Barefoot Girls (32 page)

At least she’d helped get Rose’s underwear. When Zooey and Pam had finished cleaning, having gotten the eggs they could reach from the windows off of the side of the house and leaving the rest to rot and stink in the summer sun, Amy had repeated her rant to Pam and, for the first time, Pam agreed.

“You’re right. I was hoping they’d stop, get bored or something, but they’re not stopping.”

“Not ‘they’, it’s Rose! I mean, I’m sure her friends help, but it’s Rose.”

“Rose, fine. But we do have to do something.”

“Good,” Amy said. “The best plan is running up her bra and panties. She’s so uptight and full of herself, Queen Rose, it would drive her crazy.”

“Wait,” Zooey said, “Won’t that just make things worse?”

Pam turned to Zooey. “Sometimes you just have to fight. If she was showing any sign of winding down, fine, we’d let it go. But she’s hit the house four times this week. That’s an all-time high. And even the boys, ones I’ve been friends with since we were little, won’t even say hi anymore. They just duck down or turn around and go the opposite direction, even when it’s just me. No more, ‘hey Pamster’, no more arm wrestling. I wanted to be a girl to them this summer, but honestly, I’d settle for good-old-buddy-Pam right now.”

Amy got to her feet. “Okay, Covert Operation Rose. The next time her house is empty, we’ll be waiting. Let’s go.”

Although they were prepared to spy on her house for days from among the tangle of trees just behind it, the family was a small one, Rose being the only child, and all it took was for Rose to head down the boardwalk toward one of her friends’ houses with a towel thrown over her shoulder and her parents to go sailing, which happened that afternoon at two pm.

Zooey stood lookout on the side of the house, her agreed signal her usual whippoorwill call. Pam and Amy went inside through the unlocked back door. Luckily, no one locked their doors on the island during the summer, so that was never a concern. Only a few minutes later, Pam and Amy bounced out of the back door breathlessly laughing and holding up a matching set of bra and panties decorated, appropriately, with a pattern of scattered roses.

Zooey turned over again, trying to calm down. She’d never sleep. She kept imagining them getting caught. Why hadn’t she just snuck out with them and helped? No, Pam was right: the more of them there were, the more noticeable they’d be. Amy had wanted to go on her own, but Pam insisted that she needed a lookout. Also, Pam was strong enough to lift Amy up so she could tie the underwear securely to the flagpole, which was essential to their plan. They wanted to be sure that Rose couldn’t easily pull them down. Zooey wasn’t strong enough to do the lifting or light enough to be lifted. She’d just be in the way.

She flipped on her back and stared up at the moonlit ceiling. All of this trouble over Keeley. It was hard to grasp still. Keeley, their old friend, the one they depended on for her sparkling enthusiasm and sense of humor, was now someone else entirely. Someone so caught up in a boy, she forgot all about her best friends. Someone so lusted after by every boy in their age range that every other girl disappeared in her presence. Someone who had divided Rose and Kevin, the island’s teenage power couple.

Rose had never forgiven Kevin for joining the crowd of boys around Keeley the night of the party. Rose had also never forgiven Keeley for Michael. Pam and Amy said Rose had a thing for Michael, but Zooey was certain that Rose’s outrage was really due to the embarrassment of being dropped so hard and so publicly mid-flirt. And Rose had been flirting wildly with Michael at the party, grinning at him and laughing loudly, which wasn’t her cool style, all in retaliation for being ignored by Kevin.

The moment when Michael and Keeley locked eyes, they had simply forgotten everyone else. Rose had kept chattering on, smiling up at him while he gazed at Keeley. It all went on a few minutes too long: Rose putting on her best show, unaware that she’d been forgotten. When she realized, her grin froze. That night she’d been dropped not just once, but twice for Keeley. But what was most unforgiveable, what had cut her pride all the way to its core, was that her friends and some of the boys saw it happen.

None of the three girls understood why Rose was targeting them and their little clubhouse. Keeley was never there anymore; instead they saw her sailing past with Michael on his family’s catamaran and occasionally ran into the pair on the boardwalk as they strolled hand in hand. Keeley would always greet them enthusiastically, but would never commit to any plans to see them when they’d ask, which Pam always did. Keeley would just nod and say, “Definitely! Soon!”

One day on a trip to Jones Beach with Amy’s mother, the girls saw the couple lying on the beach cuddled up on a large towel, Michael reading a book, Keeley’s head on Michael’s chest. Michael was absently stroking Keeley’s hair and Keeley looked like a contented cat, her eyes closed, her lips turned up in a soft smile. Zooey had to drag her eyes away. Although Amy had to convince Pam not to approach them, saying that if Keeley was going to blow them off then it was time to return the favor, Zooey didn’t need convincing. It hurt to look at them together.

Zooey clenched her hands under the sheet. She would not think about him. She would not. But the images flashed in her mind, his dark sparkling eyes, his beautiful shy smile, that curl of hair that always fell on his forehead. God, she loved him. Why? Why was she doing this to herself? She had to stop; it was all just pointless and painful. “Stop,” she whispered.

Just then there was a loud crack. Zooey’s whole body jerked, and she turned to look at the window where the noise came from. A small rounded nick, glowing blue in the moonlight, could be seen in the glass. Someone had just thrown a rock at her window and cracked it. Was it Rose? Targeting her directly? Or maybe the girls! Maybe they had gotten in some kind of trouble and needed her help.

She slid out of bed and tiptoed over to the window, careful to look out the window from behind the lace curtain so that she wouldn’t be seen in case it was Rose and her friends.

In the narrow clearing on the side of the house below stood Keeley, looking like a ghost in the moonlight wearing a white sundress with thin lacy straps. Her bare shoulder looked like it had a black substance on it that had dribbled down her arm and then onto the hem of her dress.

Zooey pushed open the window and leaned her face against the screen. “Keeley! What’s going on?” She whispered.

Seeing her friend, Keeley’s face crumpled. She said, gulping out the words between sobs, “You’ve got to help me. My mom. My mom tried to kill me.”

The reunion Zooey had imagined for the four of them was celebratory, full of laughter and tears, the sun shining, the planets perfectly aligned. She’d only gotten the tears part right. Zooey ran all over the island looking for Pam and Amy while Keeley hid at their clubhouse, finding Rose’s underwear flying high on the flagpole at the firehouse but no sign of the girls, finally tracking them down sitting on the back steps of Pam’s house gloating about their successful mission. Feeling wired, like she had drunk too many Cokes, she watched the other girls as they embraced back at their clubhouse, tears glistening on their faces.

It hadn’t been the same without Keeley. When it was just the three of them, the balance was off. With the exception of occasional days when she was bruised and silent after one of her mother’s beatings, Keeley was always their ray of light, the one who thought up the fun and zany ideas, the one who would do anything for a laugh. Pam was a sweetheart, but sometimes too sensitive, taking things personally that had nothing to do with her. Amy was the opposite, so strong she couldn’t understand Pam’s tender heart and was easily irritated by it. It had been Keeley who had made things work between the two, jollying them out of their fights, changing the subject to something funny or fantastic to distract them.  Zooey overthought things, was their resident worrywart. But Keeley always dispelled Zooey’s dark clouds, brushing them away with reasonable explanations. During Keeley’s absence, the clouds had returned, thunderheads shooting out forked tongues of anger between Pam and Amy, raised voices that shook the air around them regularly.

She stared at the dark splatter-marks on the hem of Keeley’s dress, feeling the fear zing through her, electric. The black substance on Keeley’s shoulder and running down her arm was blood. Her mother had gone after her with a knife, catching Keeley in the shoulder when she was trying to escape out the front door. Keeley had told her the whole story and was now telling it again to Amy and Pam. The continued story of Sean, her older brother, his death and what had happened to her family. The story of earlier that night, a routine bedtime which had exploded without warning.

Keeley’s relationship with her mother had changed earlier that year, right after their annual spring clothing shopping trip. It could be pinned on the exact moment they were in the lingerie department and Keeley asked about buying a bra. Her mother’s eyebrows shot up and her eyes raked over her daughter before she stiffly agreed.

After that, her mother started avoiding her, waving her away whenever approached with a question or a request. Keeley was both bewildered and relieved, as the beatings ended as well. Her mother spent more and more time locked in her bedroom, and when she emerged, she seemed sleepy and muted. When her parents’ bedroom door was open, Keeley spied a small pharmacy of orange prescription bottles cluttering her mother’s bedside table.

When they arrived for another summer on Captain’s, her mother’s vacation routine of housework and doing her needlepoint on the back porch was abandoned and she continued to spend her days locked away in her bedroom. Her father, in his usual manner of avoidance, preferred to spend his rare weekends on the island in the company of the other men at the island’s little yacht club, belly up to the bar or sailing in the bay with one of his buddies. Keeley had never liked being at home, her mother’s moods blowing hot and cold and the frying pan used for her punishments always waiting on the stovetop in the kitchen. Now she found the ticking quiet and increasingly dirty house unbearable and avoided it, returning only at night to sleep.

When she’d arrived home that Tuesday evening, it was late and the house was dark except for a light burning in Sean’s old bedroom, which surprised Keeley. The room was a shrine to Sean, just like his old room at home, kept exactly as it had been when he was alive. It was off-limits to anyone other than Keeley’s mother, who cleaned both bedrooms regularly, even now while the rest of their house on Captain’s grew filthy and malodorous.

Keeley had to pass Sean’s old room to get to her own and she paused at his door, curious as to why the room was lit. Her mother was lying on Sean’s narrow twin bed, wearing the dirty blue flowered housedress she’d been wearing for over a week and staring at the ceiling. A lit hurricane lamp sat on the bedside table, casting wiggling shadows on the wall. A cricket had somehow gotten in the room and was singing loudly, its high-pitched omniscient sound reverberating and echoing everywhere and nowhere.

That was why. Nothing could be alive in Sean’s rooms. No one could go there, not even a cricket. And her mother had probably been trying to find the cricket without success, lying down to rest or maybe to listen carefully in order to discover the cricket’s location.

Keeley started to continue down the hallway when her mother turned to look at her. Her mother’s eyes were bright and hard.

“You,” she said in a low voice.

“I’m sorry – I’m going. Goodnight.”

“No.”

She paused. “Sorry?”

“It’s all your fault.”

“I’m, my, fault?”

“Sean would be alive, but you had ballet that night. And I picked you up. Left poor Sean to die. I had to choose and I chose wrong.”

The old familiar turn in her stomach, like a key in a lock. Go, quickly. Go now. She backed up, started for the stairs.

Her mother, surprisingly fast for someone who’d become dependent on Valium to get through every day, was up in a flash and pounding down the stairs after her. Keeley could feel the heat coming from behind her and leapt the last three steps, her bare feet landing hard on the wood and sending shocks of pain up her shins and into her knees. A scream of anger followed her.

She ran for the front door, and then her foot caught on the faded old Oriental rug in the living room and she fell. She waited for her mother to land on her. Instead there was a clattering sound in the kitchen. What was her mother doing in the kitchen? She pushed herself up quickly, her hands raw from scraping across the carpet when they broke her fall, and climbed to her feet. She didn’t need to look back, she could feel the reverberation of her mother’s approach.

She ran to the front door, threw it open and was reaching to push open the screen door when a sharp pain went through her shoulder.

“Uh!”

“You die!” Her mother’s voice was close behind her, high-pitched and wavering.

Keeley wanted to stop, grab at her injured shoulder, see what had hurt it, but she knew her mother meant what she said. She pushed at the screen door and ran.

“What am I going to do?” Keeley said, her head resting on Pam’s shoulder. Pam had her in a big bear hug, and Amy stood close by, rubbing and patting Keeley on her other shoulder.

Pam released her and stood back. “Don’t worry. We’re going to protect you.”

“How? I have to go home sometime. And she’ll be waiting.”