Barefoot: A Novel

I’m her mother .

Melanie becomes mesmerized by the impossible smal ness of Amber’s every feature—her smal mouth, her tiny ears, her fingers and toes, her beating heart the size of an egg. The baby cries, she opens her eyes and turns her head toward sound, she roots against Melanie until she latches onto a nipple. Melanie feels an explosive, protective, overwhelming love. She wants to tel everyone about this new love, how it puts everything else into perspective. But what she quickly discovers is that the world fal s into two categories: those who don’t care and those who already know.

For three days straight, flowers arrive. There are orchids from Vicki and Ted, pink roses from Melanie’s parents, a cyclamen from Peter’s mother in Paris, an embarrassingly lavish and funereal arrangement from “the gang at Rutter, Higgens,” red gerbera daisies from Melanie and Peter’s neighbors, a potted chrysanthemum from Brenda Lyndon and John Walsh, forced paperwhites from Melanie’s col ege roommate . . . the flowers keep coming until the nurses start to joke about Melanie being “quite the popular one.” Melanie sends the next three arrangements over to the cancer ward.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, when Melanie is nursing Amber in bed, more flowers arrive. The arrangement is modest, sparse even. It’s tea roses and carnations, a few sprays of baby’s breath; it comes in a mug that says Mommy and has a pink, heart-shaped Mylar bal oon attached.

“Another one,” the nurse says. It’s Stephanie, Melanie’s favorite nurse, the head of Labor and Delivery. She is blond and pretty, kind and capable; she was with Melanie through the last part of her labor and her C-section and she has done most of the teaching—how to feed and burp the baby, how to give her a sponge bath, how to clean around the umbilical cord.

Melanie smiles. “And here I thought everyone had forgotten about me.”

“Apparently not,” Stephanie says. She sets the mug down on Melanie’s meal tray. “Would you like me to read you the card?”

Melanie studies the flowers. What she realizes is that she’s been waiting for flowers just like this: inexpensive but earnest. Easily purchased online.

“No, thanks,” Melanie says. “It’l give me something to look forward to when I’m done feeding her.”

“You’re doing a great job, by the way,” Stephanie says. “The baby’s already back up to her birth weight. That’s what we like to see.”

Melanie gazes down at Amber’s soft head, covered with dark fuzz. Stephanie leaves the room.

Later, when the baby is asleep in her bassinet, Melanie removes the envelope from the prongs of the plastic fork sticking out of the arrangement.

Melanie Patchen, the envelope says.

Peter is picking up his mother at JFK; Melanie expects them at dinnertime.

She takes out the card. It says: I know she’s beautiful.

Melanie’s eyes flood with tears, and in an instant, she is sobbing. Stephanie had told her to expect this—sudden tears, for no apparent reason.

Her hormones are al over the place. Melanie looks first at her baby sleeping and then out the window—the late-afternoon sky is gray and there are snow flurries. In the hal way, Melanie can hear strains of Muzak. She has just given birth to a gorgeous, healthy baby, and yet al she can do is cry, cry until she is struggling to catch her breath. She is back together with Peter; they are a couple again. Al she can do is hope; she likens her marriage to the New Dawn roses that hung on the front of Number Eleven Shel Street. If you cut them back, Melanie had told Blaine, they’ll be even lovelier next time. Melanie is fil ed with love and joy and wonder, and yet, she is empty. She has everything she ever wanted, but she longs for

. . .

For what?

For summertime. For an hour on a sunny deck, for a perfect slice of tomato, for the song of the wren that perched outside her window, for the way her body felt when it was cradled by the ocean’s waves, for a perfect blue hydrangea hanging over a white picket fence, for butterflies and bumblebees, for ice-cream cones after dinner, for the passenger seat of the Jeep. How intoxicating it had felt to ride down Milestone Road with the windows open and the night air rushing in, how quickening to pul up to the beach and see the water before them and the night sky spread out like a blanket, how lucky she had felt simply to sit beside someone as extraordinary as Josh Flynn.

Melanie wipes her tears and reads the card again. (She wil read it every day at first and then only on days when she needs a lift, when she needs a reminder of happiness.)

I know she’s beautiful.

The card is unsigned.

Today, Vicki’s list runs two pages long. It’s a Thursday in early February, and it also happens to be Blaine’s fifth birthday. Vicki is throwing a party that afternoon at four o’clock at Chuck E. Cheese’s. This is the venue Blaine ardently lobbied for, and Vicki acquiesced, as it conveniently placed the chaos outside the house. Stil , there are bal oons to pick up as wel as the cake and presents. There is a Valentine’s Day charity auction on Saturday night, and Vicki had hoped to get into the city to shop for something to wear (everything she has is too big; she stil hasn’t recouped from her weight loss), but the shopping wil have to wait, as wil the hundred other things on her list. The birthday party is important, yes, but there is something else in the early part of Vicki’s day that’s even more important.

Her cancer support group at ten-thirty.

Vicki manages to get there on time, or almost. She slips into a seat just before Dolores begins with opening prayer. Vicki hasn’t been to the group since three days before her surgery, when she had been too tongue-tied and paralyzed with fear to even say her name. She feels guilty now, like the lapsed returning to church. She holds hands with Jeremy and another person—a woman younger than she is, dressed in a denim jumper—

whom she’s never seen before.

When the prayer ends, Dolores raises her head and beams at Vicki.