Barefoot (52 page)

After dinner, there was pie, ice cream, the last of the wine, and smaller glasses of port passed around for the men. Buzz Lyndon produced cigars. Ted accepted one, though Josh declined and so did Walsh. Brenda said, “Daddy, cigars stink.”

“Keeps the bugs away,” Buzz Lyndon said.

Vicki stood up. “I have to . . .” She touched the top of Blaine’s head. “Josh? Will you r——ead?”

Blaine, who was almost asleep on his grandmother’s lap, revived enough to say, “Stories! Please, Josh?”

Melanie squeezed his knee. Josh stood up. “Ohhhh-kay,” he said.

He lay down with Blaine on the mattress on the floor of Ted and Vicki’s bedroom. Porter was already fast asleep, sucking away on his pacifier. Vicki sat on the bed. She handed Josh
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
.

“It’s sad,” she said.

“Mom cries whenever she reads it,” Blaine said.

“Does she, now?” Josh said. He winked at Vicki, then cleared his throat and started to read.

The story was about a donkey named Sylvester who finds a shiny red pebble that turns out to have magic powers. When Sylvester wishes for rain, it rains; when Sylvester wishes for the rain to stop, it stops. One day, when Sylvester is out, he sees a hungry lion approaching, and in a moment of panic, he wishes he were a rock. Sylvester turns into a rock and he is saved from the lion—but because Sylvester drops the magic pebble, he has no way to turn himself back into a donkey. He is stuck being a rock, no matter how hard he wishes otherwise. When Sylvester does not return home, his parents grow sick with worry. After weeks of searching, they come to the conclusion that Sylvester is dead. They are nearly destroyed by the loss of their only child.

In the springtime, however, Sylvester’s parents venture out for a picnic and they come across the rock that is Sylvester, and they use him as a table. Then Sylvester’s father spies the magic pebble in the grass—and, knowing it is an object his son would have loved, he picks it up and places it on the rock.

Sylvester can sense his parents’ presence; he can hear them talking. No sooner does he think, “I wish I were myself again, I wish I were my real self again,” than this becomes true—he turns back into a donkey, right before his parents’ eyes. And—oh!—what happiness!

In the end, Sylvester and his parents return home and put the marble in an iron safe.

“‘Some day they might want to use it,’” Josh read, “‘but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They had all that they wanted.’”

“They had all that they wanted,” Blaine repeated. “Because they’re together again.”

Vicki nodded. Her mouth was a line.

Josh closed the book. He found it difficult to speak. It would be impossible to say good-bye to the boys right now, and so he kissed first Porter, and then Blaine, on the top of the head.

“Yes,” he said.

When Josh and Vicki emerged from the bedroom, the dinner party was breaking up. Ellen Lyndon was finishing the dishes, Brenda and Walsh had left for a walk up to the lighthouse, Ted and Buzz Lyndon were standing on the back deck, blowing smoke into the night air. Josh had wondered all through dinner if he would have the guts to stay here with Melanie tonight, and now he saw the answer was no. There was an unspoken understanding about him and Melanie, but it had to remain unspoken; there was no point lifting the veil now, on the final day. Josh said his good-byes to the elder Lyndons and gave Ted his best interview handshake.

Ted said, “Oh, wait, I have something for you,” and pulled a check out of his wallet.

“Thanks,” Josh said. He was embarrassed by the money; he stuffed the check into the pocket of his suit pants, though he couldn’t help noticing, in a quick glance, that the check had one more zero on it than usual.

By the time Ted and Josh made it inside, the elder Lyndons had left for the Wade Cottages, down the street, where they were staying. So it was just Ted, Vicki, Josh and—pouring herself a glass of water at the kitchen sink—Melanie.

Ted said, “I’m going to bed. Good night, all.”

Vicki said, “Me, too. Tired.” She looked at Josh, and her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t say good——bye to you.”

There was a lump in his throat and it ached. “Oh, Boss,” he said.

She hugged him tight. “Josh,” she said. “Th——ank you.”

“Stop it. You don’t have to thank me.”

“I’m grateful.”

“I’m grateful, too,” he said. He paused, thinking of his father’s words:
It crossed my mind . . . that you’re out there in ’Sconset trying to find your mother.
Well, it wasn’t impossible.

Vicki wiped her eyes. They separated.

“Get better,” Josh said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean it, Boss.”

“I know,” she said. “I know you do.”

Vicki disappeared into the bedroom, and Josh turned around. Melanie was standing there, sniffling.

“That was beautiful,” she said. “But you know me these days, reading the phone book makes me cry.”

Josh unrolled the sleeve of his white dress shirt and used it to wipe the tears from Melanie’s face. It had been a very, very long day, perhaps the longest day of his life, but even so, he wasn’t ready for it to end.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “You can drive.”

For weeks, Brenda had dreaded the day they were to leave Nantucket—but now, with Walsh at her side, it didn’t seem so bad. They would return to Manhattan together, Brenda would assess the damage and make some decisions. As Brenda was packing up, Ellen Lyndon teetered into Brenda’s room and handed her a jelly jar filled with sand.

“For your shoes,” Ellen Lyndon said. “I just gave your sister some.”

Brenda shook her head. “You’re insane, Mother.”

“You’re welcome,” Ellen Lyndon said.

Brenda considered the jar. She didn’t really have room for it in either of her bags. She would just leave it on the dresser. But first, just in case Ellen Lyndon actually was the owner of divine intuition, Brenda sprinkled some of the sand into her Prada loafers, shoes she had not worn since arriving on the island. And then, in the end, she stuffed the jelly jar into her duffel bag. She needed all the help she could get.

Brenda’s parents left first on the fast ferry; they would pick up their car in Hyannis and drive back to Philadelphia. Melanie was the next to go. Josh appeared in his Jeep to deliver her to the airport so she could make her flight to LaGuardia. Ted, Vicki, and the boys were taking the noon boat and driving back to Connecticut in the jam-packed Yukon. So that left Brenda and Walsh to close up the house. Brenda was amazed that her parents and Vicki had entrusted her with such a massive responsibility, and she wanted to do a thorough job. The fridge was empty and shut off, the gas line disengaged from the grill, the beds stripped. Brenda returned Aunt Liv’s enamel boxes, silver tea set, and lace doilies to their rightful place on the coffee table; she tucked the key under a shingle for the caretaker, who would come the next morning. Right before Brenda closed the door to the cottage for good, she noticed the paper cup of pebbles sitting on a high windowsill. Should she leave it there or throw it away?

She left it there. There was always next summer.

Brenda’s cell phone rang in the cab on the way to the airport. For the first time in months, the Beethoven-in-a-blender ring did not cause her any anxiety.

“Well, I know it’s not you,” she said to Walsh. “Not that it was ever you.”

“I called once,” he said.

Brenda checked the display:
Brian Delaney, Esquire.
Her instinct was to let it go to voice mail, but she couldn’t run away forever.

“Hello, Counsel,” she said.

“I just got the strangest phone call,” said Himself.

“Did you?” Brenda said. Her mind started running like a taxi meter times ten. “Pertaining to me?”

“Someone called asking about the rights to your screenplay,” he said.

“What?”

“This guy, Feldman? He called the university and they gave him my name, as your attorney.”

“Feldman?” Brenda said. In the end, she hadn’t sent her screenplay to Ron Feldman or anyone else at Marquee Films. Because after that horrible phone call, what was the point?

“Yeah. I guess he borrowed his daughter’s copy of the book and he liked it and he wants to see your screenplay. He was very clear that he makes no promises. I guess Marquee is already doing something similar, a book by some guy named George Eliot, more of that old-time shit, but he did like the Fleming Trainor, he said, and he wants to see the script. You know, I sort of got the impression he thought I was your
agent
.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“I told him the script was out with various studio execs, we had lots of interest, but that we would keep him in the loop before we made any decisions.”

“You’re
kidding
me,” Brenda said. “God, I cannot believe this.”

“He makes no promises, Brenda. In fact, he said even if he did option it, it might molder for years, unproduced. I asked him what his ballpark was for an option, and he made it clear it was five figures, not six, so don’t go jumping over the moon.”

When Brenda hung up, she threw her arms around Walsh’s neck. “Feldman wants to see it. He makes no promises, but he does want to see it.” This was good news, not great news, not the best news, but not bad news either. For the first time all summer, Brain Delaney, Esquire, had called without bad news.

Brenda rested her head against Walsh’s sturdy Australian shoulder as the taxi barreled down Milestone Road toward the airport. She was already over the moon.

EPILOGUE

WINTER

A
ll over the world, mothers are dying, but at eleven o’clock on the morning of January 29, a mother is born. Melanie Patchen delivers a baby girl, Amber Victoria, weighing eight pounds even and measuring twenty inches long. Healthy.

When the nurses wheel Melanie out of recovery (after eighteen hours in labor, an epidural, a shot of Pitocin, and a distressed heartbeat, the doctors performed a C-section), Melanie is able to hold her daughter and nurse her for the first time, and she feels like the world is brand-new; she feels like she is seeing everything for the first time.

When she conveys this feeling to Peter, he says, “That’s the morphine talking.”

I have a baby,
Melanie thinks.
This baby is mine
.
I’m her
mother
.

Melanie becomes mesmerized by the impossible smallness of Amber’s every feature—her small mouth, her tiny ears, her fingers and toes, her beating heart the size of an egg. The baby cries, she opens her eyes and turns her head toward sound, she roots against Melanie until she latches onto a nipple. Melanie feels an explosive, protective, overwhelming love. She wants to tell everyone about this new love, how it puts everything else into perspective. But what she quickly discovers is that the world falls into two categories: those who don’t care and those who already know.

For three days straight, flowers arrive. There are orchids from Vicki and Ted, pink roses from Melanie’s parents, a cyclamen from Peter’s mother in Paris, an embarrassingly lavish and funereal arrangement from “the gang at Rutter, Higgens,” red gerbera daisies from Melanie and Peter’s neighbors, a potted chrysanthemum from Brenda Lyndon and John Walsh, forced paperwhites from Melanie’s college roommate . . . the flowers keep coming until the nurses start to joke about Melanie being “quite the popular one.” Melanie sends the next three arrangements over to the cancer ward.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, when Melanie is nursing Amber in bed, more flowers arrive. The arrangement is modest, sparse even. It’s tea roses and carnations, a few sprays of baby’s breath; it comes in a mug that says
Mommy
and has a pink, heart-shaped Mylar balloon attached.

“Another one,” the nurse says. It’s Stephanie, Melanie’s favorite nurse, the head of Labor and Delivery. She is blond and pretty, kind and capable; she was with Melanie through the last part of her labor and her C-section and she has done most of the teaching—how to feed and burp the baby, how to give her a sponge bath, how to clean around the umbilical cord.

Melanie smiles. “And here I thought everyone had forgotten about me.”

“Apparently not,” Stephanie says. She sets the mug down on Melanie’s meal tray. “Would you like me to read you the card?”

Melanie studies the flowers. What she realizes is that she’s been waiting for flowers just like this: inexpensive but earnest. Easily purchased online.

“No, thanks,” Melanie says. “It’ll give me something to look forward to when I’m done feeding her.”

“You’re doing a great job, by the way,” Stephanie says. “The baby’s already back up to her birth weight. That’s what we like to see.”

Melanie gazes down at Amber’s soft head, covered with dark fuzz. Stephanie leaves the room.

Later, when the baby is asleep in her bassinet, Melanie removes the envelope from the prongs of the plastic fork sticking out of the arrangement.
Melanie Patchen,
the envelope says.

Peter is picking up his mother at JFK; Melanie expects them at dinnertime.

She takes out the card. It says:
I know she’s beautiful.

Melanie’s eyes flood with tears, and in an instant, she is sobbing. Stephanie had told her to expect this—sudden tears, for no apparent reason. Her hormones are all over the place. Melanie looks first at her baby sleeping and then out the window—the late-afternoon sky is gray and there are snow flurries. In the hallway, Melanie can hear strains of Muzak. She has just given birth to a gorgeous, healthy baby, and yet all she can do is cry, cry until she is struggling to catch her breath. She is back together with Peter; they are a couple again. All she can do is hope; she likens her marriage to the New Dawn roses that hung on the front of Number Eleven Shell Street.
If you cut them back,
Melanie had told Blaine,
they’ll be even lovelier next time.
Melanie is filled with love and joy and wonder, and yet, she is empty. She has everything she ever wanted, but she longs for . . .

For what?

For summertime. For an hour on a sunny deck, for a perfect slice of tomato, for the song of the wren that perched outside her window, for the way her body felt when it was cradled by the ocean’s waves, for a perfect blue hydrangea hanging over a white picket fence, for butterflies and bumblebees, for ice-cream cones after dinner, for the passenger seat of the Jeep. How intoxicating it had felt to ride down Milestone Road with the windows open and the night air rushing in, how quickening to pull up to the beach and see the water before them and the night sky spread out like a blanket, how lucky she had felt simply to sit beside someone as extraordinary as Josh Flynn.

Melanie wipes her tears and reads the card again. (She will read it every day at first and then only on days when she needs a lift, when she needs a reminder of happiness.)

I know she’s beautiful.

The card is unsigned.

Today, Vicki’s list runs two pages long. It’s a Thursday in early February, and it also happens to be Blaine’s fifth birthday. Vicki is throwing a party that afternoon at four o’clock at Chuck E. Cheese’s. This is the venue Blaine ardently lobbied for, and Vicki acquiesced, as it conveniently placed the chaos outside the house. Still, there are balloons to pick up as well as the cake and presents. There is a Valentine’s Day charity auction on Saturday night, and Vicki had hoped to get into the city to shop for something to wear (everything she has is too big; she still hasn’t recouped from her weight loss), but the shopping will have to wait, as will the hundred other things on her list. The birthday party is important, yes, but there is something else in the early part of Vicki’s day that’s even more important.

Her cancer support group at ten-thirty.

Vicki manages to get there on time, or almost. She slips into a seat just before Dolores begins with opening prayer. Vicki hasn’t been to the group since three days before her surgery, when she had been too tongue-tied and paralyzed with fear to even say her name. She feels guilty now, like the lapsed returning to church. She holds hands with Jeremy and another person—a woman younger than she is, dressed in a denim jumper—whom she’s never seen before.

When the prayer ends, Dolores raises her head and beams at Vicki.

“Would you like some mulled cider?” Dolores asks her. “It’s organic.”

Vicki notices that the rest of the group have cups, but she demurs. “Maybe after.”

“Very well,” Dolores says. “Let’s start by introducing ourselves. Dana? Will you go first, please?”

The woman in the denim jumper speaks. “My name is Dana. Breast cancer, stage three.”

Vicki’s throat constricts. She is relieved when they go the other way around the circle. Ed, prostate cancer, stage two, Josie, breast cancer, stage three; Francesca is still there, as is Jeremy. There’s another woman Vicki doesn’t recognize who does not have cancer at all; she’s there because her seven-year-old daughter has been diagnosed with leukemia.

Vicki is so moved by this declaration that she finds herself lapsing back to her stutter.

“Vicki?” Dolores says.

“I’m V——icki,” she says. “Lung cancer.” She pauses, swallows, collects herself. “Survivor.”

Survivor. The other people in the circle stare at her, and Vicki feels self-conscious. Dolores continues to beam. Dolores had called a few days ago and asked Vicki to come back to the support group. Implored her, really.

“It will be good for the others to see,” Dolores said. “Especially at this bleak time of year. It will deliver a message of hope.”

Except what Vicki sees now in the others’ eyes is envy, resentment even. She recognizes it because she was in their shoes once, listening to Travis, who beat liver cancer, and Janice, who, against all odds, beat ovarian cancer. While Vicki was happy for them, she also hated them. And now here she is. She wants to tell this circle of people the whole story, every detail, but mostly she wants to convey that she is one of them. She is them, they are her, they are all in this together. She calls herself a survivor, but the term, as they all know, is conditional, because maybe the cancer is all gone, but maybe it only went into hiding, like an evil jack-in-the-box face that will, eventually and to her sudden surprise, resurface. Vicki lived for thirty-one years as a confident, capable person, but now she is shackled by fear and uncertainty. Nothing will ever come easily again.

“Tell us,” Dolores says. “Tell us about your journey.”

Vicki is cautious about what she says. She wants to be honest but not confessional, straightforward but not graphic. She was afraid of the surgery, she tells the group, so afraid that she developed a stutter. She was unable to speak clearly; her tongue was a lump in her mouth. Every sentence was garbled. When she returned to Darien from Nantucket, she was unable to keep food down, and she was hospitalized for dehydration. Dr. Garcia referred her to a psychotherapist. The therapy worked in reverse, her stutter worsened, and Ted was forced to acknowledge that something else was wrong with her. She wrote notes on paper, but even the notes were confusing and disjointed. She couldn’t concentrate on anything except her own fear and anxiety—it was a minute-by-minute battle to keep it from escalating into full-blown panic. The anesthesia, they’re going to kill me, I’m going to die. She dropped Blaine off at preschool, she picked him up, she shopped for diapers and Oreos and rib-eye steaks, she oiled her butcher-block countertops and did laundry, but the question was always with her: Why bother? Was this how she wanted to spend her final days? Wasn’t there something else she should be doing to stop the train that was speeding toward her? She couldn’t sleep, and when she did sleep, she had nightmares. Dr. Garcia prescribed Ativan. Vicki and Ted met with their attorney and signed a new will. Vicki named her sister as guardian. She donated her organs, lungs excepted. She signed a Health Care Proxy, a DNR order, and gave Ted power of attorney. She vomited in the bathroom of the lawyer’s office. She wrote the boys each a long letter, and she wrote a long letter for Ted, and she wrote a shorter letter for everyone else that she wanted Brenda to read at her funeral. The night before her surgery, she went to church; she knelt in the empty sanctuary and prayed, then felt like a hypocrite because she didn’t know what she believed. She went home and sat on the side of the bed as Ted read to the children. She kissed them good night and thought,
What if this is the last time?

“What I’m telling you,” Vicki says, “is that I thought I was going to die. I was sure of it.”

Around the circle, there are nods.

Vicki was so terrified that pre-op was a blur. She has vague recollections of listening to the anesthesiologist and the head surgical nurse. She remembers changing from her clothes into the gown and wondering if she would ever wear clothes again; she remembers trembling and feeling cold. She remembers the IV stuck, after three tries, into the back of her hand. She remembers Ted wearing khaki shorts and a cheerful, red polo shirt; he was there the whole time, whispering, it seemed like. Whatever he was saying, Vicki couldn’t hear him. Both Ellen Lyndon and Brenda were at home with the kids. Vicki had (irrationally) insisted that she wanted them to hold Blaine and Porter the entire time she was in surgery. She remembers being wheeled down a series of hallways, with as many tight turns as a Moroccan souk, Ted at her side, in turquoise scrubs now. He was going to stay with her until they put her to sleep. She remembers the incredible gravity of the surgical team, the meticulous professionalism, the nurses going through an inscrutable protocol—numbers, codes, her blood pressure, her temperature. It was as dramatic as the theater, and for good reason—they held Vicki’s life in their hands! But, too, it was just another day at work for these people. Hers was the body today; tomorrow it would be someone else.

The OR was cold. Vicki’s feet were bare, sticking out from under the sheet like a TV corpse. Everyone wore scrubs and masks. Vicki couldn’t tell one person from another, man from woman; it was as if she had arrived on another planet. Ted was there at her side and then a second familiar face—those thick glasses—Dr. Garcia.

“You’re going to be just fine,” Dr. Garcia said.

There was a stirring, a soft commotion, then a parting of the seas. The surgeon had arrived. His name was Jason Emery, and he was a giant—taller and broader than Ted, and very young. A superstar, Dr. Garcia had called him, the best thoracic surgeon in Connecticut. (How many could there be? Vicki wondered.) The nurses worked as quickly as a NASCAR pit crew, pulling on Dr. Emery’s gloves and getting him his equipment. When he took his spot at the helm, his mask stretched, and Vicki knew he was smiling.

“Hi, Vicki,” he said. “It’s Jason.”

They had met the week before in his office, where he explained every step of the surgery. Vicki had liked him. Like Dr. Garcia, Jason Emery was unshakably optimistic. But so young! How old? He would turn thirty-two on October 9, and so would Vicki. They had the same birthday, they were twins, it was a sign, he could save her.

“Hi, Jason,” she said.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

He started barking orders, all of them unintelligible. It reminded Vicki of a quarterback calling out plays. A rubber mask went over her face. The mask smelled like vanilla. It was the same smell, she thought, as her mother’s kitchen when cookies were baking.

This is it,
she thought. Ted squeezed her hand. Vicki thought:
Blaine! Porter!
She imagined them in her mother’s arms, in Brenda’s arms. Safe and sound.