Barefoot: A Novel

She touched his ears, she ruffled his very short hair. She was melting away with desire. She wanted to hear his accent vibrate against her chest

—but enough! He had rugby and she had . . .

“Cab?” Walsh said.

“I’l get my own,” Brenda said. “East Side, you know.”

“You sure? We can stil share.”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, then.” Kiss, another kiss. Another, longer kiss. “I’l see you Tuesday. Brindah.”

“Tuesday?”

“In class.”

Brenda stood up from her beach towel; she felt dizzy. She walked toward the ocean. She had made no progress on the screenplay again today, and tomorrow was Friday, which meant taking Vicki to chemo, which meant Ted instead of Josh, which meant Brenda would be cal ed in as backup to watch the kids and keep the peace. She had agreed to these duties wholeheartedly. ( Repentance, she thought . Atonement. ) This weekend they had an excursion to Smith’s Point planned, complete with bonfire and boxed-up lobster dinners, in an attempt to get Vicki out of the cottage, to get her eating, to get her engaged in the summer and family life—and yet what this really meant was that no work got pursued again until Monday.

Brenda waded out past the first set of gently breaking waves and dove under. She wondered what the water felt like in Australia. Back at her towel, she scrol ed through the previous ten cal s to her cel phone, just in case Walsh had cal ed during her three-minute dip, just in case she had missed his number in the hundred other times she had checked her messages. No, nothing. Brenda had left her copy of The Innocent Impostor at home in the briefcase, where it would be safe from the sand and salt air, but if she closed her eyes, she could see the smeared note. Call John Walsh!

She would cal him; she would invite him to come to Nantucket. The beach, the swimming, the fresh air—he would love it here. Did Walsh like lobster? Probably. Being typical y Australian, he would eat anything (including, he used to tease Brenda, what he cal ed “bush tucker”—grubs, tree bark, snail eggs). But no sooner had Brenda punched the first four digits into her phone—1-212 ( I could be calling anyone in Manhattan, she thought)—than the second reel started spinning against her wil . The Crash. Brenda tried to block out the dominant image, but it came to her anyway. The Jackson Pol ock painting.

It had taken weeks for Brenda to discover the painting’s al ure, but then, in the days when she was fal ing in love with Walsh, she became entranced by it. She had a favorite blue line in the painting that ran like a vein from a massive black tangle. The blue was a strand of reason emerging from chaos. Or so she had thought.

You will never work in academia again, Suzanne Atela had said, the harshness in her voice belied by her lilting Bahamian accent. I will see to it personally. As for the vandalism charges . . .

Vandalism charges: The phrase sounded so crass, so trashy. Vandalism was a teenage girl taking a Sharpie to the bathroom wal , it was hoodlums spray-painting the skateboard park or breaking the front window of a pizzeria. It had nothing to do with Brenda and Mrs. Pencaldron exchanging words in the Barrington Room. But Brenda had been so, so angry, so confused and frustrated; she had wanted to throw something!

Even as Mrs. Pencaldron shrieked and ordered Augie Fisk to stand in the doorway, lest Brenda try to escape, even as campus security arrived, Brenda could not take her eyes off the painting. The nasty black snarl mesmerized her; it was like hair caught in a drain, like real feelings shredded by a series of bad decisions.

A hundred and sixty thousand dol ars, plus legal fees. This was only the monetary price; this did not even begin to address the damage done to Brenda’s reputation. She would never work in academia again.

Call John Walsh! the note shouted. But no, she couldn’t do it. She shut off her phone.

The first of July came and went—and stil there was no sign of the two hundred and ten dol ars from Didi. Josh wasn’t surprised; lending money to Didi was as good as flushing it down the toilet. He wrote a threatening letter to Didi in his journal ( You need to grow up! Take responsibility for your actions! You can’t keep jumping in the deep end and then crying out because you’re drowning! ). Writing was cathartic, and Josh decided to count himself lucky for not enabling Didi a second time. When she’d asked for more money, he had said no, and he hadn’t heard from her since. She did not appear in the parking lot of Nobadeer Beach and she had stopped leaving drunk, late-night messages on his cel phone. Josh would have been happy to let the loan fade from his memory, but the problem was that somebody—Josh would never know who—had mentioned the loan to Tom Flynn, and in the world of Tom Flynn, when you lent out money that you’d earned with your own two hands, you should damn wel make a point to get it back. Much to Josh’s dismay, the topic came up at dinner.

“You lent the Patalka girl money?”

Josh had started dating Didi sophomore year in high school—so, six years earlier—and Tom Flynn stil (and had always) referred to her as “the Patalka girl.”

“She was in a pinch, she said.”

“She always says. Doesn’t she have a job now?”

“At the hospital,” Josh said, though his father knew this.

“Then why . . .”

“Because she was in a pinch, Dad,” Josh said. He did not want to be tricked into saying anything more. “I’l get it back.”

“See that you do,” Tom Flynn said. “What’s yours is yours. You aren’t working to support her. She doesn’t have col ege bil s to pay.”