Barefoot (47 page)

The drugs helped, at least enough so that Vicki could limp along through the next few days. Dr. Alcott had prescribed only twenty Percocets, and Vicki found that by taking two pills three times a day the pain was ratcheted down from unbearable to merely excruciating. Her left eye finally did open, though the lid was droopy, as though Vicki were a stroke victim, and both of her pupils were as big as manhole covers. Vicki wore her sunglasses whenever she could get away with it. She didn’t want Brenda or Ted to know that it felt like she was wearing a Mack truck tire around her neck, she didn’t want them to know it felt like someone was trying to pull her brain out through her eye socket, and she especially didn’t want them to know about the hand squeezing water from the sponge of her brain or the spider nesting. She wasn’t going back to the hospital for any reason, she would not agree to an MRI, because she absolutely would not be able to handle the news of a metastasis to the brain.

And so, she carried on. They had a week left. Ted was trying to cram everything in at the last minute; he wanted to spend every waking second outside. He played tennis at the casino while Josh had the kids, and he took Vicki, Brenda, and Melanie to lunch at the Wauwinet, where Vicki spent the whole time trying to keep her head off the table. Ted wanted to go into town every night after dinner, to walk the docks and ogle the yachts—and one evening, impulsively, he signed himself and Blaine up for a day of charter fishing, despite the fact that the captain eyed Blaine doubtfully and told Ted he would have to come prepared with a life jacket for the little guy. Ted bought a sixty-dollar life jacket for Blaine at the Ship’s Chandlery, seconds later.

Whereas Vicki once would have staged a protest (
he’s too little, it’s not safe, a big waste of money, Ted
), now she stood mutely by. Ted didn’t ask her how she felt because he didn’t want to hear the answer. There were only seven days of summer left; surely Vicki could hang on, could act and pretend, until they got home.

Vicki called Dr. Alcott, Mark, herself, for more drugs.

“Still the headache?” he said.

“It’s not as bad as before,” she lied. “But we’re so busy, there’s so much going on, that . . .”

“Percocet is a narcotic,” Dr. Alcott said. “For extreme pain.”

“I’m in extreme pain,” Vicki said. “I qualify as a person who needs a narcotic, I promise.”

“I believe you,” Dr. Alcott said. “And that’s why I want you to come in.”

“I’m not coming in,” Vicki said.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Dr. Alcott said.

Oh, but there was. Vicki said, “Is there anything else I can take?”

Dr. Alcott sighed. Vicki felt like Blaine.
Can I have a hamster when I’m six? A skateboard? Bubble gum?
“I’ll call something in.”

Later, out of desperation, Vicki called the pharmacy. “Yes,” the pharmacist said, in a way that could only be compared to the Angel Gabriel announcing the impending birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary, “Dr. Alcott called in a prescription for Darvocet and six-hundred-milligram Motrin.”

“Is Darvocet a narcotic?” Vicki asked.

“No, ma’am, it’s not.”

“But it is a painkiller?”

“Yes, indeed, it is, and it can be taken to greater effect with the Motrin.”

Greater effect.
Vicki was mollified.

Ted lobbied for another beach picnic. He wanted to use his fishing poles one more time, he wanted lobsters again. This time Vicki could organize, right?

Right,
Vicki said weakly.

That afternoon, when Josh dropped off the boys, Ted thumped him on the back and said, “We’re going back out to Smith’s Point tomorrow night for dinner and some more fishing. Will you join us?”

“I can’t,” Josh said. “I’m busy.”

“Busy?” Ted said.

Vicki looked at Josh’s face. She was in the kitchen with her sunglasses on and everyone looked shadowy and dim, like actors in an old black-and-white movie.

“Really?” she said. “We’d love to have you. It’s the last . . .”

“Really,” he said. “I’m busy.”

Later, after Josh left, Ted said, “We could invite Dr. Alcott to the picnic.
He
likes to fish.”

“No,” Vicki said. “No way.”

Numbed by Darvocet and Motrin (ramped up with the addition of three Advil and two Tylenol), Vicki pulled the picnic together in a near-exact replica of the previous picnic. Except, no Josh.

“Who’s coming?” Melanie asked.

Vicki said, “Just us.”

As Ted drove west toward Madaket and Smith’s Point, Vicki felt the summer ending. It was closing, like a door. The sun hung low in the sky, barely hovering over the tops of the scrub pines of Ram Pasture; its last rays dripped onto the rooftops of the huge summer homes in Dionis. Or so it seemed to Vicki, through her sunglasses. The world was slowing down, the light was syrupy. Melanie sat up front next to Ted, and Brenda and Vicki sat in the Yukon’s middle section, where they could tend to the kids in the way-back. Blaine had his hand arched over his head because Ted had asked him to
take care of those rods
and Blaine thought that meant he had to hold them for the entire ride. Porter babbled, alternately sucking on his pacifier and popping it out, which made a hollow noise he liked.
Babble, suck, pop.
The car smelled like lobster. Vicki had accidentally ordered an extra dinner—for Josh, she realized, who wasn’t coming. The car felt empty without him. Was she the only person who felt this way? The kids missed him. Melanie, probably, too, though Vicki hadn’t felt well or brave enough to talk to Melanie about Josh. Maybe later, down the road, after surgery and the baby, maybe when they more closely resembled the people they’d been before this summer. (A memory came to Vicki out of the blue: a dinner party at Melanie and Peter’s house, a catered party that featured black truffle in every course. Peter had bought the truffle from a “truffle broker” in Paris after another failed round of in vitro; it was his idea to hire the caterer and throw the party. Vicki had appeared at the party with an ounce of outrageously expensive perfume from Henri Bendel as a gift for Melanie. Melanie had seemed delighted by the perfume. Vicki guarded the conversation at that dinner party like the gestapo; every time one of the other guests mentioned anything having to do with children, Vicki changed the subject.)

They would never go back to those former selves. They had changed; they would change again. As if reading Vicki’s thoughts, Brenda let out a big sigh. Vicki looked her way.

“What?”

“I have to talk to you,” Brenda said. She slid down in her seat, and Vicki, instinctively, did the same. They were like kids again, talking below their parents’ radar, where they wouldn’t be heard.

“About what?” Vicki said.

“About money,” Brenda said.

The car’s radio was on. Journey, singing “Wheels in the Sky.” Vicki thought,
Wheels in the sky
? What did that mean, exactly? Did that mean the plan that God was endlessly spinning for us? In the front seat, Ted was blathering on to Melanie about the fishing trip he and Blaine were going to take on Tuesday. Apparently, Harrison Ford would be on the boat, too, with his nephew. Did
wheels in the sky
refer to the wheels turning in Vicki’s mind, the gears that were supposed to move at lightning speed, shuttling thoughts in and out, but that now kept getting stuck and going in reverse, as though they needed oil?
About money?
Why would anyone want to talk about
money?
Did
wheels in the sky
mean the actual sky? Outside, the sky was dark already. How was that possible, when just moments before, the sun . . .
babble, suck, pop.
Ted said,
They can pretty much guarantee you’ll catch a bluefish, but everyone wants stripers.
The car smelled like lobsters. Seven mothers died when a bus on a Los Angeles freeway flipped and caught fire. Only seven? Josh was busy.
Really,
he said.
I’m busy
. Greta Jenkins had started telling a story about her daughter, Avery, four years old, taking dance lessons and what a hassle it had been to find the right kind of tights.
Tights without feet,
Greta said. A look of loss and despair had flickered across Melanie’s face (but just for a second because she was, after all, the hostess of this dinner party, with its shavings of truffle over everything—like shavings from a lead pencil, Vicki thought). Vicki had changed the subject, saying,
Did anyone read the Susan Orlean article in
The New Yorker
about pigeon fanciers? Babble, suck, pop. About money?
Vicki missed Josh. He was busy. It was dark everywhere now.

“Ted!” The voice was Brenda’s serious voice, even more serious than when she said,
I have to talk to you.
It was her urgent voice. Signaling:
Emergency!
“Ted, pull over right now. She passed out or fainted or something. I’m calling nine-one-one.”

“Who?” Ted said, turning down the radio. “What?”

“Vicki,” Brenda said. “Vicki!”

It wasn’t the sirens that woke her or the incredible rush of pavement beneath the ambulance’s tires, though Vicki could feel the speed, and the sirens were as upsetting as the screams of one of her children, hurt or terrified. What woke her was the smell. Something sharp, antiseptic. Something right under her nose. Smelling salts? Like she had fainted in a Victorian parlor? An unfamiliar young man, Josh’s age but with hair pulled back in a ponytail (why such long hair on a guy? Vicki should have asked Castor, from the poker game, back when she had a chance), was gazing down at her, though he was blurry. Again, Vicki could only get one eye open.

“Vicki!” There, moving in to her limited field of vision, was her sister, and Vicki was relieved. Brenda. There was something important Vicki had wanted to ask Brenda all summer long, but she had been waiting for the right moment and, too, she had been afraid to ask, but she would ask now. Before it was too late.

Vicki opened her mouth to speak, and Brenda said, “I’m sorry I brought up money. God, I am so sorry. Like what you need is more upset. And . . . don’t kill me, but I called Mom and Dad. They’re on their way up. Right now, tonight.”

Before it’s too late!
Vicki thought. But her eyelids were being pulled down like the shades on the windows of her bedroom at Number Eleven Shell Street. She was tired, she realized. Tired of fighting, tired of denying it: She was very sick. She was going to die. It had been mentioned in Vicki’s cancer support group that when you got close, fear vanished and peace settled in. Vicki was tired, she wanted to go back to where she’d been before she woke up, to the lost place and time, the nothingness. But resist! Stay with us a little longer! She had to ask Brenda something very important, the most important thing, but Vicki
could not
find her voice, her voice eluded her, it was gone, it had been stolen—and so Vicki just squeezed Brenda’s hand and thought the words and hoped that Brenda, as brilliant as she was, could intuit them.

I want you to take care of Blaine and Porter. I want you to take my little boys and raise them into men. Ted will be there, too, of course. He will do the ball games and the skiing and the fishing, he will talk to them about girls and drugs and alcohol, he will handle the guy stuff. But boys need a mother, a mommy, and I want that person to be you. You know me, I’m a list person, I always have been, even when I was pretending not to be. So here is the list. Remember everything, forget nothing: Kiss the kids when they fall down, read them stories, praise them when they share, teach them to be kind, to knock on a door before they enter a room, to put their toys away, to put the toilet seat down when they finish. Play Chutes and Ladders, take them to museums and zoos and funny movies. Listen when they tell you something. Encourage them to sing, to build, to paint, to glue and tape, to call their grandmother. Teach them to cook one thing, make them eat grapes and carrots, and broccoli if you can, get them into swimming lessons, let them have sleepovers with friends where they watch
Scooby-Doo
and eat pizza and popcorn. Give them one gold dollar from the tooth fairy for each lost tooth. Make certain they don’t choke, drown, or ride their bike without a helmet. Volunteer in the classroom, always be on time picking them up and dropping them off, go to extra lengths with the Halloween costumes, the Christmas stockings, the valentines. Take them sledding and then make hot chocolate with marshmallows. Let them have an extra turn on the slide, notice when their pants get too short or their shoes too tight, hang up their artwork, let them have ice cream with jimmies when they’re good. Magic words, always, for everything. Do not buy a PlayStation. Spend your money, instead, on a trip to Egypt. They should see the Pyramids, the Sphinx. But most important, Brenda, tell them every single day how much I love them, even though I’m not there. I will be watching them, every soccer goal, every sand castle they build, every time they raise their hand in class with an answer right or wrong, I will be watching them. I will put my arms around them when they are sick, hurt, or sad. Make sure they can feel my arms around them! Someone once told me that having a child was like having your heart walk around outside of your body. They are my heart, Brenda, the heart I am leaving behind. Take care of my heart, Bren.

It’s a lot to ask, I know. It is the biggest, most important thing, and I am asking you because you are my sister. We are different, you and me, but if I can say one thing about you it’s that you
know
me, inside and out, better than Mom and Dad, better, even, than Ted. You are my sister, and I know you love my children and will take care of them like they’re your own. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do this. To do this, there is only you.

Brenda was gazing down at her. Had she heard? Vicki released Brenda’s hand.

“Okay?” Vicki whispered.

“Okay,” Brenda said.

Brenda prayed, fast and furiously.
Please, please, please, please, please
. Ted was pacing the waiting room like a raving lunatic; they took Vicki upstairs for tests, but neither Ted nor Brenda had been allowed to accompany her. Melanie, in a moment of clarity that was previously unthinkable, volunteered to drive the kids back to ’Sconset, get them an ice cream at the market, pop in a
Scooby-Doo
video, and let them fall asleep in Ted and Vicki’s bed.