That was a terrifying moment, Maddie thought, standing there in the morning light in Jake’s bedroom. She was staring at the heap of dirty clothes he had stashed by his bookcase, and she was thinking that he had doubled his life span since that September day when he was four. That day shortened my life, Maddie thought to herself, and remembered once again that her life span had been newly threatened by cells growing beyond reason in her breast and the potential of their venturing outward. And she thought again of her imaginary knitting, the invisible blanket constantly spilling from her busy hands. On that day, when the boys went wandering, had the blanket followed them? She couldn’t have sent it after them; she’d had no idea where they were.
R
Frank hadn’t just found Vincent on Facebook; he’d found Francesca, too. He hadn’t quite meant to. He had typed her name as a joke on himself: an old boyfriend of Maddie’s, an old girlfriend of his. He typed her name, knowing for certain that she wouldn’t have an account. Francesca wouldn’t be the type. Nothing so pedestrian, so quotidian for Francesca.
And then there she was, and he would know her anywhere with her long, curling hair and her glowing smile. She was living in Seattle, and Frank was a little surprised. Given a guess, he would have chosen a locale more cosmopolitan: New York, at the very least, or somewhere international, like Milan. But Seattle was cosmopolitan enough, he supposed, and likely it was only a home base. Likely she was constantly jetting off from there to New York or London and places like it. Likely she was never home.
He had heard nothing from her since her sudden disappearance from campus that day. Once or twice he had thought to troll the Internet for her. Occasionally when he picked up something like Harper’s Bazaar or The New Yorker, he half-expected to see her name listed among the contributors—and then he laughed at himself for somehow maintaining belief in the superiority of her writing skills. He had been so young and inexperienced when he knew her; he’d had no idea, at the time, whether she was really a good writer or not. And who could know if she’d even pursued a career in writing?
But he didn’t care. He couldn’t care. After their break-up, the one leaving him no recourse because she simultaneously left to “pursue her education at a school more suited to her ambitions” (or something like that), it had taken too many months of his life to get over her. It was Tim who was able to help him see Francesca’s absurdity. Her ambition, her pride, the smug overestimation of her own intellect. Her resolve to “find herself,” to never marry but take on numerous lovers, to never “settle down.” It was The Priest who had helped him see how much better a real relationship could be, a relationship with someone like Maddie.
Father Tim was right, and Frank wasn’t about to contact Francesca. He had stopped needing her—or imagining he needed her—a long time ago. But there was a lot to remember as he stared a moment longer at the image of the woman he used to know. He thought it best, most likely, if he didn’t start remembering at all.
9
She was tired all the time. Winded by loading the dishwasher or making up the boys’ beds, Maddie would sit down suddenly, frustrated that she needed to. She sat on the sofa, the edge of Jake’s bed, the stairs. But where in the past a few minutes’ sitting was all she needed to recover, the revival now seemed never to come. Sitting there Maddie only became more aware of the dead weight at her center, a weight that pulled at all of her limbs, her fingers, her jaw, her eyelids. She would will herself to stand, then would sit staring at a task across the room (the books piled right next to Eli’s bookcase, the Matchbox cars spilled out of their storage bin, a wayward tissue balled and resting under the ottoman), and would marvel at her inability to rise to her feet. She hated her body’s defiant needing, its relentless demands. It was pitiable, and on her good days Maddie tried to laugh at it. She could and did tell herself that her body was hard at work, doing other, more important things. It’s no small thing, she told herself, what her body was hard at work on: fighting itself, fighting disease. The tissue under the ottoman could wait, could even decay there. It didn’t matter.
But maintaining this spirited conviction required endurance of its own, and at night she was faced with a maddening irony: sleeplessness. Lowering herself gingerly into bed, releasing her weight to the mattress, Maddie asked her body to remember the fatigue of the earlier afternoon. But sleep would not come. She lay in bed, listening to the clock’s tick on the dresser, to Frank’s steady breathing beside her. His digital clock cast a bluish light across his nightstand, and occasionally Maddie would raise her head to read it: 1:17, 2:43, 3:31. Time’s passage seemed indiscriminate: unlike the day, when the shadows of the trees or the angle of the light could educate her guess, the night’s solid darkness left her no clues.
She would wander. At first she confined herself to the downstairs, roving from room to room in listless discontent. But as her illness grew worse she remained upstairs, moving from bed to bed in the rooms of her sleeping children. Exhausted, she would sit at the edge of a child’s bed and look at the room in the yellow glow of the nightlight. Or she would gaze at the child himself: this time it was Jake in his predictable sweat. She had him wear summer pajamas all year round, but it made no difference. Little bubbles of perspiration spread like freckles across his nose and cheeks. The oscillating fan pushed at a few dry curls, but otherwise his hair wetly adhered to his head. His eyelashes were thick and black, much darker than his sandy-blond hair. She leaned in close and studied his face.
Mothers should know. A mother should know her child’s face, she thought. She knew that Garrett’s left ear was just the slightest bit bent at the top, that Jacob’s whorl of hair was just to the right of the center back of his head. And Eli had his father’s nose: straight and, even at this young age, elegantly shaped. It was like a little ski-jump, Maddie always thought: dramatically steep with just the slightest inverted angle at the end. He would be handsome when he grew up.
She knew their faces before they were born. Frank had chuckled at how she studied the ultrasound pictures, the slick squares of paper printed in the doctor’s office and then proudly displayed on their refrigerator. To that day, she claimed she could distinguish Garrett from Jake or Eli based on sonogram image alone. Frank teased that it was because she had memorized them, but she said she would know those profiles anywhere. And it wasn’t just that, she always said to Frank. She remembered each one from before he was born: Eli’s spine on her right side, Garrett’s on her left. It was Jake who had kicked her, mercilessly, in the ribs.
In each pregnancy, Maddie felt almost desperate to get those ultrasounds: the early months had been torturous for the withheld knowledge. Until she got the pictures, the babies were frighteningly remote and anonymous: silent, shut up in the dark, their eyes sealed shut. Unknown and unknowable.
Mothers should know, she thought, and shuddered.
These hours were the worst of all, when fatigue and sleeplessness both plagued her. During the day it was easier to keep the thoughts at bay. But at night, the silence, the dark, and the clock taunted her with what might be coming: cancer insurmountable, an agonized and drawn-out death, three boys motherless and Frank grief-stricken, grimly seeing to the needs of the day.
Her mind raced relentlessly ahead: How to meet the demands—the practices, the games? The boys would only be involved in more things as they grew older; schedules would conflict. The school supplies, the school clothes, the shoes. And she always knew where to find things, not Frank. She knew for instance that right now the ketchup sat at the back of the refrigerator’s third shelf on the left-hand side. Garrett loved ketchup, but Frank could never find it.
And her mind went on: one parent at Open House at school, one parent for teacher conferences, one parent at the sports banquets, at graduation. Frank might marry again and that brought waking nightmares: if the boys didn’t like their stepmother, if she didn’t like the boys, if she had children of her own and Frank being pulled somehow between them.
She talked hersel
f through it—or tried: lots of kids were raised by single parents and were happy and well-adjusted. Blended families, too, abounded. And why needlessly worry it like this?
But her mind was unrelenting. She was their mother; she had known them before they were born. She wanted to give them the gift of a mother—even if it wasn’t necessary.
She remembered a girl in third grade whose mother had died, whose clothes didn’t fit her and were stained, whose father packed in her lunchbox a slice of cold pizza and a piece of cheese wrapped in cellophane. The girl always seemed sad, Maddie remembered, and nothing the other girls could do would draw her out.
Frank was a good father, but Maddie imagined anyway a vivid and terrible emptiness for her sons without her. It wasn’t that she was the best mother; it wasn’t that she was anything like a perfect mother, but the love of a mother, that covering (and here again the vision came of the knitted blanket) that she was forever drawing over and around her boys would be stripped away. She saw them exposed, lonely, colder. The girl she knew in third grade—the one whose mother had died—always had bare legs, even in the winter.
R
Frank felt at a loss. He had tried, and he was resigned to continue to try, but he had also—consistently—failed to reach his wife. Sure, he did what he could for her: took care of the boys, did the errands, managed laundry and cooking—but only when Maddie needed him to. Moreover, those aspects of shouldering the burden might be what one performed for a spouse who had a bad cold. There were no heroics here.
Neither was he looking to be heroic. What he might have said is that he’d like to feel useful to Maddie. He’d like to sense that he was somehow essential to her recovery or, even short of that, essential to her fight against the sickness in the first place.
Instead, Maddie continued to turn inward, and in doing so, had shut him out. Without it being actually true, Frank felt fairly constantly that his wife’s back was turned to him, that she was distracted by something so absorbing she didn’t even know he was in the room.
The closest he had felt to Maddie was some weeks ago when, fast asleep in the middle of the night, he had suddenly become aware of a chill. He reached down to the foot of the bed to pull up their extra blanket and felt Maddie doing the same thing. Although he was only half-awake, this small gesture had consoled him: their feeling was the same, the remedy identical. He had slept well after that, and it was only on waking in the morning that he recognized his comfort in it as somewhat pitiful. Rather than being an example of their connection, his pleasure in this small gesture only underscored the lack of such gestures. It highlighted their failure to connect rather than symbolizing some success.
He had promised “in sickness and in health,” but he hadn’t known what the “sickness” could mean. It wasn’t the treatment or the side effects. It was the loneliness. He had promised to endure it with her as long as it lasted—and he absolutely intended to—but it would be nice to feel that she wanted him along in the first place.
R
Despite her constant awareness of cancer in her life and body, Maddie didn’t immediately think of the disease when suddenly she was coughing all the time. Several decades’ worth of the common cold told her subconscious that her ailment was nothing more. But the feverishness set in soon afterward, and Frank reminded her to be concerned. Already she had been sick for a full day when he declared he would be taking her to the doctor.
His insistence brought her to her senses, and then the fear struck: the cancer was in her lungs. She stood unmoving in the upstairs hallway, her hand curled and bracing her against the wall. She was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating when Frank found her there, ready to take her to the doctor.
“No, no, honey,” he said, and his words were the only thing that could have incited her to move, because in that instant of paralyzing fear she was almost ready to give everything up, she was so tired. “It’s not cancer in your lungs. Cancer doesn’t give you a fever. You have an infection, sweetheart. You’re sick. You have an infection.”
Then Maddie released the wall and seized his neck, holding on to him as if he had just rescued her from drowning.
Maddie didn’t want an infection, of course. Neither of them did. Neither did they want the diagnosis of pneumonia, or the week in the hospital that followed, or the sense that this was dragging on too long.
Frank would have admitted that he hadn’t been certain it wasn’t cancer. He hadn’t known for sure. The infection wasn’t good news, either—but he sure as hell would take pneumonia in her lungs over more cancer.
And he was grateful for that moment in the hallway. She had felt fragile to him; there was an unfamiliar lightness in her limbs, as if her bones were hollow. But she had seemed to gain strength from his holding her, and soon enough she was able to draw herself together and walk down to the car. In truth, he had held her longer than he’d needed to. They had stayed there like that for a long time, which had made them late for the appointment.
R
The boys arrived and Frank brought them by the bedroom door. The four of them stood there, looking in, and then Eli ran off. There was something he didn’t like about it: the seeming ceremony or the limitations. But Jake was delighted to see his mother and waved an orange sheet of paper at her from the doorway.
“Look, Mom,” he said. “We’re learning about the states. I picked Pennsylvania!” Clearly it was some kind of research project, and Maddie wondered if second-graders were old enough for such things. But she asked him if he chose that state because that’s where his grandparents lived, and he said yes, and also because they had bears there. Maddie laughed—delighted—and said that yes, Pennsylvania had bears. She told Jake that she couldn’t wait to learn more about Pennsylvania with him, and then Jake moved off, satisfied by this interview with his mother and interested now in the possibility of an after-school snack.
It was Garrett’s turn. He was four and had a hard time understanding the limited visits with his mother. Frank held him in his arms and helped Garrett talk about his day. He had played at the water table and the sand table, and now he clung to his daddy and stared at his mommy. Maddie smiled back, focusing on the dimples on the backs of his hands.
The doctors had allowed her to come home: she was through the pneumonia. But enforced rest was the new prescription; she was to be more careful now than she had been. The doctors declared that when her counts were down, she was to be confined to the bedroom. And because the boys were exposed to God knew what all day at school, the doctors further declared that—on those days—she was allowed absolutely no physical contact with her sons.
Through the open door, she could hear them down in the kitchen. Frank was making up a song about peanut butter and Jake was punctuating it with the word “banana.” The house was too quiet all day while they were gone; she loved to hear this singing and laughter.
She let her head drop back against the pillows. She was not close to crying today; she was getting better. But someone stirred at the door and she raised her head again, eager not to miss him. It was Eli, leaning into the room. His hands rested on the door frame, one on each side, and he let his weight swing from those hands; but his toes were clearly still within the margin of the hall. He was remaining where he was supposed to—no one could say he wasn’t—but his grin told Maddie that he knew—and she knew—that he was in the room.
Then, with a thrust, he pushed off and his body disappeared into the hallway. He’d given Maddie her visit.
R
She didn’t know where he lived. Somewhere in Pittsburgh. She had thought of looking him up before—countless times, before Frank had done it, even before the cancer—but always decided she didn’t want to know.
Still, she thought of it. Pulling out of her driveway in the moonlight, backing out and then making the left-hand turn. The interstate was only a few blocks away, no more than three miles, and she envisioned the road and its orange streetlights, the drugstore and dry cleaner, the car-wash.
&n
bsp; On the interstate, both sides of the road would be lined with trees, but these would appear as shadows at this time of night. She’d have to drive for a while before the landscape opened and the sleeping farms would spring up, silos glinting silver. After a time, the mountains would come and the road would curve between their split sides. She saw her headlights alone cutting the darkness, gaining the pavement just yards before her car. Miles of road between here and Pittsburgh, but all of them connected, each one touching the next, one after the other in a long line that extended mysteriously to that place so long ago.
She thought she could see it: the roads, the turns. They had made the trip many times. She could drive right into the city, right up onto the mountain and stand looking down at the cathedral that was Pittsburgh, sitting bright astride her rivers, for all the world like a shining church in a medieval darkness. And the bridges that spanned the rivers, that stretched across the darkness, and the cars that flowed over them, their headlights like chains or diamond necklaces drawn steadily over the dark.
And somewhere in it—there or in the wrinkled skirts of the suburbs—Vincent would be sleeping, oblivious to her standing there, oblivious that she needed him at all.
10
Maddie had been raised in those wrinkled skirts, in among multitudinous folds that were an irregular system of hills and valleys—one that required curves and climbs to navigate. She knew nothing else. That the sun didn’t hit her living room until it had been up for some time did not register for her—not early on, anyway—as a disadvantage. She had always lived in a valley and many of her friends did the same; many others lived on hilltops and more still on the sides of hills, their homes planted improbably into the tilted landscape.
In the early morning she stood cold and slit-eyed at the bus stop, first hearing the bus and then watching its halting descent down the hill. The brakes screeched and the transmission churned, and Maddie boarded through the stiffly flapping doors, indifferently inhaling diesel fumes. She was accustomed to the bus’s grinding climb up the next hill, and to getting her first glimpse of the sun only when the bus had reached the top.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 11