Barefoot Girls (27 page)

After that, it was the little house they went to each day, going to Amy’s only occasionally, usually during stormy weather for real protection and Jiffy Pop. The little shack became their imaginary rocket-ship, their tree house in a forest, their medieval castle, their school, their department store. They started bringing toys and other things there and leaving them. The other children didn’t know where the girls went every day, and the Barefooters wouldn’t tell them. It was their secret clubhouse: Barefoot Girls only.

Something else had changed with the girls after that day. They would never need to speak as they did before, now they could simply look at each other and know what the other was thinking. They would never need to know who it was when the phone rang; they knew exactly which one of them was on the other end of the line. If something bad happened to one of them, the others knew something was wrong before being told. All of the girls had felt a dark scary feeling about Keeley while she was gone the week after the storm; they hadn’t needed to see her limp when she finally returned to them.

Chapter 23

“So it was that storm that drove us into our house,” Zooey said. “And we never left it again. It’s been ours ever since.”

“Wow,” Hannah said. “I can’t believe my mom never told me that story! It’s such a great one. And you know how much my mom loves a great story.”

Zooey sighed on the other end of the line. “Yeah, she does. Well, so do I.”

Hannah bit her lip. “Um, I was wondering, what you were saying about mom’s punishment? What happened?”

“Damn!”

“Aunt Zo?”

“Ahhh, well, your mom, she had a tough childhood. She hasn’t told you any of this, has she?”

Her mother never talked about her childhood or her past in any way. It was forbidden territory. Ask, but don’t expect to be told anything. Hannah said, “No, never.”

“Well, I better not say anything. That’s your mom’s story to tell.”

“Please, please tell me. She won’t! Was she abused?” By whom? Hannah wondered. Her grandfather? No, he had doted on Keeley. Before he’d died when Hannah was little, he frequently dropped in for visits at their little house in Fairfield, always with gifts for both of them. She remembered him taking them out to the restaurant at his country club where everything was shiny and pretty and waiters in tuxedos bowed to them. It had to be Grandma.

“Was it her mother?” Hannah asked.

Zooey sighed and said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but after reading the first part of your book, I think I should. I know that your mom wasn’t perfect, no one’s mother is, but she also wasn’t that nightmare of a woman that’s in your book. So, something else is going on. You’re mad at her, maybe disappointed; you think you’re entitled to some ideal fantasy of a childhood. But let me tell you something, Hannah. Your mother is a saint. She sacrificed everything for you, twisted herself into a pretzel trying to make you happy. And… and I love you, so you need to hear this: grow up. Get over the fact that your mother’s not perfect and appreciate all that’s amazing about her. If she’s mad at you, she has every right to be. You should have made that reviewer retract what she said.”

Hannah sat very still, feeling a stinging shame zipping up and down through her. Aunt Zo had never spoken so harshly to her, had never even been angry with her before. It hurt.

Aunt Zo’s voice was softer now when she said, “I hope you heard the ‘I love you’ in that.”

Hot tears spilled out of Hannah’s eyes. Her voice was wobbly when she said, “Yes, Aunt Zo. I heard. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Well, enough. I’ve got to go to the bathroom or I’m going to burst. You woke me up before I had a chance. I’ll talk to you soon. Have fun on Captain’s! I’m so jealous. I might come out to visit and get a dose myself. That island’s medicinal, you know. All right. Kisses! Moi! Moi!”

And then Aunt Zo hung up.

Hannah sat at the kitchen table staring off into space as the sun rose and peeked through the windows on the east side of the room, shining through the lace of the handkerchief café-curtains and making white rectangles on the wood floor. The book had felt so good to write, like a good cry, and the whole time she had reminded herself again and again that it was fiction. A little girl of six is abandoned by her mother and has to take care of herself. She has adventures in her neighborhood while she searches for help and finds out about the wider world. A kind elderly woman, a neighbor, comes to her rescue and when the little girl’s mother finally returns, the neighbor has the mother declared unfit in a court and then adopts the little girl. The legal battle had been especially satisfying to write, like scratching a long-resisted itch.

She stood up, her legs stiff from sitting for so long and went into the living room to search for her book. She had forgotten where it was and had to look through several bags before she found it and carried it back to the kitchen. Sitting again, she paged through it, still loving the heft of it, the smooth pages. But looking at it now, the printed words on the pages seemed especially bold and black. She thumbed to the scene where the character of the mother is introduced and reread it.

God…it was harsh. It was ugly.

She looked away, out the window at the tall grasses that stood at the edge of Pam’s little sandy yard. Had she been fair? Keeley had abandoned her many times; she knew that even though Aunt Zooey didn’t. But, unlike the cold uncaring mother in the book, Keeley had always returned with love, grabbing Hannah up and hugging her hard, telling her how much she had missed her, and asking was she okay? And Hannah had lied. Yes, of course, she was okay. Everything was okay. Why hadn’t Hannah simply confronted her mother two years ago, when the urge to scratch had overwhelmed her? Now this book was out there, and looking at it now and seeing it for what it was, she wanted to take it back. Take it back, suck out the poison, go back in time and have a do-over.

She slammed the book closed and put it on the table. Then she punched the top of it. “Stupid!” she said. She punched it three more times, each time repeating, “Stupid!”

Wait.

Maybe the book was a flop. Please let it be a flop. It’s horrible. It’s a piece of sentimental simple-minded trash. Let it get swept away, forgotten. It happened to novels all the time. It would happen to hers. But she had to know, be sure. Then she could relax.

Hannah picked up her cell again and found the number. Was it too early? No, eight wasn’t early for Felicia. She dialed.

It rang three times. Hannah slumped in her chair, waiting for voicemail.

Then she picked up. “Felicia Resnick here.”

“Felicia! It’s Hannah O’Brien.”

“Hannah! Oh, my God. I’ve was going to call you today. Exciting news!”

A zinging went up her spine. “What?”

She could hear the smile in her editor’s voice. “
Wait Another Day
made the lists! It’s way down there, but still! We’re going to have to do another printing!”

Chapter 24

Pam sat back in the soft chocolate-brown leather chair at her desk and stared into space, flipping a pen dexterously between the long tapered fingers of one manicured hand like a magician getting ready to do a trick. She had written three versions of the press release for Expressia this morning. They were all pitiful. And it wasn’t her fault.

The problem was that Expressia was trying to be Google. And Wikipedia. And both were already providing all the things that Mark Cooper talked about when he talked about his new search engine-slash-encyclopedia. The two services provided targeted searches, ads, and information so well, there was no need for Expressia. Pam had known this the first time she’d met Mark and heard his spin, which was so weak it was laughable. But the pay he was offering was extraordinary.  Mark was loaded and free with it, having made a killing in the bull market of the early two-thousands before jumping ship right before everything tanked. Unlike Warren Buffett, Mark had just been lucky – simply wanting to pull his money out of the market before going on a month-long vacation to New Zealand. He’d come back tan and fit from his trek on the Milford Track to find the U.S. swiftly slipping into the second greatest economic depression in its history.

She kept trying to figure out a fresh angle, a way of making Mark’s product sound brand new, but the words just kept falling dead and lying there on the page.  Blah, blah, blah. There had always been hopeless jobs, but somehow she’d been able to wave her fingers over the keyboard and pull the words from somewhere, like a rabbit popping out of a hat. Not lately. Was she losing it?

The phone rang and she put down the pen and pounced on it gratefully. “Hello, this is Pam McGregor?”

“Pam, it’s Dean.”

Dean from Little Brown. It had to be Tobias Locke and another of his endless demands. What now?

“Yes?”

“We’re going to need your shepherdess skills after all. Tobias is insisting on your traveling with him personally for the tour.”

Pam groaned, and said, “Oh, he doesn’t need me! He’s being ridiculous. Why not someone from your end?  Isn’t there some starry eyed little intern over there that would love to follow him all around the country and watch him sign his book?”

“He’s insisting.”

Just then, her assistant, Ashley, cracked open the door to her office and waved at her, ducking her head a little. Pam shook her head at Ashley and frowned. She was getting tired of training these twenty-year-olds. This one had seemed smarter than the rest. Though maybe all it boiled down to was that she knew not to expose too much skin at work. That and Ashley wore her long dark hair in a ponytail instead of having it hanging in her eyes, flipping it back constantly in a distracting manner like the last girl.

Ashley stage-whispered, “It’s your friend? Amy? She said it’s important?”

Pam spoke into the phone, “Hold on a sec.” And then she covered the mouthpiece and said, “Unless someone’s dying? Remember? Take a message. I’ll call her back.”

Ashley’s eyes grew wide and she nodded quickly and shut the door.

Good, maybe she had finally gotten it. Or maybe she was about to go IM her friends about her bitch of a boss. Funny how time changed things. Once, Pam was well known for being the “nice” one, the one you could go to for a hug or a shoulder to cry on. Good old teddy-bear Pam.

Pam removed her hand from the phone’s mouthpiece and resumed her defense, which went nowhere as Pam had already helped many of Little Brown’s more famous authors through their book tours with great success, and Tobias Locke was not only a difficult man in general, he was unreliable. Without someone with experience on the job, he’d probably flake on the whole tour the second day in. She remembered all too well his meltdown in Seattle two years before.

At last, Pam agreed, and was annoyed at how smug Dean sounded when he said, “Of course you will.” When they finally hung up, she couldn’t help but slam down the receiver.

“Shit!”

Now not only was she saddled with Tobias, which meant too much time away from the office, but her ex, Edward, would have even more guilt-ammo to use regarding Jacob. She could hear him now: that her lack of time at home was depriving their child of the parenting he desperately needed, that Jacob should “just” come live with him and his wife, Anna, that then he’d have the stability and order he needed to thrive. Full time with mealy-mouthed goody-two-shoes Anna?  All the way out in California? Over her dead body! Besides, Jacob was just fine, wasn’t he? Or was he okay? Was Edward right?

That was the thing about having married a psychologist - he of the Inner-Workings and Correct-Thing. At first it had thrilled her, how observant he was. Then it drove her crazy: the monitoring and the analyzing and the obsessing. She had gone from being a fairly confident person to, before the divorce, a neurotic mess. No, Anna and he were perfect for each other and far too perfect for this world. Jacob spent enough time already with them. He needed some real-life normalcy and, besides, most mothers worked these days. How many of his classmates had stay-at-home mothers or even the glorified and over-reported stay-at-home dad? She didn’t know of any. Her childhood must have been the last of its kind: mother always there, father almost never.

Ashley cracked open the door to Pam’s office, her round face impassive now. “Um, here’s your message,” she said, and crossed the room with two long strides to put a scribbled-on Post-it note down on the desk quickly, snapping her hand back as if Pam would potentially bite.

“Thanks,” Pam said, picking up the Post-it. “I’ve got to remember to say voicemail. You didn’t have to bother with taking a message. Sorry. Old habits die hard.”

“Oh, no problem,” Ashley said, backing out of the room. “My pleasure.”

Pam watched the girl shut the door behind her. Yeah, right. Her pleasure. Where did she learn that one? She looked at the loopy writing on the yellow sticky note.

“Amy wants to talk to you about Hannah. Please call back.”

Hannah? What about her? Was she okay? Pam picked up the phone again and hit the speed dial button for Amy’s house. It rang three times and went to the family’s old-school answering machine. Like Zooey, Amy refused to keep up with technology. Pam patiently waited through Amy’s youngest son’s greeting and the bark of one of their adopted dogs-in-training. Finally she got the beep.