Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  R

  Frank did not think about the weight of Maddie’s body in his arms as he climbed the stairs. He did not consider that the first time he had carried her was laughing through the door of their hotel room on their wedding night. He thought only of her comfort, of the site of her incision and the potential of his arms to pull against it, and of the doctor’s injunction that she do nothing—not climb the stairs, not push a vacuum, not drive a car.

  He hesitated a moment when reaching their room: the bed was made, and now he wanted to lay her down, but not on top of the covers. He stood there just looking at the bed, his arms laden with his wife’s body, and then she spoke to him in a faltering laugh, “Anywhere will do.”

  When he was certain Maddie was asleep; when he had fully debriefed his mother-in-law on their enlightened understanding of the cancer; when he had ensured himself, through a careful inspection of refrigerator and pantry, that they had healthy and good foods that Maddie would like to eat; when he had dispatched his mother-in-law to get the boys from school and had once again checked on his sleeping wife, Frank sat down heavily at one end of the living room sofa.

  On the coffee table stood a glass of lemonade and the sandwich his mother-in-law had made for him. Condensation beaded on the glass, its base fringed in water. They kept the coasters tucked into a drawer in the end table, just next to the TV remote. Maddie was forever after him to use a coaster, and now Frank looked toward that drawer, suddenly too tired to get up from his seat.

  What was so fatiguing, he wondered. He had slept well enough. It was only just three in the afternoon, but it had been an enormously long day.

  Remaining seated, Frank stretched toward the drawer, pulling it open awkwardly, at an angle and with his middle finger. With the tips of his fingers, he prized a coaster from the stack and then slid it under the sweating glass, wiping at the ring of water with his palm. For now, this, at least, was something he could do for his wife.

  R

  Maddie slept for a long time, dreamless. When she awoke in the late afternoon, it was to a quiet house, and she herself lay motionless on her side of the bed, wondering where the children were, but not wanting to call out to anyone yet: they thought she was asleep.

  At four o’clock the shadows from the birch tree in the front yard played across her bedspread. She was never in bed at this time of day, except maybe in the earliest days of the boys’ lives when, after her difficult deliveries, Frank insisted on her getting rest. Lying there, she remembered Frank carrying Jake in, how his hair stood up over the top of his blanket. She remembered him in his newborn infant skin, how a scratch in that soft and perfect flesh, accidentally inflicted in the morning, would by noon be only a reddish line and, at his bedtime, would have all but disappeared.

  The healing from this lumpectomy shouldn’t take too long; she’d be feeling much better within a few days; it was too early in the process for her to be an invalid. She would be on her feet and managing things in a day or two; tomorrow afternoon Jake had soccer practice and she would ride along in the car. She would drive him herself next week. She had to do these things now, because it was likely (so now it seemed) that times were coming when she would not be able to.

  She hadn’t been free from anesthesia long when the doctor came in. He had stood by her bed, grasping his clipboard and frowning faintly, speaking in low tones. Frank sat next to her, his fingers tracing the tape that secured her IV, absorbing the news without looking up: the cancer was much larger than they’d thought; they hadn’t got it all. They would revisit her case and make a new plan of treatment. And when the doctor left, closing the door softly behind him, Frank had leaned over her bed and rested his cheek on hers. She felt his breath in her hair.

  The dim and inevitable future asserted itself: more surgery and yet another recovery, chemotherapy and its sickness, radiation, maybe hair loss, nausea, exhaustion.

  It was unwise to dwell on such things.

  Dust clung to the picture frame and crucifix on the wall. She liked the picture—a cross-stitch celebrating their wedding—and the crucifix paired together, as if Jesus was keeping watch over their marriage. Now she could see that Jesus’ bent knee was, yes, dust-caked. She sighed audibly, a small sound in the silent house.

  The shadows moved over her body—never a distinct, serrated birch leaf, but only suggestions of leaves and branches. The shadows had dark centers and paler edges, but a shift in the breeze made the shadows seem to exchange those dark hearts again and again, passing them back and forth to one another in untraceable, effortless action.

  Her body was a strange constant in this mutable light: solid, motionless, and block-like under the white bedspread. Present and invisible. This body under the blankets could belong to any number of women. She could be almost anyone.

  Yet there it was again, the fact of the cancer lying over top of everything, unavoidably true. Here under the spread was her body and no one else’s, invisibly diseased, potentially dying. The calendar she kept in her mind, labeled like the one on the refrigerator with color codes for lessons, field trips, practices and games, now appeared before her in long, blackened segments, marked out by regular treatments and the days and weeks of recovery between them. And far off, unknown and impossible to guess, the day when she would be recovered and utterly well.

  Then Frank and the boys came in. Maddie wiped her tears away on a corner of the bed sheet and Garrett climbed up next to her, entreated by his father to remain on her right side. He had brought his stuffed kitten, a grey and ragged thing that he held by its tail while he sucked his thumb. He lay there beside her for a long time, content to lean against her shoulder, and she stroked his hair and studied the scab on his round knee, an injury he’d happened upon last week in the driveway. It was only a shallow abrasion, but Garrett had a very low pain threshold, and he had cried for a long time.

  4

  More and more, Frank found himself thinking of shooting hoops with The Priest behind the Catholic church in their little college town. He listened for the ring of the basketball as it pounded the dirt in the alley. He heard the clang and rattle as the ball hit the hoop and the sagging metal net beneath it. He and Tim had shot hoops together for hours at a time, starting in those dark months of his freshman year. They had been out there in the snow; in February, the ball cracked the ice in the alley’s ruts. In the spring, they had played even in the rain, both of them drenched to the skin, firing the ball at the hoop as they fired questions at one another: so often The Priest returned Frank’s questions with questions, forcing Frank to think.

  He had first come upon The Priest because of the rain, driven to the church in a sudden downpour. His roommate had warned him to take an umbrella, but Frank hadn’t cared and his roommate hadn’t been surprised: by that time, he had grown accustomed to Frank’s solitary, nightly rambles, his skulking around on the small town’s streets “like a dejected Heathcliff.” Frank’s roommate was a lit major, and Frank had rather liked the allusion. He felt it lent gravitas to his grief, the greatest loss he had known at that point in his life: Francesca’s sudden transfer to another school and her consequent departure from his life. It wasn’t until he sought refuge from the downpour and stood dripping on the carpet of the Catholic church that he was aware he might also bear some guilt, might even owe a confession or two. Since arriving at the little Protestant college in August, he hadn’t acted at all like the good Catholic he’d been raised to be.

  But happily for Frank the open church building appeared to be empty, and Frank thought he would wait out the rain in solitude. Until, that is, Father Tim startled him, appearing suddenly from out of a dark hallway. He didn’t seem at all surprised to find Frank standing there, and Frank couldn’t remain startled for long: Tim was decidedly warm and welcoming, young and tall and rosy-cheeked, and his pale hair, thinning, seemed to stand up an inch or two over the top of his head. He seemed to harbor no suspicion that Frank was in want of confessing anything, but immediately invited the drippin
g Frank into his study for tea and then (when the rain stopped) out into the alley to play basketball in the mud. Frank keenly remembered that first walk out to the hoop with The Priest, how cold the November air felt on his still-wet clothes, and how Frank asked himself what in the world he was doing. It was after midnight, and he had spent the last hour or so discussing with Tim all things not Francesca—which felt strange, as she had occupied his waking thoughts and much of his dreams since September.

  But he didn’t want to talk about her with The Priest. He needed no conversation with a man of the cloth to inform him that with Francesca he’d been feeding his lust, that sex outside of marriage was strictly against the rules. He didn’t want to hear the inevitable: that he had sinned, that his pain was his own fault, that his recent fornication-with-abandon was meaningless, was wrong, was an act of the body against the soul, and he needed to repent.

  Frank rather believed, while first crossing the parking lot to the solitary hoop, that he must get through this strange encounter without raising Francesca’s spectre at all.

  But then, despite these reservations, Frank began to talk about her. There was something about Tim that invited confidences. He was, in the first place, disarmingly young and unassuming, friendly and even jovial, for lack of a better term. And then there was the fact that, at that time and for a few months prior, Francesca had very nearly become Frank’s identity: her approval, her opinion, her affection, her body—these were all that Frank had appetite for. By the time he and Tim reached the basketball hoop, Frank had exhausted his capacity on any subject that wasn’t Francesca.

  That was how it began: the many-times-weekly dialogues with The Priest, when Frank pitched his newborn grief against existential beliefs as old as centuries, grappling with what he’d been taught, confronting it as if for the first time.

  Perhaps what made Frank go back for more was the fact that The Priest met almost none of his expectations. Tim didn’t dismiss outright his relationship with Francesca. He didn’t tell him that he was making too much of this lost love, that fornication had brought him his just desserts. Where Frank anticipated—even felt he deserved—remarks about sin, confession, repentance, Tim instead had helped him explore what it was he loved—or imagined he loved—about her. And what was it about her body, about their bodies, about the union of them that Frank loved and missed?

  It was The Priest, not Frank, who suggested that maybe it wasn’t that sex was wrong, but that sex in the wrong way was wrong. Perhaps one wasn’t intended to have sex with someone who might arbitrarily disappear, that the loss Frank was suffering was perhaps more real—not less—than he realized. That their physical union perhaps mattered far more—not less—than Frank had earlier conceived.

  It was those conversations under the basketball hoop—not his first communion, not years of Catholic religion classes, not his confirmation—that made Frank a Catholic. He and Tim banged the ball into the dirt; they passed it back and forth to one another until their hands were seamed with dirt or numb with cold. Under a sky so often leaden in that little nook of western Pennsylvania, Frank thrust his sadness and anger toward the hoop, toward Tim, toward God. They talked about theology, sex, women, about what it meant to be a spiritual being within a limited, corporal frame. The Incarnation, pounded out on the dirt. The unlikely miracle of the Eucharist.

  And could it be that sex with Francesca was somehow connected to the Eucharist? Frank was shocked, when Tim raised it, at the possibility. Could one link something so earthy and—for lack of a better term (they both laughed at it)—hot, with the death of Christ? It was Tim who made Frank see the terrible physicality of the crucifixion, the blood and sweat, the torn flesh. No, not at all the same in terms of passion, but passion nonetheless. All of it so physical, Tim said. The body matters, he said. It signifies.

  So what could it mean that communion might be more than symbolic, standing in weighty contrast to the clear belief of the Protestants? Frank and Tim hashed out the possibilities: Transignification; Consubstantiation; or the actual daily, hourly renewal of the crucifixion, made real in Holy Mass all around the world? Frank pondered the possibilities as he palmed the ball. The transformation of wine and bread into actual blood and body, nourishing body and soul. The incarnation took on new and near-frightening implications, all of it punctuated by the ball hitting the ground and the rim, and Tim’s open laughter, and the worn-out sweatpants he always wore, the ones Frank laughed at because, based on the wrestling logo riding up the leg and Tim’s own admission, The Priest had worn them even in high school. Sweat beaded and then dripped down their faces, ringed their armpits, drenched their chests, backs, stomachs, leaked into their drawers. And the talk was of “Christ with us,” a thought horrifying and wretched (how to bear the scrutiny?) but also—miraculous in its simultaneity and in Frank’s inexplicable hunger for it—infinitely comforting.

  Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was—the day or even the month—when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see.

  Now, in the days surrounding Maddie’s surgeries, Frank found himself wishing he could remember more of the hope he had found in those days. He longed to shed some light into the gloom of Maddie’s sadness. And certainly he tried, but words seemed empty. The second surgery was plainly profound loss, and he knew from his long ago grief—so trivial now—that there was no way around it. She would have to be sad—and angry, and in denial, and all the other things—until she wasn’t anymore.

  So the night before that surgery, he just told her that he loved her. What else was there to say? They fell asleep together with his arm over her shoulder and his hand at her waist, a shelter insufficient but earnest.

  R

  When Maddie knew he was sleeping, she lifted Frank’s arm and laid it along his own side, then lay still for another moment to be sure he wouldn’t stir.

  She didn’t turn on the bathroom light until the door was closed, and then she stared at herself in the mirror, studying the way her shirt lay over her body. She studied her profile, too, then lifted her shirt over her head and let it fall to the floor.

  Her breasts weren’t large, but they were shaped well enough, given the breast-feeding. They were flat at the top now; their fullness resided underneath. Maddie cupped them in her palms and studied her reflection, trying to summon the thoughts she had saved for this night: thoughts of nursing her babies, for example, of wearing her first bra when she was twelve, other memories, too—sexual ones. First times.

  Since knowing she would have a mastectomy, Maddie had tucked away these aspects of her loss in her mind, hoarding them as if in a box or journal, to be drawn out and reflected on when she was alone. Now she could think of none of it. She was just there with her body, staring at her own reflection, all of it the same as always.

  She pulled her shirt back over her head. Disbelief, she realized. That’s what this was. It was shock and disbelief. That one breast would be gone by this time tomorrow was as believable as her own death, or Frank’s, or any other terrible unreality that she had never known.

  R

  In October the day finally arrived when the humidity was gone. Standing in the backyard on a Saturday morning, coffee cup in hand, Frank felt the clear air in his lungs. For the first time since May, the damp blanket that was the summer air had been rolled up and heaved into some celestial attic. Never mind that it was October, that this delightful shift would have—and had—taken place up north a month ago. Frank was a southerner now, or trying to be one. The summertime heat and its vicissitudes were integral to a southern life. He couldn’t hold Raleigh’s weather against her.

  He inhaled deeply, taking in the crisp air a
nd the expanse of the newborn weekend. Things were better now. Maddie was doing well—well enough, anyway: almost completely healed. The second surgery had been brutal—as one would expect with an amputation. This, of course, was a word he would never use with Maddie. It was a mastectomy, a lateral mastectomy—but Frank felt that official euphemism was not effective. In his more objective moments, he wondered at the nomenclature. Perhaps it wasn’t called an amputation because reconstruction, in this case, could be effected—more so, anyway, than in the amputation of a limb. Maddie’s reconstructed breast would be prosthetic, but it wouldn’t look artificial in the way, say, of a peg-leg.

  Before the surgery, he had pondered whether she someday might allow him to give the reconstructed breast a nickname, something to privately amuse them both. But now this seemed like something he might have done in another lifetime, to a couple who did not as yet live under the weight of diagnosis. He couldn’t imagine anything about this surgery or its after-effects taking on humorous proportions. Not ever.

  It had actually been horrible to watch her come out of the anesthesia: violently sick to her stomach, her face deathly pale. The pain and how she fought against it. The drains dangling at her side, filling with red liquid—not blood entirely, the doctors said, but yes, blood and other fluids. Frank had emptied the drains himself, working to be cheerfully untroubled by the task, by the tubing’s disappearance into Maddie’s side. This was a small duty—this and the others: getting her meds, helping her bathe, all and anything it would take to help her.

  If she decided to undergo reconstruction, they would have to go through this yet again. If that’s what she wanted, Frank knew, he was more than willing. And if she didn’t want it? He didn’t care. He told her often that she was beautiful, and he meant it.