Barefoot: A Novel

“No,” he said. Thinking: Consistent message. “Good-bye, Didi.”

Nobody was more surprised by the passage of time than Melanie—the days passed, then a week, then another week. And here she was, stil on Nantucket. She couldn’t decide if she remained on the island out of sheer inertia (was she just avoiding the enormous effort it would take to get home?) or if she was starting to like it. The first days had been awful, with Vicki and Brenda fighting and then Vicki and Ted fighting and Melanie alternately vomiting, sleeping, or showering in an attempt to ameliorate the acute pain of Peter’s affair with Frances Digitt. It was pain like Melanie had broken her arm and the bone was sticking through, pain like habanero chili sauce on an open cold sore. But one morning Melanie woke up and her first thoughts weren’t about Peter and Frances, but rather about the secret that her body contained. She thought of the bud inside of her, the human being the size of a lima bean, a life that had taken root and held on in her body. This baby, unlike al the others (seven tries, eleven embryos), had recognized Melanie as its mother. She was seven weeks pregnant now, and although her body looked the same, she liked to lie in bed with her hand on her bel y and imagine she could feel the flutter of a tiny beating heart. At this same time every morning, a wren perched on the gate outside Melanie’s window and serenaded her. But the imagined sound of a beating heart and the wren’s song were only preludes to what Melanie was real y listening for. What she had started anticipating was the crackle of the Jeep’s tires over crushed shel s. Josh.

Okay, Melanie thought. There is something wrong with me. He is nearly ten years my junior. He is in col ege. I am an old woman to him, an old pregnant woman. And yet—what was it Woody Al en said?—“the heart wants what it wants.” (Were her desires as moral y ambiguous as Woody Al en’s? Maybe they were; who was she to judge?) Melanie couldn’t help what she felt, and what she felt when she heard the Jeep’s tires crunch over the shel s, when she heard the car door, the lifting of the gate latch, Blaine’s delighted cry, and Josh’s voice— Hey, buddy, how’s it hanging? —

was happy.

Melanie’s routine, then, included climbing out of bed and making it into the kitchen for tea and toast while Josh was eating breakfast. Ideal y, she would have liked to be home from a five-mile power walk, showered and dressed; she would have liked to be eating with him, buttering a scone, reading him something funny she had seen in the Globe. Instead, it was al she could do to sip her tea, nibble her toast, and make the most basic conversation.

She was dismayed to discover that he was a writing student—not because Melanie held anything against writing students, but because this gave him something in common with Brenda. Melanie heard them joking about writer’s block. Happens to the best of us, Josh would say. And Brenda would point at him and say, Keep telling me that. The writing linked them in a way that irked Melanie and made her dislike Brenda more than she already did. It seemed hardly worth mentioning that Melanie also appreciated literature. She read serious, literary novels as wel as trashy, commercial ones. She was a fan of Donna Tartt and Margaret Atwood— and Nora Roberts. She read the fiction in The New Yorker, maybe not every week, but often enough. Melanie understood, however, that reading was different from writing; she had no desire to write a short story or a novel. She wouldn’t even know where to start.

Melanie searched for details she could share about herself that would resonate with Josh. She had been a history major at Sarah Lawrence. She had spent a year in Thailand teaching English: she had touched the Reclining Buddha’s golden foot; she had commuted from her apartment to the school by water taxi; she had bought a parakeet at the bird market and named him Roger. Roger stopped singing after six weeks and then he died.

When Melanie relayed these tidbits of her personal history, Josh nodded and chewed his food and seemed interested, at least until Brenda walked into the kitchen to get her coffee. Brenda stole his attention every time. Josh looked at Brenda. It became part of Melanie’s routine to count the number of times Josh looked at Brenda and then feel jealous about it. How could Melanie blame him? Brenda was beautiful and oblivious; she lived in the house with the rest of them, but it was clear her mind was someplace else. On the lover back in New York, maybe, or on the lawyer whose phone cal s she avoided each day, or on her stupid screenplay. Brenda had been fired from Champion University in the midst of a sex scandal—

was Josh aware of this? Did he know she was in trouble with the law? Somehow Brenda rose above the smoldering fire of her recent past and managed to maintain a grip on her life. Not only was she writing a screenplay, which Josh found fascinating, but she had acquired something of a halo, taking care of Vicki and the kids in the hours when Josh and Ted weren’t there. Melanie found herself detesting Brenda and at the same time wanting to be more like her.

In the afternoons, while Porter was napping, Melanie enlisted Blaine’s help tending the gardens around the cottage. They weeded the front beds

—Blaine trailing Melanie with a plastic Tupperware bowl that she fil ed and he dumped, periodical y, in the kitchen trash. When the bed was weeded and the daylilies deadheaded, they patted down dark, sweet- smel ing mulch. Melanie cut back the trel ised New Dawn roses on the front of the house as wel as the rosebushes that lined the back fence while Blaine watched. (He was afraid of thorns, and the bumblebees.) That’s the funny thing about roses, Melanie told him. If you cut them back, they’ll be even lovelier next time.

Blaine nodded solemnly and then ran into the kitchen for a jel y jar fil ed with water. His favorite part of gardening was when Melanie cut flowers for the jar, which he then took inside and presented to Vicki.

“Those are pretty flowers,” Josh said once, about a bunch of cosmos on the kitchen table.

“Melanie and I grew them,” Blaine said. “Right, Melanie?”

“Right,” Melanie said. Josh no doubt thought that gardening was a pastime for old ladies, but Melanie couldn’t deny her proclivity for flowers, for privet hedge, for closely cropped lawn. She had always loved the sight and smel of things growing.

As the days passed, Melanie became more engaged in life on Nantucket, which meant Josh, the kids, Brenda —and Vicki. Melanie had been so consumed with her own woes that she had al but disregarded the fact that Vicki had cancer. Vicki went twice a week to chemo. Vicki was too sick

—too weak, too exhausted and confused—to walk to the beach with Melanie, no matter how hard or gently Melanie prodded.

“It wil be good for you to get out of the house,” Melanie said. “And good for me, too.”

“You go,” Vicki said. “I’l wait here until the kids get back.”

“I’l wait with you,” Melanie said. “We can sit on the deck and drink iced tea.”