Barefoot (27 page)

“You bet, buddy,” Ted said. He fiddled with the reel, attached a twenty-dollar lure, and cast out, the line making a satisfying whizzing noise and then a
plop
as it landed. Ted looked to Josh.

“Go for it, man.”

“Catch a fish, Josh,” Blaine said. “Are you going to catch a fish?”

Josh hesitated. The rod felt sleek and expensive in his hand; it was the Maserati of surf-casting rods. Ted probably thought Josh was nervous about handling such fine equipment. Josh
was
nervous—but only because anyone who lived here knew that you could catch a bluefish with a hickory stick and a piece of string. Josh was nervous because he didn’t want to show Ted up by catching the first fish. And so, he stood there with the rod in his hands.

“Do you need help?” Ted asked.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “This rod is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Ted beamed and reeled his line in. Nothing.

“Here,” he said. “Let me show you.” He took Josh’s rod. “Hey, would you like another beer?”

Brenda had promised Vicki she would tend to all the details of the picnic, but she was happy when Vicki’s old desire to be 100 percent in charge resurfaced, like something that washed up on the beach. Vicki laid the blanket down (
No sandy feet on the blanket, please!
) and unfolded chairs. She set out the boxed dinners, plastic utensils, and a tall stack of napkins, which she weighted down with a rock. She poured a glass of wine for Brenda, a small one for herself, and she cracked open a ginger ale for Melanie. She sank into a chair looking almost relaxed, but then she stood again, rummaged through the back of the Yukon, and returned with two citronella tiki torches, which she stabbed into the sand and lit up. She sank into her chair again. Her chest was heaving; she was winded by just that much activity, but the chemo was clearly working, Brenda thought, because this was more than she’d done in weeks.

Brenda and Vicki and Melanie touched glasses, and as they did so, Brenda heard everything click into place. The chemo was shrinking Vicki’s tumor; she was getting better. Melanie had shed her woe-is-me attitude, she’d stopped vomiting and moaning about her marital troubles; she acted, at least half the time, like a nice, normal human being. And Brenda had written the first scene of her screenplay the previous morning, while drinking a decadent Milky Way coffee at the Even Keel Cafe. It was the scene where Calvin Dare and Thomas Beech meet up in front of the tavern, with nothing more in common than two people parking next to each other outside of a Chili’s restaurant—and lightning strikes and Calvin Dare’s horse bucks and whinnies and kicks Thomas Beech between the eyes. Men pour out of the tavern to tend to Beech—one of them a doctor, who proclaims Beech dead. The scene was five pages long, which meant, according to the
Screenwriter’s Bible,
it would last five minutes, and Brenda thought it was pretty good.

She tried to analyze the day’s success. Maybe she should abandon the beach and do all of her work at the Even Keel Cafe with the aid of a Milky Way coffee. Maybe it was the community nature of the cafe that had helped—there were other people sitting in the dappled shade of the cafe’s back deck who were reading the paper, sketching, breezing through paperback novels, typing on their laptops. Maybe Brenda—like Hemingway, like Dylan Thomas—would do her best work in public places. However, deep down, Brenda suspected that it was the stolen nature of those two hours that transformed them. She was supposed to be somewhere else. She was supposed to be in the waiting room of the hospital’s Oncology Unit praying for her sister’s recovery. She had set aside those two hours—three, if you counted the driving—to be of service to her sister. The fact that Vicki had unexpectedly granted her leave gave those two hours a rarefied quality. What Brenda had thought was,
I’d better not waste them
. And, like magic, the words had come. The pages had filled.

As happy as Brenda was about writing the first pages of her screenplay, she still felt a twinge of guilt about abandoning Vicki. True, there was no reason for Brenda to sit in the waiting room while Vicki received her treatment; however, not being there felt like she was shirking her duties. Yesterday was the one and only time. She would never leave Vicki again.

She was proud of herself, however, for pulling together this beach picnic. The sun hovered over the water, there was a warm breeze, the waves washed over the sand in a rhythmic, soothing way. Down the beach, Ted and Josh and Blaine, bathed in the last rays of golden sunlight, cast their lines out into the water. They were like characters from a storybook. If this only lasted an hour or two, Brenda thought, that was okay. Walsh loved to point out the way Americans rushed from one thing to another. For people like Brenda, he said, happiness was always just around the bend; he accused her of being incapable of sitting back and enjoying a moment. And he was right. Now, Brenda tried to push every thought out of her mind except:
Please let Vicki enjoy this
.

There was shouting from down the beach. Brenda leaned forward in her chair. Someone had caught a fish.

When Josh felt a tug on his line, his gut reaction was excitement. Then, he thought,
Oh, shit.
He had no choice but to reel the fish in, even though Ted and Blaine hadn’t yet realized he had a bite. Oh, well, Josh thought. It was just a fish. It wasn’t as though God had tapped Josh on the shoulder and declared him the superior man. As Josh’s line tightened, he heard Ted shout, “Whoa! Josh has something! Look, buddy, Josh has a bite!” Ted didn’t sound angry or jealous at all; he sounded as excited as a little kid.

Blaine jumped up and down. “Pull it in, Josh! Pull it in!”

Josh cranked the reel; the expensive rod bent like a rainbow, and Josh thought,
Lord, please do not let the rod snap.
No sooner had he thought this than the fish rose from the water, twisting and wriggling. Bluefish. Big one.

Ted was on top of the fish as soon as it hit the sand. He stood on the flapping tail and pulled a tape measure from his shorts pocket. “Thirty-four inches,” he said. Josh wondered if this was the start of some sort of competition. Would Ted now try to catch a bigger fish? Would they make this about size in some pseudo-Freudian way? But then Ted held the end of the tape measure and dropped the spool end like a yo-yo. “They threw this in for free at the tackle shop,” he said. He yanked the lure from the fish’s mouth with a pair of pliers. He was deft and confident in all of this, which was a good thing because bluefish have a mean mouthful of teeth and Josh had seen plenty of people, including his father, get bitten.

“Look at that, buddy,” Ted said to Blaine. He sounded as proud as if he’d caught it himself.

Blaine watched the fish do a dance across the sand. Ted slapped Josh on the back, and Josh felt the offer of another, celebratory beer on its way.

“Are we going to keep it?” Blaine asked. “Are we going to
eat
it?”

“No,” Ted said. He picked the fish up by its tail. “We’re throwing her back. We’re going to let her live.”

Vicki drank her three sips of wine and poured herself three more sips. Ted, Blaine, and Josh sauntered toward them, their rods slung over their shoulders. Blaine trumpeted the news: “Josh caught a fish, a really big fish! Dad unhooked it and threw it back!” The way the facts were relayed, both Ted and Josh sounded like heroes, and Vicki was relieved.

“Let’s eat,” she said.

They all sat on the blanket or in chairs and dug into their boxes. Ted started telling Josh a story about a boat he’d sailed from Newport to Bermuda the summer after he graduated from college. Brenda tried to entice Blaine into eating lobster.

“Look, Josh is eating it.”

Blaine considered this for a second, then turned his nose up. He plopped in Vicki’s lap, and his weight nearly crushed her. She gasped; Ted stopped talking and looked over.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Blaine ate Vicki’s biscuit and her corn on the cob. Porter was still asleep in the back of the car, and Vicki was about to ask Melanie to check on him—but when she looked at Melanie, Melanie was transfixed by . . . Vicki followed Melanie’s gaze and then, inwardly, groaned. Melanie was staring at Josh in a way that could only mean one thing.
Do not judge,
Vicki told herself. After all, she was a woman who had skipped chemo. Still, Vicki hoped she was imagining things, and if she wasn’t imagining things, if Melanie did harbor some sort of fascination with Josh, then Vicki hoped it was short-lived, a phase, like with the kids. Once Vicki made up her mind to worry about it, it would be over.

“Brenda?” Vicki said. “Would you check on the baby?”

Brenda rose. Melanie continued to stare at Josh with a vague smile on her face. Possibly she was following Ted’s story about running aground on the Outer Banks, but Vicki kind of doubted it.

“Josh?” Vicki said. “Would you mind digging a hole for the fire?”

“I’ll help!” Blaine said.

“I’ll help, too,” Melanie said.

“Not you, Mel,” Vicki said. “You relax.”

“Is there firewood?” Josh asked.

“Yes,” Melanie said. “Brenda stole four pallets from the Stop and Shop.”

“I did not steal them,” Brenda said. “I do not
steal
things. They were left out by the Dumpster.”

“How’s the baby?” Vicki said. “Is he still asleep?”

“Yes, he’s fine,” Brenda spat. “I know you all think I’m a thief. I am
not
a thief.”

“You robbed the cradle,” Ted said.

“Ted!” Vicki said.

Over Blaine’s head, Brenda shot Ted the finger.

“Lovely,” Ted said.

“Thanks a lot,” Brenda said to Melanie, “for bringing it up.”

Vicki took a breath. She’d suspected things would explode one way or another.

Melanie rolled her eyes and stood next to Josh as he shoveled sand. A wailing noise came from the car.

“Ted?” Vicki said. “Will you . . . ?”

Ted was already up. He returned with a very cranky Porter. “I can’t find his bottle.”

“But you did pack it, right?”

“Right,” he said uncertainly.

“Oh, Ted,” Vicki said. “Please don’t tell me . . .”

“Vicki . . . ,” Brenda said.

“What?”

“Don’t do that armchair Napoleon thing.”

“
What
armchair Napoleon thing?”

“You just sound a little bossy is all. A little dictatorial.”

“Josh?” Vicki said. “Do I sound dictatorial to you?”

“You have him digging ditches,” Brenda said.

“A hole,” Vicki said. “For the fire. So we can roast marshmallows.”

“I want a marshmallow,” Blaine said. “Mom told me if I ate . . .”

“So we can have a nice time!” Vicki said. She could hear herself above Porter’s cries; her voice was loud and frustrated. “So we can have a bonfire and enjoy the evening.”

“Vicki?”

The sun was setting over the water; it was a melting, golden blob. Vicki stared at the backlit figures of Josh digging the hole and Melanie standing beside him and Brenda with her hands on her hips declaring she was not a thief and Ted rocking Porter and giving him a bottle (that he found who knows where). They were, all of them, familiar to her. This scene was so familiar to her that she felt she had witnessed it before—and she had, maybe, in her mind’s eye, when she’d imagined what this picnic might be like. They were having this picnic for her—to
get her out
—but there was also a summer-of-final-wishes element to it, a desire on everyone’s part for this to be a perfect beach picnic, memories of which Vicki could take to her grave. So although the bickering was unpleasant, Vicki was glad they were letting the fantasy go and being themselves.

But then something odd happened. Brenda and Josh and Ted froze, they became perfectly still. Why? Vicki realized there was someone else among them, a foreign presence, the owner of the voice that had just spoken her name.
Vicki?
The voice was curious and kind, but with deep, authoritative undertones. She knew that voice, but how?

“Vicki Stowe?” the voice repeated. “Is that you?”

In general, Vicki hated to be recognized in public. (She thought back to the god-awful scene on the beach with Caroline Knox.) She didn’t like to be caught unawares, and whoever was standing before her now—it looked like a man, in waders, with a fishing rod—was interrupting her family picnic and had, on top of that, interrupted a family squabble. Who knows what this person overheard and what this person now thought of them?

Vicki squinted. The sun was behind the man’s head, radiating like a halo. “Yes,” Vicki said.

“It’s Mark.”

“Mark?”

“Dr. Alcott,” he said.

“Oh!” Vicki said. She leapt out of her chair. “Hi!” Once she stood, she could see him clearly: It was Dr. Alcott, but in his waders and Atlantic Cafe T-shirt and Red Sox cap, he was unrecognizable, and although she knew his first name was Mark, she had never once called him that. Vicki wondered if she should shake his hand, and as she was wondering this, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek, and Vicki felt like she had just been kissed by a new boyfriend in front of her parents. Ted and Brenda and Melanie, and even Josh, were watching this exchange like it was something that was being shown on TV. None of them knew who Dr. Alcott was—not even Brenda had met him—and she was just about to make the introductions when she remembered about the previous morning.
She had skipped chemo
—and now here was Dr. Alcott, appearing out of the blue to blow the whistle on her. To inform her family that she was sabotaging her own care. To tell them that Vicki didn’t give a shit if she got better or not. At the very least, Dr. Alcott would ask Vicki where she’d been, and she would have no good answer; she would be forced to confess the truth in front of everyone.
I skipped.
The prospective humiliation of the moment was enough to leave Vicki temporarily tongue-tied.

Dr. Alcott took a step toward Ted and said, “Hi there. I’m Mark Alcott, Vicki’s doctor.”

“Aha!” Ted said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Ted Stowe.”

The men shook hands.