Barefoot Girls (5 page)

Their relationship was like that, too, at least now that they were in the flow at last. When she’d first met him, she wrote him off as a playboy, a player. But Daniel wouldn’t let her write him off and, with time, she saw that she was wrong; or at least that things were different when it came to her. With her, he abandoned the smooth act, brought out the big guns of honesty and vulnerability. In letting down his guard, he gave her the permission she needed to let down hers.

Hannah threw another weed on the growing mound beside her and stopped to look at her ring. Why couldn’t she just be happy? She was getting married; it was supposed to be a time of excitement and joy. Why this terror, cold and gnawing at her? Sometimes when she caught sight of her ring out of the corner of her eye, her stomach immediately clenched and a wave of nausea swept over her.

There was a sound from the hammock. Hannah looked up. Daniel had raised his head and was looking at her. “Hey you,” he said.

Brushing the dirt off of her hands and then wiping them on her jeans, Hannah stood and walked over to him. “Hey, yourself.”

“Come here.” He opened his arms. She crawled into the hammock carefully and curled up next to him. This was why she loved his beefy arms, they could wrap completely around her. He smelled good, a toasted smell, warm with a hint of soap.

“Whatcha doin’?” He said into her hair, nuzzling.

“Oh, this and that. I was on my laptop all morning. Just needed to stretch and the garden needed weeding. I turned my phone off. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Daniel paused and said, “Well, maybe she hasn’t gotten it yet.”

“I overnighted it. She got it yesterday.”

“Maybe she’s gone away? She could be with those barefoot women she’s friends with.”

Hannah sighed, feeling like she couldn’t get enough air. Her chest had been heavy since yesterday afternoon when she simply knew her mother had read the letter and had not forgiven her. She simply
knew
the way she always knew how her mother was feeling, like she had some special type of emotional mother-radar.

“No, she got it. And she’s not with the Barefooters. They all just got back from a month on Captain’s Island, a whole month-long annual party-thon they have together. You witnessed only a weekend of it. No, they all do their own thing in September. Aunt Pam goes full throttle with her business plus her son, Jacob, goes back to school. Aunt Amy gets another seeing-eye dog to train and her three boys all have sports on top of school so she never has a minute. And Aunt Zo travels, of course. Mom usually redecorates the house, and starts planning parties for all the holidays.”

Images came to her of her mother’s seasonal decorations: miniature haunted forests with wisps of ghosts in a long container filled with twig trees and mosses of different colors for Halloween, sparkling white winter fantasies under domes in their living room with colorful birds and glistening holly leaves and bright berries for Christmas, delicate arrangements of forced blooming branches in the early spring that were Zen-like in their simplicity.

Daniel said, “They’re quite a gang – it was fun meeting them. They’ve been friends since they were kids?”

“Yeah, they’ve been friends forever. They’re really amazing people, too. Ben is always saying that there’s no one like my mom, but, really, there’s no one like any of the Barefooters. They’re just special.”

“It must have been great having them for aunts growing up. Didn’t you say they babysat you a lot?”

Hannah laughed a little. “Constantly – I mean, they were definitely my main babysitters. Especially Aunt Zo. Mom really couldn’t afford even the neighborhood girls. Yeah, they were around a lot and definitely always on Captain’s. It was a party!” she said, smiling.

Daniel looked down at her. “Well, there it is. Your next book.”

“What?”

“Why not write something nonfiction this time. Write about your mother and her friends. Honestly, every story you tell me about them is fascinating. Maybe that’s your next book.”

Hannah had started feeling unmoored and anxious a week after she finished
Wait Another Day
and the feeling had only grown over time. She missed writing. Yet she couldn’t figure out what was next. Every idea she had felt wrong. But the Barefooters?

Hannah shook her head a little. “I don’t know. After everything that’s happened…, I don’t know. It seems wrong. Invasive.”

Daniel propped himself up on his elbow to look at Hannah. “Invasive? Wouldn’t your mom be thrilled to see a book about her and her friends? They must all be so psyched to have each other. Damn, I haven’t stayed in touch with one of my friends from high school or college. And these were guys I hung out with constantly!”

Hannah could see what he was saying. The Barefooters
were
a phenomenon. But it felt oddly like trespassing, even though it was her life too. No, she’d find stories elsewhere, off of her mother’s turf. Wasn’t it always this way? Wasn’t she always stepping all over her mother’s turf, getting in her way by being born in the first place? She felt something hot and acidic in the back of her throat, a pulse of nausea.

She swallowed, fighting the rising bile. “No. I’m not – I don’t know. Can we talk about something else?”

A week later, another letter was on its way to her mother. No reply had come in the mail and her mother’s phone continued to go straight to voicemail.

Hannah’s innocently written and maliciously reviewed novel had managed to deeply hurt her wonderful loving but flawed mother, causing the first significant rift between them. And there was no one she could turn to. Her maternal grandparents were deceased and there were no other relatives that she knew of. Daniel loved her, but what could he do? The Barefooters loved her too, but with the reserve of women who knew full well that this was not their child but the child of their best friend, invisible do-not-trespass signs everywhere. Aunt Zo was the only one to breach that barrier, occasionally calling Hannah after Keeley had declared war, reassuring her that the review was obviously false and slanderous and that, somehow, everything would work out eventually. But even as she reassured, she begged in the next breath not to be outed to Keeley for calling.

Hannah knew she had to find a way back in, that the labyrinth of her mother’s heart had secret entrances and one entrance that was not a secret at all: the Barefooters. Daniel was right, but it would be a novel.

September 19, 2010

Dear Mom,

You’re so angry. I wish I could talk to you, to explain, but the fortress is locked and the walls are high. The moat is filled with piranhas and even the Barefooters won’t return my calls. I wrote a novel, not a memoir. That reviewer was wrong, but what she said still hurt you horribly. I’m so sorry.

Anyway, I would keep on apologizing, but I’m pretty sure you’re not interested in hearing it. The reason I’m writing is I need your help. You know from my telling you one billion times that all I want in life is to be a writer. The kind of writer that can live off of her earnings, not wait tables or be a secretary to earn a living, scratching out a few words on a page here and there. My next project, with or without your blessing, is about women’s friendships. I want to write a novel about a gang of girls, ones eerily like the Barefooters. Of course, it wouldn’t be a memoir and I wouldn’t name names. I would change it up so much you’d probably barely recognize yourselves.

But I need your help to write this. I witnessed your four-way friendship all of my life, but I know nothing about your childhood except that you and Grandma never got along. I do know that you Barefooters met on Captain’s Island as children. I’ve overheard a few stories here and there from those days, but they’re not enough.  

Please help me, Mom. Help me write something beautiful and honest about your friendship with the Barefoot Girls (fictionalized). You have something remarkable that women around the world would love to hear about, something I think I can put on paper and make breathe. And I can’t write it without you. As you know, I’ve always been a loner. I’ve always prayed for just a drop of the people-magic you have by the bucket.

I hope hope hope that you’ll call me, or just write me about this. If you don’t want to do it for me, do it for all the women in the world who crave great girlfriends and would be touched to their very cores by your story.

Love,

Hannah

Two and a half weeks later, Hannah woke with a start from a dream where something huge and dark with catlike eyes was whispering to her, telling her she was hateful, that everyone hated her, but kept it a secret. The creature slithered cold and shiny against her, furry and serpentine at the same time, its red raw mouth inches from her ear.

In the dream, there were people in the next room trying to break down the door to the darkened room she was in with the creature, but the door wouldn’t open, only pulsed and swelled as they pushed at it. The huge creature had wrapped around her and was squeezing. “Everyone hates you. Hates you!”

Falling back on her pillow, Hannah blinked in the solid darkness that was unbroken by moonlight. She looked in the direction of Daniel’s side of the bed. It was so quiet over there. She listened. No sound, not even gentle breathing. She reached over and felt the empty cold sheets. He was gone.

Suddenly, the sweat coating her chest and arms felt icy. He was gone. Daniel had left her. Because she was horrible. Hateful. She was all alone. Her mother would never speak to her again. She had rescinded her mother’s stormy but brilliant love, pushed it away, leaving nothing.

Daniel knew. Keeley had called him and told him the truth: that Hannah was despicable, an ungrateful and blindly cruel person. He had been warned and had wisely left.

Hannah’s breath started to hitch. She would die. She didn’t want to live. Write a book about friendship! What a laugh! She didn’t have a friend in the world and didn’t deserve one.

Hannah curled up on her side, her knees against her chest and felt that old feeling, one she felt often as a little girl. The one where the world was either growing bigger or she was growing very small. The walls rising up, ceiling stretching away. Oh, God, help me.

Then she heard a creak on the stairs and jolted. Another creak. She sat up. Someone was there, on the stairs. She tensed her muscles, straining not to run. Let it happen. Let whoever it was kill her. Let it be over.

The door swung open revealing an even deeper darkness beyond. Hannah’s control faltered and she let out a little squeal.

The black hallway said, “Honey?”

It was Daniel.

Of course.

Hannah breathed out a sobbing gasp. “Oh, oh, God!”

“What? What? Did I scare you?” Daniel said as he crossed the room and set down the glass of water he was holding on the bedside table before climbing into bed with Hannah and putting his arm around her. They lay back down together.

Hannah couldn’t get her breath back and she gasped at the air, feeling as if her lungs were cinched by something and unable to expand to take in oxygen.

“Oh, honey, I did scare you. I just went downstairs to get something to eat. That apple pie you got at Whole Paycheck was calling my name; I couldn’t resist anymore,” he said, laughing a little. “I ate
three
slices!”

Hannah couldn’t speak, laugh, respond. She was suffocating. He hadn’t left this time, but he would. He would find out about her, and then he wouldn’t want anything to do with her. She couldn’t stand it, knowing this. She pulled off her engagement ring. Tears sprang into her eyes.

“What, you’re not going to tell me what a pig I am? There’s only one slice left of that pie!”

Holding the ring tightly in her right hand, she reached to turn on the lamp with her left. The room flooded with light.  The room was how it always was when Daniel slept over, piles of clothing scattered on the floor, his overnight bag open and spilling out in the corner. She pulled away from Daniel and sat up in bed, hugging her knees and still holding the ring. She couldn’t look at him.

“Oh, no! Now I know I’m in trouble!” Daniel said, laughing. When she didn’t turn to face him, his laughter died.

A pause. “What? What’s up?”

She glanced back at Daniel as he propped himself up on his elbow and then looked back at her clenched hand in her lap.

“Daniel…,”

He sat up more fully, sitting next to her and looking first at her face and then down at her fist which she was staring at. She opened her hand slowly, revealing the ring in her palm.

His breath caught.

“Daniel, I need to...I know,” she said and stopped. What could she say? The truth, at least some of it. “I’m scared. I mean, I want to marry you, more than anything. I just… I’m just scared.”

Daniel’s voice was suddenly very deep and it wobbled a bit. He sounded scared, too. “I don’t…why didn’t you say anything before? What…why now? We haven’t even picked a date?”

And it was Hannah who had resisted picking a date. Or a place. Or anything. Whenever he brought it up, she managed to get out of answering, sidling out of the conversation as subtly as she could.

She said, “I just need to stop. Stop everything. I just had one of the worst, the worst panic attacks I’ve had in years.., and it’s not your fault! It’s everything. It’s my mom, it’s my book and that review. I’m all backwards and I just can’t – I just need some time.”