Barefoot: A Novel

not more so? And did she real y want her chemotherapy

—the chemo that she was asking to save her life—to be administered at the Nantucket Cottage Hospital? Wasn’t that the equivalent of being treated in the Third World? What the hell are you thinking? he asked. He sounded confused and defeated. Ted was a hedge fund manager in Manhattan; he liked problems he could fel like trees, problems he could solve with brute strength and canny intel igence. The horrifying diagnosis, the wing-and-a-prayer treatment plan, and then Vicki’s wacko decision to flee for the summer left him confounded. But Vicki couldn’t believe she was being asked to explain herself.

It was, quite possibly, the last summer of her life, and she didn’t want to spend it in stifling hot Darien under the sympathetic scrutiny of her friends and peers. Already, Vicki’s circumstances were being repeated like the Song of the Day: Did you hear? Vicki Stowe has lung cancer. They’re going to try chemo first and then they’ll decide if it’s worth operating. They don’t know if she’ll make it. A steady stream of food and flowers arrived along with the offer of playdates. Let us take Blaine. Let us take the baby. So you can rest. Vicki was the new Darien charity. She couldn’t stand the casseroles or the cal a lilies; she couldn’t stand her children being farmed out like they were orphans. The women circled like buzzards —some close friends, some friends of friends, some women she barely knew. Ted didn’t get it; he saw it as outreach by a caring community. That’s why we moved here, he said. These are our neighbors, our friends. But Vicki’s desire to get away grew every time the phone rang, every time a Volvo station wagon pul ed into the driveway.

Vicki’s mother was the one who had suggested Nantucket; she would have joined Vicki herself but for an il -timed knee replacement. Vicki latched on to the idea, despite the fact that her mother wouldn’t be coming to help. Aunt Liv’s estate had been settled in March; the house belonged to her and Brenda now. It felt like a sign. Brenda was al for it. Even Vicki’s oncologist, Dr. Garcia, gave his okay; he assured her that chemo was chemo. The treatment would be the same on Nantucket as it would be in Connecticut, or in the city. The people in Vicki’s cancer support group, al of whom embraced holistic as wel as conventional medical treatment, understood. Enjoy yourself, they said. Relax. Play with your kids. Be outside. Talk with your sister, your friend. Look at the stars. Eat organic vegetables. Try to forget about fine-needle aspirations, CT scans, metastases. Fight the good fight, on your own terms, in your own space. Have a lovely summer.

Vicki had held Ted hostage with her eyes. Since her diagnosis, she’d watched him constantly—tying his necktie, removing change from his suit pocket, stirring sugar into his coffee—hoping to memorize him, to take him with her wherever she went.

I’ll miss you, she said. But I’m going.

The cottage had been built in 1803—back, Vicki thought, when life was both busier and simpler, back when people were shorter and held lower expectations. The cottage had original y been one room with a fireplace built into the north wal , but over the years, three “warts” had been added for bedrooms. Al of the rooms were smal with low ceilings; it was like living in a dol house. That was what Aunt Liv had loved about the cottage—it was life pared down, scaled way back. There was no TV, no answering machine, no computer or microwave or stereo. It was a true summerhouse, Aunt Liv used to say, because it encouraged you to spend most of your time outside—on the back deck overlooking the yard and garden, or down the street at ’Sconset’s public beach. Back in 1803 when the woman of the house had cancer, there were no oncologists or treatment plans. A woman worked right through it—stoking the fire, preparing meals, stirring the laundry in a cauldron of boiling water—until one day she died in bed.

These were Vicki’s thoughts as she stepped inside.

The cottage had been cleaned and the furniture aired. Vicki had arranged for al of this by telephone; apparently, houses that sat dormant for three years were common stuff on Nantucket. The house smel ed okay, maybe a bit too optimistical y like air freshener. The living room floors were made from wide, buttery pine boards that showed every scratch from a dragged chair, every divot from a pair of high heels. The plaster-and-wood- beamed ceiling was low, and the furniture was old-ladyish, like something out of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast: Aunt Liv’s delft blue high-back sofa, the dainty coffee table with a silver-plated tea service resting on a piece of Belgian lace. There were the bookshelves bowing under the weight of Aunt Liv’s summer library, there was the fireplace with mismatched andirons. Vicki moved into the smal kitchen, appliances circa 1962, silver-threaded Formica, Aunt Liv’s china, which was painted with little Dutch girls in wooden shoes. The caretaker’s bil was secured to the refrigerator with a magnet advertising a restaurant cal ed the Elegant Dump, which had been defunct for years.

The west bedroom was sunny. That would be Melanie’s room. Twin beds were made up with the pink-and-orange-striped sheets that Vicki remembered from her childhood. (What she remembered most vividly was staining the sheets during her first period. Aunt Liv had sensibly pul ed out the hydrogen peroxide while El en Lyndon had chirped with over-the-top sentimentality about how “Vicki is a woman now” and Brenda glowered and chewed her cuticles.) Vicki would take the largest bedroom, with the king bed, where she would sleep with the kids, and Brenda would sleep in the old nursery, a room just slightly bigger than Vicki’s walk-in closet at home. This was the room Aunt Liv had always occupied—it was cal ed the old nursery because both Aunt Liv and Vicki and Brenda’s grandmother Joy had slept in cribs in that room alongside the family’s baby nurse, Miss George, more than eighty years earlier. Once Aunt Liv had arthritis and every other old-person ailment, Vicki’s parents suggested she take the big bedroom—but that didn’t suit Liv. She stopped coming to Nantucket altogether, and then she died.

There was a flurry of activity as everyone piled into the house, dragging luggage and boxes. The cabbie stood by the car, waiting to be paid. That was Vicki’s department. She was going to pay for everything al summer. She was summer’s sponsor. She handed the kid twenty bucks. Enough?

He grinned. Too much. “Thanks, ma’am. Enjoy your stay.”

As the cab pul ed away, Blaine started to cry. Vicki worried that al the change would traumatize him; there had been a scene at breakfast when he’d said good-bye to Ted, and then he’d knocked Melanie off the airplane’s steps. He was acting out. It was three o’clock, and although he was outgrowing his nap, Vicki knew he needed some quiet time. She herself was bone weary. Just picking up her bag and walking five feet to the bedroom made her feel like she’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Her lungs were on fire. She hated them.

Suddenly, Brenda made a noise even worse than Blaine’s whiny cry. She was moaning in that Oh no, oh no, no, the-world-is-ending kind of way .

What was it? A dead animal in the old nursery? A family of dead animals? Vicki lowered her bottom onto her bed’s squishy mattress. She didn’t have the energy to move, so she cal ed out, “What’s wrong, Bren?”

Brenda appeared in the absurdly low doorway of Vicki’s bedroom. “I can’t find my book.”

Vicki didn’t have to ask which book. This was Brenda, her sister. There was only one book: Brenda’s two-hundred-year-old first edition of Fleming Trainor’s The Innocent Impostor. This book, a little-known novel of a mediocre Early American writer, was the foundation of Brenda’s career. Brenda had spent six years getting her master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Iowa, she had written a dissertation and had part of it published in an obscure literary journal, and she’d landed the job at Champion