Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Then Nicky stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Where?

  Downtown. To find Willy. Obviously.

  R

  The night was beautiful: unseasonably warm and clear-skied. Summer’s last hurrah. They drove with the windows down, and warm air beat around the car. They had to shout over it to be heard, wondering aloud what to say when they found Willy.

  And that was it—that was the gist. Not whether they would find Willy, or in what condition they might find him, but when they would find him—and the certainty, in that discovery, that he had been healed.

  Nicky was especially enthusiastic. He was grinning, watching Vincent in the rearview mirror as if fearing he would miss something.

  “What!” Vincent yelled finally, meeting Nicky’s grin in the mirror, smiling and exasperated, embarrassed.

  And, “What!” Nicky shouted back, as if Vincent had been healing people constantly for the last several months and so had long ago become accustomed to people staring at him, waiting for the next dispensation of wonder.

  Amy told Nicky to leave him alone, and Nicky shouted back to her that he couldn’t help it, what was he supposed to do? Vincent could heal people! He didn’t want to miss anything!

  Maddie had imagined multiple scenarios in which she and Vincent talked with Willy again, but always she was unable to move past the moment of discovery; she was never able to fill Willy’s mouth with faith or gratitude. Now, as they made their way through the suburbs, it occurred to her that none of her visions were likely to be realized, that the actual encounter would be something else entirely.

  She closed her eyes and felt the warm wind buffet her. She felt Vincent’s fingers locked through her own and the warmth of his bare arm resting against hers. She listened to him shouting to Nicky in the front seat, to Amy scolding that they needed to turn the music down, to Vincent laughing at her for scolding him. Maddie opened her eyes when Nicky drew her into the conversation: “Maddie, how have I always told you to listen to The Cars?” and Maddie answered him: “Loud!” Laughter.

  Then they were in the tunnel, where the increased noise forced them to speechlessness. Their faces glowed orange from overhead lights that hung in strips like a road’s dotted lines.

  Their car was packed with faith, Maddie thought: the four of them believing that Vincent had healed two people and also that Willy could be found, overtaken in some lightless alley, maybe, or sitting on his blanket near the stadium. Each scenario was equally unlikely, but improbability, she realized, was essential for faith. What was it to have faith if everything was certain? Maddie’s years of church teaching, of watching fellow congregants kneel at the altar were aligning themselves in her mind, exposing an architecture she had never noticed before. Faith—God Himself—was making sense to her. Invisible in the wind-blown car, God was taking on a tangible shape. Maddie squeezed Vincent’s hand.

  And then the darkly lit tunnel spit them out. In all the excitement over Willy, Maddie had forgotten this moment was coming: the shocking emergence into open air. It had always conjured in her a brief but fearsome sense of inevitability, for there was the tunnel’s abrupt end and then suddenly there was Pittsburgh: all vertical lines, shining glass, light. The bridge itself obscured its foundation: it rose before them out of nothing and consumed the horizon. And in both directions, other bridges also crossed the river’s span, laid out like arms to pull you in. After hurtling through the mountain, she was now flying—unimpeded, helpless—into the city’s burning heart, a heart made of glass, concrete, wire, light. There was no helping her.

  But happily, Maddie wasn’t needing help. This was a harmless city, a safe one. One praised in the papers as great for families. A place where, for example, two teenagers could wander unaccompanied to a late afternoon baseball game and come home again, safe and sound, after dark. The breathless fear at the end of the Fort Pitt Tunnel was only a game, some residue of childhood. She knew that now.

  And tonight she rode through that city in a faith-filled car. In no time they had crossed the bridge and were headed toward the stadium. They were driving slowly over ground familiar and less so, each of them trolling sidewalks and squinting down side-streets for a figure that might be Willy’s. All the while they talked of Vincent’s gift or other things, the normal and the miraculous sifting together as if all of a piece.

  It was late when they got back to the Tedescos’ and significantly later when Vincent kissed her goodnight at her front door. He wasn’t bothered that she had told them. He was relieved, he said, that these friends should know. To not tell them felt a little bit like a lie. It was good that they believed in the healings, too—even though they had no proof.

  Maddie laughed, delighted. Of course they would take it this way. The Holiness people, she knew, were faith-filled people. She had known this all her life.

  They hadn’t found Willy that night, and they never did. Maddie’s imagined possibilities were lost in memories of what actually took place: the long, slow car-ride over the thoroughfares of the city; the sense of sitting beside Vincent in the late-summer, God-filled air; the Tedescos joyful and laughing in the front seat.

  14

  Maddie had to wait for the next healing until a cold night in October. She was not expecting it. There were no cars in sight, first of all, reducing the potential for accidents, and there was the excitement of the football game to distract her. There was watching Vincent down on the field, and the group of youth group friends to surround her. Moreover, they had spotted the Tedescos sitting a few sections away, and so had scrambled over the seats to join them. Theirs was a noisy cluster, watching the game among the grown-ups.

  It was a very cold night, and the stadium’s thin metal seats drove the cold through their bones. Most spectators had taken to standing. From her position just to the right of the fifty-yard line, Maddie had a great view of the field, could see Vincent’s every move, and could make eye-contact with Justine, where she sat in the stands with the marching band. But Maddie had nonetheless missed the bad tackle, always wondering where exactly to be watching during football games, learning again and again that it wasn’t always adequate to keep her eye on the ball, that things could take place elsewhere that were equally—if not more—important.

  And so it had happened this time that, watching the ball or watching Vincent, she had heard the crowd react to something she hadn’t seen: the crack, the thud, the whistle and the end of a play. The lull between plays was different this time though, the atmosphere stilled by communal fear. The boy was lying there motionless and already had lain there too long; he hadn’t emerged as he should have, as they usually did when surrounded like that by coaches and players and others who had run on from the sidelines.

  Maddie’s hands were curled into fists inside her mittens, while next to her Nicky and Amy and the others were quiet, their breath clouding in front of them.

  Nicky murmured, “That was awful. That was bad,” and Amy said, after a moment or two, “Vince is there.”

  She was right. Maddie had missed it but now recognized Vincent’s frame bent over the boy, helping the coaches from both teams to surround him, while the other players hung back in pairs or threes or alone and looked toward the motionless player.

  “This could be serious,” Nicky said in a low voice, turning as he did so to look around. Involuntarily Maddie turned, too, and saw the stricken faces of the adults. The students in their section had fallen silent, standing still on the bleachers. Maddie caught Justine’s eye. She looked solemn and shook her head.

  “What happened? I didn’t see what happened,” Maddie said, and Nicky explained in a low voice, gesturing with his gloved hands to show the way one boy had hit the other boy and how his neck had snapped back. He had landed on the back of his head while the rest of his body was in the air. Clearly the force of his body slamming into his head at that speed, at that angle, could do serious damage.

  “Might have a broken neck,” Nicky said, and Amy murmured agreement
while Maddie entertained unsolicited visions of paralysis in its varying awful forms.

  The small crowd around the motionless player shifted. A stretcher was carried in from the sidelines; on the track, the lights of an ambulance flashed. The few players around the boy stood back, making room. But Vincent remained, kneeling there near the boy’s head, his helmet next to him on the ground. Maddie could recognize his profile and the fall of his hair even at this great distance, would know, even from this far away, the shape of his arms.

  The medics closed in, and still Vincent remained by the boy. Then suddenly the injured boy was standing in their midst, upright and not needing the stretcher after all. He was standing and then walking to the sidelines of the opposing team—not walking with a limp but walking carefully, gingerly for all that he’d been through, as if he himself couldn’t quite trust the miracle despite the fact that he was the center of it.

  Cheers came from all sides. What a relief! What a gift they’d been given, and in the face of such terrible potential loss! The game was resumed, and Maddie never remembered which team won.

  Then there they were, the four of them at the Pizza Hut, and Nicky blew past any discussion of the game or major plays and closed in on the injury in the third quarter.

  “I can’t believe he walked out of there, man,” Nicky said, and Vincent said he could hardly believe it himself. The boy couldn’t have—shouldn’t have—walked away.

  “He couldn’t move,” Vincent was saying, “It was really scary.” They had brought the stretcher; they were getting ready to strap him to the body board, and then the kid had bent his knees and rested his feet on the ground. Then he was sitting, and then he stood up.

  “Amazing,” Nicky said.

  Vincent said, “Yeah,” and smiled. He took a bite of his pizza.

  “Vincent,” Amy said, prodding him for more.

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you going to tell us what happened out there?”

  “I think you saw what happened out there,” Vincent said. He was eating, wiping his mouth with a napkin as if he were a normal person, a boy in high school eating pizza after a football game.

  “Come on, Vincent,” Maddie said.

  “We want to hear about it from your perspective,” Amy said.

  “I’ve told you my perspective.”

  “You healed him, didn’t you,” Nicky said.

  Vincent sighed and stretched his arms high over his head, his body arched away from the table. “Who knows?” he said, mid-stretch.

  “You said it yourself,” Nicky said. “You said he couldn’t move.”

  Well, Vincent said, it was true. It was scary. But that was all Vincent knew. All he knew for sure was everything he had already told them. What more did they want him to say? He hadn’t seen the tackle, but the play ended and then the game stopped because the guy was lying there on the ground, and the coaches were running over to him.

  Vincent had gone to him, too. It used to be that he wouldn’t go anywhere near an injured player; he always left that to the experts. Not that he was an expert now. But if someone’s in trouble, shouldn’t we do whatever we can to help? That’s all he was doing. He went over to the kid to pray for him, that was all. It wasn’t a big deal.

  “Same as you did for me,” Maddie said.

  “Same as you did for Willy,” Nicky said.

  “Yeah,” said Vincent. He shrugged, and they were all quiet for a moment, waiting, Maddie thought, for Vincent to make the obvious connection.

  But it was Nicky who finally said it: “You healed the kid.”

  “Well—” said Vincent.

  “Vincent,” said Amy with some delighted frustration. “You of little faith,” she said.

  Maddie was glad she said it. She didn’t want Vincent to make light of it—and that seemed to be what he was doing.

  “What,” said Vincent. He was straight-faced and serious. “I have faith, Amy,” he said.

  Amy blushed, as if he’d scolded her. “Well, I know that,” she said quickly.

  “Yeah, but it’s probably important that you yourself believe you healed the kid,” Nicky said.

  Maddie agreed with Nicky, and said so.

  “Important to who?” Vincent asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘Important to who?’” Nicky asked.

  “I mean, who does it matter to that I have faith here?”

  They were all quiet for a moment, and in the silence, Maddie felt herself somehow implicated. She knew that Vincent trusted in God. The Tedescos knew it, too. So why were they telling him, of all people, to have faith?

  Amy’s eventual response shed no light. “God just wants us to have faith, Vincent,” she said.

  Vincent sat back, smiling. “Yes. And I think we’ve already established that I do have faith. So what’s the problem?”

  “I just think it’s pretty important that you believe in what happened,” Amy said gently.

  Maddie agreed with her. That was it: they knew Vincent had faith, but did he believe his own miracle? And didn’t he need to? Wasn’t that how it worked? With faith you can move mountains, or something like that.

  “What exactly do you want me to believe?” Vincent asked. “I was there. I saw the kid get up. But I don’t know how badly he was hurt in the first place.”

  “Well,” Nicky said, “I think there is every reason to believe the kid was hurt badly. He might have been paralyzed, Vince.”

  “Right,” Vincent said. His tone wasn’t annoyed; he sounded remarkably self-assured. He spoke as if he was simply explaining to his friends things he expected them to understand, believing they would come along eventually. “But I don’t know exactly what happened out there, and that’s fine,” he said. “Isn’t that fine? Isn’t that okay? Not to know?” His question was sincere.

  “I think it’s pretty important that you believe in what happened,” Amy said gently. “God wants us to have faith.” She was repeating herself, but the words were comfortingly familiar, and Maddie waited for Vincent to agree. She wanted him to agree, because Amy and Nicky were offering a trustworthy framework for Vincent’s apparent gift, a framework Maddie understood: we believe, we have faith, and God works through us. If Vincent didn’t believe it, then it wouldn’t keep happening—and Maddie felt keenly that healings were something that should definitely keep happening.

  “Okay, but here’s the thing,” Vincent said. “I didn’t heal him. I haven’t healed anybody. If anybody is doing any healing around here, it’s God doing the healing.”

  Nicky leaned toward him, as if Vincent were in want of comfort. Vincent had been vehement, but still he didn’t seem perturbed. He helped himself to another piece of pizza.

  Nicky said, “We all understand that it’s God who heals, Vince, but you need to understand that you have an incredible gift here. It’s important. And to use your gift, you’re going to have to have faith.”

  Vincent was listening carefully. He focused on Nicky’s face, and when Nicky was quiet, Vincent still waited as if digesting his words.

  Finally, “Okay, fine. Got it,” he said. “It’s just that I want my faith to be in God and not in healing people, you know? God will do what he wants to do—and if he wants to heal people, then he’s gonna heal people.”

  “Yes,” Amy broke in, almost exasperated, “but Vincent, this might be a really powerful gift.”

  And Nicky said, “You have a responsibility, Vince.”

  “Okay,” said Vincent. “That may be. But I don’t know what God is going to do, do you? I think the only thing I can do is pray about it. And if someone is hurt again or sick or whatever, I’m going to be praying. What else should I do? What should anyone do?”

  What more could any of them say? Maddie and the Tedescos both agreed with him: Who would disagree about praying? All of them could—and should—pray.

  It was the bit about what God wanted that eluded Maddie. Was that possible to determine? And anyway, didn’t God always want to heal people? Wasn’t it
always a lack of faith that prevented people getting healed in the first place?

  Maddie decided that Vincent had far more faith than most people. Regardless of his opinion as to how it worked or even what he did or should believe, he had healed three people now.

  Why shouldn’t she believe this to be a miracle? What, in all honesty, had she managed to retain from sophomore-year biology that might convince her otherwise? Her knowledge of actual biological functions was understandably limited, her comprehension of muscle, nerve, ligament and sinew was, at best, tentative.

  Meanwhile, the Bible was rife with miracle. She had been taught to live in expectation. And then, below Amy’s ribcage, was the certain abdominal swell—a pregnancy advancing where it had once seemed impossible.

  Nicky announced it during a Sunday evening service in November: Amy was three months along! A collective gasp and the church erupted in applause. People stood to their feet with shouts and cheers; they left their seats and surrounded—as best they could, in the middle of the pews—Nicky and Amy both. The service was delayed for a long time by all of this, and when the congregation finally managed to resume some decorum, Pastor McLaughlin stood before them wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, and commented that this was one of the best worship services he had ever known.

  Nicky had let Vincent and Maddie in on the news the night before, informing them in a roundabout way by asking what they would be doing in June.

  In June? Vincent would be graduating. They would both be finding jobs for the summer, and in August, Vincent would head upstate with a scholarship to play football.

  They were standing in the Tedescos’ kitchen; Amy’s back was to them where she stood at the sink. Vincent had his arm around Maddie. June was a long way off.

  “We were hoping you could babysit,” Nicky had said casually. He was replacing the garbage bag in the trashcan, and Maddie hadn’t understood what Nicky could possibly be talking about.

  It was Vincent who understood, scarcely missing a beat before he let out a whoop and hoisted Nicky off his feet, and then he was gripping Amy in his arms and trying to spin with her around their far-too-little kitchen.