All of them ate the bread; they drank the wine. Judas, the betrayer. Peter, who betrayed him, too. Not one of them comprehending any of it.
R
Friends had offered to sit with her; her mother had offered to come down for this first bout of chemotherapy. But Maddie only wanted Frank.
Now he sat next to her in the infusion room. He had found childcare and had taken the afternoon off work, and he avoided asking her if she was nervous. He also avoided looking for words of comfort or hope which, when attempted in his mind, sounded as hollow platitudes. Instead he said things like, “It’s the big day!” and “Your chemotherapy debut!”
It was going to be merriment and joking, Maddie realized, which was not surprising: she recalled the route he used to take on their way home during the last weeks of each pregnancy, the ones with the huge speed bumps. “Pregnancy bumps,” he called them, his little effort to jostle the baby out of her womb.
Maddie’s cancer diagnosis had opened a new line of interest in Frank, who had lived on Pop-Tarts and Kraft macaroni and cheese in college. Now everything was organic, and the overhaul of pantry and refrigerator were only the front line of his assault on their household goods. Detergents were newly scent-free and environmentally friendly; all soaps and lotions were organic. Who knows what these chemicals do to our bodies, he had said to her and their friends and sometimes even the clerk in the checkout line. How do we know that cancer isn’t connected directly with hormones in milk or some rogue food coloring?
He sat next to her while the liquid dripped into her chest. It hung on a pole above them, a weighty red bag attached to Maddie’s port by its equally red tube. She watched Frank bravely watch the bag. This is good stuff, he said, gesturing to the medication. Just a little Kool-aid, he said.
R
Maddie had been remarkably lucky to find Frank, that much she knew. He was, as she often told him, her own Renaissance man: the writer, tennis player, and opera lover, who last summer built the boys a tree house of his own design. He was both passionate and grounded, and he was her best friend.
When she had told him that her parents would be upset that he was Catholic, he took this in his stride, making no apology or excuse. He wasn’t changing anything but was pleased that Maddie wanted to convert and go to church with him. It makes the most sense for our family, he had said, for any children we might have, that we be of the same mind about church. And her heart had warmed at the thought of a family.
Sometimes it occurred to her that she might have missed him; she very nearly did, turning him down after he asked her out in the library. She had dismissed him as too bookish, maybe, too intellectual: all she wanted to do in that first semester was to blast high school’s memory from her mind. Frank, wearing glasses and distributing microfilm, didn’t seem relevant to that plan—which required, for starters, a whole lot of drinking.
So she had been surprised to see him leaning against the bar at the Landmark, a popular dive at the edge of town. It was her first time there, and everything about it was a study in extremes: the dark, the loud, the grit, the crowd. She was following a friend who was pushing aggressively toward the band at the back, and Maddie had been jostled into Frank by a stream of people coming the other way. She glanced up and recognized him immediately, and then, to her extreme discomfort, remained pressed into his side for some time: the stream was a long one, seemingly endless. She kept her head turned away from him, hoping that he hadn’t identified her.
But he had, and apparently was not made at all uncomfortable by this forced interaction. Of course he wouldn’t pretend he didn’t know her and had also to immediately bring up the source of her discomfort: that she had turned him down for a date. “How’d that test go?” he’d yelled to her over the noise, grinning.
Maddie felt unaccountably offended by his asking, as though he were implicating her in a lie (she had had a test that Monday), but she felt forced to yell back anyway (“Fine!” terse and dismissive), while continuing to face out into the (still streaming) crowd.
For his part, Frank continued talking to her. He yelled to the back of her hair, “I was really disappointed when you said no.”
She couldn’t have fallen in love with him at that point. She was too embarrassed, her mind too much in the way of wanting to keep her distance from him. But she was caught nonetheless on this confession: any other guy might have asked about the test and left it there, or said something snarky, or ignored her altogether.
The least she could do, she thought, was try to impress him. She turned so as to give him her profile and shouted—bragging—that all she really wanted was to get mind-numbingly drunk, failing to realize that this goal might actually be banally familiar, the senseless objective of legions of college students. But Frank was still interested, and he drew her out. Soon the two of them were leaning into the bar side by side, their heads inclined, their voices nonetheless, necessarily, raised. Over a glass of beer (Frank insisted on paying for it) she eventually related the cause of her rebellion: the hide-bound strictures of her church upbringing. Frank was fascinated: he had recently done some soul-searching of his own in terms of religion, had explored a handful of options—both foreign and domestic (he chuckled)—and had settled on the Catholic faith of his childhood.
At about that point Maddie’s friend returned for her, having long since achieved the enticing back of the room. But Maddie was too engrossed in the conversation—or was it Frank?—to leave. Feeling herself something of a legitimate expert, she was giving him her full-on critique of Christianity: all doctrines, disciplines, denominations. Frank mostly listened, but he gave bold answers where he knew more than she did—which was, to her mind, surprisingly often. Maddie’s fondest memory of the evening was Frank’s explanation of the Immaculate Conception, shouted at her over the noise of the band.
She did not get drunk that night, but she found she didn’t mind this as she drove her drunk and stumbling friend back to the dorm. The next morning, she was glad she wasn’t suffering from a hangover, gladder still to remember that she needed to go to the library. And unwittingly blushing when she saw that Frank was in his station at the microfilm desk. She thought she remembered that he worked on Saturday mornings. When he asked her out this time, she said yes.
They would tell the story in the way that all couples do, reliving it in fast-forward motion behind their eyes. Maddie would always punctuate it by repeating, “The Immaculate Conception,” and Frank would always smile, the skin crinkling up around his eyes the way it did even back in college.
It had been different with Vincent. She had been much younger then—not yet sixteen and truly naïve. Justine was the one to tell her. “You’re next,” she had said.
Maddie had no idea what Justine was talking about, despite Vincent’s instant and near-constant presence in her life. She couldn’t remember when she hadn’t known who he was, and since that display at the church altar, he had become a fixed part of the Bethel Hills congregation, enfolding himself into this part of Maddie’s world. But Maddie didn’t take the hints that were his frequent phone calls and sitting next to her at lunch; Justine’s “You’re next,” fell on innocent ears. For all of his attentions and presence, she was confident that he would never choose her for anything beyond a friend, and she attributed his attentions to his conversion and his acquaintance with her through church.
And then she was next, just the way Justine promised. Word was all over school that Vincent Elander had dumped Jennifer Imhoff, that he had ended his partying ways, that he had become a church-goer and a Bible-beater. And Maddie found herself his new girlfriend, not entirely comprehending, sort of lifted and tucked under his arm in the way he would take hold of a football.
She finally realized it when she noticed her picture: he had cut it from the yearbook and stuck it inside the door of his locker. “Hey, that’s me!” she said, leaning in to focus.
“Yep,” he said without looking at her. He was reaching to get a book from the shelf.
“Wh
y do you have my picture in here?” she asked him, incredulous, blushing.
“Why do you think, silly?” he had asked her, and slammed the door so suddenly she had felt the breeze of it on her face. Then he had walked her to class.
R
It was that sort of thing that could change a life. Walking side by side down the hall, stopping at the door of your classroom when he himself isn’t going in. Sitting with you at lunch every day, even inviting his friends to join him, because he’s no longer sitting at his table; he’s sitting at yours.
Or holding hands.
It had such significance when, walking out of church into the late spring sunlight, Vincent had taken her hand and held it. He had continued to walk; the gesture—the taking and holding of her hand—had been sudden and also casual; it depended on an understanding, one they hadn’t discussed, and so Maddie wondered in retrospect how it was he knew that enough of her affections belonged to him that he could also claim some proprietary regard for her hand.
No, she hadn’t wondered that. Not, at least, until much later. That kind of reflection rooted itself in indignation, and it was nothing like indignation she felt on that spring day when he first took her hand in the church parking lot and she tried to act nonchalant, following his lead, his presumption that taking her hand was perfectly natural, even what was expected of him.
Yet for some time it had the continuing power to surprise her. Walking down the hall at school, standing outside the locker room after a football game, Vincent casually took her hand, their fingers loosely touching or even intertwined. A life can be changed when things like that happen, when other people see something like that, and Maddie saw them see—saw the girls she knew but had never spoken to take in at a glance Vincent Elander standing next to Maddie, not even standing closely, not even talking to her necessarily, but their hands just touching, just holding like that. Something so small as this changed everything.
Including Maddie, of course. She would think of herself later—much later—as victimized or preyed upon. But then, at the beginning, she didn’t think of such things. What she knew then was the contour of his hands, the length of his fingers, the calluses of his palms. She came to know the perimeter of her own hand by the perimeter of his; she came to know the comfortable distance between her own fingers as determined by the width of his. And she came to know, too, the power of his hand on her untouchable center, the solidity of her core.
But she didn’t marvel about it at the time; she didn’t wonder at the power of that hand in hers to make her untouchable solid core turn, bend, cave slowly in upon itself so that she felt she was composed of liquid.
R
The vomiting had started at about one o’clock in the morning—no, earlier. It was one or so when Frank heard something in the bathroom and then turned, confused, to discover that Maddie wasn’t in the bed. He found her squatting in front of the toilet bowl, gripping the seat with both arms, her hair falling around her face. Crouching behind her on the floor, Frank tended to her hair, holding it away at the back of her neck.
Already there was nothing left. The toilet was empty of all but its standard water and what looked like saliva. Maddie heaved and heaved again, and afterward spat at the strings of mucous still clinging to her lips. Frank looked about him for a washcloth, then pulled his bath towel from its bar and tucked it toward Maddie’s face. Breathless, she thanked him, and then the heaving began again.
With every pause in the retching, Frank thought this would be the end. The tension in Maddie’s shoulders eased. She sat back on her heels, eyes closed, lungs gasping for air. There was nothing left in her stomach; surely it was over.
And then it started again, and Frank remembered what he was dealing with. This was no virus. This was nothing her body would readily be rid of. Who knew how long it would continue?
“How long have you been in here?” Frank managed to ask. He was afraid of the answer. The nausea’s abatement was long enough to have given him hope: for the first time, Maddie had leaned against him, her back full against his chest.
Her answer came after a long pause: “I have no idea.”
Then Maddie lurched away from him and Frank marveled at her instinct: she may have been here like this for hours; did she think there was anything left in her stomach?
He struggled to his feet, legs cramping from their prolonged crouch. He stumbled toward the cabinet, found an elastic band and clumsily tried to work it into her hair. He could wrap it well enough but couldn’t figure out how to make it stay in tightly, and then Maddie was pulling away from him again. He finally gave it up, leaving some of her hair loosely coiled in the elastic while thick strands still swung toward her face. These he occasionally tried to tuck behind her ears when he wasn’t otherwise stroking her back, but all of it struck him as futile.
Exhaustion interfered with consciousness. Half-awake, eyes open, Frank hallucinated: the towers of San Gimignano were etching themselves unprovoked in varied order across the bathroom wall. He and Maddie had visited the town on their honeymoon, but he hadn’t the energy now to wonder why this should be the vision that accompanied his vigil. Mindless, he stroked Maddie’s back and gazed at the towers against a bright blue morning sky and then washed in red against a sunset orange—always only the towers and not the lower walls of the city. Just that many-pinnacled skyline, the architectural remains of medieval ambition lined solemnly along wall and shower curtain. After that, those towers—their varied heights, their persistently haunted sense of abandonment—were always linked in his mind with cancer.
Finally they dozed: he slumped with his upper back against the bathroom wall, and Maddie spread out over him, her face on the cool linoleum floor. Occasionally, the nausea would force her mouth open and the dry retching would convulse her body, but she no longer sat up to the toilet bowl for this. She lay there crookedly without opening her eyes, a small spot of saliva pooling under her cheek.
6
On her good days, Maddie could be impressed by cancer’s power to reshape her life. There were the obvious daily changes to medication and diet, and then there was her hair—or had been her hair—which she decided not to think about.
But cancer was even more assertive than this, reassigning the calendar to something of its own choosing. No longer did Maddie think in terms of months or weeks, the standard weekends, seasons and holidays in their course. Instead, she had to organize her thinking around the three-week periods between her chemotherapy treatments. Listening to a friend discuss holiday plans, Maddie ran the dates through the gauntlet of her treatment schedule. She couldn’t attend this party because her white blood count would be at its lowest at that time; she couldn’t meet friends for lunch because she had to avoid restaurants, crowds, the world in general.
This was routine for cancer care, nothing to complain about. Others had endured these circumstances with prognoses far worse.
She reminded herself that she was receiving the best treatment. Never mind that most of her discomfort was due to that treatment and not from the cancer itself: currently she was taking medications for several chemotherapy side-effects, the results of which made her tired most of the time and ruined the taste of her food.
Endurance was the name of the game. Maddie knew that. Chemotherapy was poison, plain and simple, and it was her task to survive it, to outlive the cancer with as much of herself intact as possible. Her hair and her fingernails seemed almost obligatory sacrifices. Everyone lost at least this much in cancer treatment. So she told herself.
She didn’t do the research; she left that to Frank. For Maddie, survival meant taking care of herself and also of her sons—to the best of her ability—and keeping at bay those thoughts of Vincent’s year in her life, memories useless, vague, and vexing nonetheless.
Lately it wasn’t Vincent she was thinking of but the people he had prayed for: Mr. Pavlik, Mrs. Senchak, little Joey Amoretti on the parsonage lawn. She thought of Susan Sweet and her high, soft voice, thanking Vincent fo
r praying for her there in the church reception hall.
All of them had wanted to be healed, whether they asked for it or not. This much she knew, and that knowledge filled her with an unaccountable defiance. Maddie, too, wanted to be well—although she was willing to wait for it, to endure the treatment and all the time and energy it took from her. She was willing not to ask to be healed.
And she thought of Matthew, Justine’s little brother. She remembered him sitting in the pew between his parents, his legs sticking out straight on the pew bench, the heels of his shoes extending just over the edge. He had lived and died years before any of them knew Vincent. His casket had been very small and was covered in white flowers.
R
Frank kept a watchful eye on the calendar. From diagnosis to right now, cancer had taken seven months of their lives. Only seven months. What was it in the scheme of things? They were spending their lives together. He told himself that this cancer ordeal was manageable. Give it a year. Let it take every bit of a year. And the boys were fine. They were doing fine, and they were so young. By the time Maddie was better, they would scarcely remember it.
But he worried about his wife. The treatment was taking its toll, and he was sure the fatigue frustrated her. Yet he never had a word of complaint from her—as was her way.
In truth, he never had much in the way of any conversation from her these days. He would have liked to hear her thoughts, even if they weren’t pleasant ones. But she was often silent. She seemed absorbed with something outside them all. Sometimes, thinking she was asleep, Frank might quietly enter their room to check on her and find that she was just lying there, staring at the wall. She would barely register his presence.
She had let him help her with her hair when it started falling out. Frank had tried to add levity to the process: he had fetched his electric clippers from under the bathroom sink and announced they’d have a head-shaving party. Maddie had agreed to it, and they had laughed as her hair fell in clusters to the floor. Frank insisted on doing the clean-up while Maddie examined her newly exposed head in the mirror, and he thought they had cleared the danger nicely, that she had accepted her new look with pluck. But when is anything of this magnitude so simple? She had cried into her pillow for a long time that night, immune to his efforts at comfort.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 8