Barefoot

by Brown, Sharon Garlough;

  “Tom wins again,” she said. Bailey cocked his head and looked at her as if trying to understand. “You’d think I’d learn. After everything I’ve been seeing about myself and God, you’d think I’d figure out how to apply it. Live it.”

  My soul is like a—

  She hadn’t been able to think of a truthful response.

  A few months ago the response would have been easy to give: a rejected child. For years that’s what it had felt like in every sphere of her life. But now? She knew the “right” response, knew what God had been trying to reveal to her through her journey with the Sensible Shoes Club: her soul was like an embraced child. A wanted child. A chosen child. A beloved child.

  Some days the love of God filled her and overwhelmed her, and she felt at peace, able to imagine herself snuggled into the lap of God, like she had often snuggled against Nana’s soft pillow breast, inhaling the fragrance of lemon verbena.

  But many days it was hard to trust the love of God. She needed to figure out how to calm and quiet her soul on those days. Or let God calm and quiet her with a reminder of his presence. That’s what had hit her hard during their reflection and prayer time. She had heard a whisper, like God was saying, Shhhhh, my child. I’m here.

  She had shared that moment of presence with the group. But given Charissa’s shock over her story about Tom and Brian, Mara had decided not to talk about that memory—no need to upset Meg while she was still recovering or burden Hannah while she was getting ready to go on her trip. Mara caught Charissa’s meaningful glance during their closing minutes of sharing prayer requests, but thankfully, Charissa hadn’t spoken on her behalf. Instead, Charissa had confronted her privately in Meg’s driveway afterward. “Have you seen your counselor yet?”

  “Nope. I called, but she’s out of town.”

  “Did you make an appointment?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about seeing Katherine?”

  “Maybe.”

  Charissa raised her eybrows.

  “I’m okay,” Mara replied, “don’t worry about me. I’ve been through worse.”

  Besides. She wasn’t sure she had the emotional energy to probe all the psychological layers of her relationship with Brian—layers she knew Dawn would want to explore. A hostile child conceived not in love but with abuse? Yep. Dawn would have a field day with that one. Dawn would tell Mara again that Brian needed to be in counseling—that both boys needed input from professionals—and Tom would fight with her about it and accuse her of trying to “chickify” them and claim she was the crazy one with all the issues and that she needed to leave the boys out of it. And if she were to confront Tom about what he’d done? She could hear him laugh and say, “Prove it.”

  Bailey barked at her again.

  “What? You already went out.”

  He pattered across the floor and stood in the doorway, waiting.

  “Okay, fine. Another walk.”

  There. She had found her image: my soul is like a little child trying to be quiet and pay attention, but she keeps getting interrupted by barking dogs.

  She changed out of her pajamas and, flashlight in hand, forged into the subdivision again, Bailey lunging on the leash, his front paws suspended midair as she yanked him back. For a little dog, he sure could exert some force. “You need obedience training,” she said. In reply, he strained again on the leash, hacking. Hopefully, he wouldn’t take too long to do his business.

  The cul-de-sac was still, the asphalt reflecting the amber glow of streetlamps. Chubby snowmen, lopsided and deformed after a mild thaw and refreeze, designated the houses where children played and now slept. She wondered if Madeleine was asleep. She had offered to babysit—several times—but Abby wasn’t eager to give up any time with Madeleine now that her return to work loomed.

  Mara had taken for granted her freedom to stay home with the boys.

  Not that her presence had made much difference to them. Well, maybe to Kevin. She was cautiously optimistic about Kevin. He still had his sullen, irritable moments, but at least he didn’t intimidate her.

  In a neighbor’s yard the wind tossed a new “For Sale” sign on its chains, distracting Bailey with the movement and noise. “C’mon, dog. Hurry up and poop. I’m freezing.” Glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching, she opened the brochure box, took a flyer, and whistled. “Yeah, good luck with that,” she muttered, crumpling the paper into her coat pocket. Of course, that house was quite a bit larger and immaculately kept. Mara had been there once for a Come-for-food-but-then-buy-all-this-expensive-stuff-or-feel-guilty party. She bought a spice rack.

  She hoped she would be able to keep their house. She didn’t want the stress of a move.

  Her attorney had explained to her the nature of the temporary court order: no disposing of assets while they were pursuing discovery issues regarding financial accounts and earnings. Assets you might not be aware of, her attorney had said. Translate: money and resources Tom might have hidden from her. If Tom had thought that child support would be based on his former salary, he’d had a rude awakening. Mara would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when he was told that his promotion would be taken into account in financial calculations.

  Gotcha.

  Even so, there was no predicting what “equitable distribution of assets” would mean once it was all said and done. Though her attorney thought they could make a good case for spousal support—at least temporarily—he had also made it clear that it was in her best interest to investigate job training or going back to school for some kind of degree. You’ll need to think ahead about your future and plan for contingencies, he’d said.

  Bailey sniffed around a stand of uniform mailboxes. All along the street, white fairy lights twinkled in keeping with an annual neighborhood pact: keep the shrubs and trees lit through January to cheer the winter landscape. And keep refreshing the evergreen in the window boxes so the arrangements don’t yellow and fade. And blah, blah, blah.

  Maybe she would be happier if she moved out of the neighborhood. Moving would eliminate the chronic complaining about all the ways they routinely broke the homeowners’ association bylaws: grass too long, too many weeds beneath the hedges, garbage cans too visible from the street . . .

  Nothing’s changed, she thought. Nothing. She and her family had always been interlopers in the neighborhood’s economic class, from the time she was a little girl. White trash, the neighbors whispered when they thought she and her mother couldn’t hear them, and her mother would walk a little faster down the sidewalk, a little straighter, hurrying Mara alongside. Don’t you pay them any mind, Sweet Pea, Nana would say. Having class isn’t about having money.

  Bailey barked at a plastic bag swirling in the wind, his yaps setting off a chain reaction of canine howls and yelps up and down the street. Mara tugged on the leash. What had she been thinking, walking without gloves? Her fingers tingled from the cold. She rubbed her hands together and exhaled on her fists, her breath visible in the frosty air.

  There were nights in her childhood house when she could see her breath, nights when she and her mother huddled together for warmth under a layer of moth-eaten, musty quilts, nights when the wind whistled through the eaves and between the cracks and into the holes plugged with sheets of crumpled newspaper.

  Well, have you seen where she lives? Girls’ mocking, gossiping voices echoed in Mara’s head. Maybe their voices would always echo, even after she had forgiven them.

  She glanced over her shoulder at their house. In her wildest dreams as a little girl, she never would have imagined living in a neighborhood like this, in a house as large as theirs. But she had paid a high price for it, sharing it with Tom. Maybe—maybe getting rid of the bed was the first step in a larger purge. Maybe what she needed was a totally fresh start somewhere, a different house where the rooms didn’t echo with memories of his voice. Maybe the boys would benefit from a change—if she could find a place where they wouldn’t have to switch schools.

/>   Maybe—

  A cat darted across the road. Bailey bolted left, right, behind, the leash twining around Mara’s ankles. She teetered, then toppled like a felled tree, landing with a thud on the asphalt. Bailey scampered off, dragging his leash through the snow.

  She lay still, too stunned to move. Then she slowly turned her head. No sign of him.

  Of all the blasted—

  She tried to whistle. No breath. Tried to roll over. No luck. Reached into her pocket. Empty. She’d left her cell phone on the kitchen counter next to her keys.

  Of all the stupid—

  She could see the headline now: Woman too fat to get up after fall on ice, hit by car.

  Please, God. Help.

  If she could just reach the flashlight, maybe she could catch someone’s attention by waving it, like the beacon lights she used to watch from the patio at Nana’s apartment, a nightly display of magical choreography from a nearby used car lot.

  God, please.

  She lifted her head and tried to shift her weight onto her right elbow. There. Nearly. There. With one more push she managed to roll into a fetal position on the street. Then she gingerly tested her wrists. Nothing seemed to be broken. Using her elbow as a prop again, she rolled onto her hands and knees, the pavement bitter cold against her palms. Pain throbbed in her back and rear end. She would be black and blue by morning.

  Could she stand up?

  No.

  God, help me.

  Maybe she could crawl the length of three houses to her own driveway, maneuver herself up the front porch steps, and then call Jeremy for help finding Bailey. Brian would kill her if something happened to his dog.

  She plucked the flashlight from the gutter, wedged it into her coat pocket, and slowly dragged herself toward home.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Jeremy said, stomping the snow from his boots. “Couldn’t find him anywhere.”

  Mara looked up from the couch, where she lay with multiple bags of frozen vegetables wrapped in towels and compressed against her body.

  Jeremy sat down in the chair across from her, still wearing his coat. “But he has tags, right? Someone will find him and call.”

  She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I haven’t gotten new ones yet! His collar still has the old name and address, whatever guy Tom found on Craigslist.”

  “So, someone will call that number. Don’t worry.”

  “But I don’t know how to reach the old owner—never even wrote down the name or number! And I don’t know if they have our address or phone number—probably not. And who knows if Tom kept their contact info! I’m screwed.” Beyond that, somewhere out in the cold was a little dog she had been entrusted with, a dog that could easily be struck by a car in the dark, mistaken for a possum, and abandoned as roadkill.

  “Hey,” Jeremy said, kneeling beside her and brushing a wisp of hair back from her forehead. “Hey, it’s okay, Mom. I’ll drive around one more time, okay?”

  She nodded, tears trickling down her cheeks.

  The front door clicked behind him, and his old pickup truck rattled out of the driveway. She had awakened him with her phone call—she could tell from the artificial cheerfulness in his voice when he insisted that no! he was up and happy to come over, no trouble at all! She hoped she hadn’t awakened Abby too. Or Madeleine.

  She shifted a bag of frozen peas to a different part of her back. Was ice the right treatment? She never could keep straight the rules for using heat or ice. But right now, the numbness felt good.

  The house was eerily quiet. In just a week she had grown accustomed to the sound of a dog slurping at a water dish, crunching on kibble, whining to go outside. What would she do if the dog wasn’t home when Brian returned on Sunday? He would throw a fit. An absolute fit. She would have to make sure that Jeremy was at the house with her, just in case Brian tried anything violent.

  But I have calmed and quieted my soul—

  Maybe while she was waiting for Jeremy to come back, she could distract herself by praying for others. For Charissa and her mother-in-law stress. For Meg to feel completely well. For Hannah as she traveled to Oregon.

  Mara hadn’t traveled much. They had flown to Disney World when the boys were little. And to Mexico once, after Tom won a cruise for being the top salesman. She spent most of that trip seasick in their claustrophobic cabin, but Tom and the boys enjoyed their scuba diving and parasailing and horseback riding. When he won again the next year, she sent the three of them off for ten days and stayed at home. One of the best vacations ever.

  She winced in pain as she tried to scoot upright on the couch. The clock on the cable box declared that Jeremy had been gone for twenty, then thirty minutes. The vegetable bags thawed, leaving her clothes damp and cold. Thirty-five minutes. She couldn’t get up off the couch to make more ice packs. Forty-five minutes. She would have to call Tom and let him know, see if he could get a contact phone number for the guy from Craigslist. Or maybe she would text Kevin. Maybe Kevin would remember where the owner lived. She could post flyers. But she didn’t have a picture. Maybe Craigslist kept some kind of archive online.

  But I have calmed and quieted my soul—

  Deep breath. Ouffff! Shooting pain through her back. No deep breath. Calm and quiet the soul without a deep breath.

  She tried to imagine the lap of God and a soothing embrace that wouldn’t hurt the bruises. Then she listened for a whisper. Shhhh . . . shhhh . . . I am with you. Shhhh, my beloved, chosen, wanted child.

  Eyes closed. Calmed and quieted. Drifting off . . . into silence . . . into sleep . . .

  A car door slammed. Boots scraped on the welcome mat. The front door creaked open. A dog—a dog!—whimpered. “Oh, Jeremy! Thank God! Where was he?”

  “Huddled under one of the neighbors’ bushes.” As soon as Jeremy set him down, Bailey scampered behind the couch. “I was traipsing through yards with a flashlight, calling for him, when I saw the leash on the snow. Thankfully, he was still attached to it.”

  “Jeremy, thank you! Thank you so much.” She managed to scooch sideways. “Let me get you something hot to drink, a cup of tea, hot chocolate. You must be frozen right through.”

  He signaled for her to lie back down. “I’m okay. Woulda been here sooner, but I got stopped by a patrol car. Seems one of your neighbors thought I was up to no good and—”

  “What the—”

  He cracked his knuckles, a stress habit he’d had since he was a little boy. “Yeah, well, between the beat-up truck crawling along the street and the guy in dark clothes poking around with a flashlight . . .” Jeremy didn’t say it, but she knew they were both thinking the same thing: No one on the cul-de-sac had skin the color of his.

  Her pulse quickened, her nostrils flared. Alexis Harding, she bet. Alexis was always casting judgment from behind her louvered blinds.

  If she could move, she’d march across the street, pound on the door, and make that woman come and apologize to her son. “Jeremy, I—”

  “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry about it.” A forced smile, taut voice. “He was a nice enough guy, apologized and everything after asking me lots of questions. I had just found Bailey when he pulled up, so that was good timing. At least my story checked out.” He motioned toward the kitchen. “What can I get you? More ice? Some Advil?”

  Mara rose slowly to her feet, her whole body screaming in protest. “I’ll get it, hon. I need to move around.”

  He reached for her arm to steady her. “You sure you didn’t break anything?”

  “Yeah, I was lucky, I think. Coulda been bad.” She shuffled toward the kitchen, Jeremy holding lightly to her elbow, his hand trembling. “Jeremy, I’m so sorry. These neighbors, they’re—”

  “Yeah, I know . . . just doing their job.”

  She did not correct the way he completed her sentence. But after her boy went home, Mara collapsed onto the couch and vented her fury in the dark, her soul like a tempest that was only stilled when a little dog emerged from hidi
ng and licked her hand.

  Hannah

  Nathan hoisted Hannah’s suitcase into the trunk while Meg lingered on the front step to wave goodbye. “Go back inside,” Hannah called from the driveway. “You don’t need to catch another cold.”

  “I’m okay,” Meg said. “Text me when you get there.” In an effort to communicate with Becca on Becca’s terms, Meg had begun texting the past week.

  “I will,” Hannah said. “Take care of yourself, okay? And I’ll see you Thursday.”

  Meg blew her a kiss and went back inside, the bells on the front door jingling behind her.

  Hannah sank into the passenger seat. “I told her if that cough isn’t gone by the time I get back here, I’m dragging her to the doctor.”

  Nathan rested his hand on the nape of her neck. “There’s a lot of crud going around right now,” he said. “You’re taking your vitamin C, right?”

  She laughed. “Yes, Dr. Allen.”

  Poor Charissa. Even with Hannah’s reassurance that Meg wasn’t running a fever and that they had scrubbed down the house with bleach, Charissa had been visibly uneasy whenever Meg coughed, and she’d frequently dipped her hands into her purse, where she probably kept a bottle of antibacterial gel.

  “How’d it go with the group last night?” Nathan asked as he reversed out of the driveway.

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  Hannah shrugged. “Guess I was feeling a bit of disequilibrium about my role. Leader or facilitator or participant? I don’t want them to get in the habit of relying on me to guide our conversations, so we agreed last night to take turns. Mara said she’ll choose the exercise for next time.”