Elin Hilderbrand - Barefoot - A Novel

“No, we don’t,” Brenda said.

“What is it?” Ted asked.

“Josh is sleeping with your friend,” Didi said. “The one who’s pregnant.”

“Whoa-ho!” Ted said. “That’s a pretty big accusation.” He looked at Vicki first, then Brenda. His brow creased. “You’re talking about Melanie, right? Melanie? How do you know this? Did Josh tell you this?”

“Go away,” Brenda said. “Please.”

“My brother saw them together,” Didi said. “Out in Monomoy. In the middle of the night.”

“Your brother?” Ted said.

“She’s ful of shit, Ted,” Brenda said. “I don’t know what your problem is with our family, but we real y need you to leave us alone. We’re under a lot of stress here.”

Stress, Vicki thought. There should be another word.

“Fine,” Didi said. She crossed her arms over her chest in a way that seemed diffident. “But I’m not ful of shit. They are sleeping together.” She spun on her heels and marched away.

Yes, Vicki thought. The girl was probably right. Josh and Melanie. Strange, nearly unbelievable, and yet Vicki had picked up on a bunch of clues that made her believe the girl was correct. Josh and Melanie together: It should have been the biggest revelation of the summer, but Vicki threw it into the basket with everything else. It didn’t matter.

At home, the routine went to pot. Josh returned with the kids.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” Ted said. “The doctor is going to cal later.”

“Oh,” Josh said. He looked at Vicki quizzical y. “You okay, Boss?”

Melanie and Josh, she thought. Possible? She couldn’t waste time wondering. Palliative care. A year, maybe two. Blaine would be six, Porter three. Blaine would remember her, Porter probably not. There would be long hospital visits and drugs that put her mind on Pluto. Vicki felt like she was going to faint. She col apsed in a chair.

“Ted, can you take the kids out, please? I can’t deal.”

“Take them out where? What about Porter’s nap?”

“Drive him around until he fal s asleep. I can’t lie down. What if the phone rings?”

Josh cleared his throat. “Okay, I’m going to go, then.”

Blaine protested. “What about a story, Josh? What about Kiss the Cow ?”

“You’re going with Daddy,” Vicki said.

Josh slipped out with a wave; he seemed eager to leave.

“I don’t know about this, Vick,” Ted said. “You’re going to sit here by yourself and obsess.”

“I’l take the kids,” Brenda said. “That way you can both sit here and obsess.”

Vicki felt like screaming, We are talking about my health, my body, my life!

“Go,” she said. She hid in her hot bedroom with the door closed. She opened the window; she turned on the fan. She sat on the edge of the bed.

Al over the world mothers were dying. Pal iative care: steps that could be taken to prolong her life. There was a question she needed to ask Brenda, but they never seemed to get a minute alone so Vicki could ask her. Because Melanie was always there? Melanie, twirling outside the dressing room. Are you sure there’s not something else going on? Melanie and Josh. But when? Where? And why wouldn’t Melanie have told her? But maybe the answer to that was obvious. She thought Vicki would be mad. Would Vicki be mad? She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor. Her feet, her toes, her body. Ted tapped on the door.

“Come in,” she said.

He handed her the phone. “It’s Dr. Alcott.”

So soon? But when she checked the clock, she saw it was quarter to four. “Hel o?” she said.

“Vicki? Hi, it’s Mark.”

“Hi,” she said.

“First of al , let me tel you that Dr. Garcia has scheduled your surgery for September first.”

“My surgery?” Vicki said. “So it worked? The chemo?”

Ted clapped his hands like he might have at a sporting event.

“It worked exactly the way it was supposed to,” Dr. Alcott said. “The tumor has shrunk significantly, and it has receded from the chest wal . The thoracic surgeon should be able to go in and get it al out. And . . . assuming the cancer hasn’t metastasized, your chances of remission are good.”

“You’re kidding me,” Vicki said. She thought she might laugh, or cry, but al she felt was breathless wonder. “You are kidding me.”

“Wel , there’s the surgery,” Dr. Alcott said. “Which is never risk-free. And then there’s the chance that the surgeon wil miss something or that we’ve missed something. There’s a chance the cancer wil turn up somewhere else—but this is just my ultra-cautious side talking. Overal , if the surgery works out like it should, then yes, remission.”

“Remission,” Vicki repeated.

Ted crushed Vicki in a bear hug. Vicki was afraid to feel anything resembling joy or relief, because what if it was a mistake, what if he was lying .

. . ?

“This is good news? I should feel happy?”

“It could have been a whole lot worse,” he said. “This is just one step, but it’s an important step. So, yes, be happy. Absolutely.”

Vicki hung up the phone. Ted said, “I’m going to cal your mother. I promised her.” He left the room, and Vicki sank back down on the bed. On the nightstand lay the snapshot of the boys, the one Ted had handed her at the hospital. It was of Blaine and Porter in a red vinyl booth at Friendly’s.

They had been eating clown sundaes, and Porter’s face was smeared with chocolate. Vicki had taken them for lunch one day last winter because it was cold and snowy and she had wanted to get out of the house. It had been just a random day, just one of hundreds she had al but forgotten. Just one of thousands that she had taken for granted.

Looking back, Brenda couldn’t believe she had ever been worried. Of course Vicki’s news was good, of course the tumor had shrunk, of course surgery would be successful and Vicki would beat lung cancer. The woman was the luckiest person on the planet. Her life was Teflon—mess happened, but it didn’t stick.

And why, Brenda wondered, should Vicki be the only one with luck? Why shouldn’t Brenda be able to emerge from her own morass of problems in a similarly exultant way? Why shouldn’t Brenda and Vicki be like sister superheroes, overcoming adversity in a single summer, together?

Ted had brought his laptop with him, but he only used it to send e-mail and check the market in the morning. Sure, Brenda could use it. Of course!

Because of the good news of the CT scan, the whole house was in a generous frame of mind. Brenda took advantage of this—she set herself up on the back deck with the laptop and a thermos of coffee and her stack of yel ow legal pads and she got to work typing in The Innocent Impostor, the screenplay. She was able to revise as she went along, she used an online thesaurus, she referenced a copy of The Screenwriter’s Bible that she had checked out of the Nantucket Atheneum. The movie script had started out as a lark, but it had become something real. Was this how Pol ock had felt? He’d dripped paint over a canvas in an approximation of child’s play—and somehow it became art? Brenda tried not to think about Walsh or Jackson Pol ock or one hundred and twenty-five thousand dol ars as she worked. She tried not to think: What am I going to do if I don’t sell it? Her mind flickered to the phone number she had programmed into her cel phone for Amy Feldman, her student whose father was the president of Marquee Films. To Brenda’s recol ection, Amy Feldman had liked The Innocent Impostor as much as anyone else; she had turned in a solid midterm paper comparing Calvin Dare to a character from Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm . Had Amy Feldman heard about what happened to Dr. Lyndon right before the end of the semester? Of course she had. The students were official y told that Dr. Lyndon resigned for personal reasons; the last two classes were cancel ed, and Dr. Atela took responsibility for grading the final papers. But the scandalous stories—