Barefoot: A Novel

“It’s boring,” Josh said. He did not share the story about the three women, the woman fal ing, the baby, the briefcase, or the delivery of the briefcase to ’Sconset, though Josh understood it was this incident that was causing him to think about quitting. “It’s pointless. I’d rather be doing something else.”

“Real y?” Tom Flynn said. He cut into his wedge of iceberg lettuce. Always with dinner they had iceberg salad. It was one of the many sad things about Josh’s father, though again, Josh couldn’t say exactly why. It was his refusal to deviate, his insistence on routine, the same salad winter, spring, summer, fal . It was tied to the death of Josh’s mother eleven years earlier. She had hanged herself from a beam in the attic while Tom was at work and Josh was at school. She hadn’t left a note—no hint or clue as to why she did what she did. She had seemed, if not overly happy, at least steady. She had grown up on the island, she had gone away to Plymouth State Col ege, she had worked as an office manager for a construction company. She had few close friends but everybody knew her—Janey Flynn, nee Cumberland. Pretty lady, runs the show at Dimmity Brothers, married to Tom who works out at the airport, one son, good-looking kid, smart as a whip. That was his mother’s biography—nothing flashy but nothing sinister either, no quiet desperation that Tom or Josh knew of. And yet.

So at the age of twelve Josh was left with just his father, who battled against his anger and confusion and grief with predictability, safety, evenness. Tom Flynn had never yel ed at Josh; he never lost his temper; he showed his love the best way he knew how: by working, by putting food on the table, by saving his money to send Josh to Middlebury. But sometimes, when Josh looked at his father, he saw a man suspended in his sorrow, floating in it the way a fetal pig in the biology lab at school floated in formaldehyde.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Wel , I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.” Josh wished he had taken a job off-island for the summer, at a camp in Vermont or something. He liked kids.

The phone rang. Josh finished off his bottle of Sam Adams and went to answer it, since, invariably, it was for him.

“Josh?” It was Didi. It sounded like she was a couple of drinks ahead of him. “Wanna come over?”

“Come over” meant sex. Didi rented a basement apartment in a house on Fairgrounds Road, less than a mile away. The apartment was al hers and Josh liked the privacy of it, though it was always damp, and it smel ed like her cat.

“Nah,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “Please?”

Josh thought of Scowling Sister in the green shimmery bikini top.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not tonight.”

T he duck-breast sandwich with fig chutney wrapped in white butcher paper from Cafe L’Auberge on Eleventh Street. Spinach in her teeth. The smell of a new car. Blaine’s preschool field trip to the dairy farm. Colleen Redd’s baby shower. The baseball standings.

At the end of every winter, Vicki became restless, and this past April the restlessness had been worse than ever before. The skies in Darien were a permanent pewter gray; it rained al the time; it was unseasonably cold. Vicki was trapped in the house; the baby stil nursed six times a day and wouldn’t take a bottle, which limited how much Vicki could get out alone. Some days she stayed in her yoga pants until Ted got home from work.

She tried to enjoy the quiet rhythm of her days—her kids would only be little once—but increasingly she dreamed of a change in her life. Returning to work, maybe? She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Duke, after al , and at one point had entertained thoughts of going to law school. She craved something private, something entirely her own. An affair, maybe? She’d heard her friends whisper about similar longings—their biology was to blame, a woman hit her sexual peak in her thirties, it was their situation: a husband, smal children. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone tending their every need for a change? Suddenly, men everywhere looked good to Vicki—the mechanic who worked on the Yukon, the boys at the gym, the new associates, just out of business school, at Ted’s office. Vicki needed something else in her life, otherwise she would turn into one of these women with too little to do who slowly lost her mind. She felt combustible, like she might burst into flames at any moment. Her anger and her desire scared her. She began to feel a tightness in her chest, and then the tightness, if she wasn’t imagining things, became a pain. She was short of breath. One morning, she woke up huffing like she did when she was in the basement doing laundry and she heard Porter on the baby monitor and she raced up two flights of stairs. Something was wrong with her.

Vicki’s disdain of doctors and hospitals was legendary. In col ege, she contracted a bladder infection that she left untreated, and it moved to her kidneys. She was so sick, and yet so averse to going to the doctor, that her roommates took her to the infirmary while she was asleep. Years later, when she had Blaine, she arrived at the hospital forty minutes before he was delivered and left twenty-four hours later. And yet that morning, she drove right to the ER at Fairfield Hospital. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I breathe?

At first, the doctors thought she had walking pneumonia, but the X-ray looked suspicious. An MRI revealed a mass in Vicki’s left lung the size of an apple. Subsequent tests—a PET/CT scan and a fine-needle aspiration— confirmed that this mass was malignant, and it showed suspicious cel s in her hilar lymph nodes. She had robust stage-two lung cancer. She heard the oncologist, Dr. Garcia, say the words “lung cancer,” she saw his melancholy brown eyes swimming behind the lenses of his thick glasses—and yet Vicki assumed it was some kind of joke, or a mistake.

“Mistake?” she’d said, shaking her head, unable to come up with enough oxygen to say anything more.

“I’m afraid not,” Dr. Garcia said. “You have a four-centimeter tumor in your left lung that is hugging the chest wal , which makes it difficult to remove. It looks like the cancer may have also spread to your hilar lymph nodes, but the MRI didn’t detect any additional metastases. A lot of times when the cancer is this far along it wil turn up elsewhere—in the brain or the liver, for example. But your cancer is contained in your lungs and this is good news.” Here, he pounded his desk.

Good news? Was the man stupid, or just insensitive?

“You’re wrong,” Vicki said. It sounded like she meant that he was wrong about the “good news,” but what she meant was that he was wrong about the cancer. There was no way she had cancer. When you had cancer, when you had an apple-sized tumor in your lung, you knew it. Al Vicki had was a little shortness of breath, an infection of some sort. She needed antibiotics. Ted was sitting in the leather armchair next to Vicki, and Vicki turned to him with a little laugh. Ted was a powerful man, big and handsome, with a crushing handshake. Tell the doctor he’s wrong, Ted! Vicki thought. But Ted looked like he had taken a kick to the genitals. He was hunched over, and his mouth formed a smal O. Tell the doctor he’s wrong, Ted! Vicki did not have cancer, technical y or otherwise. Who was this man, anyway? She didn’t know him and he didn’t know her. Strangers should not be al owed to tel you you have cancer, and yet that was what had just happened.