Barefoot: A Novel

Love.

Brenda pul ed out her cel phone and walked to the end of the hospital corridor. She dialed the number from memory. Al summer she had tried to forget that number, and yet, it came automatical y.

One ring, two rings.

And then, Walsh. “Hel o?”

His voice. It threw Brenda off balance. She took a stutter step backward. Rumor has it you committed the only sin that can’t be forgiven other than out-and-out plagiarism.

“Hi,” she said. “It’s Brenda.”

“Brindah.” There was a pause. “Brindah, Brindah.”

Oh, God. She was going to cry. But no.

“I’m on Nantucket stil ,” she said. “At the hospital. Vicki is upstairs having tests. Because one minute she was fine, and the next minute she was unconscious. It could be nothing, or it could be something awful. I’ve done a good job al summer. Taking care of Vicki, I mean. Not a perfect job, but a good job. I’ve been praying, Walsh, but I kind of get the feeling no one is listening.”

“Yeah, I know that feeling.”

“Do you?”

“Wel , I did,” he said. “Until now.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t cal ed,” she said.

“Ahhh,” he said. “Yeah.”

“I just felt like . . . al that stuff back in New York, with the university . . . it was al wrong. ”

“They made you feel like it was wrong.”

“There were things about it that were wrong,” Brenda said. “The time and place. We should have waited.”

“I couldn’t have waited,” Walsh said.

Could I have waited? Brenda thought. To save my career? To salvage my reputation? Could I not just have waited? Down the hal , Brenda watched Ted sink into a chair and drop his head in his hands. His ship was going down.

“I should go,” Brenda said. “My sister . . .”

“Is there anything I can do?” Walsh said.

“No,” Brenda said. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

“Ahhh,” he said again. “Yeah.”

Love is all that matters, Brenda thought. Tell him! But she couldn’t. She was too rattled by the sound of his voice, she was too mired in the nonlanguage of ex-lovers. There was too much to say, so she would say nothing at al .

“Wel , okay,” Brenda said. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Walsh said.

They were keeping Vicki overnight for tests, they said. One of which would be an MRI, in the morning, when Dr. Alcott could be present.

“Your sister has lung cancer,” the doctor, a trim, handsome Indian man visiting from Mass General, said. “We’re looking for metastases to the brain. Tumors in her brain.”

“Right,” Brenda said. “I understand that.”

“You can see her before you leave,” he said. “You can say good night.”

“Okay,” Brenda said. “I wil .”

Brenda and Ted took the elevator upstairs in silence to Vicki’s room. It was a private room, quiet and white. Vicki had an IV and wore an oxygen mask. Brenda kissed her cheek, and Vicki opened one eye.

“I was real y hoping I’d never come back here,” Vicki said into her mask.

“I know,” Brenda said. “I know.”

Ted sat down on the bed and wrapped Vicki up in his arms. “I love you, baby,” he said. “You have to hang in there. You have to get better.” Ted was crying and Vicki was crying, and watching the two of them together made Brenda choke up. One of her secret goals was to someday have a man love her the way that Ted loved Vicki. He always referred to her as “my bride” or “the beautiful mother of my beautiful boys.” If Vicki was in the room, she was Ted’s sole focus. He did act like an alpha male a lot of the time—with his hedge-fund-manager big-shot spiel— but real y, he was a man on his knees in front of his wife.

Brenda thought of Walsh. I couldn’t have waited.

No, she thought. Me either.

Josh was at the Chicken Box drinking Bud drafts, shooting pool with Zach, trying not to think about the beach picnic that was taking place out at Smith’s Point without him, although certain images flashed through his mind, unbidden: fishing poles sticking out of the sand, Blaine’s face in firelight, Melanie dripping and shivering from her nighttime swim. In the name of getting the night off to a good start, Josh and Zach had done a couple of tequila shots at Zach’s house before they went out, but what this had led to, in the car on