Barefoot (36 page)

“You would have found someone else,” he said.

“But it wouldn’t have been the same.”

“Things happen for a reason,” Josh said. “I knew when I saw you coming off the plane . . .”

“When Melanie fell?”

“Yeah, I knew then that something like this would happen.”

“Something like what? You knew you’d be our babysitter?”

“I knew our paths would cross.”

“You did not.”

“I did. First Brenda left the book behind, then I saw Melanie at the airport. . . .”

“She was trying to leave,” Vicki said.

“But I brought her back,” Josh said. “It’s like it was all part of some greater plan.”

“If you believe in a greater plan,” Vicki said.

“You don’t believe in a greater plan?” Josh said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Vicki said. When she looked at the ocean, or at some smaller, more delicate perfection—like Porter’s ear, for example—it was hard to deny there was a force at work. But a plan into which everyone fit, a plan where everything happened for a reason? It was a convenient fallback. How many people in Vicki’s cancer support group had said they believed they got cancer for a reason? Almost everyone. But look at Alan—he was dead. What was the reason there? The woman in Royersford, Pennsylvania, shot in the face, leaving her three-month-old motherless. That didn’t happen for a
reason.
That was a mistake, a tragedy. If there was a greater plan, it was full of holes and people dropped through all the time. Vicki thought back on her own life. It had progressed in a way that made sense . . . right up until the cells of her lungs mutated and became life-threatening. “I’ve never been good at these meaning-of-life conversations.”

Just as Vicki said these words, an amazing thing happened. Porter let go of the umbrella pole and took two, three, four steps forward.

Vicki leapt from her chair. “Oh my God! Did you see that?”

Porter stopped, turned to his mother with a triumphant expression that quickly became bafflement. He fell back on his butt and started to cry.

“He took his first steps!” Vicki said. “Did you see him? Josh, did you
see
him?”

“I saw him. He was walking.”

“He was walking!” Vicki swept Porter up and kissed his face. “Oh, honey, you can walk!” She held Porter so tightly his cries amplified. Forget trying to find the meaning of life in some greater plan—it was right there in front of them! Porter had taken his first steps! He would walk for the rest of his life, but Vicki had been there, watching, the very first time. And Josh had seen. If Vicki hadn’t come to the beach today, she might have missed Porter’s first steps—or maybe he only took them because Vicki was there. Or maybe, Vicki couldn’t help thinking, maybe seeing Porter’s first steps was a small gift for Vicki before she died.
No negative thoughts!
she told herself. But she couldn’t help it; doubt followed her everywhere.

“Amazing,” she said, trying to hold on to her initial enthusiasm. She called out to Blaine. “Honey, your brother can walk. He just took his first steps!” But Porter was crying so loudly Blaine couldn’t hear her. “Oh, dear. I scared him, maybe.”

Josh checked his watch. “Actually, it’s time for his nap.”

“Eleven o’clock?” Vicki said.

“On the nose. Here, I’ll take him.”

Vicki handed Porter over to Josh, who laid Porter on his stomach on a section of clean blanket. Josh patted Porter’s back and gave Porter his pacifier. Porter quieted, and as Vicki sat and watched, his eyes drifted closed.

Josh stood up carefully. “Now is when I play Wiffle ball with Blaine,” he said. “He’s really learning how to connect with the ball.”

“You’re going to be a great father,” Vicki said.

“Thanks, Boss.” Josh smiled, and something about the smile gave Vicki a glimmer of hope. Josh would get older, fall in love, marry, have children. One thing, at least, would be right with the world.

PART THREE

AUGUST

T
here was a lot to be learned from children’s games, Brenda thought. Take Chutes and Ladders, which she and Blaine had played umpteen times this summer and which they were playing again now on the coffee table. The board, with its 100 spaces, was a person’s life, and a random spinner dictated which space a person would land on
. This little girl did her chores so she earned money to go to the movies:
short ladder.
This boy stood on a wobbly chair to reach the cookie jar, but he fell and broke his arm:
steep chute. As Blaine assiduously practiced counting out spaces, he looked to Brenda for nods of affirmation, but she was musing about all the things that had happened to her in the past year. Brenda had sailed up a tall ladder with her doctorate and the job at Champion and the highest teaching rating in the department, but all this seemed to do was to elevate her to a place where there were more perilous chutes. A professor has an affair with her student. . . . A woman throws a book in anger. . . .

Blaine won the game. This always made him happy.

“Want to play again?” he asked.

It was August, everybody’s summer, though for Brenda the month heralded the beginning of the end. They would be leaving the island in three and a half weeks. It made Brenda physically sick to think of leaving Nantucket and returning to the city, to the apartment she could no longer afford and the pervasive back-to-school atmosphere that now meant nothing to her. For the first time in her memory, Brenda would not be going back to school. She had been banned from school.
You will never work in academia again.
It was almost too much to bear. And so, Brenda did her best to ignore the fact that it was August.

Brian Delaney, Esquire, however, would not let her forget. His calls came so frequently that Brenda’s life felt like a video game in which Brian Delaney, Esquire, popped up in her path to thwart her.

She finally called him back from a bench in the small park next to the ’Sconset Market. Even ’Sconset, quaint village that it was, was bursting at the seams with people now that it was August. There was a line out the door of the market for coffee and the paper, and there were no fewer than five people on cell phones in the small park, but none of them, certainly, were conducting business more unpleasant than Brenda’s.

Trudi, Brian Delaney, Esquire’s secretary, sounded relieved to hear it was Brenda calling. “He wants to get this settled,” Trudi confided to Brenda, “before he goes to the Hamptons!”

“So now we’re working around your vacation?” Brenda said when Himself came on the line. She meant to sound snappy-funny-sarcastic, but for once, Brian Delaney, Esquire, wasn’t biting.

“Listen,” he said. “The university is willing to settle at a hundred and twenty-five. Are you jumping for joy? One twenty-five. And they’ll waive the ten grand you owe them to work on the painting. I guess the guy Len, or whomever, is going to write a paper about the restoration. So that’s a clean and clear one twenty-five. That is as good as it’s going to get, Dr. Lyndon. I strongly advise you to take it.”

“I don’t have a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars,” Brenda said. “And I don’t have a job. How can I settle when I don’t have the money?”

“We have to settle,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “How’s the screenplay coming?”

“Fine,” Brenda said. Which was true—the screenplay, which had started out as a wing and a prayer, was now nearly done. But the problem with finishing the screenplay was the incipient worry about selling the damn thing.

“Good, good,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “There’s your million dollars right there.”

“Yeah,” Brenda said. “In my dreams.”

“And there’s that pretty piece of real estate you’re sitting on. You could sell out to your sister.”

“No,” Brenda said. The cottage was the only thing Brenda owned. If things didn’t work out in the city, she would have to live on Nantucket year-round. She would have to get a job as a landscaper, or as a salesperson at one of the shops in town. She would have to make friends with other year-rounders who had failed to make lives in the real world. “I’ve told you I don’t know how many times, my sister is sick. She has cancer. I can’t bother her or her husband with a real estate thing now, just because I need money.”

“But you do need money,” Brian Delaney, Esquire, said. “We can’t leave this hanging. Everything doesn’t
stop
just because it’s summer and you’re on Nantucket. The university will take us to trial, where, I assure you, we will lose—to the tune of three hundred grand, plus all the money you’ll have to pay me to prepare. I don’t know what you did to that woman Atela, but she is
pissed.
She wants
justice,
the university counsel tells me.
Justice!
” Brian Delaney, Esquire, huffed impatiently. “Do you want me to settle this thing or not?”

There was no justice, Brenda thought. There were only chutes and ladders.

“Settle,” she said.

The beginning of the end with Walsh had arrived when Brenda handed back the midterm papers to her class. She knew students compared notes and shared grades, but she never expected that Walsh would do so. Then again, she never told him (as perhaps she should have):
Don’t tell anyone what grade I gave you.
The fact of the matter was, Brenda and Walsh didn’t discuss the paper, or his grade, at all. It wasn’t relevant to their relationship; it might have been someone else who gave Walsh the grade.

On the first day of April, no one showed up for class. At five past eleven, not a single student. This struck Brenda as odd, but she relished the quiet. She was tired. She had spent the night before at her parents’ house in Philadelphia; she and Vicki had gone to their father’s law office and signed the papers that made them the official owners of Number Eleven Shell Street. Ellen Lyndon had persuaded Brenda to stay for a dinner that featured roast chicken and several bottles of celebratory wine. Brenda missed the last train back to New York and had spent the night in her childhood bed. She’d awoken at six that morning to get to 30th Street Station. Her day had been a blur of Metroliner, subway, crosstown bus.

So as she waited for her class to arrive, she rested her head on the Queen Anne table. It smelled like lemon Pledge. She closed her eyes.

And jolted awake! A minute later, two minutes? No, it was eleven-fifteen and still no one had come. She checked her syllabus; spring break wasn’t for two weeks. But then she thought, April first, April Fool’s. The class was playing a trick on her. Ha, ha. But where
were
they?

Brenda walked down the hall to Mrs. Pencaldron’s desk, and on the way, she was passed by the university caterers rolling a tray of linens and dishes toward the Barrington Room.

Mrs. Pencaldron was on the phone. She saw Brenda but looked right through her. She said something about shrimp in the pasta salad, Dr. Barrett was allergic, if he ate it, he’d die. She hung up, huffing.

“Impossible!” she said.

“Am I missing something?” Brenda said.

Mrs. Pencaldron laughed with a false brightness. It had become clear to Brenda over the course of the year that Mrs. Pencaldron regarded all the professors in the department as pets she was trying hard to train, but to no avail.

“Your class,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “What are you
doing
here?”

“No one’s in the Barrington Room,” Brenda said. “Except now it looks like they’re setting up some kind of lunch.”

“The department’s spring luncheon,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. “The notice has been in your box for ten days.”

“It has?” Brenda was guilty. She never checked her box.

“It has. Along with a memo informing you that because of the luncheon your class is being held in Parsons 204.”

“It is?”

“It is,” Mrs. Pencaldron said. She was all gussied up in a floral-print dress. Should Brenda have gotten gussied, too?

“Should I go to the luncheon?”

“Are you a member of this department?”

That sounded like a rhetorical question, but was it?

Mrs. Pencaldron sighed in a way that made Brenda feel like a hopeless case. “We’ll see you at one.”

Brenda booked it over to Parsons 204. It was a beautiful spring day—finally!—and the quad looked like one of the pictures on the university Web site. Champion University had grass after all! It had daffodils! It had students eating Big Macs on beach towels! Brenda hurried, but she was almost certain her effort would be in vain. After twenty professorless minutes, the class would have left, and on such a sublime day, how could she blame them? So there was one precious seminar wasted. Brenda prayed that, at the very least, Walsh waited around. The weather had put her in a flirtatious frame of mind. Maybe they could go out tonight, to the Peruvian chicken place. Maybe they could stroll in Carl Schurz Park and check out barges on the East River. She would tell him about the cottage on Nantucket, half of it now hers.

Just outside Parsons 204, Brenda heard voices. She opened the door and there was her class, thick in discussion of the week’s reading, Lorrie Moore’s short story “Real Estate.” The kids were so into it, they didn’t even notice her standing there, and Brenda nearly burst with pride.

Brenda’s good mood got better: Walsh grinned when she told him, after everyone else had filed out of the room, that she wanted to go on a chicken-eating, park-strolling, barge-watching date, and then—because they were in a strange classroom in the Biology Department—they kissed.

“I have to run,” Brenda said. “I’m expected.”

The department’s spring luncheon was in full swing by the time Brenda arrived. The Barrington Room looked very elegant with the layered tablecloths, flowers, tiered silver trays of tuna and egg salad sandwiches, radishes with sweet butter, the shrimpless pasta salad, a bona fide punch bowl. There was a cluster of female graduate students by the door, teaching assistants, who greeted Brenda like a group of teenagers might greet Hilary Duff. Brenda was the department’s rising star, but to the teaching assistants, Brenda tried to come across as a nice, regular, down-to-earth person. She complimented Audrey on her skirt and told Mary Kate that she’d be happy to proofread the first chapter of her thesis. Brenda chatted with Dr. Barrett, the Russian literature authority who had been friends with Aunt Liv, and then Brenda found herself in conversation with Elizabeth Graves’s secretary, Nan, about the gorgeous weather and the weekend forecast. Across the room, Brenda saw Mrs. Pencaldron, Suzanne Atela, and a graduate student named Augie Fisk, who was a Chaucer specialist and who had asked Brenda out to dinner no less than three times. It would have been a beneficent gesture to seek out Augie Fisk and talk with him, it would have been wise to schmooze with Suzanne Atela—but Brenda was tired, and hungry. She fixed herself a plate and took a seat in a chair along the far wall next to a stout gentleman in a gray suit.

“I’m Bill Franklin,” he said.

Aha! Bill Franklin was the drama professor, a famous queen, known among the students as “Uncle Pervy.” Brenda had never met him. He taught at night, in the university theater. He had an office in the department, but the door was always closed.

“Oh, hi! It’s nice to finally put a face to the name. I’m Brenda Lyndon.”

“Yes, I know.”

She smiled, trying not to let his unfortunate nickname color her first impression. Bill Franklin was in his midfifties, he had a nondescript, semi-desperate traveling-salesman aura about him. Something about him was familiar. She had seen him before. Around campus, maybe. Brenda sneaked another look at him sideways as she nibbled on a radish.

“This is a very nice event,” she said.

And at the same time, he said, “You seem to be quite popular with the kids.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, who knows? I like teaching. I love it. Today I was late and the class just started up without me.”

“You’re very young.”

“I’ll be thirty this month,” Brenda said.

“Much closer to their age. They must find you intriguing.”

“Intriguing?” Brenda said. “Oh, I kind of doubt that.”

Bill Franklin was drinking a Michelob. He brought the bottle to his lips. He had a gray handlebar mustache. A handlebar mustache. Something about the mustache rang a bell, but why? Brenda got a funny-sick feeling in her stomach. It was a really bad paranoid suspicion. Really bad. Through three bites of pasta salad, she watched Suzanne Atela conferring with the head caterer. Dr. Atela was pointing; Brenda heard the word “coffee.” Brenda had to stand up. She wanted to look at Bill Franklin from across the room. She pretended to be headed for the punch bowl, though the punch was the color of Pepto-Bismol, and no one had touched it. She lingered, trying to get a good, long look without getting caught. Okay. He drank from his bottle, he saw her, he winked. Winked.

Brenda looked away, horrified. Horrified!
We’re in Soho. It’s like another country. The man at the end of the bar would like to pay for your drink.

The man at the end of the bar at the Cupping Room the night Brenda met Walsh, the night she kissed Walsh and flaunted her hot longing for all to see . . . the man who offered to buy her a drink was Bill Franklin.

Brenda cancelled Walsh without explanation, and nine o’clock found him leaning against Brenda’s buzzer until she let him in.

On purpose, she was wearing sweatpants. Since they were no longer to be lovers, he could see her looking grubby. Ancient Philadelphia marathon T-shirt, ponytail, no makeup. Well, a little makeup. Brenda took a long time with the dead bolts. She didn’t want to see him.

“What’s going on?” he said. “You sounded bloody awful on the phone. What happened?”

Walsh stepped inside, and she locked the door back up. Her apartment, at least, was safe. She took her clothes off before Walsh could get a good look at them.

Later, as they lay in bed sweating and spent, Walsh kissed her temple. Some days he seemed much older than he really was. Maybe because he was from Australia.

“You’re upset,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”