Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Now she was nearly healed, which meant they would be moving on to the next phase of treatment. Chemotherapy didn’t sound good, but to Frank—and to Maddie, too, he thought—it meant progress, moving forward, getting on with this phase and thereby, eventually, getting past it. The waiting had been tiresome despite its necessity. They were both ready to move on.

  And yet. He hadn’t been able to help himself: he had spent more than enough time researching this next phase that they were supposedly ready for. The potential side effects to chemotherapy were legion and ranged from bad to horrible. Meanwhile, doctors couldn’t tell them which ones Maddie would be likely to face; one couldn’t predict how an individual would react. He had read the good news: stories of women whose treatments had been a relative breeze. No side effects to speak of, carrying on with work and life in an almost normal way. And he had read the horror stories. They were mostly horror stories on the Internet.

  Standing there in the yard, Frank considered mowing the lawn and pruning the bushes between them and the neighbors. Through the open window at his back drifted the sounds of running water as Maddie cleaned up after pancakes and the mania of Saturday morning cartoons. Who knew what they were headed for? Already they were moving forward, driving toward God-knew-what and there was no turning around, no escape hatch into the bright and open air. In sickness and in health. His wife had breast cancer.

  Maddie would scold him if she knew, but Frank thought of it often: a story of the Superhero, her old boyfriend, Vincent. He had been playing football and an opponent had been injured—his neck, his back, something awful. Vincent had prayed for him right there on the field, and the kid had gotten up and walked off unassisted to the sidelines. Completely fine. A miracle on the gridiron.

  But Maddie would protest—and had, so many times—that this, like all the other stories, was a misunderstanding. “He couldn’t really heal people,” he heard her saying. “It just didn’t happen.”

  R

  The thing to do was not to think about it. Mind over matter, that was Maddie’s philosophy. Let the incision heal; let her body recover. Move on with her treatment and kill the cancer. There was no need to shed tears over what was already done.

  She need only look at her boys, at her boys and Frank, or even, while they were all gone to school and work during the day, to look at the little pieces of their lives: Garrett’s stuffed kitten, lying lopsided by his pillow; Frank’s array of favorite pens on his desk; Jake and Eli’s Lego empire waiting for their return. All of it spurred a keen tenderness within her. Whereas she used to see these and other things as merely part of the household, now it was all hung with profound and ineluctable meaning. Everything pointed to the demand of her recovery—which meant looking forward, not back.

  Still, mind over matter wasn’t effective in all arenas. Once upon a time Maddie had worked to push thoughts of Vincent from her mind, and she had largely been successful. But lately the memories sabotaged her. They volunteered themselves, each a small eruption triggering another that—chronologically or causally—was completely unrelated to the one before it.

  Kneeling next to her on the pavement, the sky pale around his bent head. He had taken off his baseball hat and his hair was pressed in a ring. His profile, his silence, his deliberate attention to her leg and the center of the pain where the car had hit her. He hadn’t even known her name.

  Her photo, cut unevenly from the yearbook page and stuck inside his locker door. It was a terrible picture. She didn’t think until much later of him leafing through the book to find her picture, wielding the scissors, finding tape—or maybe chewing gum—to hold it in place.

  Standing after dark in the pouring rain, allowing his own body to be the means by which a drunk and homeless man righted himself, even reaching down to take hold of his shoulders and helping the man to his feet.

  His patient progress through the oncology ward of the children’s hospital and the way the sunlight streamed through the room, falling on and between the beds of the little sick children, their eyes over-wide and dark.

  His head bent over Mr. Pavlik, his hands on Mr. Pavlik’s swollen head. His hand on Mrs. Senchak’s head, her body curled and shrunken on the hospital bed, her breath grating like a shovel over pavement.

  How much of it was certain? It had happened so long ago. The scenes were isolated but clear—and who was to say which ones were true memories and which imagined, things she envisioned then and now envisioned again, as clear and acute as memory? And which of them was accurate? Was that the way it happened? He said it, and in this way?

  At home, recovering from the surgeries, Maddie had these quiet hours to regain her strength. Yet the memories plagued her; she was almost angry: she had left this wretched territory behind her long ago. Cancer was more than enough, thank you. Must she spend its treatment combing through this layered sediment again?

  She considered talking it all out with Frank. Yes, she had other friends she could talk to, but she found her husband was the best candidate for helping her assess the sometimes swarming contents of her mind. He had certainly heard this stuff before, or much of it, anyway, and maybe that prior knowledge would be insightful. But that was reason enough, too, not to mention it to him. Why drag him through the old narrative when they had so much else to deal with?

  At the very least, she could set the record straight in her mind, the simple and exonerating order of events. For none of it could be claimed to be her fault, could it? Vincent—of his own mysterious accord—had visited her church in the spring of her sophomore (his junior) year. His loud repentance at the altar had engendered natural curiosity in Maddie, and it was this that led to her innocently observing him over the ensuing week at school.

  She had wondered what to expect from a boy like that, wild party-er that he famously was, after his bone-chilling display at the altar. What happened, exactly, in that interaction with God?

  It was because she had been watching for him at school that she had been hit by the car. She had been staring at Vincent Elander—but this time they locked eyes, and she had been unable to look away. So she hadn’t seen or even heard the car coming, the one that should have, for all of its speed and impact, broken her leg.

  That Vincent knelt to pray over Maddie as she awaited the ambulance was his choice. She hadn’t asked him to do that. Had she known what would follow after it, she would have done everything in her power to send him away. Not that it would have worked. And then this memory: “You shouldn’t worry about what other people think.” His first words to her, just a few days after her accident. And she might never have believed it was Vincent Elander who had said it if he hadn’t turned his head and looked at her as he was going inside, if he hadn’t looked right at her with those deep blue eyes and smirked before disappearing behind the door.

  That was when Maddie seized on the idea of Vincent’s having healed her.

  A miraculous healing was not the sort of thing that one could recount easily to Justine who, like Maddie, had been raised in the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness. Justine had some time ago come to the conclusion that the people of their church were too readily inclined to look for miracles, so Maddie knew she would have to keep her mouth shut on that score. But Maddie wasn’t one to remain silent, and so she said something different. She said, “Vincent Elander says I shouldn’t worry about what other people think.”

  “When did you talk with Vincent Elander?” Justine asked. Immediately Maddie wished that she had talked to Vincent, and could see again, as she had imagined it so many times already, the way the conversation might have opened up in the hallway before class, could imagine leaning against the wall with, perhaps, one knee bent, the sole of her shoe pressed against the wall, and Vincent standing perpendicular to her, his shoulder pressed against that same wall, looking down at her, talking to her, listening. If she had only come down the hall sooner, maybe that’s how it would have gone.

  But honesty was one of Maddie’s strengths. “I didn’t talk to V
incent,” she said. “He talked to me.”

  Justine had no patience for this cryptic response. She wanted immediate and full disclosure, and so Maddie immediately disclosed it.

  “Well,” Justine said, and Maddie noticed how she moved effortlessly past any surprise, “he’s right. You shouldn’t worry about it, Maddie. You just have to let it go.” To which Maddie responded that she knew this was true, but she did not say aloud how difficult she found it: to reject or be unconcerned with other people’s responses.

  “Did he say anything else?” Justine asked. Maddie said that he hadn’t, and then went on to say that the bell had rung, creating and leaving open the possibility that, had the bell failed to ring, the conversation during which she would have leaned against the wall enjoying Vincent’s perpendicular attention might have taken place. She did not mention that he hadn’t paused, hadn’t stopped, but had spoken as he was walking and then had walked away from her.

  “I wonder what he thinks of the whole thing,” Justine said.

  “I thought that you shouldn’t care what other people think,” Maddie said.

  “Ha, ha,” said Justine in that way she had of sounding as if she thought something were funny while showing you that it wasn’t really funny at all. “I mean,” she went on to say, “that you should ask his opinion as to what went on that day. Why did he come over to you in the first place? Why didn’t he stay with the team? And why did he touch your leg like that? How did he know? You should ask him,” she said.

  Maddie was certain that she couldn’t ask him and never would. In the first place, she couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which she could put such a question: Does one walk up to a person like Vincent in the hallway or the cafeteria and just start asking questions? Or does one first have to say, “Can I ask you something?” and then proceed to ask while all the friends, girlfriends, and general entourage stand by to overhear? She said as much to Justine.

  “I think you should ask him anyway,” she said, without offering suggestions as to how. Maddie was easily influenced by Justine. She was easily influenced by lots of people; it couldn’t be helped. She was only fifteen, after all, and most of the people she knew were nice enough. But Justine especially, despite her gruffness, was someone who could be trusted. She had a level head; Maddie’s parents had said this before, and Maddie had observed it to be true.

  Still, Vincent Elander would be difficult to talk to. There remained the whole question as to when and how to approach him. And there remained, too, (although this she did not say) the way that Vincent Elander looked in his baseball uniform, and the way that he had met her gaze from under the brim of his baseball hat. And there was the way, too, that she had heard him cry out from the altar at the front of the church only a few weeks before that. All of this informed her intimidation. All of it made Vincent Elander, of all people, particularly difficult to approach.

  Now Maddie shifted her weight, making to stand up from the sofa where she had been resting yet again, and felt only the slightest twinge at the incision site. Swinging her legs gently to the floor, she sat, hands on knees, and contemplated getting to her feet.

  Frank would laugh with her at this narration, at what had been adolescent insecurity laced with puppy love. Naming it with Frank would put it in its place.

  Except that she wasn’t sure they would agree on it. The insecurity, yes; the infatuation, sure. But what of the healing? From their long dormant conversations about those miracles, Maddie guessed that Frank still might wish to talk with Vincent if he could.

  Frank simply had more faith than Maddie had. She knew this. Or, at the very least, he was more open to possibility. And now, of all times, was not the time to get him thinking that way. Neither one of them needed to be hoping for miracles now.

  Hoping for miracles had only gotten Maddie into trouble. If she had been at all to blame, then it was here, when she was talking with Justine and newly convinced that Vincent had healed her. Maddie had believed that she had been part of a miracle, but she had believed lots of things. Once when they were ten, she and Kelly Cox, minds teeming with Nancy Drew novels, tried to discover mysteries to solve in their Pittsburgh suburb. The girls were committed to the notion that Michael Pulaski, the thirty-something across the street who sold used cars and still lived with his parents, was a cat burglar. Which, of course, he wasn’t.

  It takes no psychologist to demonstrate that the emotions of teenage girls are powerful things. From an adult’s perspective, Maddie could see this clearly. It was enough to be driven by hormones, to be amazed by Vincent’s demonstrated remorse, to be hit by a car. Any teenage girl in this situation could conjure the notion of miraculous healings, especially at the hands of a boy like Vincent.

  Now she liked to imagine that she had asked him, that she had put to him the question Justine had encouraged her to ask—and other questions, too. Why did you touch me, Vincent? Why didn’t you just stay with your friends? Why didn’t you leave me alone? She liked to think that the very next day found her striding up to him in the hallway before their language classes, calling him by name so that he turned to face her, and questioning him without preamble as to why he had knelt next to her in the parking lot, and what exactly he was doing when he’d groped for her injury.

  She liked to imagine this, but only much later, and when she did imagine it the dialogue went no further. She was never able to put the right words in his mouth, never able to envision his stunned expression, his frank surprise. Her fantasy ended satisfactorily only in leaving him wordless, while she turned her back on him and strode away again down the hall.

  5

  Frank knew that cancer treatment was a process; there was no quick fix. He understood this implicitly, and how could he not, when every day of their lives had to take into account the process they were subject to.

  But the thought persisted that he should be able to offer her something else, something in the line of hopefulness that would help her. Again his conversations with Father Tim came to mind, but the specifics that emerged were topical, even theoretical. The only practical thought he could construe was stuff about sin—which really didn’t seem at all helpful here—and yes, hope, but hope in the eternal, in an after-life, in a glorious eternity devoid of loss or pain.

  Despite the inherent hope in that, he really didn’t want to raise those issues. Not now.

  What returned again and again were thoughts of his first communion—and not the one he had endured in the first grade, although his dress shirt’s itchy collar came vividly to mind.

  No, what he meant by his first communion came much later, again during his college days and at Father Tim’s little church, a Sunday morning Mass that Tim hadn’t expected Frank to attend, as Frank never—up until that point—had attended Mass there. And in truth, Frank was somewhat surprised to be there himself.

  It was April and unseasonably warm for Pennsylvania, and Frank had awakened early that Sunday with a strong compulsion to go to Mass. He dressed in a hurry and almost ran down the street to the church. For all his rushing, he had nonetheless arrived late, and he sat in the back and watched The Priest do what he presumably did multiple times a week—though Frank had never seen him at it.

  When it was time for communion, Frank had thought he’d remain in his seat. He had reasoned there should be something more to this: some hoop to jump through, some meeting with Tim in which he forthrightly affirmed his faith before once again—after so many months—receiving communion. But again, Frank hadn’t been able to help himself: there was an unnameable joy that propelled him, behind the presumably faithful parishioners, toward the front. He was grinning like a fool by the time he reached Tim and held out his hands for the host.

  On seeing Frank grin like that, Tim had tried to maintain his solemnity, but Frank could detect the smile working at the corners of his eyes. Later Frank had teased him: Would it have been so wrong, he asked his friend, for Tim to smile back? After all, it wasn’t a private joke the two of them were conc
ealing—at least, no joke they could name. Could the laughter that both of them worked to stifle have somehow misled the congregation?

  But Tim had argued that there aren’t words for some things, that it would have been impossible and perhaps inappropriate for him to have held the parishioners captive to the obligatory explanation that here was laughter for the best reasons: Frank was a lost one, found; the two of them were brothers of the best kind; the bread and wine were everything they believed them to be, and therefore likely signified more than either one of them, or anyone, could understand. Frank, his back to the congregation, had smiled broadly as Tim said, with all the earnest seriousness he could muster, “The body of Christ.” And Frank had said, “Amen.”

  Frank realized now that he could no longer muster the joy. Neither could he recall how long it had lasted, or if it ever returned to him in subsequent Masses. There had not been, in his memory, a repeat performance.

  But he considered the actual first communion. Surely it had been a solemn occasion: that evening with Jesus and his disciples in a borrowed upstairs room. Frank envisioned a low-ceilinged space subtly lit by torches. A dimness matched by dim awareness in the disciples, who were satisfied to have met the teacher’s instructions in securing donkey and room, products of yet another mysterious confluence of prophetic instruction and providence.

  There were thirteen of them there, thirteen dusty, sweating travelers. A room full of egos, Frank thought, full of self-interest. They asked Jesus which of them would betray him—and didn’t the question betray them all? Each of them had thought of it. Each of them had been given the opportunity and had at least one justification to follow through.

  Jesus, moving among them, washing feet. He broke bread and poured wine. He was surrounded by friends and also profoundly alone, his acts of humility and love misunderstood.