Barefoot: A Novel

“You’l stil talk to Vicki, won’t you?” Brenda asked. “Please?”

He shrugged. His eyes were fil ed with hurt and boyish disappointment. “Sure,” he said.

The bedroom was dim, with the muted morning light peeking in around the edges of the pul ed shades. Vicki rocked on the bed, holding both kids, but Brenda lifted Porter out of Vicki’s arms and said to Blaine, “Come on out now. We have pebbles to throw.”

“I want to stay with Mommy,” Blaine said.

“Outside,” Brenda said. “Now.”

“I need to talk to your mom anyway,” Josh said. “I’l be out in a couple of minutes.”

This was so unusual that neither Blaine nor Vicki protested. Blaine left quietly, shutting the door behind him, and Vicki fel back on the bed. She was wearing gray athletic shorts and a navy Duke T-shirt that hiked up her midsection. She was a lot thinner than she’d been when Josh first saw her at the airport. She was wearing a bandanna over her head like a rap star; her hair was nearly gone.

“Brenda told you I don’t want to take my medicine?”

“Actual y, she told me nothing,” Josh said. “Except that she’s in love with someone else, not me.”

At this, Vicki made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. Josh was astounded at his own candor. But there was something about Vicki that put him at ease. She was too young to be his mother, though there had been times in the past few weeks when he’d felt like she was his mother, and he had relished it. She was sort of like an older sister might have been, or a very cool older girl best friend, the kind he’d never been lucky enough to have. He cal ed her “Boss” as a joke, though why this was a joke he wasn’t sure; she was his boss. And yet she didn’t come across as his boss, despite the fact that she was always tel ing him what she wanted him to do and she was always asking for a ful report of his and the kids’ activities—their every word and deed and fart—when he got home at one o’clock. Stil , she gave the impression that he was the boss, that he was ultimately in charge—and that was, he supposed, why Brenda had asked him to come in and talk. Vicki would listen to him.

“She’s in love with someone named John Walsh,” Vicki said. She sat up, plucked a tissue off the nightstand, and blew her nose. “One of her students, back in New York. I can’t believe she told you.”

“I can’t believe I told you she told me,” Josh said. “I thought I was sent in here to talk about something else.”

“You were,” Vicki said. She sighed. “I’m not going to chemo.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve had enough,” Vicki said. “It’s not helping. I can feel it not helping. It’s hurting. It’s kil ing me. You know what chemotherapy is, right? It’s control ed poisoning. They try to poison the cancer cel s, but most of the time they poison healthy cel s, too. So the way I feel is that I used to have healthy cel s and now al I have are poisoned cel s. I am a vessel fil ed with vile green poison.”

“You look the same to me,” Josh said, though this was a lie.

“I can’t eat,” Vicki said. “I’ve lost twelve pounds, and I’m bald. I can’t cook, I can’t stay awake through a Scooby-Doo, I can’t concentrate long enough to play Chutes and Ladders, I can’t land a single pebble in the damn paper cup. I can’t do anything. What was the point in coming to Nantucket if I only go outside to get to the hospital? I want to go to the beach, I want to swim, I want to drink my Chardonnay on the back deck, I want to feel better. I’m done with chemo. There was never a guarantee it was going to shrink my tumor anyway. It’s just a gamble the doctors take, a gamble with my body. But I’m putting an end to it today. I’m al done.”

“I’l point out the obvious,” Josh said. “If you don’t go to chemo, your cancer might get worse.”

“It might,” Vicki said. “Or it might stay the same.”

“But if they think the chemo wil help, you should take it. You have the kids to think about.”

“You sound like my husband,” Vicki said. “Which is too bad. One thing I real y appreciate about you is that you’re nothing like my husband.”

Josh felt himself redden. He had yet to meet Vicki’s husband, Ted Stowe, though he had heard about him in detail from the kids. Ted Stowe came every weekend, he was some kind of financial wizard in New York, and Blaine had let it slip that Ted didn’t like Josh.

But I don’t even know your dad, Josh said. We’ve never met.

Trust me, Blaine said. He doesn’t like you.

If Ted Stowe didn’t like Josh, then Josh was determined not to like Ted Stowe. Josh understood, however, that whereas he fil ed a certain role, there were other men—Ted Stowe, Melanie’s husband, Peter, and now this guy Brenda was in love with—who fil ed another role, a more important, more substantial role, in their real lives, away from Nantucket.

Josh sat down on the bed next to Vicki. He felt himself about to become self-referential and he recal ed another one of Chas Gorda’s much-repeated phrases: Be wary of your own story. Josh tried to stop himself, but it was pointless. Just this once, he told himself.

“My mother died when I was twelve,” he said. “She kil ed herself.”

Vicki did him the favor of being matter-of-fact. So many women—the girls he met at Middlebury, Didi—met this statement with a gush of sympathy, as useless to Josh as a lace handkerchief.

“Did she?” Vicki said.

“She hanged herself while I was at school.”

Vicki nodded, like she was waiting for the rest of it.

There was nothing else to say. Josh had bounded off the school bus and headed home just like any other day. Except that day, his father was in the living room sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. There were no police, no