Barefoot (17 page)

He didn’t come in to see her right away. He was busy with the kids first and then with all the stuff. Vicki had her eyes closed, but she tracked his presence, his footsteps on the flagstone path, the creak of the gate, the clicks and thumps of the car doors opening and closing. She heard him teasing Melanie, and indignation bloomed in Vicki’s chest:
Your wife has cancer! You might take a few seconds to check on her and say hello!
By now, Vicki felt good enough to get out of bed, but she would wait (childishly?) for him to come to her.

When he did come, finally, it was all wrong. She knew it from the way he tapped on the door, from the tentative way he said her name. “Vicki? Vicki?” He never called her Vicki, only Vick. He was afraid of her now; she was a stranger to him.

And yet, they went through the motions. Ted knelt by the bed and kissed her forehead like she was a sick child. She pressed her face into his shirt and smelled him. He had a strange smell that she hoped was just hotel soap.

“How was the rest of the trip?” she said.

He eyed the glass of chocolate milk. “Well, I’m here.”

He was there, yes, but in the weeks since Vicki’s diagnosis, Ted had changed. He had become Mister Rogers. His voice used to boom and resonate, but now he sounded timid and supplicant, and if Vicki wasn’t dreaming, he was getting fat. He had stopped going to the gym after work. She knew that with her and the kids gone, he worked late and either grabbed fast food from Grand Central or foraged through the freezer for one of the leftover casseroles. In the evenings he did onerous chores, things Vicki had been after him to do for years, like cleaning the attic. He did them now because he thought she was going to die. The day before Vicki left for Nantucket he threw away thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars by ceremoniously breaking them in half over the kitchen trash.
Really, Ted,
Vicki had said.
Is that necessary?

Their sex life had come to a halt. Ted had taken to kissing her on the forehead and cheek; he hugged her like she was his sister. That afternoon, while Porter was napping, Brenda took Blaine to the beach with a wink and a nod so that Vicki and Ted could have some privacy. Ted closed the bedroom door and kissed Vicki in a way that let her know he was trying. They fell back on the bed, Vicki reached down his shorts, and . . . nothing. His body didn’t respond to her touch. For the first time in ten years, he could not get an erection.

He pulled away, sunk his face into the squishy mattress. “I’m tired,” he said. “I barely slept last night.”

Vicki’s heart broke at this excuse. “It’s me,” she said.

“No,” he said. He touched her lips. She was trying, too. She had risen from bed to put on lipstick, to put on perfume and a thong—all to try to disguise the fact that she was sick. The port alone was enough to turn any man off. She felt as sexy as a remote control, as desirable as a garage door opener. There was no pretending it didn’t matter. Her husband had shown up, yes, but something vital, it seemed, had been left behind.

They fell asleep in the warm, stuffy bedroom and woke an hour later to Porter crying and the sounds of Brenda and Blaine playing Chutes and Ladders in the living room. They might have been tender with each other, apologetic—but instead, they started fighting. Ted took issue with the fact that Vicki had gone out the night before. “To the Club Car, no less.”

“What’s wrong with the Club Car?” Vicki said.

“All those rich, divorced men on the prowl.”

“No one was prowling after us, Ted. I promise you.”

“And you got drunk,” he said.

He had her there. She drank three or four glasses of wine at dinner, two flutes of Veuve Clicquot with dessert, and a glass of port at the bar. She had become utterly intoxicated, savoring the pure defiance of it. Her spirits lifted; she felt herself leaving her body behind. Dr. Garcia and Dr. Alcott had both told her
no alcohol,
but she felt so fantastic, she didn’t understand why. She had even wanted to go dancing at the Chicken Box, chug a few beers and lose herself further, but Melanie had groaned and yawned and Brenda sided with Melanie.

It’s late,
Brenda said.
I think you’ve probably had enough.

“I got drunk,” Vicki admitted. The chocolate milk, now soured and separated, was still on her nightstand.

“It was irresponsible,” he said.

“You’re Blaine and Porter’s father,” Vicki said, rising from bed. She felt light-headed and nauseous. “You are not, however, my father.”

“You’re sick, Vicki.”

Vicki thought of the circle of human beings that comprised her cancer support group. They had warned her this would happen:
You’ll become your cancer. It will own you, define you.
That was true even within the group itself. Vicki knew the other members of the group only by first name, type of cancer, and stage. Maxine, breast, stage two; Jeremy, prostate, stage one; Alan, pancreatic (there was no stage with pancreatic, it was always terminal); Francesca, brain, stage two; and the leader, Dolores, Hodgkin’s, five years in remission.

“So what?” Vicki, lung, stage two, said to her husband. “I’m an adult. I can do what I want. I wanted to have fun with my sister and Mel. Fun is allowed, you know. Even for people with cancer.”

“You need to take care of yourself,” Ted said. “Have you been eating kale, or broccoli? I noticed you left your vitamins at home. Dr. Garcia said . . .”

“You don’t know what this is like for me,” Vicki hissed. She marched into the other room, past Brenda and Blaine, to the kitchen counter, where she snatched up Porter’s bottle. It was amazing how as some things fell apart, others came together. Porter had taken a bottle the night before for Josh, and another one this morning for Vicki, just like that, without a peep. Vicki stormed back into the bedroom and closed the door. Ted was bouncing Porter around, trying to get him to stop crying.

“Here’s his bottle.”

“Will he take it?”

“He took one last night from Josh and another one this morning from me.”

“Who’s Josh?”

“The babysitter.”

“A guy?”

“A guy.”

“What kind of guy?”

“He’s going to be a senior at Middlebury. We met him at the airport the day we got here and now he’s our babysitter.”

Ted sat down on the bed and started feeding Porter the bottle. “I don’t know how I feel about a male babysitter.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What kind of guy wants to babysit? Is he a pedophile?”

“Do you honestly think I would hire someone like that? Josh is extremely normal. Athletic, handsome, trustworthy. He’s a doll, actually.”

“So you’re trying to replace me?”

“Stop it, Ted.”

“Was this Brenda’s idea?”

“Well, sort of. But please don’t . . .”

“Ha!” he said. “I knew it. Your sister’s a pedophile.”

“Ted, stop it!”

“She’s going to have sex with the kids’ babysitter.”

“Ted!” Strangely, Vicki felt jealous. Josh didn’t belong to Brenda! Last night when they got home, the three of them stood over Josh as he slept with Porter on the bed and they did everything shy of coo and cluck. Then Josh opened his eyes and startled—he was like Snow White waking up to the curious gazes of the dwarfs. Vicki had started to laugh, then Brenda laughed, then Melanie asked Josh if he wanted her to walk him out to his car and that made Vicki and Brenda laugh so hard they nearly peed themselves. Josh had seemed mildly offended, or perhaps just embarrassed that they had found him asleep, but he woke up enough to give Vicki a full report and she was so happy about Porter taking a bottle that she gave Josh a hundred dollars and good feelings were restored all around. She did not want to be attacked for hiring a male babysitter, and she did not like anyone’s insinuation that Josh was somehow around because of Brenda.

“Just please be quiet,” Vicki said. She stopped herself from asking,
Why did you even come?

Later, when it cooled down a bit, they went for a walk.
Get out of the house,
Vicki thought. The house was so small, the ceilings so low, that words and feelings got trapped, they ricocheted against the walls and floors instead of floating away.

Vicki and Ted put the kids in the double jogger and headed up Baxter Road, past the grandest of the island’s summer homes, homes they had long fantasized about owning and now could probably afford, toward Sankaty Head Lighthouse. Ted was pushing the kids, Vicki was trying not to let on how much the simple walk winded her.

“Do you remember the poker game?” she said.

“Of course.”

“It was like a lifetime ago,” she said.

“I’ll never forget you in those leather pants,” Ted said. “Taking everyone’s money.”

“I’ve been thinking about all those cigars I smoked,” she said. “One cigar a week for two years. You don’t think . . .”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

She was quiet. A white-haired man wearing madras Bermuda shorts strolled by, walking a golden retriever. Vicki smiled at him.

“Beautiful family,” he said.

That was how they appeared to others, she knew. Blaine was asleep in the stroller, Porter was sucking on his pacifier. A man walking a dog on a mild summer afternoon would never know that Vicki was sick, and he would never know that Ted couldn’t handle it.

But here they were on Nantucket, walking along the bluff with Sankaty Head Lighthouse like a giant peppermint stick in front of them, its flashing beacon steady and predictable. Being here made Vicki feel better.
Beautiful family,
the man walking his dog said, and whereas he was wrong, he was also right. They would grill fish for dinner, boil early corn, walk to the market for ice cream cones. After the kids were asleep, Vicki and Ted would try again in bed.

No sooner had these thoughts soothed Vicki, no sooner was the man with the dog past them and out of earshot, than Ted cleared his throat in a way that made Vicki nervous.

“I want you to come home,” he said.

One of the things Vicki loved about her parents, Buzz and Ellen, was that they were still married; they had been married for thirty-five years. Vicki appreciated this more than Brenda did because she herself was part of a marriage, she was tied to Ted Stowe in a thousand ways—the children, the house, the friends, the community, their church, the ten years of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, bills paid, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, dinners out, movies, parties, plays, concerts, the countless conversations. It seemed when they were first together that their conversations had been about other things—worldly matters, politics, books, ideas—and now the conversations were only about themselves. Did that happen to every couple? These endless discussions of schedules and logistics, squash games and Junior League lunches, of Blaine’s fine-motor skills, his bowel movements, the amount of TV he watched, of Porter sleeping or not sleeping, of should they have a third child, go for the girl, of Ted’s career, of their investments, their taxes, the warranty on the Yukon, of Vicki’s involvement with the neighborhood association, of which day for what kind of recycling. Was everyone so inward-looking? Or was it just their family, the Stowes, and especially now, with Vicki’s cancer?

A few years earlier, Ellen Lyndon had said something curious to Vicki.
Your father and I have been having the same argument for fourteen years,
she said.
Different manifestations, but the same argument.

Vicki was both grateful and disturbed to discover that she didn’t know what this argument between her parents might be about. She hadn’t lived at home since the summer after her sophomore year in college, true, but it unsettled her to think that she didn’t know her parents well enough to be privy to the subject of their one and only argument. And yet she understood, because she was married, that her parents’ marriage was its own thing, an entity separate even from the children it produced; it was mysterious, sacred, unknowable.

Vicki’s marriage to Ted had its own nooks and crannies, false starts and dead ends, with its own arguments, repeated and repeated again.
I want you to come home.
Ted didn’t have to say another word—Vicki had the rest of his speech memorized.
I love you, I miss you, I miss the kids, I hate coming home to an empty house, I’m sick of Chinese takeout and frozen waffles. The house is too quiet. Porter’s just a baby; he’ll forget who I am—he already cries when he sees me. I want you to come home so you can have chemo in the city, let’s not mess around, let’s get serious, let’s kill these cells, smug fuckers, get the best doctors, so what if the drugs are exactly the same, administered the same way? I want you at Sloan-Kettering so I can sleep at night, knowing you have the best money can buy, no second-guessing.

But what Ted was also saying was,
I want you to come home because I’m afraid I’m going to lose you. Afraid like a little kid, Vick. Scared shitless. I’m going to lose you in September on the operating table, or at some point after that if the surgery doesn’t work, if the tumors aren’t resectable, if the cancer metastasizes to your brain or your liver, if they can’t get it all out.

I want you to come home,
Ted said, because he had no faith. And that was what really stood between husband and wife, that was what had turned him into milquetoast, that was what caused Vicki’s anger and Ted’s impotence: He thought she was going to die. And, too, he didn’t understand Nantucket the way Vicki did, he hadn’t grown up in the house on Shell Street, he didn’t feel the same way about the ocean, the sand, the reliable beacon of Sankaty Head Lighthouse. There were so many things that no longer mattered, but these things—this ocean, this air, this ground under her feet—did matter.

“I
am
home,” Vicki said.

Vicki made it crystal clear: The most important thing when caring for children was to establish a routine. Especially when those children’s mother was sick. “The kids sense a change,” Vicki said. “They sense uncertainty, they know something is wrong. Your job is to keep them calm and secure. Be consistent. Promote sameness.”