Barefoot Girls (55 page)

Keeley reached for and patted a pad and pen that had been sitting next to the bed on a metal stand and lifted it up, gesturing to Hannah to take it. Hannah walked around Aunt Zo’s wheelchair and reached for it, looking at her mother. “Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

Keeley furrowed her brow and shook her head. She waved the pad at her. Hannah took it and read it.

Hannah,

No poor-me crap. Stop it now. I know you too well.

Your Aunt Zo has something very important to tell you. She’s going to tell you the whole story. Hand this note to her so she knows I want her to tell it now. It’s time.

I love you.

Hannah started crying, reading the last sentence, but did as she was told and handed the notepad to Zo, who read it, looked hard at Keeley, and then said, “Okay. Okay. Now? All right. It is time. I don’t think they’ll let us stay here that long, though.”

Keeley gave another hard assured nod.

Zo nodded, too. “Okay, here goes then. Hannah, sweetie? Go get a seat, okay? Check with the nurse.”

Hannah didn’t have to look far. A chair sat against the wall nearby. Hannah dragged it inside the curtained space and sat down.

 Aunt Zo, taking one long last look at Keeley, turned to Hannah. “Wow. I never thought I’d be the one to do all the talking. Your mom was going to tell her part, and then I was going to tell mine, and they fit together, so it worked. Where should I start? Well, I guess, the summer we were eighteen. Keeley and Michael had been dating for four years at that time, even long distance during the school year, him living in Wilton and her in Fairfield. They were both in Connecticut - it was doable. But summers were the best for them. Except for the mornings hanging out with just us Barefooters, Keeley never left Michael’s side. Everyone thought they were the perfect couple.”

“That last summer, Keeley and Michael started fighting a lot. No one knew what about. Neither of them would say what was the matter. One day, they’d be all lovey-dovey and then next, they wouldn’t be speaking. Now, Rose, the woman that you knew as Mrs. McGrath? When we were little, she was mean, the island girl-bully, the kind that pinched you and tripped you when a grown-up wasn’t looking. Remember the story I told you about how the Barefooters met? The slap heard-round-the-world? That was the same Rose. But when we got older, she got in a kind of competition with your mom. And Michael was at the center of it. For some reason Rose saw him as hers.”

Hannah’s eyes grew wide. Now it was making some kind of sense, that day at Mrs. McGrath’s, the stuff she’d said.

“Whenever Michael and Keeley were having one of their fights, Rose would come out of the woodwork and follow Michael around while he was down in the dumps, act like his buddy. All the time, she was inviting herself over to Michael’s house, visiting even when Michael wasn’t there. His parents were nice about it, invited her in, gave her refreshments while she waited for Michael to show up.”

“She would insist to them that Michael had invited her, but Michael, nice as he was, hadn’t. He didn’t give her a hard time about it though, just smiled, shrugged. See, Michael was a sucker for lame ducks. If someone had a problem, he tried to help them. If someone was picking on someone, he’d step in. If a kid was a loser, he’d be that kid’s champion.”

“Most boys that were good-looking like him, who were athletic and smart and funny like he was, were either dismissive or oblivious to kids who didn’t fit the same mold. Not Michael. He always said he was lucky, that’s all, and some kids weren’t. But he wasn’t a pushover. He could fight with the best of them. He beat the crap out of Charlie Whittaker when Charlie wouldn’t give back the Hooper twins’ savings he’d taken for those cheesy sea-monkeys. Remember, Keeley?”

Keeley nodded slightly, and made a circular let’s-move-this-story-along gesture with her right hand.

“Anyway, Rose was like a fly, annoying and always buzzing around Michael whenever Keeley and he were in one of their funks that summer.”

Hannah interrupted, curious, “But wait. Why were they fighting?”

Aunt Zo nodded. “We all wondered. It turned out, I mean, I found out-“

There was a rustling behind them and the nurse stuck her head in. “Time’s up, ladies.”

Hannah turned around to look at the nurse, “No! Please? This is important!”

The nurse, a heavy-set dark haired woman with a long pointed nose, didn’t look impressed. She shook her head. “Sorry, hospital rules. You can visit longer when she moves out of ICU, but right now she needs her rest.”

“Oh!” Aunt Zo said. “Just a little longer. I’ll be quick?” Keeley was grunting through her tube and waving her hands.

The nurse spread the curtains wide and gestured to them to leave. “Okay, out. Now Mrs. Cohen’s become agitated. Let’s go.”

Aunt Zo turned to Keeley. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell her. I only wish you could chime in. I’m not sure how to tell this whole thing by myself.”

Keeley reached for the pad and pen by the bed again. The nurse stood, arm still outstretched holding the curtain open and making loud impatient sighing noises while Keeley wrote. She handed the pad to Aunt Zo.

“You can do it,” Zo read out loud. “Okay. Let’s hope so. Get better quick, Key. We need you, all right?” She reached over and tried to pat Keeley’s thigh, barely reaching it with her good left hand.

Hannah stood slowly. She didn’t want to go. She looked over at the nurse again, but there was no sympathy there at all; the woman’s face was impassive. She went and kissed her mother’s cheek, listened to her mother’s little squeak in reply, and then pushed her Aunt Zo in her wheelchair out of ICU.

They ended up in the hospital’s cafeteria. It was the best place for them to talk. Ben was on the phone outside in parking lot, calling his contacts in the medical community. Pam and Amy were keeping their distance, just nodding at Zo and Hannah when they came out of the ICU rather than jumping up and running over to compare notes. This was extremely unusual among the four friends, chatterboxes all. It was then that Hannah knew that that the story she was about to hear was something between just her mother and Aunt Zo, something that even Amy and Pam didn’t share with them.

In the cafeteria they got coffee, which was surprisingly good, as well as buttered rolls, and found a table in the corner of the dining room. Aunt Zo busied herself with her coffee, stirring it and adding more and more sugar until Hannah started to wonder if her godmother was going to have a little coffee with her sugar. Then Aunt Zo rearranged herself in her wheelchair, clearing her throat over and over.  Finally, she said, “Okay. I’m nervous. Can you tell?”

Hannah nodded.

“It’s pretty obvious, huh?” Aunt Zo said, looking at her coffee and stirring it. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this. I just never imagined it would be like this. We were supposed to be at Captain’s sitting on a dock or in the living room at the Barefooter house. There would be wine or champagne or something. Your mom would tell her part, be there to help me tell mine. You know how we always finish each other’s thoughts. It would've been easy. This isn’t.”

Aunt Zo cleared her throat again and sat, continuing to stir her sugary black coffee and stare at it. Then she began to speak, slow halting words that trickled one by one at first, before flooding out in a rush, blocking out the empty cafeteria and filling it with late-summer memories of their eighteenth year.

Chapter 61

Zooey just couldn’t stop saying, “I’m sorry,” that summer. She was sorry for everything. Sorry she had missed all of June and most of July on Captain’s. Sorry Michael and Keeley were fighting for no apparent reason. Sorry she was too tall and flat-chested and weird-looking, still Zork the Stork at eighteen.

Most of all, she was sorry because she was the reason her father was dead. If she hadn’t gotten drunk that Friday night in December after she received her early-decision acceptance letter from Wellesley, hadn’t gone to that party with her friend from school, Amanda Hobson, and then gotten behind the wheel of her family’s old Volvo, giggling and oblivious to everything, the roads caked with ice, she wouldn’t have crashed the car and ended up in the hospital with a concussion and a cut on her forehead. Then her father and mother wouldn’t have had to endure the embarrassment of the charges of drunk driving and the fear for their daughter’s life.

That was what had done it, made her dad have a heart attack only a week later. She knew it. She didn’t care what people said about him being older, in his sixties already, with a family history of heart disease. No, it was her fault. She should have been a better daughter. Her father couldn’t have loved her more, couldn’t have been more supportive or interested in everything she said and thought and did. Although Wellesley was her mother’s alma mater, it was her father who had always encouraged Zooey’s artistic dreams and backed up her choice of a major in Studio Art there. A frustrated artist himself, her father’s family never allowed him to consider art as a vocation; it was only something to enjoy as a hobby.

“You’ll do it, Zooey. You have the talent and the drive,” he said, his eyes shining with pride when they’d discussed her plans.

He had been the one to buy her first set of watercolor paints as a girl. He’d been the one to make sure she was continually enrolled in local art programs. They would go together to various picturesque spots on the weekends and paint, each checking each other’s canvases, commenting and making suggestions. Now, he was gone. There would be no more blissful days like that, the sharp smell of turpentine permeating and euphoric.

When she finally arrived on the island with her mother in late July, she could tell as soon as they got off their boat and started unloading that her mother wouldn’t stay. She was barely there anymore. Her vibrant zany mother had left. This ghost only wanted to be back with her four older sisters in Michigan, where they’d been staying since her father’s death. There her mother was cared for and petted, a child again in her family’s presence. Zooey had never realized that her mother, though acting the part of a grown-up, had also been a child in her marriage.

Her mother had never held a job, balanced a checkbook, made a deposit at the bank, or even paid a bill. It had been her father taking care of her and Zooey all along. There had always been plenty of money – both of her parents came from great wealth – that wasn’t a problem. Her mother would never have to work or worry about expenses, but it was clear that all she wanted to do was go back to Grosse Point, get a house in the same neighborhood where she grew up and where all her sisters lived, and be watched over by them. She had been resistant to Zooey’s pleas to go to Captain’s, finally giving in only when her sisters said it would be a good idea.

Zooey was right. Her mother lasted only a week on Captain’s before leaving on the next flight out of JFK for Detroit.

“You’re leaving?” Zo had been in the kitchen preparing her breakfast of toast and tea when her mother appeared carrying her suitcase.

Her mother put down her suitcase on the kitchen floor and smiled at her daughter hopefully. “I was hoping you’d come back home with me? We can go to the lake house on the weekends with everyone. Everyone wants us there. We’ve been here a whole week. That’s been enough, hasn’t it?”

“But, my friends. I was… this is our last summer before college. We were going to have our own special party at the end of August, remember?”

“Oh, yes. Dogs something?”

“Dog Days. You know, like summer? Dog days of summer? I told you,” Zo said, unable to keep the irritation of having to repeat herself once again. The mother she knew remembered every little thing Zo told her, every dream, every party, every fanciful idea. This mother remembered nothing.

“Oh, oh, right. Yes. Well, then, of course. You have to stay and have fun with your friends. Do you mind being on your own? Do you need me to stay?”

Zooey looked at her mother. She was already on her own, even with her mother around. She’d seen that all spring and early summer in Michigan, felt the coldness of it. Her aunts were kind, but she barely knew them, having only met them twice in her life – once when she was a toddler and once at a family reunion when she was ten. Oh, Daddy. Why did you have to leave us? “No. I don’t mind. No, you go.”

“I’ll be back soon. I just miss my sisters. But I’ll be back in a week or so. Definitely before the end of August and your little party. Do you need anything? Here, let me give you some spending money,” she said, forgetting again that Zooey had a large savings account as well as an enormous trust fund left to her by her father. The only thing she didn’t need was money.

Being alone in the house was less lonely than she thought it would be. In a way, being around her pale ghost-mother had made her miss all the more the family that once was. She slept in later without her mother’s oversight, and wandered around most mornings in her nightgown without bothering to put on a robe, eating meals standing up at the kitchen counter like a wild heathen. It would have been fun if she wasn’t so miserable.

Even though she had stayed on the island to be with her friends, daily she was surprised by their lack of understanding of her and what she was going through. Never before had she felt so separate from them, angry at what seemed like willful obtuseness on their part. If Pam’s clueless remarks and Amy’s impatient rudeness was bad, Keeley’s near-jubilation was the worst.