Barefoot Girls (18 page)

Rose somehow struck up a conversation with Jackie shortly after they moved in, Phil couldn’t remember the details, but he could remember exactly what he thought when the Lloyds invited them over for their housewarming party a few weeks later. First, it was the twin Prius's sitting in the two-car garage with the doors open unnecessarily, both cars plastered with stridently liberal bumper stickers. Then it was the ridiculous crystal chandelier in the kitchen. Then it was them, smug and smiling that fake kind of smile that never reached the eyes.

The Lloyds were the type of people who had to be on top. Rose was like that, too, but she was charming about it. The Lloyds were simply insufferable with their up-to-the-minute gadgets that they made a point of showing off. Hypocritically, this rampant consumerism was paired with their highly-touted “Green” lifestyle where everything was recycled and organic. They spoke of Mother Earth as if she was a close relative of theirs they had just visited. Jackie Lloyd, apparently, had decided to recycle her face too. It was pulled taut to the point of looking painful. Rose told him later that Jackie had already had two facelifts. The result was a surprised windblown look worsened by Botox-immobilized eyebrows that would not move even under the greatest duress. Phil thought the woman looked hideous.

Rose terrified him by asking Jackie for her “beauty secrets” every time they visited with the couple, which was more and more frequent to Phil’s great displeasure. He despised the way Nat talked with his nose constantly in the air, eyes often closed, clearly enjoying hearing his own voice. When it became apparent that every weekend was going to be spent with the other couple, Phil hurriedly took up golf. It didn’t completely spare him as they often dined with the Lloyds on Saturday nights, but it worked to get him out of day trips to visit small organic farms to learn about the many uses of manure, to orchards to pick their own organic fruit, to the co-op they all belonged to now that smelled like patchouli, mold, and sawdust.

Then Rose, in addition to fully adopting their Green lifestyle and macrobiotic diet, started seeing Jackie’s dermatologist and therapist. She started looking worse and worse every time she came home from the dermatologist and acting stranger and stranger every time she came home from Jackie’s therapist, Dr. Omin. The man’s name both disturbed Phil and made him laugh uneasily. Dr. Omin had suggested that Rose use rituals to calm her anxiety about aging, so now everything was a ritual with magical words and special steps she had to take to do everything from brush her teeth to prepare the recycling. Rose latched on to this practice with enthusiasm, and hearing her go about her day was like being in a psychiatric unit specializing in patients with OCD. “Beauty inside, beauty outside,” she’d repeat over and over.

When Rose started talking about getting a facelift that spring, Phil begged her to wait until after their annual vacation on Captain’s.

“Why? What does that have to do with it?” Rose had said, her bright look of excitement fading. She had practically crowed when she told him of her plans. It would be the same doctor Jackie used. He’d had a cancellation and could fit her in next week!

“Can you just do this for me? I really think once you’ve had some R and R, you’ll love how you look. You just need a break,” Phil said. A break from that psychotic bitch, Jackie, he thought.

She had relented, but with a caveat. “All right, but once we get back I’m getting this thing scheduled. I need it.”

Lying in bed that morning, the sun streaming in, the sounds of his happily puttering wife below, Phil was exultant. It had worked. The magic of this place, the time away from the Lloyds. Next, he would have to find a way to protect Rose from Jackie. There had to be something he could do…

Suddenly, there was a crash from downstairs. Phil’s eyes popped open. Wailing rose through the floorboards. He sat up. Did she fall? What happened?

He leapt out of bed and, wearing only his boxers, ran down the icy wooden stairs to the first floor. Rose was crouched in the corner of the living room near the front door. A mirror that used to hang next to the front door was gone and on the floor silver reflective shards lay everywhere around where Rose cowered, her hands over her face, wailing.

“What? What happened?” Phil shouted.

Rose wailed louder.

Phil ran over to her, careful to step around the pieces of glass and wishing he had stopped to put on shoes. The floor was so cold, it hurt. Then he felt a piece of glass pierce his foot. “Ow! Shit!” He lifted up his right foot and saw a dark sliver sticking out of the skin near his little toe. He plucked it out and watched the blood swell and spill from the wound. It was just a little cut; he’d deal with it later. He gingerly put his bleeding foot back down on the floor and took the last few steps. He squatted down next to Rose.

Close up, he could see that she wasn’t just covering her face, she was digging her nails into it, scratching the skin, creating long raw shallow scrapes on her cheeks and forehead that were bleeding lightly.

“Stop that!” Phil grabbed at her hands. She was surprisingly strong, her hands fighting, clawing to get back at her face. He would pull away one, but the other would gain purchase on her face, making more marks. Her wails changed to shrieks.

“Leave me alone!” Rose cried, grabbing at her face. “Leave me alone, you bastard! You bastard!”

Phil grabbed harder at her hands, all gentleness gone. He couldn’t let her do this to herself. “Stop! That! Now!”  Using all of his strength, he was able to pry her hands away and hold her arms down.

“Nooooo!” Rose screamed and then sobbed.

Her face was scored from her fingernails, but now he could see what might have happened. Her eyes were swollen. Probably from the alcohol and the salty cheese and crackers. But no, she was vain, but this wasn’t vanity. This was insanity.

“What’s going on, honey? What happened?”

Rose sobbed, catching her breath. “Can’t you…, can’t you…, can’t you see? See?”

Phil felt a stillness. “Your eyes?”

She sighed and said, “Yes! Yes! I’m hideous! How can you love me? How can anyone love me? Look at me!”

The stillness within stayed, but he made himself respond. “Of course I love you. Everyone loves you. Come here.” He released her wrists and wrapped his arms around her from the side. She slumped in surrender and began crying again, softly now.

He had no idea what to do. Before he had seen solutions, answers to what was happening with his wife. Now, even though the living room had been cleaned up and his wife’s self-inflicted wounds washed, disinfected and bandaged, he didn’t know what to do with the zombie sitting with her face wrapped in gauze on the porch of their house poring over those goddamn fashion magazines.

He’d left the house, gone for a boat ride to clear his head. He felt like he was going a little crazy, too. Then he saw the O’Brien girl striding down the boardwalk in the direction of their house as if she was heading there. He couldn’t believe it. He’d almost responded to her before he realized that the last thing to do was to engage her. He couldn’t take another set of problems, and he was pretty certain she had problems or she wouldn’t be out here alone on Captain’s in October.  He wasn’t worried about her throwing parties anymore. He was more worried that he might have two mental patients on his hands and not just one.

Steering the boat away from her, he could feel Hannah’s eyes on him. He thought back to their initial conversation on the community dock. She said she wanted to be alone. He was struck by sudden hilarity, an uncontrollable urge to laugh aloud. It was so ridiculous, all this Garbo-esque posturing that some women engaged in. Especially when you realized that what they really wanted was attention, the polar opposite of what they said.

He tried to fight the laughter, afraid Hannah might see.  But it bubbled up inside, little bursts coming out of his mouth as he shook, trying to stay still. Alone! She vants to be alone! Ha! Ha!

Shaking with uncontrollable laughter and terror, he steered the boat blindly away from the island and prayed that Hannah would give up, go home to wherever she lived. No good could come from her being on the island, and if Rose found out…Phil didn’t want to think about that.

Go home, Hannah! He prayed. Please, go home!

Chapter 17

Sitting and eating her tuna fish sandwich on Pam’s back deck, she spotted a white heron flying over the marsh that alighted in the estuary. Seeing something so gracefully beautiful usually filled her with peace, but for the first time, she wished she had someone to share it with.  Was her relationship with Daniel changing her and her naturally solitary nature?

She had always been so good by herself, so at ease in her own company. She had thought being on this deserted island would be like a private party, a chance to be free, away from people and their endless demands. Instead, it was as if this island, usually crowded with people she loved, was filled with their echoes, their voices and laughter. Maybe it was just that – the fact that Captain’s had always been about people.

Chewing her sandwich and looking out over the wide green and gold marsh, it hit her again that she finally had what she had desperately wanted: a key to that house and all its telltale memories. Albums and albums filled with photos and other clues and artifacts. Exactly what she had dreamed of, and the key was sitting in her pocket.

Hannah put down her half-eaten sandwich. She wasn’t hungry anymore. Why wasn’t she in the Barefooter house right now? That was why she was here, right?

She took her plate inside and left it in the sink. She would clean up later. She had to go now, enough! She ran out of the house, heading south.

When she arrived at the Barefooter house she was panting, and had to bend over and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She looked up at it. What was she waiting for? What she needed was there, not the albums of the Barefooters these days, but the ones from their shared childhood. The ones that held pictures of her mother as a little girl. The little girl in the diving contest who was both proud and afraid. Who was that girl? Why did her mother never speak of her childhood?

Hannah climbed the stairs, unlocked the door, and went straight to the shelves near the door stacked with all the photo albums. As she opened each to check which one it was and set it aside, she was amazed at how much there was here. Vacations the women had taken together all over the world, each fully documented in individual albums. There were albums depicting different eras of their lives. Hannah lifted the one from the shelf she had always loved the most, the one dedicated to the Barefooter’s children. In the first half of that album, Hannah was the star, their Barefoot Baby. The latter half of the album showed the other Barefooter’s children as they appeared. There was Pam’s son, Jacob, born when Hannah was eleven years old and a year before Pam’s brief and seemingly-happy marriage dissolved. Five years later came the first of Amy’s three boys, Ryan, followed by Elliott and then Sam. Even after all the other the Barefooter children had been born, Hannah was still called their Barefoot Baby and treated like their collective child.

Hannah, though tempted to go through its pages again, put the baby album down. Now, where was it? She piled album after album on the couch until she found it sitting at the bottom of the pile. Unlike the others, dressed up in fine leather, canvas, or pretty printed cloth covers, this one had a cheap brown vinyl cover that was cracking and peeling. Why hadn’t they replaced it? Sentimental feelings for vinyl?

She opened it to the first picture, the biggest in the album that covered a full page. It was all four of them sitting with their legs dangling from the boardwalk in front of Amy’s parent’s house. Amy’s father dead of a heart attack, her mother in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, and her three older brothers living on the other side of the country, the family house on Captain’s was occupied by Amy and her family now, only the occasional brotherly visit filling the house beyond capacity with their combined families. The house looked different in the photo, somber in gray rather than the sunny yellow it wore now.

It must have been that first summer. They looked about seven years old, but what was notably different was their body language. They sat next to each other, yes, but there was space between their bodies. The only exception was Pam and Keeley, whose thighs were touching. They leaned more eagerly toward the photographer than toward each other. Their smiles are tentative, eyes squinting against the sun. Amy really did look like a tiny curly-headed doll and Zooey, sitting at the end next to Amy, was as ridiculously tall and skinny as described, even seated.

Looking closer at her mother, Hannah noticed that the usual wide confident grin wasn’t there. This girl looked self-conscious, her smile tentative, her shoulders up around her ears instead of down and back. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Hannah turned the pages, looking closely at each photo of her mother. All of them that summer are the same, smiling but not quite. The space remains between the girls, though they are captured again and again throughout that first summer playing together. Whatever made that space disappear hadn’t happened yet.

Who had taken the photos? Hannah went back to the beginning and looked at each photo carefully. They were all taken near Amy’s house. Had Amy’s parents taken them? Maybe her older brothers?