Barefoot: A Novel

Funny how the surgery was what Vicki had wished for, it was the goal of the chemotherapy, and yet it frightened her beyond al comprehension. It made her insides twist, her pelvis tighten, it made her shoulders and wrists stiff with anxiety. The anesthesia alone was nearly impossible to come to grips with. She would be out, way out, for more than six hours. It was different from sleep, she understood that. It was forced unconsciousness, a place between sleep and death. Vicki would be kept there, in that purgatory of nothingness, while they cut through her chest muscles, spread open her rib cage, col apsed her lung, and then removed it. It was worse than a horror movie. A hundred things could go wrong during the surgery and a hundred things could go wrong with the anesthesia. What if the surgery was a success but they pushed her too far under with the anesthetic and she drowned in it? What if she crossed to the other side?

She lay in bed, ticking like an overheated engine. Was it any wonder she couldn’t sleep? Was it any wonder she had nightmares?

Next came the headache.

When Vicki woke up in the morning she felt like she was wearing a lead helmet. There was not only pain, there was pressure. Blaine launched himself onto the bed as he did every morning when Ted was there—no need to worry about Mommy not feeling wel when Dad was around—and Porter whined to be lifted up. He was stil too little to climb. Vicki opened one eye. This wasn’t intentional; it seemed, for whatever reason, that she could only get one eye open. And even that took a Herculean effort. And it hurt—sunlight coming in around the edges of the shades hurt, and Porter’s whining hurt. She tried to extend a hand to the baby, thinking she might haul him up onto the mattress with one arm despite the fact that he weighed nearly twenty pounds, but she couldn’t sit up to get leverage. She couldn’t lift her head.

“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.