Elin Hilderbrand - Barefoot - A Novel

“Josh,” the voice repeated. There was a pause, then an intake of breath. “Oh! You must be the young man who helped out this summer.”

“Yes,” Josh said. He heard Penelope Ross’s reedy voice. Didi told us . . . “Yes, I am. Who’s this?”

“Oooh, I’m El en Lyndon. Vicki and Brenda’s mom. They just raved about you. Raved! So, I thank you and their father thanks you. We would have been here ourselves if we could, but I had some ambulatory issues, knee operation and al that. And Buzz, my husband, has work. We only came now because it was a real emergency . . .”

“Right,” Josh said. “Is Vicki okay?”

Another sharp intake of breath. And then it sounded like the woman was trying to hold herself together. “She’s okay. Which is to say, she stil has cancer. But it’s just the regular old cancer and not any new cancer. We were al sure it was going to be new cancer, but no, the MRI was clear. She lost consciousness the other night in the car, and we al thought the cancer had gone to her brain. But the doctors said she had overmedicated, her blood was thinned, plus there was the heat and the stress. You know Vicki. She feels an enormous amount of pressure because of the surgery and whatnot.” El en Lyndon paused, and Josh heard her pluck a Kleenex from a box. “My daughter wants to live more than anyone I have ever known.”

She wants to live, Josh thought. Unlike Didi. Unlike my own mother.

“Because of the kids,” El en Lyndon said. “Because of everything.”

“Right,” Josh said. “I know.”

El en Lyndon’s voice brightened. “So, anyway! If you hold on one moment, I’l get Melanie.”

“Okay,” Josh said. “Thanks.”

Y ou should never underestimate the power of your mind, Dr. Alcott said. The cancer isn’t making you sick. You’re making yourself sick.

These words were delivered to Vicki, bedside, in the hospital. Coming from anyone else they would have sounded like an admonishment, but from Dr. Alcott—Mark—it just sounded like the truth, gently spoken.

“I’m going to release you,” he said. “But you have to promise me that, between now and the date of your surgery, you’l relax. You’l drink plenty of water and take the vitamins and eat right. You wil not self-medicate. You’l talk to someone when you feel anxious or upset. If you internalize your fear, it can turn around and destroy you.”

Vicki tried to speak, but found she couldn’t. She nodded, then choked out, “I know.”

“You say you know, but you don’t act like you know,” Dr. Alcott said. “You’re making the road harder for yourself than it needs to be. You took so many pil s you nearly put yourself into a coma.”

She tried again to speak but got stuck. Something was wrong with her voice. “S——orry.” Her tone was not what she intended; she sounded like an automaton on a recording.

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to yourself.”

“I’m sorry, s——elf,” Vicki said. She was only half joking.

Dr. Alcott smiled. “I want you to take it easy, do you hear me?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” Dr. Alcott said. He leaned in and kissed Vicki on the cheek. “This is good-bye. I won’t see you again this summer. But Dr. Garcia has promised to cal me after your surgery. And”—here he squeezed Vicki’s hand—“I want you to come back and visit me and the rest of the team next summer. Promise?”

She couldn’t speak! Something was wrong with her voice, or maybe she’d damaged her brain. She nodded.

“Good. Those are the visits we like the best.” He held her gaze. “Because next summer you’re going to be healthy.”

Vicki’s eyes swam with tears. It wasn’t as easy as Dr. Alcott was making it seem. She was petrified; anxiety held her by the shoulders. She couldn’t just click her heels like Dorothy and make that go away. She could not relax; she was incapable of taking it easy. She was standing on a ledge, fifty stories off the ground; she couldn’t pretend that she was safe, or that everything was going to be okay. She couldn’t even speak properly; something had been lost, or altered, while she was unconscious. Maybe she’d had a stroke. Maybe the drugs had ravaged her central controls.

Vicki let a few tears drop. What she wanted more than anything was to be out of this hospital for good and back home with her family at Number Eleven Shel Street.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

At home, she stil had trouble speaking. She had a stutter. The words and sentences were fluid in her mind, but in delivering them, she hit the same frustrating stumbling block again and again, even with Ted and the kids, even saying phrases she had said thousands of times. Magic words. Hold on. Be careful. I love you. Vicki was concerned about this but she was incapable of articulating her concern, and no one in the cottage seemed to notice her speech impediment, or the fact that, in order to hide the impediment (she would not be able to tolerate another trip to the hospital or any more drugs), she said next to nothing. The announcement of no metastases had put everyone’s mind at ease; the implication that Vicki’s “incident”

had come at her own hands (overdoing it with the painkil ers) or that it was al in her mind made her feel like a malingerer. If she complained now of something else, no one would believe her. They would think she was making it up. At times she thought perhaps she was making it up. She whispered to herself in the shower, I’m making it up. She got stuck on the m and stopped trying.

Ted, in an attempt to wring every bit of fun out of what remained of the summer, cajoled Vicki into joining him and Blaine on the fishing trip. He arranged for El en to stay home and watch Porter. It would be good for Blaine to have Vicki there as wel as Ted; it would be good for the three of them to spend the day together. It would be good for Vicki to be out on the water; in years past, Ted had chartered a sailboat, and Vicki had loved it. Remember, Vick, how you loved it? Vicki couldn’t protest. She nodded. Ohhhhh——kay.

It was just the three of them—plus the captain and first mate—because Harrison Ford cancel ed. Ted was disappointed, but only for a minute, and Vicki found it nicer without any other people. It was like they had their own boat. Blaine was over the moon to be on a real fishing boat, with a fight chair and special holders for his pole and his very own can of Coke. He bounded from one side of the boat to the other, bundled in his brand-new orange life jacket. He had both his parents to himself for the first time in a long time, and Vicki could see that while he was feeling very adult to be on this excursion, he was also relishing his role as the only child of his two parents. He let Ted hold him up high as they motored out of the harbor, past the jetty and around the tip of Great Point.

It was a stunning day. With the drone of the engine making conversation unnecessary, Vicki was set free for long periods of time. She basked in the sun, she sat up to feel the spray of the waves and to see Nantucket as just a sliver of pale sand in the distance. She watched the business of catching a fish as though it were a movie. Ted was doing most of the fishing while Blaine sat in the fight chair, a captive audience through one, two, three bluefish. With the fourth fish, Blaine said, “Another blue.” His voice was weary and disappointed beyond his years. With a wink between Ted and Pete, the captain, it became clear that the mission was to now catch a striped bass. Pete motored al the way to the other side of the island; if they set up right between Smith’s Point and Tuckernuck, he said, they would have better luck. The first mate, a kid named Andre, sat next to Vicki.