Barefoot Girls (12 page)

He also loved her complexity and intelligence, and that was something she shared with his mother. She surprised him all the time with her powers of observation, her right-on intuition, her wise reflections. He was amazed by her book, how eloquent and poetic it was. He loved her for her mind, and on top of that, he was crazy about her body and her beautiful face and long dark curling hair. He usually loved beautiful women until they opened their mouths. Hannah had opened hers and he had been paralyzed, rooted to the ground at that party where they met, gawking wordlessly at her like a geek.

He had recovered, of course, and put on his suave playboy act, which had actually turned her off. She had made excuses to escape their conversation and avoided him for the rest of the party. He didn’t know at the time that his usual shtick was the cause of it. Instead, he’d wondered about his breath, checked his teeth in the bathroom, and replayed their brief exchange in his head.

It took a lot of research to track her down and stage a “chance” meeting. The party’s hostess, Carly, barely knew Hannah. They worked together at a restaurant in Greenwich, but Carly didn’t know where Hannah lived or even her last name. He couldn’t believe this beautiful fascinating creature was a waitress. Why? The elegant intelligence he had witnessed at the party bore no resemblance to any waitress he had ever known. Maybe it was a second job or a way of paying the bills through school. Or, God forbid, was she an actress?

He talked Carly into giving him Hannah’s schedule as well as what section of the restaurant she usually worked. Then he talked his buddy Brian into humping it out to Greenwich for lunch at said restaurant on a Thursday, the only lunch shift she worked. When he made reservations, he specified a table by the windows overlooking the river that ran beside the restaurant, Hannah’s section.

His confidence punctured by the way she had avoided him the last time they met, he couldn’t bring himself to put on his cocky act – the act that had always worked with women before. Without it, he simply smiled at her when she approached their table, let her remember him and watched the conflict on her face. He asked her questions about herself this time, and listened. When she left their table the second time after coming back to take their lunch order, Brian had looked at him strangely.

“What’s up with you and that chick?” Brian asked in a low voice, his lips twisting in a half-smile. Brian was his wing-man and his neighbor. He knew Daniel as well as anyone did, and knew that Daniel’s reputation as a player was rooted in fact. “Is that the one we came all the way out here for? A waitress with a stick up her butt? Seriously?”

Daniel picked up his beer and took a sip before answering. How could he explain? Well, he wasn’t going to take the chance of Hannah overhearing their conversation. He raised his eyebrows at Brian, “I’ll tell you later.”

Without his usual bravado, Daniel couldn’t pursue her as he had last time, and started to realize the benefit of this as she slowly warmed to him. She reminded him of a scared fawn:  make any sudden moves and she’d dart away into the brush. Whenever she stopped by their table to check on them, he was friendly, but not too friendly. By the end of their meal, Hannah had visibly relaxed, delivering their check with a wide smile.

Now.

He put down his credit card, paying for the meal as he had promised Brian, excused himself and headed toward the bathroom. There she was, by the computers, punching in an order. He stopped behind her.

“Hey,” he said.

She looked over her shoulder at him and her eyebrows went up in surprise. “Oh, hi. Uh, wait a second.”

She punched in a few more things, her back to him. He tried not to admire her perfect pert ass too much. She might catch him. He looked away, down the hall toward the dining room.

Hannah turned around. “Yeah? What’s up? Did you need something?”

He had read that people respond best to requests for help. Here goes. “I’m kind of stuck. My buddy is heading back to the city, but I have to stay in town for an appointment I have tomorrow morning, and I have no idea what to do tonight. I really can’t handle sitting around in a hotel room channel-surfing and I was wondering if you could recommend something to do around here? You live here, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I live here,” she said, and looked down, her face turning a fetching pink. “But I don’t know how much I can help you. I don’t go out much.” She bit her lip and looked away, thinking. She thought of something, her face brightening, and smiled at him. “I guess you could go to downtown Stamford. There’s a lot going on there.”

A beautiful girl that didn’t go out much? She was the strangest girl he had ever met. Beautiful girls went out all the time in Manhattan. Everywhere, actually. Rome, LA, London. They didn’t stay home, hidden. They knew better than that.

“You don’t go out?” he blurted, trying unsuccessfully to keep the incredulous tone out of his voice.

She turned even redder and looked away, shrugging her shoulders. “Ah, yeah. I stay home a lot.”

She was embarrassed! Why didn’t she go out? She had to have invitations all the time. Or maybe the way she had avoided him at the party was how she acted with everyone.

He said, “Hey, I have an idea. Maybe we can both show each other the town. You haven’t been there. I haven’t been out in Stamford before. What do you think? Could be fun.” He kept his tone light, like it was a thought out of left field.

She looked at him again, considering. “Well, I don’t know-“

“Come on, you’d be doing me a favor.”

“I don’t even know where we’d go.”

“You know where the downtown area is, right?” He had her!

“Yeah?”

“Well, we’ll just go there. Walk around.”

She nodded. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. I really don’t go out and I don’t know anything about where to go. But…okay.”

Once she agreed to the night out in Stamford, she opened up completely. She gave him her address when he offered to pick her up later. She even asked him what to wear. A woman like this, asking him what to wear! He wanted to shake his head in disbelief, but controlled himself.

The night was a roaring success. She was like a gorgeous teenager, so shy and delighted with everything. She genuinely laughed at his jokes and listened to what he said. When they found an appealing Italian restaurant with tables on the sidewalk, she actually ate a real meal, bruschetta for an appetizer and lobster ravioli in a rich cream sauce for her entree, rather than picking at a salad like most of his dates. He loved talking to her and listening to her and looking at her. He felt lit up and buzzy, a high he hadn’t had on a date, well, ever.

That date turned into many more. He traveled out to Greenwich. She came in to the city. She didn’t fall into bed with him, and he was grateful. That would have been the end of it, her being easy. Instead she held him off for over a month, gently but firmly. When they finally slept together, he fell even more in love with her, her responsiveness and passion were all he could have asked for.

After a wonderful year together, he knew. She was the one. He asked her on the little sailboat he had bought that spring and kept in Stamford. She said yes. He was over the moon and back, and that was even before he met Hannah’s mother, who turned out to be an unusually appealing mother-in-law-to-be: beautiful, funny, and charismatic with a doting husband and a gaggle of women friends who were boisterous and friendly. When Hannah’s family and friends had all toasted to their engagement at the intimate party they had held for them on Captain’s Island, Hannah’s family’s summer retreat, he had felt that it was the final seal of approval, and he let the little nagging worry that had followed him since he met Hannah finally go free. He had her and she had him. Done deal.

Except it wasn’t.

He looked down at the phone in his hands, turned and threw it across the room. It landed with a loud crack and skittered across the wooden floor, slowing over an area rug, before coming to a stop under a table.

He sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands.

Chapter 11

Two hours later, boxes and bags piled around Aunt Pam’s living room, the windows open to blow away the stuffy mousy smell the house had developed after being locked up for a month, the sun was starting to set. Outside, the water in the channel had turned from brilliant sapphire to dark cobalt blue and was flecked with golden late-day sunlight.

Now, before it was too late. While there was still daylight to fill the Barefooter house.

She didn’t see the point of going there after dark:  the flashlights and gas-lamps they relied on in the absence of electricity only illuminated disjointed patches of a room like scattered pieces of a puzzle. It was light for conversation and ease, not discovery or productivity. Her mother and aunts had always loved the lack of electricity on the island, its power to stop even the most efficient Type A in his or her tracks, force languor, encourage intimacy. Lately, as older women with all the usual wrinkles, sags, and bags, they’d grown to appreciate even more deeply the gentle flickering light and its forgiveness.

Hannah had a flash of a memory from that summer, the engagement party the women had thrown together last minute for her and Daniel. She saw them all standing around her mother’s kitchen, champagne glasses in hand, tiny wild strawberries that were so perfect they didn’t look real floating among the golden bubbles. Candlelight and gaslight filled the room, making the scene glow. It had been warm inside and out that night, love like electricity, passing constantly between everyone in the room.  Happy relaxed faces that were so open, they were like children’s. Only on Captain’s was it like this. The night wouldn’t have been the same anywhere else.

Hannah had placed all the keys her mother had sent her on one key ring to keep from losing them, but now decided to separate the Barefooter house key. It had to be special, kept apart from the mundane. It was her shining hope, the fact her mother had given it to her. There was a road between them - overgrown with brambles and shadowed by dark woods – but it was there.

She pulled on a knit hoodie against the cooling air, grabbed a notepad and pen in case she was inspired to make notes for her novel-to-be, palmed the key, and closed Pam’s front door behind her without locking it. Despite Mr. McGrath’s fear of dangerous intruders, the island was only rarely targeted by vandals and thieves. Doors were never locked except during the winter and only because the houses would stand empty until late spring.

It had been a warm day, and the crickets had woken and were singing in the tall grasses as Hannah headed down the dock, her feet bare against the wooden boards, the rough and the smooth of old and new boards communicating through the soles of her feet. How much longer could she go barefoot? She wanted to, in honor of the Barefooters, who never wore shoes on Captain’s.

She looked at the houses as she passed them en route, thinking of each family or couple that owned them and trying to remember details about them. She hadn’t been on the island much, except for the weekend she’d been there with Daniel this August.  The Schuster’s, did they still live there? Maybe they had sold. She thought she could remember hearing something about that. She squinted at the last house before the Barefooter house that sat engulfed in tall tufted grasses and was painted a soft pale green that made it seem to be part of the island, organic to it. 

She was out of touch. Since high school, she had spent a full week on the island every year, usually for the big annual party the Barefooters threw. This year, she’d only visited that one weekend with Daniel. As a child, she had lived on the island from mid-June until Labor Day, just as her mother had. Keeley had wanted that for her daughter, to have the same island experience she’d had as a girl, and had struggled financially to make sure they had it every year.

The gate that marked the end of the public boardwalk wasn’t truly locked, not with the kind of lock where you needed a key. The only lock was a childproof latch, the kind commonly used at community pools with a button on top that you lifted up to release. On the gate were two notices. The first was a manufactured metal sign, its message sober and clear: Private Property – No Trespassing. The second was loud and red and hand-painted: Beware! Attack Chipmunk!

Hannah laughed. She always did when she read this sign. It was true Barefooter humor, the kind that loved Monty Python’s Knights who say ‘Ni’ and Jack Handey’s
Deep
Thoughts
. Aunt Amy, the cartoonist of the bunch, had painted a little sweet looking chipmunk at the bottom of the sign with big soft brown eyes and furry cheeks with a speech balloon coming out of its mouth that said, “Hi!”

She opened the gate and passed through. The approach to the house was unlike any of the other houses as the patches of sandy beach interspersed with tall tufted grasses, trees, and shrubs that ran alongside the boardwalk gave way to a grassy sandbar. When you reached the house, the grasses and sand, too, gave way, and house stood above the water on pilings partially crusted with barnacles from where they were covered by water at high tide.

Hannah stopped where a flight of steps rose to the elevated house and looked at it in its present incarnation. White painted shingles and a bright turquoise for the shutters, the house looked both tropical and fantastical with all of the fish and sea-themed sculptures, weathervanes, signs, and wind chimes covering the roof and swinging in the breeze from every eave. Every time the Barefooters took a vacation together, which was at least two or three times a year, they brought back another decorative item for their shared house. Years of this had led to the current cacophony of décor, and rather than looking cluttered, it gave the house the feeling of a wild festival, color and life shooting out from every inch of it.