Barefoot (6 page)

At the end of every winter, Vicki became restless, and this past April the restlessness had been worse than ever before. The skies in Darien were a permanent pewter gray; it rained all the time; it was unseasonably cold. Vicki was trapped in the house; the baby still nursed six times a day and wouldn’t take a bottle, which limited how much Vicki could get out alone. Some days she stayed in her yoga pants until Ted got home from work. She tried to enjoy the quiet rhythm of her days—her kids would only be little once—but increasingly she dreamed of a change in her life. Returning to work, maybe? She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Duke, after all, and at one point had entertained thoughts of going to law school. She craved something private, something entirely her own. An affair, maybe? She’d heard her friends whisper about similar longings—their biology was to blame, a woman hit her sexual peak in her thirties, it was their situation: a husband, small children. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone tending
their
every need for a change? Suddenly, men everywhere looked good to Vicki—the mechanic who worked on the Yukon, the boys at the gym, the new associates, just out of business school, at Ted’s office. Vicki needed something else in her life, otherwise she would turn into one of these women with too little to do who slowly lost her mind. She felt combustible, like she might burst into flames at any moment. Her anger and her desire scared her. She began to feel a tightness in her chest, and then the tightness, if she wasn’t imagining things, became a pain. She was short of breath. One morning, she woke up huffing like she did when she was in the basement doing laundry and she heard Porter on the baby monitor and she raced up two flights of stairs. Something was wrong with her.

Vicki’s disdain of doctors and hospitals was legendary. In college, she contracted a bladder infection that she left untreated, and it moved to her kidneys. She was so sick, and yet so averse to going to the doctor, that her roommates took her to the infirmary while she was asleep. Years later, when she had Blaine, she arrived at the hospital forty minutes before he was delivered and left twenty-four hours later. And yet that morning, she drove right to the ER at Fairfield Hospital.
What is wrong with me? Why can’t I breathe?

At first, the doctors thought she had walking pneumonia, but the X-ray looked suspicious. An MRI revealed a mass in Vicki’s left lung the size of an apple. Subsequent tests—a PET/CT scan and a fine-needle aspiration—confirmed that this mass was malignant, and it showed suspicious cells in her hilar lymph nodes. She had robust stage-two lung cancer. She heard the oncologist, Dr. Garcia, say the words “lung cancer,” she saw his melancholy brown eyes swimming behind the lenses of his thick glasses—and yet Vicki assumed it was some kind of joke, or a mistake.

“Mistake?” she’d said, shaking her head, unable to come up with enough oxygen to say anything more.

“I’m afraid not,” Dr. Garcia said. “You have a four-centimeter tumor in your left lung that is hugging the chest wall, which makes it difficult to remove. It looks like the cancer may have also spread to your hilar lymph nodes, but the MRI didn’t detect any additional metastases. A lot of times when the cancer is this far along it will turn up elsewhere—in the brain or the liver, for example. But your cancer is contained in your lungs and this is
good news
.” Here, he pounded his desk.

Good news?
Was the man stupid, or just insensitive?

“You’re wrong,” Vicki said. It sounded like she meant that he was wrong about the “good news,” but what she meant was that he was wrong about the cancer. There was no way she had cancer. When you had cancer, when you had an
apple-sized tumor
in your lung, you knew it. All Vicki had was a little shortness of breath, an infection of some sort. She needed antibiotics. Ted was sitting in the leather armchair next to Vicki, and Vicki turned to him with a little laugh. Ted was a powerful man, big and handsome, with a crushing handshake.
Tell the doctor he’s wrong, Ted!
Vicki thought. But Ted looked like he had taken a kick to the genitals. He was hunched over, and his mouth formed a small O.
Tell the doctor he’s wrong, Ted!
Vicki did not have cancer, technically or otherwise. Who was this man, anyway? She didn’t know him and he didn’t know her. Strangers should not be allowed to tell you you have cancer, and yet that was what had just happened.

“I have children,” Vicki said. Her voice was flat and scary. “I have two boys, a four-year-old and a baby, seven months. You would have a hard time convincing them or anybody else that their mother having lung cancer is good news.”

“Let me tell you something, Victoria,” Dr. Garcia said. “I’m a pulmonary oncologist. Lung cancer is my field, it’s what I do. And if you take all the patients I’ve seen in the past fourteen years—let’s say, for the sake of argument, a thousand patients—I would put you smack in the middle. It’s a challenging case, yes. To give you the best shot at long-term remission, we’ll try to shrink the tumor with chemo first and then we’ll go in surgically and hope we can get it all out. But full remission is a viable outcome, and that, Vicki, is good news.”

“I don’t want to be a case,” Vicki said. “I don’t want you to treat me like your nine hundred and ninety-nine other patients. I want you to treat me like the mother of two little boys.” She started to cry.

“Many of my other patients had children,” Dr. Garcia said.

“But they’re not me. My life is valuable. It’s really fucking valuable. My children are young. They’re babies.” Vicki looked to Ted for confirmation of this, but he was still incapacitated. Vicki wiped at her eyes. “Am I going to die?” she asked.

“We’re all going to die,” Dr. Garcia said.

Just as Vicki was about to tell him to stuff his existential bullshit, he smiled. “The best thing you can do for yourself,” he said, “is to keep a positive attitude.”

Positive attitude?
But that, in the end, was how he had won Vicki over. Dr. Garcia was the kind of oncologist who used phrases like
good news
and
positive attitude.

She went for a second opinion at Mount Sinai right after the initial diagnosis, at Ted’s insistence. That appointment was with a female oncologist named Dr. Doone, whom Vicki had immediately renamed Dr. Doom because she wasn’t nearly as upbeat about Vicki’s chances of recovery as Dr. Garcia. Dr. Doone basically told Vicki that IF chemo shrank the tumor in her left lung such that it receded from the chest wall (which, tone of voice conveyed, was doubtful), then POSSIBLY a pneumonectomy would solve the problem IF THERE WERE NO ADDITIONAL METASTASES.
It’s not the tumor in your lungs that’s the problem,
Dr. Doone had said
. It’s where that tumor came from. It’s where that tumor is going
. She made a comment about Vicki being FOOLISH to pursue treatment in the BOONDOCKS. Dr. Doone felt Vicki should be treated at Mount Sinai—but since Dr. Doone herself had enough cancer patients to fill ten city buses, Vicki should accept as a HUGE FAVOR a referral to Dr. Martine, an oncologist at Sloan-Kettering who also happened to have been Dr. Doone’s roommate at Columbia Physicians and Surgeons.

No, thank you,
Vicki had said.
I’m sticking with Dr. Garcia
.

And Vicki understood at that point that Dr. Doom wrote her off. As good as dead.

Vicki had two days until her chemo started. Two days until the doctors cut into her chest to install a port through which they would pump her full of poison twice a week for the next two months. It was, Dr. Garcia assured her, nothing to get frantic about. The problem was, the chemo wouldn’t cure her cancer. It would merely discipline it. Vicki could feel the mean-ass, dumb-shit little cells throwing a beer bash, doing the bump and grind and drunkenly copulating and reproducing as she lay in bed trying to breathe, with Porter hiccupping at her side
. I have a malignant tumor in my lungs. Lung cancer
. She could say it in her mind and out loud, but it didn’t seem true. It wasn’t even a kind of cancer that made any sense. Breast cancer made sense, and Vicki irrationally wished she had breast cancer. She was a thirty-one-year-old nonsmoking mother of two.
Give me breast cancer!
Lung cancer was for old men, two packs a day for twenty years; it was for John Wayne. Vicki laughed joylessly. Listen to yourself.

The traffic on I-95, a sale on beef tenderloin at Stew Leonard’s, the United States’ involvement in Iraq. Powder-post beetles in the attic. Swim lesson sign-ups. Collecting pinecones for Christmas wreaths. Chapped lips. Uncut toenails. Pollution in the Hudson. Duke, once again, in the men’s NCAA basketball finals.

The chemo regimen consisted of two drugs: gemcitabine and carboplatin. Vicki could barely pronounce the names, but she was well versed in the possible side effects: weight loss, diarrhea, constipation, nausea and vomiting, fatigue, confusion—and she would, most likely, lose her hair. She had to stop nursing and she might become sterile. It was enough to bring her to tears—she had cried many silent hours when Ted and the kids were asleep, when the dark house seemed as terrifying as death itself—but the chemo was nothing compared to the pneumonectomy. The surgery blocked Vicki’s path; she couldn’t see over, around, or beyond it. If the chemo worked as it was supposed to, they would operate at Fairfield Hospital in early September. Dr. Emery, thoracic surgeon, Dr. Garcia attending. Two resident surgeons, five OR nurses, six hours, the removal of her left lung and the hilar lymph nodes. Who survived a surgery like that?

Oh, lots of people,
Dr. Garcia said.
Every day. And it has to be done, obviously. If you want to live.

But it was as though he were asking Vicki to pass through a tunnel of solid granite, or travel into outer space and back. Impossible to come to grips with. Terrifying.

Vicki could have lain in bed all day, obsessing about her cancer, dissecting it until it was in ten or twelve comprehendible pieces, but the curse and the blessing of her present situation was that there was no time. She was in Nantucket with two children to look after, a household to run—and a sister and a best friend who were, after being together for less than twenty-four hours, arguing.

Vicki heard them in the kitchen—strained pleasantries that quickly turned bitter. By the time Vicki wrapped herself in her seersucker robe, collected Porter, and made it out to the kitchen, she had pieced together the gist of the argument: Peter had called the night before, but Brenda had neglected to give Melanie the message.

“You were asleep,” Brenda said. “You’d been asleep for hours.”

“You could have left a note,” Melanie said. “Slipped it under my door. Because now he won’t answer his cell phone. He’s furious with me.”

“He’s furious with
you?
” Brenda said. “That’s rich. You’ll pardon me for saying so, but I don’t understand why you care. The man is cheating on you.”

“You know nothing about it,” Melanie said.

Brenda sliced a fig in half and tried to feed it to Blaine, who “yucked” and clamped a hand over his mouth.

“I know nothing about it,” Brenda agreed. “I didn’t write a note because I was busy with the kids. We were on our way out to buy groceries. You were asleep. Vicki was asleep. I was left to captain the ship by myself and I . . . just forgot. Honestly, it flew out of my mind.”

“I hope you didn’t tell him I was pregnant,” Melanie said.

“Oh my God, of course not.”

“Or even hint at it. I don’t want him to know. And I mean that.”

“I didn’t hint at anything. I was very vague. I didn’t even tell him you were asleep. All I said was that you were unavailable. You should be
thanking
me. I did a great job.”

“Except you didn’t tell me he called.”

“I had my hands full!”

“Bren,” Vicki said.

Brenda whipped her head around. When she did that, her hair was a weapon. “Are you taking sides?”

There can’t be any sides this summer,
Vicki thought.
I am too sick for sides
. But she knew it would be fruitless. There was Brenda, her sister. There was Melanie, her friend. They didn’t have a single thing in common except for Vicki. Already Vicki felt herself splitting down the middle, a crack right between her diseased lungs.

“No,” she said.

Vicki had come to Nantucket with the hope of re-creating the idyllic summers of her youth. Had those long-ago summers really been idyllic? Vicki remembered a summer with one hundred mosquito bites, and another summer, or maybe the same summer, when she had a gnat trapped in her ear overnight, and one year Vicki fought with her father about long-distance phone calls to her boyfriend Simon. But for the most part, yes, they had been idyllic. Vicki and Brenda left school and friends behind in Pennsylvania, so the summers had starred only them and, in a hazy, parallel adult world, their parents, Buzz and Ellen, and Aunt Liv. The sand castles with moats, the smell of a real charcoal barbecue—it had all been real. And so, even as Melanie pouted on the living room sofa and Brenda huffed around the kitchen—they were like boxers back in their corners—Vicki peeled a banana, eyed the sunlight pouring through the cottage windows like honey, and thought:
It’s a beach day
.

This sounded like a simple idea, but it took forever to get ready to leave. The children had to be changed into bathing suits and slathered with lotion. (Skin cancer!) Brenda found plastic sand toys, bleached white by the sun, in a net bag in the shed. The toys were covered with years of dust and cobwebs and had to be rinsed with the hose. Then, lunch. Vicki suggested, for the sake of ease, picking up sandwiches at Claudette’s, but Brenda insisted on a picnic hodgepodged together from the bizarre ingredients she had brought home from the market: bread and goat cheese, figs and strawberries. At the mention of these provisions, Melanie gagged and ran for the bathroom. Vicki and Brenda listened to her throwing up as they folded the beach towels.

“Try not to upset her,” Vicki said.