This silenced them long enough for Josh to escape down the stairs and out into the driveway. He couldn’t stay. The party for “Didi’s real friends,”
“for the people who knew her best,” was not for him. He backed out of the driveway, trying to control his breathing. He was very, very nervous. He headed out Shimmo Road toward Polpis. He waited until he had turned onto Polpis Road before he picked up his phone. He told himself he could always change his mind.
But then, as he knew he would, he dialed the number.
An unfamiliar voice answered the phone. A singsongy, Julie Andrews–type voice. “Hel-lo!”
Josh was caught unprepared. Had he dialed the wrong number?
“Uh . . . hi,” he said. “Is Melanie available, please?”
“Melanie,” the voice said. “Yes. Yes, indeed, Melanie is available. May I tel her who’s cal ing?”
“Josh.”
“Josh,” the voice repeated. There was a pause, then an intake of breath. “Oh! You must be the young man who helped out this summer.”
“Yes,” Josh said. He heard Penelope Ross’s reedy voice. Didi told us . . . “Yes, I am. Who’s this?”
“Oooh, I’m El en Lyndon. Vicki and Brenda’s mom. They just raved about you. Raved! So, I thank you and their father thanks you. We would have been here ourselves if we could, but I had some ambulatory issues, knee operation and al that. And Buzz, my husband, has work. We only came now because it was a real emergency . . .”
“Right,” Josh said. “Is Vicki okay?”
Another sharp intake of breath. And then it sounded like the woman was trying to hold herself together. “She’s okay. Which is to say, she stil has cancer. But it’s just the regular old cancer and not any new cancer. We were al sure it was going to be new cancer, but no, the MRI was clear. She lost consciousness the other night in the car, and we al thought the cancer had gone to her brain. But the doctors said she had overmedicated, her blood was thinned, plus there was the heat and the stress. You know Vicki. She feels an enormous amount of pressure because of the surgery and whatnot.” El en Lyndon paused, and Josh heard her pluck a Kleenex from a box. “My daughter wants to live more than anyone I have ever known.”
She wants to live, Josh thought. Unlike Didi. Unlike my own mother.
“Because of the kids,” El en Lyndon said. “Because of everything.”
“Right,” Josh said. “I know.”
El en Lyndon’s voice brightened. “So, anyway! If you hold on one moment, I’l get Melanie.”
“Okay,” Josh said. “Thanks.”
Y ou should never underestimate the power of your mind, Dr. Alcott said. The cancer isn’t making you sick. You’re making yourself sick.
These words were delivered to Vicki, bedside, in the hospital. Coming from anyone else they would have sounded like an admonishment, but from Dr. Alcott—Mark—it just sounded like the truth, gently spoken.
“I’m going to release you,” he said. “But you have to promise me that, between now and the date of your surgery, you’l relax. You’l drink plenty of water and take the vitamins and eat right. You wil not self-medicate. You’l talk to someone when you feel anxious or upset. If you internalize your fear, it can turn around and destroy you.”
Vicki tried to speak, but found she couldn’t. She nodded, then choked out, “I know.”
“You say you know, but you don’t act like you know,” Dr. Alcott said. “You’re making the road harder for yourself than it needs to be. You took so many pil s you nearly put yourself into a coma.”
She tried again to speak but got stuck. Something was wrong with her voice. “S——orry.” Her tone was not what she intended; she sounded like an automaton on a recording.
“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to yourself.”
“I’m sorry, s——elf,” Vicki said. She was only half joking.
Dr. Alcott smiled. “I want you to take it easy, do you hear me?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” Dr. Alcott said. He leaned in and kissed Vicki on the cheek. “This is good-bye. I won’t see you again this summer. But Dr. Garcia has promised to cal me after your surgery. And”—here he squeezed Vicki’s hand—“I want you to come back and visit me and the rest of the team next summer. Promise?”
She couldn’t speak! Something was wrong with her voice, or maybe she’d damaged her brain. She nodded.
“Good. Those are the visits we like the best.” He held her gaze. “Because next summer you’re going to be healthy.”
Vicki’s eyes swam with tears. It wasn’t as easy as Dr. Alcott was making it seem. She was petrified; anxiety held her by the shoulders. She couldn’t just click her heels like Dorothy and make that go away. She could not relax; she was incapable of taking it easy. She was standing on a ledge, fifty stories off the ground; she couldn’t pretend that she was safe, or that everything was going to be okay. She couldn’t even speak properly; something had been lost, or altered, while she was unconscious. Maybe she’d had a stroke. Maybe the drugs had ravaged her central controls.
Vicki let a few tears drop. What she wanted more than anything was to be out of this hospital for good and back home with her family at Number Eleven Shel Street.
“Thank you,” she mumbled.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
At home, she stil had trouble speaking. She had a stutter. The words and sentences were fluid in her mind, but in delivering them, she hit the same frustrating stumbling block again and again, even with Ted and the kids, even saying phrases she had said thousands of times. Magic words. Hold on. Be careful. I love you. Vicki was concerned about this but she was incapable of articulating her concern, and no one in the cottage seemed to notice her speech impediment, or the fact that, in order to hide the impediment (she would not be able to tolerate another trip to the hospital or any more drugs), she said next to nothing. The announcement of no metastases had put everyone’s mind at ease; the implication that Vicki’s “incident”
had come at her own hands (overdoing it with the painkil ers) or that it was al in her mind made her feel like a malingerer. If she complained now of something else, no one would believe her. They would think she was making it up. At times she thought perhaps she was making it up. She whispered to herself in the shower, I’m making it up. She got stuck on the m and stopped trying.
Ted, in an attempt to wring every bit of fun out of what remained of the summer, cajoled Vicki into joining him and Blaine on the fishing trip. He arranged for El en to stay home and watch Porter. It would be good for Blaine to have Vicki there as wel as Ted; it would be good for the three of them to spend the day together. It would be good for Vicki to be out on the water; in years past, Ted had chartered a sailboat, and Vicki had loved it. Remember, Vick, how you loved it? Vicki couldn’t protest. She nodded. Ohhhhh——kay.
It was just the three of them—plus the captain and first mate—because Harrison Ford cancel ed. Ted was disappointed, but only for a minute, and Vicki found it nicer without any other people. It was like they had their own boat. Blaine was over the moon to be on a real fishing boat, with a fight chair and special holders for his pole and his very own can of Coke. He bounded from one side of the boat to the other, bundled in his brand-new orange life jacket. He had both his parents to himself for the first time in a long time, and Vicki could see that while he was feeling very adult to be on this excursion, he was also relishing his role as the only child of his two parents. He let Ted hold him up high as they motored out of the harbor, past the jetty and around the tip of Great Point.
It was a stunning day. With the drone of the engine making conversation unnecessary, Vicki was set free for long periods of time. She basked in the sun, she sat up to feel the spray of the waves and to see Nantucket as just a sliver of pale sand in the distance. She watched the business of catching a fish as though it were a movie. Ted was doing most of the fishing while Blaine sat in the fight chair, a captive audience through one, two, three bluefish. With the fourth
fish, Blaine said, “Another blue.” His voice was weary and disappointed beyond his years. With a wink between Ted and Pete, the captain, it became clear that the mission was to now catch a striped bass. Pete motored al the way to the other side of the island; if they set up right between Smith’s Point and Tuckernuck, he said, they would have better luck. The first mate, a kid named Andre, sat next to Vicki.
He reminded her of Josh; he was on Nantucket for the summer, working. The fol owing week he would head back to the Col ege of Charleston.
At lunchtime, Vicki pul ed out the lunch she had made: chicken salad sandwiches, potato chips, cold plums, watermelon slices, and chocolate peanut butter cookies. Pete and Andre devoured the sandwiches and cookies Vicki had included for them, and Andre said it was the best lunch he’d had al summer.
“Leave it to my wife,” Ted said.
“Leave it to my mom,” Blaine echoed proudly.
Vicki smiled at them and felt happiness, fleeting though it was. After lunch, she went up to the bow of the boat and closed her eyes as the boat sliced through the water. This will not be my last day on the water, she thought. But then she had a vision of herself on the operating table, the surgeon brandishing a scalpel. Why not just cut me open with a saber? The night before, Vicki had watched Brenda and Walsh holding hands.
Walsh was the kind of person El en Lyndon referred to as a “gem,” or “a real treasure”; he was immediately recognizable as good, kind, and sensitive, as wel as extremely attractive (wel , there had never been any doubt about that)—he was the kind of person that it might be reasonable to lose one’s job over. Brenda and Walsh were so visibly happy together that Vicki thought, They will get married. But I won’t be alive for the wedding.
Where did these thoughts come from? How could she make them stop? Dr. Alcott was right about one thing: Fear was its own disease.
Vicki handed Ted his cel phone; she wanted him to check on Porter. It would stand to reason that since she was enjoying herself, something must be horribly amiss at home. Ted dialed the number and it rang once, then the connection cut out. Call ended. As Ted dialed again, Vicki pictured Porter’s face in a purple squeal. It used to be when Porter got upset, he would throw up, and though he hadn’t done this al summer, it was the vision that came to Vicki: Porter spewing pureed carrots al over El en Lyndon’s white linen pants and choking on the vomit until he stopped breathing.
The second cal didn’t go through at al , and Ted shook the cel phone in frustration. “There’s no reception out here, hon. Just relax. Everything is fine.”
You always say everything is fine, Vicki thought angrily. How am I supposed to relax when Porter is probably in the hospital on a respirator?
She was distracted from these thoughts by a shout from her other son. “Dad! Daddy!” It had only occurred to Vicki a hundred times since the day began that Blaine would fal overboard and be sucked under the boat by the power of the engines. When Vicki looked up, however, what she saw was Blaine holding on to the fishing pole for dear life. The line was taut, and Blaine was pul ing back in a professional way, bracing his bare feet against the side of the boat.
Ted said, “You’ve got a bite! Here, let me bring him in.”
Vicki thought Blaine might protest, but he handed the rod over to Ted right away, with relief. Vicki, too, was relieved. She didn’t want Blaine pul ed into the drink by the resistance of some monstrous fish, nor did she want to see Blaine lose the rod altogether, which was the more likely outcome. Vicki thought there might be a long, drawn-out Ahab versus Moby Dick–like struggle, but Ted landed the fish in a matter of seconds. Even in the overwhelming sunlight, Vicki could see the glint of silver scales. The fish was sleek but long, much longer than any of the bluefish Ted had caught.
“Striped bass?” Ted said uncertainly.
The captain whistled. “Better. You caught a bonito. She’s a beauty.” He pul ed out a tape measure and pressed the flopping fish to the deck with his shoe. “Thirty-seven inches. She’s a keeper.”
“What’s it cal ed?” Blaine asked.
“Bonito,” Ted said. “Bone-ee-to.”
“They’re good eating,” the captain said.
“Do you want to keep it?” Ted said. “Do you want to take it back to the docks so Grammie and Grandpa can see it?”
“We could gr——il it for dinner,” Vicki said.
Blaine sucked his lower lip as he studied the fish. In his sun visor with his hands on his hips and the look of deliberation on his face, he could have been fourteen. He could have been twenty-four.
“Nah,” Blaine said. “I want to throw her back. I want to let her live.”
They threw the bonito back, but to celebrate their day of fishing, Ted stopped at East Coast Seafood on the way home and bought salmon, swordfish, and tuna. It was their next-to-last night on the island, the evening of the last big dinner, and it would be real y big with the addition of Buzz and El en Lyndon and John Walsh.
When Ted pul ed the Yukon up in front of the house, Vicki blinked with disbelief. Josh’s Jeep was parked out front.
“Josh,” she said. His name came easily, al in one piece.
“Josh!” Blaine shouted.
“Good,” Ted said, unbuckling his seat belt. “I can give him his check.”
Vicki felt unaccountably happy when she walked inside. She expected a house ful of people, but the only person waiting for them was El en Lyndon, who was relaxing on the sofa, gimpy leg up.
“Hel o, al ,” El en said. “How was fishing?”
“We caught fish!” Blaine said. “Seven bluefish and one . . .” Here, Blaine looked to his father.
“Bonito,” Ted said.
“Bonito!” Blaine said. “But we let them go.”
“Josh?” Vicki said. Again, no stutter, no stumble.
“Josh?” El en Lyndon said.
“Is heeeee——here?” Vicki said.
“Yes,” El en Lyndon said. “Josh and Melanie took Porter for a walk.”
Josh and Melanie, Vicki thought.
“And Brenda and Walsh are at the beach,” El en said. “And I sent your father to the farm for corn, tomatoes, and blueberry pie.”
“We bought . . .” Vicki held up the fish to show her mother. She set the fil ets on the counter and immediately started thinking: eight adults for dinner if Josh would stay; she had to marinate the fish, chil wine, soften butter, set the table, and get a shower. Plus, food for the kids. Shuck the corn when her father got home, slice and dress the tomatoes. Would there be enough food? Should she run to the market for a baguette?
The lists were back. Vicki scribbled some things down on a tablet. But as she unwrapped the beautiful fish fil ets from the butcher paper, the terror returned. Terror! When Ted passed behind her, she turned and grabbed his wrist.
“What is it?” he said.
“We’re leeee——aving.”
“We have to go back sometime,” Ted said. “We just can’t stay here forever.”
Of course not, Vicki thought. However, back in Connecticut, reality awaited.
From her outpost on the sofa, El en Lyndon sang out, “Nantucket wil always be here, honey.”
Yes, Vicki thought. But will I?
Josh might have been more comfortable in the house with the women—Vicki, Melanie, Brenda, and Mrs. Lyndon—but he found himself, instead, out on the deck with “the men.” The men included Buzz Lyndon, Ted, and John Walsh, Brenda’s student, Brenda’s lover, who had (Josh learned from Melanie) shown up without warning a few days earlier. Initial y, Josh felt threatened by John Walsh, but it quickly became apparent that John Walsh was different from the likes of Peter Patchen, or even Ted. To begin with, John Walsh was Australian, and his accent alone made him seem cheerful and approachable, open, friendly, and egalitarian. When Ted introduced Josh, John Walsh stood up right away from the deck chair and gave Josh a hearty handshake.
“Hey, mate. Name’s Walsh. Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Josh said.
> “Beer?” Ted said.
“I’l get it,” Buzz Lyndon said. He handed Josh a Stel a.
“Thanks,” Josh said. He took a long, cold swal ow.
“Not your usual duds,” Ted noted.
“No,” Josh said. He was wearing the bare bones of his gray suit—the gray pants, the white dress shirt (unbuttoned at the neck, cuffs rol ed up), and his dress shoes with black socks. He had walked with Melanie and Porter to the beach in this unlikely outfit, and whereas he felt overdressed, the suit made him feel older, like an actual grown-up. “I had a funeral.”
“Who?” Ted said.
“Friend of mine from high school,” Josh said. “A girl. My ex-girlfriend, actual y. Didi, her name was. She worked at the hospital.”
Ted stared at him. “Blond girl?”
“Yeah.”
“I met her,” Ted said. “Briefly. When we were there for Vicki last week. That’s terrible. God, I’m sorry.”
John Walsh raised his beer bottle. “Sorry for your loss, mate.”
“Oh,” Josh said. “Thanks. She had . . . a lot of problems.”
“That’s too bad,” Buzz Lyndon said. “Young girl like that.”
“Was she sick?” Ted asked. “She didn’t look sick.”
“No, not sick. She overdosed. It was a combination of pil s and alcohol.” Already he had said more about Didi than he wanted to. He had hoped to leave behind the sadness of the funeral and the discomfort he felt around his high school friends, but that was proving to be impossible. Al summer, he’d tried to keep his job at Number Eleven Shel Street separate from his life at home, but he saw now it was pointless. The island was so smal that everyone intersected. Thinking back, Josh realized he wouldn’t even be working here if he hadn’t shown up at the hospital that day to lend Didi the two hundred dol ars. So in a way it was like Didi led him here. “It was an accident,” Josh added. “Her death was accidental.”
Barefoot: A Novel Page 40