of course, refuses to go.”

Melanie was silent. She was as marginal to this drama as Josh was. That was part of their connection, that was how they’d found each other in the first place—involved but not connected. Connected but not related. Melanie’s eyes were locked on him in a way that was almost impossible to ignore.

“So . . . I should take the kids?” Josh said.

“Please,” Ted said.

“I’ll go with you,” Melanie said. “To help.”

“No, that’s all right,” Josh said. “We’ll be okay.”

“No, really,” Melanie said. “I don’t mind.”

“Well, I . . . ,” Josh nearly said “
do
mind,” but he already had Ted and Brenda peering at him curiously. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Whatever.”

As they ambled down Shell Street, Josh felt supremely self-conscious. He had walked this way dozens of times with Blaine and Porter—and yet with Melanie at his side, he felt like this was his family: Blaine and Porter his sons, Melanie his pregnant wife. The people they passed in front of the ’Sconset Market easily could have believed this was the case—and what was worse, Josh realized, was that a part of him
wanted
this to be the case. Part of him wanted to marry Melanie and have children with her. And yet, he was angry with her, he’d been hurt by her, and he resented the way she’d just insinuated herself into his routine with the boys, giving him no chance to protest or assert his control. Hence, he said very little. But that didn’t stop Melanie from blundering ahead.

“I miss you,” she said.

He met this with silence. He was happy to hear her say it, but it wasn’t enough.

“Do you miss me?” she asked.

“Melanie,” he said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter.”

“I’m not going to do this all morning. This ‘I miss you, do you miss me’ thing. Why did you even come with us?”

“I wanted to get out of the house. It was tense.”

Josh eyed Blaine. Blaine was in one of his rare mellow, reflective moods—Josh could tell he wasn’t listening with his usual acuity.

“Is it serious?” Josh said. “The headache?”

“It could be, I guess.”

“Oh,” he said.

They walked in silence all the way to the beach parking lot.

“Do
not
run ahead,” Josh said to Blaine. “We’ll all go together.”

“I know,” Blaine said.

Melanie sniffed. “I want you to meet me here tonight.”

“No.”

“It’s only for another week.”

“I know, so what does it matter?”

“It matters,” she said. “I want to be with you.”

Josh looked at Blaine. His head seemed to be cocked at the perfect angle for listening; maybe this was Josh’s imagination, but Josh didn’t care. He shook his head at Melanie. Porter babbled in Josh’s ear.

Later, when Blaine was playing two umbrellas down with Abby Brooks and Porter was halfway through his bottle on his way to la-la land, Melanie hoisted herself up out of the chair and plopped down next to Josh on his towel. He readied himself for another onslaught, but Melanie was quiet and as still as a statue, and yet she was most definitely
there;
Josh could smell her hair and her skin. They sat side by side, staring at the ocean and the people in it, and it should have been tense, but surprisingly, it was okay. Coexisting, without touching or talking. Josh found himself afraid to move, afraid to break whatever spell had been temporarily cast over them. Maybe this was what Melanie meant by closure. It wasn’t the rapture he’d experienced all summer—the night at the Shimmo house came to mind, rolling around with Melanie on those sheets, holding her close as they stood on the deck taking in the view—but it wasn’t bad or painful, either. He felt like he was suspended directly between the best minutes with Melanie and the worst, and there was something comforting in the neither-good-nor-bad of it. Ten days from today Josh would be beside his father in their Ford Explorer, driving back to Middlebury. He would see his friends, girls, people he hadn’t thought of in three months, and they would ask him,
How was your summer?
And all he knew for certain as he sat, sharing his towel with Melanie, was that there was no way he would ever be able to explain.

First, there was the dream. Vicki couldn’t remember it completely. It was a surgery dream, the doctors were going to perform Vicki’s surgery right then and there and not on September first as they had planned. There was urgency, secrecy—somehow Vicki was told, or perhaps she discerned, that what they were removing from her lungs wasn’t tumors at all, but rather, precious jewels. Huge rubies, emeralds, amethysts, sapphires—the biggest in the world, right there inside Vicki’s chest, embedded in the healthy tissue of Vicki’s lungs. The doctors weren’t doctors, they were thieves of some international acclaim; they were planning on doing the surgery, she learned, without any anesthetic. Vicki would die from the pain; they were planning on killing her.

She woke up. Not with a start, like in the movies, not sitting straight up in bed gasping for breath, but quietly. She opened her eyes and felt tears on her cheeks. Ted was beside her, breathing like a man on vacation. With a crook of her neck, Vicki saw both her children asleep on the mattress on the floor. It hurt to breathe. Vicki wondered what the inside of her chest would look like after the surgery. Would there be a big hole where her lung used to be?

The surgery, now that it was a reality, was newly terrifying.
It has to be done, obviously
, Dr. Garcia had said months ago.
If you want to live.
Funny how the surgery was what Vicki had wished for, it was the
goal
of the chemotherapy, and yet it frightened her beyond all comprehension. It made her insides twist, her pelvis tighten, it made her shoulders and wrists stiff with anxiety. The anesthesia alone was nearly impossible to come to grips with. She would be out, way out, for more than six hours. It was different from sleep, she understood that. It was forced unconsciousness, a place between sleep and death. Vicki would be kept there, in that purgatory of nothingness, while they cut through her chest muscles, spread open her rib cage, collapsed her lung, and then removed it. It was worse than a horror movie. A hundred things could go wrong during the surgery and a hundred things could go wrong with the anesthesia. What if the surgery was a success but they pushed her too far under with the anesthetic and she drowned in it? What if she crossed to the other side?

She lay in bed, ticking like an overheated engine. Was it any wonder she couldn’t sleep? Was it any wonder she had nightmares?

Next came the headache.

When Vicki woke up in the morning she felt like she was wearing a lead helmet. There was not only pain, there was pressure. Blaine launched himself onto the bed as he did every morning when Ted was there—no need to worry about Mommy not feeling well when Dad was around—and Porter whined to be lifted up. He was still too little to climb. Vicki opened one eye. This wasn’t intentional; it seemed, for whatever reason, that she could only get one eye open. And even that took a Herculean effort. And it hurt—sunlight coming in around the edges of the shades hurt, and Porter’s whining hurt. She tried to extend a hand to the baby, thinking she might haul him up onto the mattress with one arm despite the fact that he weighed nearly twenty pounds, but she couldn’t sit up to get leverage. She couldn’t lift her head.

“Ted?” she said. Her voice was dry and papery. She was just dehydrated, maybe. She needed water. She reached for the glass she kept on the nightstand, but her arms trembled and she could not lift her head to take a sip. Ted was busy with the kids, tickling and teasing, roughhousing and kicking—and he didn’t hear her. The glass slipped, or she dropped it, it got away from her somehow, and fell to the floor, spilling everywhere, though it didn’t break.

“Jesus, Vick,” Ted said.

“My head,” she said.

“What?”

“My head,” she said, “is killing me.” This sounded colloquial—it was, after all, a popular turn of phrase—and hence there was no way Ted would know Vicki meant it literally. Her head was killing her. Her head was trying to kill her.

“The light,” she said. “The kids.” She pulled the sheet over her head but it was as effective at blocking out noise and sunlight as a Kleenex.

“Do you want aspirin?” Ted said. “Some chocolate milk?”

As if she had a hangover. There had been some wine the night before—wine every night since her CT scan—but this was not a hangover. Still, Vicki wasn’t hearty enough to turn down the offer of medicine.

“I might have painkillers left,” she said. Just eking out this sentence hurt.

Ted sloughed the boys off the bed and scooted Blaine out the door of the bedroom. “Go out. Mom doesn’t feel well.”

“Again?” Blaine said.

Ah, the guilt. Blaine would probably end up in therapy due to Vicki’s cancer, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Get better, she thought. Then worry about it.

Ted held Porter in one arm and checked the prescription bottles on Vicki’s dresser.

“Percocet,” he said. “Empty.”

“Shit,” she said. She was pretty sure there’d been three or four left. Brenda? “Would you call Dr. Alcott?”

“And tell him what?” Ted was like Vicki used to be: supremely uncomfortable around doctors. But since Vicki had begun regularly relying on doctors to save her life, her attitude had changed.

“Call in more,” Vicki said. And then she became confused. Why was she asking Blaine to call the doctor? Would he, at the age of four and a half, be able to do it? He wasn’t even good at talking on the phone with his grandmother. “Magic words,” Vicki reminded him.

Who knew how many painful moments passed? It felt like forever. Vicki moaned into her pillow. She could hear noises from the rest of the house, domestic noises—the frying pan hitting the stove, eggs cracking, the whisk chiming against the side of the stoneware bowl, the butter melting, the refrigerator door opening and closing, ice in a glass, Porter crying, the rubber squeal of the high chair sliding across the linoleum, Blaine’s constant stream of chatter, Ted’s voice—yes, on the phone, thank God. So much noise—and all of it as loud and unpleasant to her ears as a jackhammer in the room. Vicki grabbed Ted’s goose-down pillow and covered her head.

The pain was a hand squeezing water from the sponge of her brain. Let go!

There was a tap on the door. Brenda. “Vick, are you okay?”

Vicki wanted to scream at her sister for stealing her Percocet, but screaming was beyond her.

“Headache,” Vicki mumbled. “Unbearable pain.”

“Ted just called Dr. Alcott. He wants you to come in.”

Come in where? Vicki thought. Come into the hospital? Impossible. The whole idea of getting out of bed, getting into the car, driving through the eyeball-bursting sunny day to the hospital, completely preposterous.

Ted’s voice was alongside Brenda’s now. “Dr. Alcott wants to see you, Vick.”

“Because I have a headache?” Vicki said. “What about the Percocet?”

“He’s calling them in,” Ted said.

Vicki felt something like relief, though it was difficult to identify under the blanket of pain.

“But he wants you to come in,” Ted said. “He wants to take a look at you. He said it might not be a bad idea to have an MRI.”

“Why?” Vicki said.

“I don’t know.”

That was a big, fat lie. Metastasis to the brain, she thought. Dr. Alcott’s suspicions were correct; she could feel it. The cancer was a hand, fingers spreading through her brain, pressing down. The cancer was a spider, nesting in her gray matter. The pain, the pressure, the increased sensitivity to sound, to light. This was what a brain tumor felt like; she had heard someone in her cancer support group describe it, but she couldn’t remember who. Alan? No, Alan was dead. It wasn’t Alan. Vicki said, “I had too much wine last night.”

“One glass?” Ted said.

“Water,” Vicki said. “Magic words. Please. Thank you.”

The pillow was lifted. Vicki smelled Brenda—what was it? Noxema. Piña colada suntan lotion.

“You’re not making sense, Vick. Open your eyes.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

Vicki tried. The one eye opened. There was a very blurry Brenda. Behind her, a form Vicki knew to be Ted, but could just as easily have been an international thief, come to cut her open and take the jewels.

“You stole my Percocets,” Vicki said to Brenda.

“Yes,” Brenda said. “I’m sorry.”

“I need them,” Vicki said. “Now.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Ted said. “I’ll take the kids.”

“I’ll get you water,” Brenda said to Vicki. “Ice water with paper-thin slices of lemon, just how you like it.”

“No hospital,” Vicki said. “I’m never going back.”

Brenda and Ted left the room. The click of the door shutting was like a gunshot. Brenda said to Ted, “Her pupil was really dilated. What do you suppose that means?”

There’s a spider on my brain, Vicki thought. Brenda was whispering, but her voice reverberated in Vicki’s head like she was back at CBGB at a B-52’s concert standing next to the chin-high speaker, which was blaring at a bazillion decibels.
Quiet!

“I have no idea,” Ted said.