Elin Hilderbrand - Barefoot - A Novel

“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.

Pregnant.

Of course, she thought. Of course, of course. She was pregnant now, when it no longer mattered, when it was a painful and complicated discovery instead of a joyous one. Melanie was aching to tel Peter. Every time she looked at him, she felt like she was going to burst with the news.

She thought he would be astute enough to figure it out on his own—because she rushed to the bathroom to vomit, because she slept al the time.

Peter either didn’t notice these obvious symptoms or he chalked them up to Frances Digitt–inspired melodrama. Melanie decided she would not tel Peter—she was resolved in this—until something changed. She wanted Peter to leave Frances Digitt because he loved her, Melanie, and not because there was now going to be a baby. A baby. Their baby. After al that trying, after al the needles, drugs, treatments, counting days, scheduling sex, it had happened on its own. Even Peter would be amazed, even he would shout with joy. But she couldn’t divulge the news yet. The pregnancy was her only currency; it was al she had left, and she didn’t want to share it.

So . . . get out of town. Go with Vicki—and her sister, Brenda—to an island thirty miles out to sea.

Melanie hadn’t told Peter she was leaving; he wouldn’t realize it until seven o’clock that evening when he found her note in an envelope taped to the door of the mudroom. He would be stunned by her departure. He would realize he’d made a horrible mistake. The phone would ring. Maybe. He would ask her to come home. Maybe.

But maybe he’d be happy she left. Relieved. Maybe he would count Melanie’s departure as his good fortune and invite Frances Digitt to move into their house and tend Melanie’s garden.

One bad thought was al it took. Melanie rushed to the communal bathroom and vomited bitter green bile into the toilet, which was spotted with urine because Blaine could not yet clear the rim. She pooled water in her hand and rinsed her mouth, glanced at her reflection in the brown-spotted mirror. Even the mirror looked sick. She stepped onto the rickety bathroom scale; if the thing were right, then she had lost three pounds since discovering she was pregnant. She couldn’t keep anything down, not ginger ale, not dry toast, but she kept at it, eating and vomiting, because she was hungry, ravenous, and she couldn’t stand to think of her baby starving and dehydrated, shriveling up like a piece of beef jerky.

The house was quiet. Vicki and the kids were sleeping, and Brenda was outside talking to . . . that handsome kid from the airport, the one who had offered Melanie first aid. It figured. Melanie hadn’t gotten the whole story about Brenda and her student, but it didn’t take a wizard to figure out that Brenda was a loose cannon. Promiscuous. Easy. Look at the way she was touching the kid’s shoulder, then shaking her boobs at him. And he was just a kid, in his twenties, though quite adorable. He had smiled at Melanie when he offered the first aid, like he’d wanted to help but wasn’t sure how. Melanie sighed. When was the last time Peter had smiled at her? She pul ed the shades against the sun. The only good thing about pregnant sleep was that she was too exhausted to dream.

Brenda was the only adult awake when the phone rang. She had cleared Aunt Liv’s tea set and al the ceramic knickknacks and enamel boxes from the coffee table so that she and Blaine could play Chutes and Ladders. The baby, meanwhile, would sit in Brenda’s lap for thirty or forty seconds, then climb over her folded knees like Hannibal over the mountains and he was off, crawling across the satiny floorboards, pul ing at lamps, fingering electrical cords, plugs, outlets. Somehow, while Brenda was teaching Blaine to count out spaces on the board, Porter put a dime in his mouth.

Brenda heard him gagging, and she picked him up and smacked him on the back; the dime went flying across the room. Blaine moved himself forward an il egal fourteen spaces, and Brenda, although desperate for the game to be over, made him move back on principle. He started to cry.

Brenda gathered him into her lap, and Porter crawled into the kitchen. At least he was too short to reach the knives. But then, as Brenda explained to Blaine that if he cheated at games no one would ever want to play with him, she heard a muffled thud that sickened her heart.

“Porter?” she said.

He gurgled happily in response.

Brenda slid Blaine off her lap. Aunt Liv’s banjo clock chimed; it was six-thirty. Vicki and Melanie had been in their respective rooms with the doors closed since three. Brenda would have welcomed three and a half quiet hours for herself—but she was not pregnant and she did not have cancer. Cancer, she thought. Did the word ever get less scary and horrible? If you repeated it often enough and understood it better, did it lose that Grim Reaper chil ?

In the kitchen, Brenda found her two-hundred-year-old first edition of The Innocent Impostor splayed on the floor like a dead bird. Porter sat next to the book, chewing on something. The cap to Brenda’s pen.

Brenda cried out. Gently, she picked up the book, amazed that as old as it was, it hadn’t crumbled into dust from the impact. She never should have taken it out of the briefcase—the book, like an elderly person, needed to be coddled. She smoothed the pages and swaddled it in its plastic cover, nestled it in the bubble wrap and locked it up, safe from grubby little hands. She plucked the pen cap out of Porter’s drooly little mouth and threw it, with some force, into the kitchen trash.

Her problems were smal beans, she reminded herself. In comparison, that was. She did not have cancer, she was not carrying her cheating husband’s baby. Out of three bad situations, hers was the least dire. Was that a blessing or a curse? I am grateful for my health. I will not feel sorry for myself. I am here to help Vicki, my sister, who has cancer. Two hours after the news of Brenda’s dismissal hit Champion’s campus, Brenda had received an e-mail from a col eague of hers at the University of Iowa. Rumor has it you’ve been axed, Neil Gilinski wrote. Rumor has it you committed the only sin that can’t be forgiven other than out-and-out plagiarism. Brenda’s heart had tumbled. The news of her disgrace had traveled halfway across the country in two hours. It might as wel have appeared on Page Six. But she would not feel sorry for herself. She would be grateful for her health.