Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  She no longer played like this, of course. The driveway had long been nothing other than a means to the street, and more recently the means by which Vincent often entered her world. His was a little car—a Pacer or something equally humble—something old and beat up, because Vincent’s family didn’t have much money, not that this mattered to her. What mattered was that Vincent was arriving in her driveway, coming to the house, chatting with her parents and taking her away again. They were headed to church, school, the plot-points on which her world turned, but also now to the trolley stop, because they were going downtown to a baseball game, or to get ice cream at the Dairy Queen, to the Tedescos’, to the roller rink.

  Like the driveway at the end of her childhood game, the whole of her life was now colored and filled by Vincent. He left no corner untouched; nothing remained to her that did not also belong to him or was not also inhabited by him, which was fine with Maddie. She couldn’t say—even now in the summer when they sat on the back steps of Vincent’s porch and, later, when Willy stumbled across the intersection—that she had seen it coming. She had been just as surprised as the villagers would have been—the tiny, imagined inhabitants of her driveway civilizations—when the flood came blasting over the paved rise and washed them all away.

  Of course, a flooded landscape is no landscape at all, but this did not bother Maddie. Why should she be bothered when her only reaction to this change was new and whelming joy? Her identity as Camaro-victim and ambulance patient was lost in being Vincent Elander’s girlfriend. And while that new identity came with considerable school-wide fame, it also came with the comfort of his near-constant presence, making her lost anonymity somewhat less of a loss.

  Moreover, her parents loved him. Not only was he a good athlete (Maddie’s father was a huge football fan), but his commitment to church life (he never missed a service) was impressive. And he was very respectful—Maddie’s parents commented on this with some frequency—to their daughter.

  Maddie was happily adrift on this flood, and she assumed the same of everyone else because she was young; because when you are in love, everything looks beautiful.

  Who could be bothered, in the radiance of this transition, by the lesser details—that, for example, Vincent’s friends must become her own, must also become Justine’s friends? Certainly not Justine, whose lunch experience now included Vincent and his glut of loud companions. Justine handled it even better than Maddie; she kept pace with their banter and business. Her rise in social standing was meteoric. It couldn’t matter that it came through the tether of Maddie’s friendship.

  No, Maddie had no inkling of dissatisfaction in Justine, with the exception of a singular conversation early in that only summer—Vincent’s summer. And even then it was merely Justine’s raised eyebrow. That was all.

  It was in the Tedescos’ backyard at some informal youth group gathering. The sun had gone down, the grass grown cool underfoot. Teenagers clustered in groups here and there on the patio. Some were shooting hoops in the driveway, others tossed a Frisbee on the lawn. Nicky, Vincent, Maddie and Justine sat together at the picnic table, holding disposable cups of warming soda.

  They had likely been talking about summer plans and jobs, about the freedom of the months stretching ahead. And then—who knew why?—Vincent flipped an invisible switch, turning their casual conversation into an earnest debate on church doctrine.

  He had asked a question about Communion, of all things—an honest query that marked him as still “new” to church life. What was with the restrictions on who could or couldn’t take Communion?

  An odd question, especially from a teenager. But this was Vincent.

  Except that it made Maddie uneasy. She remembered Justine’s words after his apparent altar-call conversion: “Wait and see,” she had said.

  Justine had a mind of her own. Maddie was accustomed to how carefully she weighed things and came, sometimes rather over-confidently, to her own conclusions. Now Vincent was innocently asking questions about church practice. Despite his apparent commitment to follow up on his conversion experience, Justine might remain unconvinced. He couldn’t know this, but Maddie thought he shouldn’t be giving Justine fodder for her doubt.

  As the present adult and a minister, Nicky might have answered him, and Maddie wished he would. But he crossed his arms over his chest and waited for the conversation to unfold, smiling as if he had been hoping through years of youth ministry for a debate about Communion on his backyard patio.

  Of course, Justine enthusiastically took up the subject. This sort of thing was fascinating to her. She perceived herself as something of an expert—which might have been a fair assessment for a person well-churched as she was.

  Communion wasn’t just for anybody, she said. It would lose all meaning if just anybody could take it. If you did it that way, then you might just as well take it anytime, anywhere. Which would make it into another meal. A snack, even—which would be wrong. The whole thing was deeply meaningful, she said. You can’t take Communion until you understand and accept that meaning.

  This was the right answer, but Maddie nonetheless felt a rising sense of protectiveness for Vincent. How could he be expected to understand that Communion was only for saved people, for people who accepted the sacrificial death of Jesus? She saw in her mind’s eye the wide brass plates, bearing flat discs of Communion bread, passed down the rows of pews.

  Vincent apparently was unsatisfied. He countered that nobody really understood Communion, right? Who could? And the disciples—the first people to take Communion—were the best example of this. They didn’t get it at all. They hadn’t even understood that Jesus was going to die. Vincent said that much was obvious—and yet they were “allowed” to take it. Besides, he said, if people were really and truly ingesting the body and blood of Jesus, then couldn’t one expect it to have an impact—even without their understanding it?

  Here Justine was quick to point out what Maddie had immediately thought: the body and blood were symbolic. It wasn’t actually the body and blood. That was just for Catholics.

  But Vincent had shrugged off what seemed to him inconsequential distinction. Symbol or the real deal, Vincent said, Communion was Communion. Taking Communion, whether or not you really understood it, would change a person, might even convert, might even save a person. In which case, everybody should be allowed to take it. Heck! Everyone at church should want everyone possible to take it. He spoke with emphatic conviction, and Maddie was impressed. For someone so new to this, he clearly thought and felt deeply about it—far more than Maddie ever had. But the protectiveness surged again: Justine thrived on argument. She wouldn’t be gentle with him.

  Justine doubled back. She said that the disciples hadn’t gotten it because the Last Supper was before Christ’s death and resurrection. She said that, in the church today, we understand Communion. We understand it now, Vincent, she said, gently repeating herself.

  Almost condescendingly, Maddie feared, and she reached for Vincent’s hand.

  Vincent took her hand across the table, mindlessly lacing his fingers through hers, and he laughed out loud. “Do we understand it?” he asked her, and he leaned toward her over the table. “Do we?” he said again.

  Maddie cringed at the laughter. She could see that Vincent was enjoying the conversation, but she wasn’t sure Justine felt the same.

  That was when Justine raised her eyebrow. “Yes,” she said. Curtly. Smugly? Maddie didn’t like it.

  But the taut dialogue between them had been broken by Vincent’s laughter, and then Nicky spoke. He said there was lots they still didn’t understand, lots no one understands—and the three of them waited on him, hoping, perhaps, that he could parse it for them. Maybe he could itemize what, exactly, they—meaning the church or even Christians in general—could list as comprehensible and firm.

  Nicky didn’t. Years later, Maddie would still wonder why he hadn’t resolved the debate, reasserting doctrinal truth as Justine had so carefully explained i
t and putting their questions to rest. Maybe—as it seemed—he had simply enjoyed the conversation, believing that it was good for Vincent to ask and Justine to answer. Maybe he expected that God would intervene subtly and, as ever, in his own time.

  What Nicky did say was that theirs had been an excellent conversation, the best one he’d heard in weeks. He said he was proud to know them, proud to know that they thought about such important things, and that they should think about them some more.

  Then he invited Vincent to help him find the leftover pizza, and the two of them left the table, leaving Maddie with a rare Justine: one who had not clearly won an argument.

  Maddie waited for her to speak, as she wasn’t sure what to say. She thought that Vincent had actually made some good points. He had questioned things she hadn’t thought possible to question, and what he had said made sense.

  And there sat Justine with centuries of church tradition just over her shoulder—tradition, Maddie thought, that certainly stood for something, even if she herself couldn’t articulate what.

  “Nicky sure likes Vincent, doesn’t he?” Justine said. She was watching them across the yard, smiling.

  Maddie followed Justine’s gaze to where Nicky and Vincent had joined a game of football, each with a slice of pizza in his hand. “Yes,” she said aloud. “Yes, he does.”

  R

  And what wasn’t there to like? Maddie had a close-up view to all of it: Vincent playing catch with his little brothers in the backyard or helping them with their homework; Vincent carrying the groceries inside, the laundry up from the basement. He teased his mother; they laughed together a lot. She chased him around the kitchen, making to whip him with the dishtowel. Or he got hold of the dishtowel, and then their roles were reversed. He was trying always, he told Maddie once, to make up for the fact that his mom was doing all of the parenting alone. His dad had left when Vincent was seven.

  No one else, really, was privy to that view. But Nicky—and Justine—and everyone else knew his involvement at the church: Vincent voluntarily took on the task of mowing the lawn that summer. He helped collect the offering on Sundays. And he met regularly with Pastor McLaughlin in his study.

  “Forget God’s gift to women,” Justine said. “Your boyfriend thinks he’s God’s gift to the church.”

  Maddie suppressed immediate irritation. “They’re studying the Bible, Justine,” she said.

  “Then he thinks he’s God’s gift to God,” Justine answered.

  When Maddie didn’t laugh Justine told her, “Relax, I’m kidding!”

  But Justine wasn’t kidding the time she gave her warning: “You be careful, Maddie,” she said. “You know that Vincent Elander is used to having sex with his girlfriends.”

  Maddie was shocked. This was, at the very least, an intrusion into her privacy and, even more so, an assault on Vincent’s character. Everyone knew that Vincent Elander had changed. He hadn’t had a drink since he’d become a Christian. He had completely quit swearing. His friends at school even teased him for being a “Bible beater.” And he had sworn off sex until marriage.

  That conversation had also been an unexpected one for Maddie who, until very recently, had seen sex as a forbidden swimming pool lost behind insurmountable concrete walls topped in loops of barbed wire. And then Vincent had talked with her almost like it was a confession, sitting across from Maddie at the Pizza Hut, holding both her hands across the table. In a low voice, he had gone through the list of girls he’d had sex with: when, where, how many times. And while the list was a good deal shorter than legend or even speculation might have credited him for, Maddie felt some of her innocence lost in this uninvited divulgence.

  She hadn’t liked it; she couldn’t quite articulate why. But she managed to question him. Why did he need to tell her? Didn’t he realize that she would be thinking about this now, that she would think about it every time she saw one of those girls (two of them still went to their school)? And didn’t he already know that she planned to wait until marriage to have sex? Where was the urgency in talking about it?

  But Vincent wouldn’t apologize for telling her. “It’s important, Maddie,” he said. He needed her to know.

  “Why?” Maddie asked him. What happened before didn’t matter. He was different now and she knew that.

  They were in her driveway now. He had turned off the engine and was looking away from her, out the window on the driver’s side, searching, perhaps, for a way to explain himself.

  “Maddie,” he said, “you’re different from the other girls—all the other girls. You’re the real deal,” he said, looking at her now. “You’re special. I don’t want to treat you like them. I don’t want us to be like that. I just don’t,” he said.

  How to translate that to Justine—as if it were any of her business? Should Maddie tell her how there were honest-to-goodness tears in his eyes when he said that, how he took her hand and kissed it, like something out of a fairy tale?

  She could guess what Justine would say: it was too good to be true.

  And then Maddie realized that Vincent’s sincerity was beyond Justine. For all her years of Sunday school and knowledge of doctrine, Justine had a seam of skepticism in her, and when it came to Vincent Elander, skepticism won out over faith. Who knew why? But telling Justine about that conversation with Vincent, his pledge of sexual purity, his earnestness about God, would be (the strange biblical simile took on practical meaning) throwing pearls to pigs.

  “Oh, yes, well, he’s different now,” Maddie said, trying to sound casual and not too confident, when in fact and in both cases, the opposite was true.

  Justine had scarcely waited for that reply. “I heard that Tracy Delaney had to get an abortion her senior year.” She said it almost lightly, as if tossing it at her, but Maddie received it as a challenge. Tracy Delaney had been Vincent’s steady girlfriend when she was a senior. She was the former captain of the high school cheerleading squad and was now a rising sophomore at Penn State.

  “That’s a lie, Justine. It’s a lie and a mean rumor, and I hope you haven’t said it to anyone else.”

  “How do you know it’s a lie? What if it isn’t?” Justine said.

  “Because Vincent would have told me,” Maddie answered, now glad of his confession.

  Justine was quiet for a moment.

  “He’s really different now, Justine,” Maddie said, more gently.

  Justine answered quickly, hanging her words on the end of Maddie’s sentence. “Oh, I know,” she said. “I know he is. I just felt like I should say something, you know. As a friend. That’s all.”

  Maddie thanked her. It seemed the only thing to do.

  Yet, for a while anyway, she was angry with Justine. She’d had no right talking to her about sex. Maddie knew the rules; she knew right from wrong.

  But the timing of it was uncanny, as if Justine could actually tell, as if she knew things impossible for her to know. That, just last Sunday afternoon, kissing Vincent had taken on unanticipated power. There was no denying that Maddie liked kissing him, that sometimes—sitting next to him in church or talking with him and the Tedescos—she was mentally racing ahead to when she could be alone with him. But there was always a resolve within it. Kissing, holding hands: that was all. Hands never straying from waist, neck. The rules were simple.

  And then, that Sunday afternoon as he kissed her, as she received it, returned it (acts surprisingly both novel and instinctive), she felt her resolve soften. It was a small collapse, the sort of thing no one would notice.

  Vincent must have sensed it—and how? She didn’t act on it, not that she knew of, anyway. But he had stopped her. He had broken away from her abruptly and had taken hold of her face with both hands and kissed her, firmly, on the forehead. And then he had taken her home.

  Two days after that, he took her out for dinner so that he could confess his sexual history to her in a booth at the Pizza Hut.

  It was as if Justine had surmised what Maddie had never told her: that
the defenses she had built against sexual temptation were not quite so resolute as she thought.

  But it didn’t matter. After his confession, Maddie was newly resolved—with Vincent—to do what was right. And certainly Maddie would never tell Justine about any of this. She would never tell anyone. Nobody—not in her world, anyway—talked about these things.

  13

  Vincent’s summer meant baseball, and so came the first professional baseball game, all the way downtown, just the two of them on a weekday evening. That was when Maddie met Willy, and even that—she decided as they walked away—was a little bit exhilarating.

  Vincent walked with a kind of lope: there was a smoothness to his stride and a slight lift in his step. When the crowd pressed nearer at the gate, Maddie held his arm and felt the muscles grow taut under her fingers. He scanned the faces of the people around them and looked briefly down at Maddie in almost absent-minded reassurance. But he smiled broadly as he showed her their seats: behind home plate, the best seats he’d ever had, he said. They didn’t notice that the clouds had come in. The night sky was eclipsed by stadium light, and they weren’t looking up. Vincent was showing Maddie the game; she hadn’t cared about it before and now was determined to love it. He was teaching her to keep score in the game program. The first drops of rain surprised them; rain hadn’t been in the forecast. Who would have expected this sudden downpour that had them all scrambling up the steps to the shelter of the stadium?

  Already drenched, Vincent and Maddie watched through the rain as groundskeepers unrolled tarps on the field. It was only the bottom of the fourth. How long could the rain go on like this? It would stop soon enough. Vincent and Maddie—and most of that night’s fans, so it seemed—would wait it out.

  But when an hour passed and it was still coming down, the crowd shifted its weight. Having turned away from the edges of the field to the concrete walkways and concession stands of the stadium, the waiting fans finally acquiesced to the weather. Maddie and Vincent felt the population thinning, and still the rain came down. The tarps were pocked with puddles.