Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand Page B

Garcia attending. Two resident surgeons, five OR nurses, six hours, the removal of her left lung and the hilar lymph nodes. Who survived a surgery like that?
    Oh, lots of people, Dr. Garcia said. Every day. And it has to be done, obviously. If you want to live.
    But it was as though he were asking Vicki to pass through a tunnel of solid granite, or travel into outer space and back. Impossible to come to grips with. Terrifying.
    Vicki could have lain in bed all day, obsessing about her cancer, dissecting it until it was in ten or twelve comprehendible pieces, but the curse and the blessing of her present situation was that there was no time. She was in Nantucket with two children to look after, a household to run—and a sister and a best friend who were, after being together for less than twenty-four hours, arguing.
    Vicki heard them in the kitchen—strained pleasantries that quickly turned bitter. By the time Vicki wrapped herself in her seersucker robe, collected Porter, and made it out to the kitchen, she had pieced together the gist of the argument: Peter had called the night before, but Brenda had neglected to give Melanie the message.
    “You were asleep,” Brenda said. “You’d been asleep for hours.”
    “You could have left a note,” Melanie said. “Slipped it under my door. Because now he won’t answer his cell phone. He’s furious with me.”
    “He’s furious with you? ” Brenda said. “That’s rich. You’ll pardon me for saying so, but I don’t understand why you care. The man is cheating on you.”
    “You know nothing about it,” Melanie said.
    Brenda sliced a fig in half and tried to feed it to Blaine, who “yucked” and clamped a hand over his mouth.
    “I know nothing about it,” Brenda agreed. “I didn’t write a note because I was busy with the kids. We were on our way out to buy groceries. You were asleep. Vicki was asleep. I was left to captain the ship by myself and I . . . just forgot. Honestly, it flew out of my mind.”
    “I hope you didn’t tell him I was pregnant,” Melanie said.
    “Oh my God, of course not.”
    “Or even hint at it. I don’t want him to know. And I mean that.”
    “I didn’t hint at anything. I was very vague. I didn’t even tell him you were asleep. All I said was that you were unavailable. You should be thanking me. I did a great job.”
    “Except you didn’t tell me he called.”
    “I had my hands full!”
    “Bren,” Vicki said.
    Brenda whipped her head around. When she did that, her hair was a weapon. “Are you taking sides?”
    There can’t be any sides this summer, Vicki thought. I am too sick for sides . But she knew it would be fruitless. There was Brenda, her sister. There was Melanie, her friend. They didn’t have a single thing in common except for Vicki. Already Vicki felt herself splitting down the middle, a crack right between her diseased lungs.
    “No,” she said.
    Vicki had come to Nantucket with the hope of re-creating the idyllic summers of her youth. Had those long-ago summers really been idyllic? Vicki remembered a summer with one hundred mosquito bites, and another summer, or maybe the same summer, when she had a gnat trapped in her ear overnight, and one year Vicki fought with her father about long-distance phone calls to her boyfriend Simon. But for the most part, yes, they had been idyllic. Vicki and Brenda left school and friends behind in Pennsylvania, so the summers had starred only them and, in a hazy, parallel adult world, their parents, Buzz and Ellen, and Aunt Liv. The sand castles with moats, the smell of a real charcoal barbecue—it had all been real. And so, even as Melanie pouted on the living room sofa and Brenda huffed around the kitchen—they were like boxers back in their corners—Vicki peeled a banana, eyed the sunlight pouring through the cottage windows like honey, and thought: It’s a beach day .
    This sounded like a simple idea, but it took forever to get ready to leave. The children had to be