Barefoot (4 page)

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Uh,” Josh said. He took a few steps back. His vision was splotchy and green—green from the plot of grass in the side yard, green from the shiny material cupping Scowling Sister’s breasts. Okay, now, for sure, the hair on his arms was standing up. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m Dr. Lyndon,” Scowling Sister said, offering her hand. “Brenda.”

“Josh Flynn.”

“You’re such a doll to bring this by,” Brenda said. She hugged the briefcase to her chest. “I thought it was gone forever.”

“No problem,” Josh said, though it was more of a problem than he imagined. He was thrown into a frenzy by the sight of Scowling Sister. Her hair, which had been loose at the airport, was now held in a bun by a pencil, and little pieces fell down around her neck. She was very pretty. And pretty old, he guessed. Maybe thirty. She was barefoot and her toes were dark pink; they looked like berries.
Enough!
he thought, and he may have actually spoken the word because Brenda tilted her head and looked at him strangely, as if to say,
Enough what?

“Do you want to come in?” she asked.

Chas Gorda would have encouraged Josh to say yes. One way to avoid being self-referential was to open your world up, meet new people. Listen, observe, absorb. Josh had never seen the inside of one of these little cottages. He checked his watch. Five o’clock. Normally, after work, he went for a swim at Nobadeer Beach, and sometimes he stopped by his old girlfriend Didi’s apartment. He and Didi had dated all through high school, but then she had stayed on the island and Josh had left, and now, three years later, you could really tell the difference. Didi worked at the admitting desk at the hospital and all she talked about was her weight and
Survivor.
If she had found an old book nestled in Bubble Wrap, she would have snorted and chucked it in the Dumpster.

“Oh-kay,” he said. “Sure.”

“I’ll make us some tea,” Brenda said. But she was distracted by a noise, a computerized version of “Für Elise.” Brenda pulled a cell phone out of her back pocket and checked the display.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I am
not
going to answer that.” She smiled lamely at Josh, and he watched the enthusiasm drain from her face. They were two steps from the door when Brenda stopped. “Actually, everyone in the house is asleep.”

“Oh.”

“The kids. My sister. Her friend. And I’m not sure we even have any tea, so . . .”

“That’s all right,” Josh said, backing away. He was disappointed, but also relieved.

“Another time,” Brenda said. “You promise you’ll come back another time? Now you know where we live!”

Melanie would never complain out loud, not with her best friend so gravely ill, but she felt like mold on the wall at a fleabag motel. Here, then, was a classic case of Be Careful What You Wish For. Her breasts felt like lead balloons. They hurt so much she couldn’t sleep on her stomach, and yet that was her favorite position for sleep, facedown, without so much as a pillow. Now she had to contend with new sleeping quarters, a sagging twin bed in this strange, sunny room that smelled like artificial pine trees.

All she had wanted was to get away—as far away as possible. When she was in Connecticut, facing the utter wasteland her life had become, moving to Pluto had seemed too close. But now she was at loose ends; from a distance, things somehow looked worse than they did when she was standing in the middle of them. And the bizarre, unfathomable fact was, she missed Peter.

Peter, Melanie’s husband of six years, was very tall for an Asian man. Tall, broad in the shoulders, startlingly handsome—people on the streets of Manhattan occasionally mistook him for the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Melanie had met Peter at a bar on the East Side. Peter, at that time, had worked on Wall Street, but shortly after he and Melanie married he became a market analyst at Rutter, Higgens, where he met Ted Stowe, Vicki’s husband. Vicki and Ted were expecting their first child; they were moving to Darien. Melanie and Vicki became good, fast friends, and soon Melanie was pestering Peter about moving to Connecticut, too. (“Pestering” was how Peter described it now. At the time, to Melanie, it had seemed like a mutual decision to move.) Melanie wanted children. She and Peter started trying—nothing happened. But Melanie had fallen in love with a house, not to mention the green-grass-and-garden vision of her life in Connecticut. They moved and became the only young couple in Darien without children. At times, Melanie blamed her fertility problems on the suburb. Babies were everywhere. Melanie was forced to watch the stroller brigade on its way to the school bus stop each morning. She was confronted by children wherever she turned—at the Stop & Shop, at the packed day care of her gym, at the annual Christmas pageant of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church.

You’re so lucky,
the mothers would say to Melanie.
You’re free to do whatever you want. You can sit through dinner and a bottle of wine at Chuck’s without sixteen hundred interruptions, without all the silverware and half the dinner rolls ending up on the floor, without the waitstaff glaring at you like you’re something stuck to the bottom of a mortician’s shoe.
The mothers were kind; they pretended to envy Melanie. But she knew that they pitied her, that she had become a woman defined by her faulty biology. Never mind that Melanie had graduated from Sarah Lawrence, that she had taught English to the hill tribes of northern Thailand after college; never mind that Melanie was an avid gardener and a dedicated power walker. When the other women saw her, they thought:
That’s the woman who’s trying to conceive. The one who’s having difficulty. Barren, maybe. Something’s wrong, poor thing.

Peter didn’t acknowledge any of this, and Melanie knew now, in the post-breakup where deep, dark secrets oozed out like sludge from the sewer, that he’d never cared whether they conceived or not. (No wonder she’d had such trouble! Everyone knew the game was 90 percent attitude, positive thinking, visualization.) Peter had tried to make her happy, and the best way he knew to do this, being a man, was to spend money on her in flabbergasting ways. Weekend trips to Cabo, the Connaught in London, the Delano in South Beach. An Yves Saint Laurent velvet blazer that had a two-month waiting list. A twelve-ounce black truffle flown in from Italy in a wooden box packed with straw. Orchids every Friday.

As the months of infertility dragged on, Melanie immersed herself in starting seeds, digging beds, planting shrubs and perennials, mulching, weeding, spending nearly a thousand dollars on annuals and herbs and heirloom tomato plants. She let the two beautiful little girls who lived next door cut her tulips and hyacinths for their May baskets. She fed her hydrangea bushes clam necks from the fish market. A Saint Bernard would have been easier to take care of than the damn garden, Peter complained.

Peter had told Melanie about his affair with Frances Digitt on the way home from the Memorial Day picnic that Rutter, Higgens threw every year in Central Park. There were softball, hamburgers and hot dogs, watermelon, egg-in-a-spoon races and water balloons for the kids. It was a nice event, but Melanie had suffered through it. She and Peter had tried in vitro seven times with no results, and they had decided not to pursue any more treatment. It just wasn’t working. But still people asked, “Any news?” and Melanie was forced to say, “We’ve let it go, for the time being.” Ted and Vicki had not attended the picnic at all because Vicki had just gotten her diagnosis confirmed with a second opinion from Mount Sinai and she didn’t feel up to seeing anybody. So Melanie fielded inquiries not only about her infertility but about Vicki’s cancer as well. With the number of people pursuing Melanie and pinning her down in conversation, it would have been easier to hold a press conference.

On the way home, Melanie mentioned to Peter that the afternoon had worn her down, she hadn’t had much fun, probably because Ted and Vicki weren’t there.

“Life is too short,” Melanie said. She said this every time she thought of Vicki now. Peter nodded distractedly; Melanie intoned this sentiment so often, its meaning was diluted. But Melanie meant the words urgently: Life was too short to fritter away in a constant state of yearning, aching, wanting. Waiting for something to happen.

At Exit 1 on I-95, they hit traffic and Peter cursed and they slowed to a crawl.

Now’s the time,
Melanie thought. And she said, “I think we should try again. Once more.”

She steeled herself for his reaction. He hadn’t wanted to pursue in vitro at all. There was something about it that felt forced to Peter, unnatural. Melanie had pushed the issue not once, not twice, but
seven
times, promising that each round would be the last. And then, a few weeks ago, she had really, really promised; she and Peter had made a pact of sorts, sealing it with their first spontaneous lovemaking in nearly a year. Afterward, Peter talked about a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, just the two of them. They would stay at a resort that didn’t allow children.

Melanie was ready for Peter to be annoyed that she was revisiting the topic
yet again;
she was ready for anger. But Peter just shook his head, and with his eyes on the bumper of the car in front of them, he said, “I’m involved with someone else.”

It took Melanie a moment to understand what he meant by “involved,” but even after the obvious occurred to her, she still wasn’t sure. “Involved?” she said.

“Yes. With Frances.”

“Frances?” Melanie said. She looked at Peter. He had drunk several beers at the picnic. Was he impaired? Should he even be driving? Because what he was saying didn’t make any sense. “You’re involved with Frances? Frances Digitt?” Melanie could only picture Frances as she had just seen her—in a pair of red nylon running shorts and a white T-shirt that said
Mad River Glen, Ski It If You Can
. Frances Digitt was twenty-seven years old, she had a butch haircut, she was into all these
extreme
sports, like rock climbing and backcountry skiing. She had hit a home run during the softball game and she ran the bases pumping her fist in the air like a sixteen-year-old boy. “You’re having an affair with Frances?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

Yes: They were having the sleaziest kind of office sex—in coat closets, in the deserted restrooms after hours, on top of his desk with the door closed and locked, in his swivel chair, Frances’s skirt hiked up, straddling him.

When they got home that night, Peter moved into the guest room while Melanie took a bath and cried. Peter did not move out—he claimed he didn’t want to, and Melanie couldn’t bring herself to demand it. They slept under one roof, in separate rooms. He was not willing to end his “involvement” with Frances Digitt, not yet, he said, but maybe someday. Melanie was tortured by this. She loved the man, and he was using her heart for target practice. Most nights he came home, but some nights he called to say he would be “staying in the city” (which meant, she could only assume, staying with Frances Digitt). He rendered Melanie powerless; he knew she didn’t have the courage to divorce him and take all his money, which was what everyone encouraged her to do.

When Melanie started feeling sick, she wasn’t surprised. Extreme emotional stress, she thought. Depression. She couldn’t keep food down. She would think about Frances Digitt and gag. She was overcome with exhaustion; she took three- and four-hour naps in the afternoons. Her cycle had been manipulated for so long with hormones that she didn’t notice when she missed her period. But then her breasts started to tingle and ache, and smells she normally loved—coffee, fresh sage from the garden—turned her stomach. She went to a drugstore three towns away, where nobody knew her, and bought a test.

Pregnant.

Of course, she thought. Of course, of course. She was pregnant now, when it no longer mattered, when it was a painful and complicated discovery instead of a joyous one. Melanie was aching to tell Peter. Every time she looked at him, she felt like she was going to burst with the news. She thought he would be astute enough to figure it out on his own—because she rushed to the bathroom to vomit, because she slept all the time. Peter either didn’t notice these obvious symptoms or he chalked them up to Frances Digitt–inspired melodrama. Melanie decided she would not tell Peter—she was resolved in this—until something changed. She wanted Peter to leave Frances Digitt because he loved her, Melanie, and not because there was now going to be a baby. A baby. Their baby. After all that trying, after all the needles, drugs, treatments, counting days, scheduling sex, it had happened on its own. Even Peter would be amazed, even he would shout with joy. But she couldn’t divulge the news yet. The pregnancy was her only currency; it was all she had left, and she didn’t want to share it.

So . . . get out of town. Go with Vicki—and her sister, Brenda—to an island thirty miles out to sea.

Melanie hadn’t told Peter she was leaving; he wouldn’t realize it until seven o’clock that evening when he found her note in an envelope taped to the door of the mudroom. He would be stunned by her departure. He would realize he’d made a horrible mistake. The phone would ring. Maybe. He would ask her to come home. Maybe.

But maybe he’d be happy she left. Relieved. Maybe he would count Melanie’s departure as his good fortune and invite Frances Digitt to move into their house and tend Melanie’s garden.

One bad thought was all it took. Melanie rushed to the communal bathroom and vomited bitter green bile into the toilet, which was spotted with urine because Blaine could not yet clear the rim. She pooled water in her hand and rinsed her mouth, glanced at her reflection in the brown-spotted mirror. Even the mirror looked sick. She stepped onto the rickety bathroom scale; if the thing were right, then she had lost three pounds since discovering she was pregnant. She couldn’t keep anything down, not ginger ale, not dry toast, but she kept at it, eating and vomiting, because she was hungry, ravenous, and she couldn’t stand to think of her baby starving and dehydrated, shriveling up like a piece of beef jerky.