Barefoot: A Novel

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “Ted?” she said. Her voice was dry and papery. She was just dehydrated, maybe. She needed water. She reached for the glass she kept on the nightstand, but her arms trembled and she could not lift her head to take a sip. Ted was busy with the kids, tickling and teasing, roughhousing and kicking—and he didn’t hear her. The glass slipped, or she dropped it, it got away from her somehow, and fel to the floor, spil ing everywhere, though it didn’t break.

  “Jesus, Vick,” Ted said.

  “My head,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My head,” she said, “is kil ing me.” This sounded col oquial—it was, after al , a popular turn of phrase—and hence there was no way Ted would know Vicki meant it literal y. Her head was kil ing her. Her head was trying to kil her.

  “The light,” she said. “The kids.” She pul ed the sheet over her head but it was as effective at blocking out noise and sunlight as a Kleenex.

  “Do you want aspirin?” Ted said. “Some chocolate milk?”

  As if she had a hangover. There had been some wine the night before—wine every night since her CT scan—but this was not a hangover. Stil , Vicki wasn’t hearty enough to turn down the offer of medicine.

  “I might have painkil ers left,” she said. Just eking out this sentence hurt.

  Ted sloughed the boys off the bed and scooted Blaine out the door of the bedroom. “Go out. Mom doesn’t feel wel .”

  “Again?” Blaine said.

  Ah, the guilt. Blaine would probably end up in therapy due to Vicki’s cancer, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Get better, she thought. Then worry about it.

  Ted held Porter in one arm and checked the prescription bottles on Vicki’s dresser.

  “Percocet,” he said. “Empty.”

  “Shit,” she said. She was pretty sure there’d been three or four left. Brenda? “Would you cal Dr. Alcott?”

  “And tel him what?” Ted was like Vicki used to be: supremely uncomfortable around doctors. But since Vicki had begun regularly relying on doctors to save her life, her attitude had changed.

  “Cal in more,” Vicki said. And then she became confused. Why was she asking Blaine to cal the doctor? Would he, at the age of four and a half, be able to do it? He wasn’t even good at talking on the phone with his grandmother. “Magic words,” Vicki reminded him.

  Who knew how many painful moments passed? It felt like forever. Vicki moaned into her pil ow. She could hear noises from the rest of the house, domestic noises—the frying pan hitting the stove, eggs cracking, the whisk chiming against the side of the stoneware bowl, the butter melting, the refrigerator door opening and closing, ice in a glass, Porter crying, the rubber squeal of the high chair sliding across the linoleum, Blaine’s constant stream of chatter, Ted’s voice—yes, on the phone, thank God. So much noise—and al of it as loud and unpleasant to her ears as a jackhammer in the room. Vicki grabbed Ted’s goose-down pil ow and covered her head.

  The pain was a hand squeezing water from the sponge of her brain. Let go!

  There was a tap on the door. Brenda. “Vick, are you okay?”

  Vicki wanted to scream at her sister for stealing her Percocet, but screaming was beyond her.

  “Headache,” Vicki mumbled. “Unbearable pain.”

  “Ted just cal ed Dr. Alcott. He wants you to come in.”

  Come in where? Vicki thought. Come into the hospital? Impossible. The whole idea of getting out of bed, getting into the car, driving through the eyebal -bursting sunny day to the hospital, completely preposterous.

  Ted’s voice was alongside Brenda’s now. “Dr. Alcott wants to see you, Vick.”

  “Because I have a headache?” Vicki said. “What about the Percocet?”

  “He’s cal ing them in,” Ted said.

  Vicki felt something like relief, though it was difficult to identify under the blanket of pain.

  “But he wants you to come in,” Ted said. “He wants to take a look at you. He said it might not be a bad idea to have an MRI.”

  “Why?” Vicki said.

  “I don’t know.”

  That was a big, fat lie. Metastasis to the brain, she thought. Dr. Alcott’s suspicions were correct; she could feel it. The cancer was a hand, fingers spreading through her brain, pressing down. The cancer was a spider, nesting in her gray matter. The pain, the pressure, the increased sensitivity to sound, to light. This was what a brain tumor felt like; she had heard someone in her cancer support group describe it, but she couldn’t remember who. Alan? No, Alan was dead. It wasn’t Alan. Vicki said, “I had too much wine last night.”

  “One glass?” Ted said.

  “Water,” Vicki said. “Magic words. Please. Thank you.”

  The pil ow was lifted. Vicki smel ed Brenda—what was it? Noxema. Piña colada suntan lotion.

  “You’re not making sense, Vick. Open your eyes.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  Vicki tried. The one eye opened. There was a very blurry Brenda. Behind her, a form Vicki knew to be Ted, but could just as easily have been an international thief, come to cut her open and take the jewels.

  “You stole my Percocets,” Vicki said to Brenda.

  “Yes,” Brenda said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I need them,” Vicki said. “Now.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” Ted said. “I’l take the kids.”

  “I’l get you water,” Brenda said to Vicki. “Ice water with paper-thin slices of lemon, just how you like it.”

  “No hospital,” Vicki said. “I’m never going back.”

  Brenda and Ted left the room. The click of the door shutting was like a gunshot. Brenda said to Ted, “Her pupil was real y dilated. What do you suppose that means?”

  There’s a spider on my brain, Vicki thought. Brenda was whispering, but her voice reverberated in Vicki’s head like she was back at CBGB at a B-52’s concert standing next to the chin-high speaker, which was blaring at a bazil ion decibels. Quiet!

  “I have no idea,” Ted said.

  The drugs helped, at least enough so that Vicki could limp along through the next few days. Dr. Alcott had prescribed only twenty Percocets, and Vicki found that by taking two pil s three times a day the pain was ratcheted down from unbearable to merely excruciating. Her left eye final y did open, though the lid was droopy, as though Vicki were a stroke victim, and both of her pupils were as big as manhole covers. Vicki wore her sunglasses whenever she could get away with it. She didn’t want Brenda or Ted to know that it felt like she was wearing a Mack truck tire around her neck, she didn’t want them to know it felt like someone was trying to pul her brain out through her eye socket, and she especial y didn’t want them to know about the hand squeezing water from the sponge of her brain or the spider nesting. She wasn’t going back to the hospital for any reason, she would not agree to an MRI, because she absolutely would not be able to handle the news of a metastasis to the brain.

  And so, she carried on. They had a week left. Ted was trying to cram everything in at the last minute; he wanted to spend every waking second outside. He played tennis at the casino while Josh had the kids, and he took Vicki, Brenda, and Melanie to lunch at the Wauwinet, where Vicki spent the whole time trying to keep her head off the table. Ted wanted to go into town every night after dinner, to walk the docks and ogle the yachts

  —and one evening, impulsively, he signed himself and Blaine up for a day of charter fishing, despite the fact that the captain eyed Blaine doubtful y and told Ted he would have to come prepared with a life jacket for the little guy. Ted bought a sixty-dol ar life jacket for Blaine at the Ship’s Chandlery, seconds later.

  Whereas Vicki once would have staged a protest ( he’s too little, it’s not safe, a big waste of money, Ted ), now she stood mutely by. Ted didn’t ask her how she felt because he didn’t want to hear the answer. There were only seven days of summer left; surely Vicki could hang on, could act and pretend, until they got home.

  Vicki cal ed Dr. Alcott, M
ark, herself, for more drugs.

  “Stil the headache?” he said.

  “It’s not as bad as before,” she lied. “But we’re so busy, there’s so much going on, that . . .”

  “Percocet is a narcotic,” Dr. Alcott said. “For extreme pain.”

  “I’m in extreme pain,” Vicki said. “I qualify as a person who needs a narcotic, I promise.”

  “I believe you,” Dr. Alcott said. “And that’s why I want you to come in.”

  “I’m not coming in,” Vicki said.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Dr. Alcott said.

  Oh, but there was. Vicki said, “Is there anything else I can take?”

  Dr. Alcott sighed. Vicki felt like Blaine. Can I have a hamster when I’m six? A skateboard? Bubble gum? “I’l cal something in.”

  Later, out of desperation, Vicki cal ed the pharmacy. “Yes,” the pharmacist said, in a way that could only be compared to the Angel Gabriel announcing the impending birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary, “Dr. Alcott cal ed in a prescription for Darvocet and six-hundred-mil igram Motrin.”

  “Is Darvocet a narcotic?” Vicki asked.

  “No, ma’am, it’s not.”

  “But it is a painkil er?”

  “Yes, indeed, it is, and it can be taken to greater effect with the Motrin.”

  Greater effect. Vicki was mol ified.

  Ted lobbied for another beach picnic. He wanted to use his fishing poles one more time, he wanted lobsters again. This time Vicki could organize, right?

  Right, Vicki said weakly.

  That afternoon, when Josh dropped off the boys, Ted thumped him on the back and said, “We’re going back out to Smith’s Point tomorrow night for dinner and some more fishing. Wil you join us?”

  “I can’t,” Josh said. “I’m busy.”

  “Busy?” Ted said.

  Vicki looked at Josh’s face. She was in the kitchen with her sunglasses on and everyone looked shadowy and dim, like actors in an old black-and-white movie.

  “Real y?” she said. “We’d love to have you. It’s the last . . .”

  “Real y,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  Later, after Josh left, Ted said, “We could invite Dr. Alcott to the picnic. He likes to fish.”

  “No,” Vicki said. “No way.”

  Numbed by Darvocet and Motrin (ramped up with the addition of three Advil and two Tylenol), Vicki pul ed the picnic together in a near-exact replica of the previous picnic. Except, no Josh.

  “Who’s coming?” Melanie asked.

  Vicki said, “Just us.”

  As Ted drove west toward Madaket and Smith’s Point, Vicki felt the summer ending. It was closing, like a door. The sun hung low in the sky, barely hovering over the tops of the scrub pines of Ram Pasture; its last rays dripped onto the rooftops of the huge summer homes in Dionis. Or so it seemed to Vicki, through her sunglasses. The world was slowing down, the light was syrupy. Melanie sat up front next to Ted, and Brenda and Vicki sat in the Yukon’s middle section, where they could tend to the kids in the way-back. Blaine had his hand arched over his head because Ted had asked him to take care of those rods and Blaine thought that meant he had to hold them for the entire ride. Porter babbled, alternately sucking on his pacifier and popping it out, which made a hol ow noise he liked. Babble, suck, pop. The car smel ed like lobster. Vicki had accidental y ordered an extra dinner—for Josh, she realized, who wasn’t coming. The car felt empty without him. Was she the only person who felt this way? The kids missed him. Melanie, probably, too, though Vicki hadn’t felt wel or brave enough to talk to Melanie about Josh. Maybe later, down the road, after surgery and the baby, maybe when they more closely resembled the people they’d been before this summer. (A memory came to Vicki out of the blue: a dinner party at Melanie and Peter’s house, a catered party that featured black truffle in every course. Peter had bought the truffle from a

  “truffle broker” in Paris after another failed round of in vitro; it was his idea to hire the caterer and throw the party. Vicki had appeared at the party with an ounce of outrageously expensive perfume from Henri Bendel as a gift for Melanie. Melanie had seemed delighted by the perfume. Vicki guarded the conversation at that dinner party like the gestapo; every time one of the other guests mentioned anything having to do with children, Vicki changed the subject.)

  They would never go back to those former selves. They had changed; they would change again. As if reading Vicki’s thoughts, Brenda let out a big sigh. Vicki looked her way.

  “What?”

  “I have to talk to you,” Brenda said. She slid down in her seat, and Vicki, instinctively, did the same. They were like kids again, talking below their parents’ radar, where they wouldn’t be heard.

  “About what?” Vicki said.

  “About money,” Brenda said.

  The car’s radio was on. Journey, singing “Wheels in the Sky.” Vicki thought, Wheels in the sky? What did that mean, exactly? Did that mean the plan that God was endlessly spinning for us? In the front seat, Ted was blathering on to Melanie about the fishing trip he and Blaine were going to take on Tuesday. Apparently, Harrison Ford would be on the boat, too, with his nephew. Did wheels in the sky refer to the wheels turning in Vicki’s mind, the gears that were supposed to move at lightning speed, shuttling thoughts in and out, but that now kept getting stuck and going in reverse, as though they needed oil? About money? Why would anyone want to talk about money? Did wheels in the sky mean the actual sky? Outside, the sky was dark already. How was that possible, when just moments before, the sun . . . babble, suck, pop. Ted said, They can pretty much guarantee you’ll catch a bluefish, but everyone wants stripers. The car smel ed like lobsters. Seven mothers died when a bus on a Los Angeles freeway flipped and caught fire. Only seven? Josh was busy. Really, he said. I’m busy. Greta Jenkins had started tel ing a story about her daughter, Avery, four years old, taking dance lessons and what a hassle it had been to find the right kind of tights. Tights without feet, Greta said. A look of loss and despair had flickered across Melanie’s face (but just for a second because she was, after al , the hostess of this dinner party, with its shavings of truffle over everything—like shavings from a lead pencil, Vicki thought). Vicki had changed the subject, saying, Did anyone read the Susan Orlean article in The New Yorker about pigeon fanciers? Babble, suck, pop. About money? Vicki missed Josh. He was busy. It was dark everywhere now.

  “Ted!” The voice was Brenda’s serious voice, even more serious than when she said, I have to talk to you. It was her urgent voice. Signaling: Emergency! “Ted, pul over right now. She passed out or fainted or something. I’m cal ing nine-one-one.”

  “Who?” Ted said, turning down the radio. “What?”

  “Vicki,” Brenda said. “Vicki!”

  It wasn’t the sirens that woke her or the incredible rush of pavement beneath the ambulance’s tires, though Vicki could feel the speed, and the sirens were as upsetting as the screams of one of her children, hurt or terrified. What woke her was the smel . Something sharp, antiseptic.

  Something right under her nose. Smel ing salts? Like she had fainted in a Victorian parlor? An unfamiliar young man, Josh’s age but with hair pul ed back in a ponytail (why such long hair on a guy? Vicki should have asked Castor, from the poker game, back when she had a chance), was gazing down at her, though he was blurry. Again, Vicki could only get one eye open.

  “Vicki!” There, moving in to her limited field of vision, was her sister, and Vicki was relieved. Brenda. There was something important Vicki had wanted to ask Brenda al summer long, but she had been waiting for the right moment and, too, she had been afraid to ask, but she would ask now.

  Before it was too late.

  Vicki opened her mouth to speak, and Brenda said, “I’m sorry I brought up money. God, I am so sorry. Like what you need is more upset. And . . .

  don’t kil me, but I cal ed Mom and Dad. They’re on their way up. Right now, tonight.”

  Before it’s too late! Vicki
thought. But her eyelids were being pul ed down like the shades on the windows of her bedroom at Number Eleven Shel Street. She was tired, she realized. Tired of fighting, tired of denying it: She was very sick. She was going to die. It had been mentioned in Vicki’s cancer support group that when you got close, fear vanished and peace settled in. Vicki was tired, she wanted to go back to where she’d been before she woke up, to the lost place and time, the nothingness. But resist! Stay with us a little longer! She had to ask Brenda something very important, the most important thing, but Vicki could not find her voice, her voice eluded her, it was gone, it had been stolen—and so Vicki just squeezed Brenda’s hand and thought the words and hoped that Brenda, as bril iant as she was, could intuit them.

  I want you to take care of Blaine and Porter. I want you to take my little boys and raise them into men. Ted will be there, too, of course. He will do the ball games and the skiing and the fishing, he will talk to them about girls and drugs and alcohol, he will handle the guy stuff. But boys need a mother, a mommy, and I want that person to be you. You know me, I’m a list person, I always have been, even when I was pretending not to be. So here is the list. Remember everything, forget nothing: Kiss the kids when they fall down, read them stories, praise them when they share, teach them to be kind, to knock on a door before they enter a room, to put their toys away, to put the toilet seat down when they finish.

  Play Chutes and Ladders, take them to museums and zoos and funny movies. Listen when they tell you something. Encourage them to sing, to build, to paint, to glue and tape, to call their grandmother. Teach them to cook one thing, make them eat grapes and carrots, and broccoli if you can, get them into swimming lessons, let them have sleepovers with friends where they watch Scooby-Doo and eat pizza and popcorn. Give them one gold dollar from the tooth fairy for each lost tooth. Make certain they don’t choke, drown, or ride their bike without a helmet. Volunteer in the classroom, always be on time picking them up and dropping them off, go to extra lengths with the Halloween costumes, the Christmas stockings, the valentines. Take them sledding and then make hot chocolate with marshmallows. Let them have an extra turn on the slide, notice when their pants get too short or their shoes too tight, hang up their artwork, let them have ice cream with jimmies when they’re good. Magic words, always, for everything. Do not buy a PlayStation. Spend your money, instead, on a trip to Egypt. They should see the Pyramids, the Sphinx. But most important, Brenda, tell them every single day how much I love them, even though I’m not there. I will be watching them, every soccer goal, every sand castle they build, every time they raise their hand in class with an answer right or wrong, I will be watching them. I will put my arms around them when they are sick, hurt, or sad. Make sure they can feel my arms around them! Someone once told me that having a child was like having your heart walk around outside of your body. They are my heart, Brenda, the heart I am leaving behind. Take care of my heart, Bren.