Barefoot: A Novel

by Elin Hilderbrand

  The nights passed in what felt like a blaze of light, at once slow-burning and quick as a flash. Neither of them was wil ing to skip a night, take a break, although they both pretended to think it was a good idea. ( We should probably take a breather at some point, Josh said. And with a yawn, Melanie: I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep these late nights up. ) Josh figured that at some point the novelty would wear off; his insanely absorbing anticipation of the moment when Melanie climbed into his Jeep would diminish. A lackluster night would come upon them, a night when he just wasn’t that into it, a night when Melanie seemed less dynamic than usual, or too familiar. This was how things went with Josh and girls.

  Eventual y he felt—as with Didi—that he was being pul ed along against his wishes.

  But with Melanie, it was different. With Melanie, it was like climbing a mountain to a breathtaking view, and each time it was as novel and captivating as the first time.

  More and more, he wanted to be with Melanie in a real bed, but that wasn’t possible. His bed, his childhood bed, in his room with his model airplanes and soccer trophies, his journals now tucked into the drawer of his nightstand? No. And Josh would never have the guts to sneak into Number Eleven Shel Street knowing that Vicki and Brenda and Blaine and Porter (and Ted, on the weekends) were al right there. Josh found himself brainstorming for an alternative—a night in a bed-and-breakfast, maybe? It was an expensive option and risky to boot because Tom Flynn knew everyone on the island. Somehow, Josh was sure, word would get back to his father that Josh had paid three hundred and fifty dol ars for a room, which he had shared with an “older woman.”

  Josh hadn’t seen much of his high school friends al summer. He was busy with work, they were busy with work—and going to the parties or meeting up at bars meant risking a run-in with Didi, which Josh was happy to avoid. Josh felt bad cal ing up Zach for what was, basical y, the first time al summer—but Zach could help him. Zach was spending his summer working for Madaket Marine, the business his parents owned, but as a sideline, he served as caretaker for a house in Shimmo, right on the harbor. The house was modest for Nantucket’s waterfront—it had five bedrooms and three baths, with a deck that extended the length of the second floor. The house was only used two weeks of the year—the first two weeks of July—and the rest of the time, it sat empty. It was Zach’s responsibility to let the cleaners in every two weeks and arrange for the landscaping—and in winter to shovel the snow and check for burst pipes or leaks. The owners lived in Hong Kong; they never showed up without warning, and in fact, Zach spent the weeks before their arrival ensuring that every detail was perfect and in place—Asiatic lilies on the dining room table, Veuve Clicquot in the fridge. People had been urging Zach for the years that he’d been taking care of the Shimmo house to throw a party, man! But Zach was even more intimidated by his father than Josh was by Tom Flynn, and the owner of the house was a longtime Madaket Marine client. So Zach’s answer was always, No way, man. Are you kidding me? Zach threw his parties at the beach.

  Zach had been known, however, to entertain women at the house in Shimmo, especial y summer girls (he told them the house was his). So Zach’s scruples were negotiable (this had always been the case), and Josh thought, Well, it’s worth a shot. He cal ed Zach one night on his way home from swimming at Nobadeer Beach.

  “I want to use the Shimmo house,” Josh said. “One night. Any night next week.”

  “What?” Zach said. “Who is this?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I haven’t heard from you in ages, man. You skipped my party. You never go out. And now you want to use the house?”

  “Don’t be so sensitive,” Josh said. “You sound like a woman. Can I use the house?”

  “You have a girl?” Zach said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who is it?”

  “None of your business,” Josh said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “What?”

  “Tel me who it is.”

  “A girl I met in ’Sconset.”

  “Real y?”

  “Real y. There are girls in ’Sconset who never show their faces in town.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Why so secretive? Just tel me her name.”

  “No.”

  “If you tel me her name, I’l let you use the house. Next Wednesday.”

  “Her name is Merril ,” Josh said. He wanted to use a name he would remember—and Merril was Melanie’s maiden name.

  “Merril ?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is she in school?”

  “She just graduated,” Josh said. “From Sarah Lawrence.”

  “Sarah Lawrence?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She graduated? So she’s older?”

  “She’s older. A little bit older. I’d like to impress her. Hence, the request for the house.”

  “And I take it this Merril person is why I haven’t seen your ass al summer.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Wel , okay,” Zach said. “Next Wednesday. I’l get you the keys. But you must promise to strictly adhere to al the rules.”

  “I’l adhere,” Josh said.

  The fol owing Wednesday, instead of driving to the beach, Josh turned down Shimmo Road and pul ed into the last driveway on the left. He was al wound up with anxiety and sexual anticipation and an overwhelming desire to surprise Melanie. He dug the keys to the house from the console and jangled them in her face.

  “What are we doing here?” she said.

  “What we normal y do,” he said, grinning.

  He got out of the car and hurried around to open Melanie’s door for her.

  “Whose house is this?” she said.

  “It belongs to a friend of mine,” Josh said. “He’s not using it this week.”

  He watched for her reaction. She seemed nonplussed. It had occurred to him since the moment that Zach handed him the keys that Melanie would think borrowing someone else’s house was cheesy and juvenile. Peter Patchen made serious money. He was the kind of guy who booked a suite at a five-star resort in Cabo. He could have rented a place like this with ease.

  Josh’s hands shook as he unlocked the front door. He checked over his shoulder at the neighbor’s house, where a single onion lamp burned.

  These neighbors, according to Zach, were real watchdogs, and so one of the rules Josh had to strictly adhere to was not to turn on any lights on the north side of the house.

  Inside the house, Josh took off his shoes.

  “Take off your shoes,” he said.

  Melanie laughed. “Ohhhh-kay.”

  “I know,” he said. “Sorry.” The floors were made of some rare wood, Zach said, and the rule was: No shoes, not even if you were the Queen of England.

  Josh walked up a curving staircase to a great room with windows overlooking the harbor. He turned on some lights and immediately set them on dimmers, way down low. There was a fancy bar with mirrors and blue granite and a hundred wineglasses hanging upside down. On the counter, as promised, Zach had left a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice and a plate of cheese, crackers, strawberries, and grapes.

  “For us,” Josh said, brandishing the champagne bottle.

  “Oh,” Melanie said. She walked to the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the deck. “This place has some view!” she cal ed out.

  Josh nearly asked her to lower her voice. The last thing he wanted was for the neighbor to hear them and come over to investigate—or worse, to cal the police. Since he’d gotten the keys, a hundred ruinous scenarios had presented themselves in Josh’s mind, making him wonder if al this was even worth it.

  But later, after they had used the bed (not the master bed, of course, but the best guest-room bed, which was a king and very soft and luxurious, a five-star bed, in Josh’s estimation) and after they had showered together in a bathroom tiled with tumbled marble and after they had consumed the entire bottle of champ
agne (this was mostly Josh, since Melanie was pregnant) and the plate of cheese and fruit (this was mostly Melanie because she was ravenous after sex)—he decided that yes, it was worth it. The champagne had gone to his head, but that only intensified his enjoyment of these moments stolen, borrowed. Josh turned on the flat-screen TV at the foot of the bed. He had never done anything normal with Melanie, like watch TV.

  “What do you watch?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Wel , The Sopranos. And Desperate Housewives, if I remember to Tivo it. And footbal .”

  “Footbal ?” he said. “Col ege or NFL?”

  “NFL,” she said.

  He fed her Brie on crackers, and the cracker crumbs fel onto the sheets. Josh tickled her and she squirmed and Josh noted how squirming on 400-count sheets was far superior to squirming in grainy sand. He tickled her so relentlessly that she squealed, and Josh stopped immediately, cocking his head like a dog, listening. Had anyone heard them?

  “What’s wrong with you?” Melanie said.

  “Nothing.”

  “We’re not supposed to be here, are we?”

  “Of course we’re supposed to be here,” Josh said. “We are supposed to be here.”

  He and Melanie wrapped themselves in white, waffled robes that were hanging in the closet and stepped out onto the deck. Josh found himself wondering where he might find six mil ion dol ars, so he could buy the house. So they could just stay there. So they would never have to leave.

  He pul ed Melanie back into bed. “Are you happy?” he asked. “Do you like it here?”

  “Mmmhmmgwshw,” she said. Her mouth was ful of strawberry. “Yeah. It was very sweet of you to arrange this. You didn’t have to, though, Josh.

  The beach is fine.”

  “You deserve better,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. Her eyes misted up. She touched his cheek. “You are better.”

  You are better: She said things like this and rendered Josh speechless. You are better: He replayed the words over and over again in his mind, even after he took Melanie back to Number Eleven Shel Street, even after he returned to Shimmo to wash the sheets and wipe down the bathroom, even as he fel into bed at three o’clock in the morning. You are better.

  The fol owing night, it was back to the beach.

  “I almost got caught today,” Melanie said.

  They were lying next to each other on an old blanket. (It was, in fact, the blanket that Vicki had given Josh to take to the beach with the kids.

  Earlier, he’d had to shake it free of raisins and graham cracker crumbs.) They were on the very smal beach in Monomoy, hidden on the far side of two stacked wooden dinghies. To their left was tal marsh grass, which thrummed with the sound of bul frogs. The best thing about Monomoy was the view of town, which glittered in the distance like a real city. Monomoy was one of Josh’s favorite spots on the island, though compared to the night before, it was camping. Riches to rags, he thought.

  Josh propped himself up on his elbows. Melanie wasn’t trying to scare him. It had become part of their ritual to detail the ways in which they had almost gotten caught. There were a hundred pitfal s. Josh himself had nearly blown their cover that morning by showing up at Number Eleven with Melanie’s watch in his pocket. She had left it on the bedside table in Shimmo the night before and he had meant to slip it to her or leave it, casual y, on the kitchen table, but the second he walked through the gate, Blaine grabbed him by the pocket and the watch fel onto the flagstone path.

  Brenda was sitting on the step at the end of the path, but she was so intent on landing a pebble in the paper cup that she didn’t notice the watch.

  Blaine noticed, however—it was impossible to get anything past that kid—because later, when Josh asked the family beside them at the beach for the time, Blaine scrunched his brow.

  I thought you had Melanie’s watch, he said.

  Right, Josh said, determined not to get flustered. I found it in the yard. But I gave it back to her.

  Oh, Blaine said. He might have looked at Josh suspiciously for an extra beat, or that might have been Josh’s paranoid imagination.

  “What happened today?” Josh asked Melanie now. He leaned over and kissed her neck. She smel ed like chocolate. Immediately after sex she had pul ed a bag of M&M’s from her pocket, and now she was letting them dissolve, one by one, on her tongue.

  “I sat with Vicki after dinner,” Melanie said. “I read to her. And when I left, I told her I’d check on her when I got in.”

  “And she said, ‘Get in? From where? Are you going out?’” Josh said.

  “Exactly,” Melanie said. “So I told her I was planning on walking to the market to cal Peter from the pay phone.”

  Josh stiffened. Peter? Cal Peter?

  “That was a stupid excuse,” he said. “Because why wouldn’t you just cal Peter from the house?”

  “There’s no long distance from the house,” Melanie said. “So to cal Peter I’d have to go to the market.”

  “It was stil a stupid excuse,” Josh said. “Why would you want to cal Peter? He’s such an asshole.”

  “Right,” Melanie said. “That was just what I told Vicki.”

  “So you didn’t cal Peter?”

  “God, no. Not tonight.”

  “Another night? Did you cal him another night? Last night?”

  “Last week,” Melanie said. “In the morning, I cal ed him. About a household thing.”

  They were quiet. Josh heard the clanging of a buoy somewhere offshore. Normal y, he enjoyed Melanie’s too-close-for-comfort stories. It was thril ing, the secret of the two of them, the forbidden aspect of it. Josh’s senses were heightened, his desire doubled and tripled by the simple fact that they were flying under everyone’s radar. And yet now, with the mention of Peter, with the confession that she had spoken to him earlier in the week, he felt confused and jealous. He felt like he had been deceived. If she had talked to Peter earlier in the week, she should have told him. He might not have gone to al the trouble that last night entailed had he known Melanie was back in touch with Peter the creep, the lowlife, the philanderer. He might have skipped it and saved the ninety dol ars he’d had to pay Zach for the champagne.

  Why the hel would Melanie be cal ing Peter? A household thing? Which meant what, the electric bil ? Josh didn’t get it. He wanted to ask Melanie to explain, he wanted her to clarify. But Josh was halted by the sensation that this relationship was becoming too important to him—and one of the deals he had made with himself was that this was fun, yes, and exciting, certainly, but it was also short-term. For the summer only. He and Melanie had real lives to live—Josh would return to Middlebury, Melanie would go back to Connecticut and have her baby. There wasn’t real y room for jealousy or hurt feelings, and yet Josh was dangerously close to suffering from both.

  Melanie offered Josh the bag of M&M’s, but he pushed her hand away.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “Someone’s upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “It was nothing, Josh. One phone cal . I probably won’t cal him again this summer.”

  “Go ahead and cal him,” Josh said. “He’s your husband.” He took a breath of pungent air. At that moment, Monomoy seemed like less of a haven and more of a swamp. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Melanie eyed him for a second, and he thought she might protest, but Melanie wasn’t sil y or desperate like the other girls he knew. She folded the top of the M&M’s bag over neatly, stood up, and brushed herself off.

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They walked back to the Jeep in silence, with Josh thinking alternately that this whole thing was stupid, they should just end it now. Deep down, however, Josh knew he would never be able to end it, and why would he want to? Melanie wasn’t going back to Peter any time this summer, and summer was al he cared about so he should stop whining and enjoy himself.

  Fine. That conclusion reached, he felt much better. At the Jeep, he opened Melanie’s door an
d kissed her as he helped her in.

  Headlights swooped in on him so fast he didn’t know what they were at first. He felt caught, like a cartoon convict pegged by searchlights. He shouted at Melanie to get down, but she didn’t hear him or she heard him but didn’t listen because when he checked she was staring into the front of the big, black truck like she thought it might run them over. The engine gunned and the truck swerved into the spot next to the Jeep for just long enough that Josh could see who was driving; then the truck reversed and pul ed out, leaving behind the proverbial cloud of brown dust and a spray of sand that peppered Josh’s legs like buckshot.

  Shit, Josh thought, and he said it over and again as he climbed into the Jeep next to Melanie. Shit, shit, shit. It might have been a coincidence, Josh thought. It wasn’t like parking in Monomoy was an original idea. But who was he kidding? Rob Patalka, Didi’s brother, was fol owing him, stalking him, or driving around the island at Didi’s insistence trying to hunt him down. Didi certainly wasn’t paying Rob, so what incentive did Rob have to do her bidding? Was it out of loyalty? Brotherly love? Josh didn’t want to think about it. Al he knew was that the thril and rush of almost getting caught had turned, like sour milk, into the reality of getting caught.

  Melanie, not knowing this, looked amused. “Friend of yours?” she said.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  A card came in the mail. It was from Dolores, the leader of Vicki’s cancer support group back in Connecticut. Alan, the member of the group with pancreatic cancer, had passed away the previous Monday. Vicki stared at the words “passed away” in Dolores’s spidery handwriting. Alan was fifty-seven years old, he’d been married for thirty-one of those years, he was the father of one son and two daughters; he had a grandchild, the son of his son, a baby named Brendan, who was the same age as Porter. Alan, either coincidental y or on purpose, always chose the seat next to Vicki in the support group circle; they held hands during the opening and closing prayer. This was al Vicki knew of the man, and yet as she read Dolores’s note (“passed away”) she felt cold and numb. Alan had kissed Vicki’s cheek before she left for Nantucket. She’d said, I’ll see you when I get back. And he’d said, You bet.