Barefoot: A Novel

by Elin Hilderbrand

  —it was shorter than the day shift, and busier. Maybe next month, if he did a decent job.

  Josh fiddled with the briefcase locks just to see if anything would happen. At the mere touch of his fingertips, the locks sprung open with a noise like a gun’s report. Josh jumped out of his chair. Whoa! He had not expected that! He checked the office. No one was around. His father worked upstairs through the evening shift. He always got home at eight o’clock, and he liked to eat dinner with Josh by eight-thirty. Just the two of them with something basic that Josh put together: burgers, barbecued chicken, always an iceberg salad, always a beer for his father—and now that Josh was old enough, a beer for Josh. Just one, though. His father was a creature of habit and had been since Josh had bothered to take note of it, which he supposed was at the age of twelve, after his mother committed suicide. His father was so predictable that Josh knew there was no way he would ever come down to the office, and his father was the only person he feared, so . . .

  Josh eased the briefcase open. There, swaddled in plastic bubble wrap, was a heavy-duty freezer bag, the kind of bag fishermen down on the wharves fil ed with fresh tuna steaks. Only this bag contained . . . Josh peered closer . . . a book. A book? A book with a brown leather cover and a title in gold on the front: The Innocent Impostor. A novel by Fleming Trainor . After three years of literature courses at Middlebury, Josh’s knowledge of important writers was growing. He had read Melvil e, Henry James, Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac. He had never read—nor heard of—Fleming Trainor.

  Josh stared at the book and tried to put it together in his mind with Scowling Sister’s panicked voice. Nope, didn’t make any sense. But Josh liked that. He closed the briefcase, locked it tight.

  The briefcase sat on the passenger seat of his Jeep for the ride out to ’Sconset. Josh had lived on Nantucket his entire life. Because there was a smal year-round community, everyone had an identity, and Josh’s was this: good kid, smart kid, steady kid. His mother had kil ed herself while he was stil in elementary school, but Josh hadn’t derailed or self-destructed. In high school he studied hard enough to stay at the top of his class, he lettered in three sports, he was the senior class treasurer and did such a fine job running fund-raisers that he cul ed a budget surplus large enough to send the entire senior class to Boston the week before they graduated. Everyone thought he would become a doctor or a lawyer or a Wal Street banker, but Josh wanted to do something creative, something that would endure and have meaning. But nobody got it. Even Josh’s best friend, Zach Browning, had cocked his head and said, Do something creative? Like what, man? Paint someone’s portrait? Compose a fucking symphony?

  Josh had kept a journal for years, in a series of spiral-bound notebooks that he stashed under his bed like Playboy magazines. They contained the usual stuff—his thoughts, snippets of dreams, song lyrics, dialogue from movies, passages from novels, the scores from every footbal , basketbal , and basebal game of his high school career, riffs on friends, girlfriends, teachers, and his father, memories of his mother, pages of descriptions of Nantucket and the places farther afield that he had traveled, ideas for stories he wanted to write someday. Now, thanks to three years under the tutelage (or “hypnosis,” as some would say) of Middlebury’s writer-in-residence, Chas Gorda, Josh knew that journal keeping was not only okay for a writer, but compulsory. In high school, it had seemed a little weird. Weren’t diaries for girls? His father had caught Josh a couple of times, opening Josh’s bedroom door without knocking the way he’d been wont to do in those days and asking, “What are you doing?”

  “Writing.”

  “Something for English?”

  “No. Just writing. For me.” It had sounded odd, and Josh had felt embarrassed. He started locking his bedroom door.

  Chas Gorda warned his students against being too “self-referential.” He was constantly reminding his class that no one wanted to read a short story about a col ege kid studying to be a writer. Josh understood this, but as he rol ed into the town of ’Sconset with the mysterious briefcase next to him, anticipating interaction with people he barely knew who didn’t know him, he couldn’t help feeling that this was a moment he could someday mine.

  Maybe. Or maybe it would turn out to be a big nothing. The point, Chas Gorda had effectively hammered home, was that you had to be ready.

  Nantucket was the dul est place in America to grow up. There was no city, no shopping mal , no McDonald’s, no arcades, no diners, no clubs, no place to hang out unless you were into two-hundred-year-old Quaker meetinghouses. And yet, Josh had always had a soft spot for ’Sconset. It was a true vil age, with a Main Street canopied by tal , deciduous trees. The “town” of ’Sconset consisted of a post office, a package store that sold beer, wine, and used paperback books, two quaint cafes, and a market where Josh’s mother used to take him for an ice cream cone once a summer. There was an old casino that now served as a tennis club. ’Sconset was a place from another age, Josh had always thought. People said it was “old money,” but that just meant that a long, long time ago someone had the five hundred dol ars and the good sense it took to buy a piece of land and a smal house. The people who lived in ’Sconset had always lived in ’Sconset; they drove twenty-five-year-old Jeep Wagoneers, kids rode Radio Flyer tricycles down streets paved with white shel s, and on a summer afternoon, the only three sounds you could hear were the waves of the town beach, the snap of the flag at the rotary, and the thwack of tennis bal s from the club. It was like something precious from a postcard, but it was real.

  The address Scowling Sister had given Josh over the phone was Eleven Shel Street. The Jeep’s tires crackled over crushed clamshel s as he pul ed up in front of the house. It was smal , cute, typical of ’Sconset; it looked like the house where the Three Bears lived. Josh picked up the briefcase. He was official y nervous. The house had a gate with a funny latch, and while he was fumbling with it, the front door swung open and out came a woman wearing a pair of denim shorts and a green bikini top that shimmered like fish scales. It was . . . wel , Josh had to admit it took him a minute to get his eyes to focus on the woman’s face, and when he did, he was confused. It was Scowling Sister, but she was smiling. She was getting closer to him, and closer, and before Josh knew it, she was wrapping her arms around his neck, and he felt the press of her breasts against his grubby airport-issued polo shirt, and he smel ed her perfume and then he felt something unsettling happening—he was losing his grip on the briefcase. Or no, wait. She was prying it from his hand. She had it now.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Uh,” Josh said. He took a few steps back. His vision was splotchy and green—green from the plot of grass in the side yard, green from the shiny material cupping Scowling Sister’s breasts. Okay, now, for sure, the hair on his arms was standing up. “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m Dr. Lyndon,” Scowling Sister said, offering her hand. “Brenda.”

  “Josh Flynn.”

  “You’re such a dol to bring this by,” Brenda said. She hugged the briefcase to her chest. “I thought it was gone forever.”

  “No problem,” Josh said, though it was more of a problem than he imagined. He was thrown into a frenzy by the sight of Scowling Sister. Her hair, which had been loose at the airport, was now held in a bun by a pencil, and little pieces fel down around her neck. She was very pretty. And pretty old, he guessed. Maybe thirty. She was barefoot and her toes were dark pink; they looked like berries. Enough! he thought, and he may have actual y spoken the word because Brenda tilted her head and looked at him strangely, as if to say, Enough what?

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

  Chas Gorda would have encouraged Josh to say yes. One way to avoid being self-referential was to open your world up, meet new people.

  Listen, observe, absorb. Josh had never seen the inside of one of these little cottages. He checked his watch. Five o’clock. Normal y, after work, he went for a s
wim at Nobadeer Beach, and sometimes he stopped by his old girlfriend Didi’s apartment. He and Didi had dated al through high school, but then she had stayed on the island and Josh had left, and now, three years later, you could real y tel the difference. Didi worked at the admitting desk at the hospital and al she talked about was her weight and Survivor. If she had found an old book nestled in Bubble Wrap, she would have snorted and chucked it in the Dumpster.

  “Oh-kay,” he said. “Sure.”

  “I’l make us some tea,” Brenda said. But she was distracted by a noise, a computerized version of “Für Elise.” Brenda pul ed a cel phone out of her back pocket and checked the display.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I am not going to answer that.” She smiled lamely at Josh, and he watched the enthusiasm drain from her face. They were two steps from the door when Brenda stopped. “Actual y, everyone in the house is asleep.”

  “Oh.”

  “The kids. My sister. Her friend. And I’m not sure we even have any tea, so . . .”

  “That’s al right,” Josh said, backing away. He was disappointed, but also relieved.

  “Another time,” Brenda said. “You promise you’l come back another time? Now you know where we live!”

  Melanie would never complain out loud, not with her best friend so gravely il , but she felt like mold on the wal at a fleabag motel. Here, then, was a classic case of Be Careful What You Wish For. Her breasts felt like lead bal oons. They hurt so much she couldn’t sleep on her stomach, and yet that was her favorite position for sleep, facedown, without so much as a pil ow. Now she had to contend with new sleeping quarters, a sagging twin bed in this strange, sunny room that smel ed like artificial pine trees.

  Al she had wanted was to get away—as far away as possible. When she was in Connecticut, facing the utter wasteland her life had become, moving to Pluto had seemed too close. But now she was at loose ends; from a distance, things somehow looked worse than they did when she was standing in the middle of them. And the bizarre, unfathomable fact was, she missed Peter.

  Peter, Melanie’s husband of six years, was very tal for an Asian man. Tal , broad in the shoulders, startlingly handsome—people on the streets of Manhattan occasional y mistook him for the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Melanie had met Peter at a bar on the East Side. Peter, at that time, had worked on Wal Street, but shortly after he and Melanie married he became a market analyst at Rutter, Higgens, where he met Ted Stowe, Vicki’s husband. Vicki and Ted were expecting their first child; they were moving to Darien. Melanie and Vicki became good, fast friends, and soon Melanie was pestering Peter about moving to Connecticut, too. (“Pestering” was how Peter described it now. At the time, to Melanie, it had seemed like a mutual decision to move.) Melanie wanted children. She and Peter started trying—nothing happened. But Melanie had fal en in love with a house, not to mention the green-grass-and-garden vision of her life in Connecticut. They moved and became the only young couple in Darien without children. At times, Melanie blamed her fertility problems on the suburb. Babies were everywhere. Melanie was forced to watch the strol er brigade on its way to the school bus stop each morning. She was confronted by children wherever she turned—at the Stop & Shop, at the packed day care of her gym, at the annual Christmas pageant of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church.

  You’re so lucky, the mothers would say to Melanie. You’re free to do whatever you want. You can sit through dinner and a bottle of wine at Chuck’s without sixteen hundred interruptions, without all the silverware and half the dinner rolls ending up on the floor, without the waitstaff glaring at you like you’re something stuck to the bottom of a mortician’s shoe. The mothers were kind; they pretended to envy Melanie. But she knew that they pitied her, that she had become a woman defined by her faulty biology. Never mind that Melanie had graduated from Sarah Lawrence, that she had taught English to the hil tribes of northern Thailand after col ege; never mind that Melanie was an avid gardener and a dedicated power walker. When the other women saw her, they thought: That’s the woman who’s trying to conceive. The one who’s having difficulty.

  Barren, maybe. Something’s wrong, poor thing.

  Peter didn’t acknowledge any of this, and Melanie knew now, in the post-breakup where deep, dark secrets oozed out like sludge from the sewer, that he’d never cared whether they conceived or not. (No wonder she’d had such trouble! Everyone knew the game was 90 percent attitude, positive thinking, visualization.) Peter had tried to make her happy, and the best way he knew to do this, being a man, was to spend money on her in flabbergasting ways. Weekend trips to Cabo, the Connaught in London, the Delano in South Beach. An Yves Saint Laurent velvet blazer that had a two-month waiting list. A twelve-ounce black truffle flown in from Italy in a wooden box packed with straw. Orchids every Friday.

  As the months of infertility dragged on, Melanie immersed herself in starting seeds, digging beds, planting shrubs and perennials, mulching, weeding, spending nearly a thousand dol ars on annuals and herbs and heirloom tomato plants. She let the two beautiful little girls who lived next door cut her tulips and hyacinths for their May baskets. She fed her hydrangea bushes clam necks from the fish market. A Saint Bernard would have been easier to take care of than the damn garden, Peter complained.

  Peter had told Melanie about his affair with Frances Digitt on the way home from the Memorial Day picnic that Rutter, Higgens threw every year in Central Park. There were softbal , hamburgers and hot dogs, watermelon, egg-in-a-spoon races and water bal oons for the kids. It was a nice event, but Melanie had suffered through it. She and Peter had tried in vitro seven times with no results, and they had decided not to pursue any more treatment. It just wasn’t working. But stil people asked, “Any news?” and Melanie was forced to say, “We’ve let it go, for the time being.” Ted and Vicki had not attended the picnic at al because Vicki had just gotten her diagnosis confirmed with a second opinion from Mount Sinai and she didn’t feel up to seeing anybody. So Melanie fielded inquiries not only about her infertility but about Vicki’s cancer as wel . With the number of people pursuing Melanie and pinning her down in conversation, it would have been easier to hold a press conference.

  On the way home, Melanie mentioned to Peter that the afternoon had worn her down, she hadn’t had much fun, probably because Ted and Vicki weren’t there.

  “Life is too short,” Melanie said. She said this every time she thought of Vicki now. Peter nodded distractedly; Melanie intoned this sentiment so often, its meaning was diluted. But Melanie meant the words urgently: Life was too short to fritter away in a constant state of yearning, aching, wanting. Waiting for something to happen.

  At Exit 1 on I-95, they hit traffic and Peter cursed and they slowed to a crawl.

  Now’s the time, Melanie thought. And she said, “I think we should try again. Once more.”

  She steeled herself for his reaction. He hadn’t wanted to pursue in vitro at al . There was something about it that felt forced to Peter, unnatural.

  Melanie had pushed the issue not once, not twice, but seven times, promising that each round would be the last. And then, a few weeks ago, she had real y, real y promised; she and Peter had made a pact of sorts, sealing it with their first spontaneous lovemaking in nearly a year. Afterward, Peter talked about a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, just the two of them. They would stay at a resort that didn’t al ow children.

  Melanie was ready for Peter to be annoyed that she was revisiting the topic yet again; she was ready for anger. But Peter just shook his head, and with his eyes on the bumper of the car in front of them, he said, “I’m involved with someone else.”

  It took Melanie a moment to understand what he meant by “involved,” but even after the obvious occurred to her, she stil wasn’t sure. “Involved?”

  she said.

  “Yes. With Frances.”

  “Frances?” Melanie said. She looked at Peter. He had drunk several beers at the picnic. Was he impaired? Should he even be driving?

  Because
what he was saying didn’t make any sense. “You’re involved with Frances? Frances Digitt?” Melanie could only picture Frances as she had just seen her—in a pair of red nylon running shorts and a white T-shirt that said Mad River Glen, Ski It If You Can. Frances Digitt was twenty-seven years old, she had a butch haircut, she was into al these extreme sports, like rock climbing and backcountry skiing. She had hit a home run during the softbal game and she ran the bases pumping her fist in the air like a sixteen-year-old boy. “You’re having an affair with Frances?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  Yes: They were having the sleaziest kind of office sex—in coat closets, in the deserted restrooms after hours, on top of his desk with the door closed and locked, in his swivel chair, Frances’s skirt hiked up, straddling him.

  When they got home that night, Peter moved into the guest room while Melanie took a bath and cried. Peter did not move out—he claimed he didn’t want to, and Melanie couldn’t bring herself to demand it. They slept under one roof, in separate rooms. He was not wil ing to end his

  “involvement” with Frances Digitt, not yet, he said, but maybe someday. Melanie was tortured by this. She loved the man, and he was using her heart for target practice. Most nights he came home, but some nights he cal ed to say he would be “staying in the city” (which meant, she could only assume, staying with Frances Digitt). He rendered Melanie powerless; he knew she didn’t have the courage to divorce him and take al his money, which was what everyone encouraged her to do.

  When Melanie started feeling sick, she wasn’t surprised. Extreme emotional stress, she thought. Depression. She couldn’t keep food down. She would think about Frances Digitt and gag. She was overcome with exhaustion; she took three- and four-hour naps in the afternoons. Her cycle had been manipulated for so long with hormones that she didn’t notice when she missed her period. But then her breasts started to tingle and ache, and smel s she normal y loved—coffee, fresh sage from the garden—turned her stomach. She went to a drugstore three towns away, where nobody knew her, and bought a test.