Gathered in this way, they reached for Mr. Pavlik’s covered body, finding limbs through the blanket. The elders and Pastor McLaughlin flanked his sides, Mrs. Pavlik gripped his right foot, Maddie rested her hand lightly on his left. Then they bowed their heads and closed their eyes—except for Maddie, who raised her head to watch Vincent lay both of his hands on Mr. Pavlik’s shaved head.
She hadn’t wanted to look at Mr. Pavlik when she entered the room. He had come to church after his last surgery, months ago now, confined to a wheelchair, his head mercifully wrapped in a bandage and then covered in a hat. But she thought for certain today when finding his head bare that she noted swelling near his ear, and the thought frightened her. Pastor McLaughlin prayed aloud, and Maddie wondered how Vincent could bear to put his hands on that venous head where pink scars traced its contours and then disappeared into the pillow.
Next to her, Mrs. Pavlik sighed. Maddie stole a glance at her face to see it red and tear-streaked. Her eyes were closed, but tears spilled from them nonetheless, and her lips were moving. Maddie considered the Pavliks’ partnership. He was tall and thin; she was short and heavy-set. He was quiet, given to making one laugh with his dry humor, but only if you hung around to listen. Mrs. Pavlik, on the other hand, talked constantly, so much that you found yourself tuning her out. She was the busy sort, always doing something. She was responsible for the kitchen at church and for many of the decorations in the church building. Even there in the hospital she was constant motion, always fussing over her motionless husband, adjusting his blanket or his bed sheet, patting his leg, stroking his arm. During the prayer she rubbed his foot vigorously, and briefly the blanket came away and exposed bare toes, long and somewhat yellowed.
This unanticipated nakedness, innocent as it was, shocked Maddie. Suddenly she had a vivid sense of Mr. Pavlik’s body there in front of her—all of it. His long limbs motionless, their muscles flaccid and sagging, his torso and the organs at work inside it: spleen, liver, lengths of intestine. He was unconscious—or maybe only sleeping—but his heart continued its mindless contractions, pushing the blood out to his extremities and drawing it back again. And what other crucial fluids pulsed among the membranes of tissue and bone?
She marveled at the body as container, grotesquely complex and having far too many distasteful needs. Yet here Mr. Pavlik wasn’t making use of his body at all: something had taken root in the brain, had grown there and now was commanding his stillness. For a moment, the idea that he should be living—lying there mute, blind, unmoving—seemed absurd.
And yet she had seen that his toenails were neatly trimmed. Maddie could imagine Mrs. Pavlik bent over her husband’s bare foot, wielding the nail scissors. She would have chatted away as she cut his toenails for him, now accustomed to his silence but talking to him nonetheless, tending to the heedless growth of these nails. She would have thought nothing of the length of those toes and their hairlessness or the yellowing of the flesh. To her, Maddie supposed, it was all familiarity, as customary to her as her own two feet. She probably didn’t find it disgusting.
Maddie did. She couldn’t imagine fondness over such a thing. She couldn’t imagine an aging lover; she couldn’t imagine loving Vincent in any way other than the way he was now. Even if he were to age—which was almost inconceivable—he wouldn’t age like this.
Through the blanket, Maddie could feel the bony thinness of Mr. Pavlik’s left foot, and she closed her eyes as if to shut the image away. She thought instead of Vincent’s toes, which she had seen often enough. They were strong and brown, like his whole body had been during the summer. She remembered swimming with him and the tautness of his torso and the bulk of muscle in his arms.
He had swum up and caught her from behind. He was pinning her arms against her chest, teasing and threatening to force her underwater, and she had screamed and struggled against him but hadn’t failed to sense his chest against her back. She had been acutely aware of that naked contact between their bodies, more than she was aware of his arms around her shoulders or his hands on her wrists. Even then, when everything about him had been new to her and when every physical interaction felt alive, she had wanted more.
The prayer was over. She hadn’t heard the closing words, but everyone around her was straightening, withdrawing the hands that had taken hold of Mr. Pavlik’s body. There were exhalations and clearings of throat, bleary-eyed blinking as the room returned to focus.
Before she knew what to do with herself, Maddie found that Mrs. Pavlik had taken her hand.
“Oh, you young people are just so wonderful,” she said. “It’s so good of you to come. So good of you.”
“We’re glad to do it,” Maddie found herself saying.
“Just wait until Dean finds out you were here,” she said, and she gripped Mr. Pavlik’s left foot, the one Maddie had instantly released at the close of the prayer. She clasped his feet with both hands and went on: “He doesn’t know now. He doesn’t know you all are here. He’s sleeping now. But when he wakes up, I’ll tell him. You were in his Sunday school class, weren’t you, Maddie?”
“Yes. Fourth grade.” She remembered his retelling the story of the Genesis Joseph: it had been compelling the way he extended the saga from one week to the next, this Sunday leaving Joseph in the bottom of an abandoned well, next week in the bottom of a prison, and the next as second-in-command over Egypt. For the first time in years, Maddie had been interested in going to Sunday school; attending Sunday school had been, prior to the fourth grade, decidedly old hat: she knew every story they were going to teach her; she’d been going to Sunday school since she was two.
Mr. Pavlik had made it exciting again.
“Well, Dean will be delighted that you were here. He talks about you, you know. He talks about all of you. He hasn’t forgotten a single one of his Sunday school students,” she said. She was still holding on to both of his blanketed feet, and now she was smiling at his face: the closed eyes, the sallow complexion, the loose skin that hung down in folds below his jawbone.
R
The news was not good. Mr. Pavlik had taken a turn for the worse; the tumor had grown. That disappointment came on Sunday morning, the first day after their hospital-beside prayers, and it continued trickling out after that, day after day of bad news. He was drifting in and out of consciousness. He would be home and in hospice care before the week was out—and after that, maybe he had another week left. Family was coming in from out of town.
Maddie found this incomprehensible. What could it mean? Had there been some mistake? Her mind stabbed wildly at guesses, and time and again she returned to the same fears: they should have kept Vincent’s gift a secret; or worse, they had been mistaken from the outset—Vincent had never healed anyone.
She traced the history. Her own healing hadn’t been immediate—not quite. The pain hadn’t dissolved right away. The healing had taken time—much of the ambulance ride, at least—to sink in. And Willy’s healing hadn’t been instantaneous either—or had it? When he stumbled away from them, he had still clutched his crippled arm to his chest. She tried to reconstruct the memory, but always his retreating image dissolved in the rain, his back turned against her.
She asked Vincent about it, pressing him for answers that she inexplicably believed he could offer: “Do you think maybe it just takes time, Vincent? Do you think it will still work?” The healing had to work. It had to. If Mr. Pavlik’s tumor continued on the way it seemed to be doing… The ramifications were too many. Maddie didn’t like to consider them.
Vincent answered gently but without encouragement. “I don’t know, Maddie,” he said. “We can keep praying, I guess.”
Which is what the whole church had been doing for years, Maddie thought with some resentment. Mr. Pavlik had been diagnosed over two years ago. No one had done anything more or less than pray for years.
This was all Vincent could muster? If he couldn’t produce miraculous results, then he might at least show more concern. Worry, maybe, or a s
ense of pending loss. He seemed immune to fears of failure and all that it would mean.
Justine was more sympathetic. She, too, had known Mr. Pavlik her whole life. But she was nonetheless somewhat surprised by Maddie’s distraction over it. After all, the church had known its losses over the years, and neither she nor Maddie was terribly close to Mr. Pavlik. “Why are you so concerned about him, Maddie? I mean, he’s a nice guy and everything,” she said.
This was a lunchtime conversation, and as usual, their table was crowded. At Justine’s question, Maddie stole a look at Vincent, who didn’t appear to be listening. He seemed blissfully unbothered by Dean Pavlik’s plummet towards death and therefore was able to enjoy his lunch, his friends. At that moment, he was creating goalposts with his fingers on the tabletop, waiting for his friend Brad to send a paper football flying between them.
Maddie felt exasperated, and also, suddenly, profoundly alone. Other than the Tedescos and the group who had prayed in the hospital room last Saturday, no one knew about Vincent’s gift. Within that number, perhaps only Nicky and Amy truly believed it, while Vincent, gift-bearer himself, didn’t really seem to care about it one way or the other.
Maddie wanted desperately to tell Justine everything. She wanted that matter-of-fact approach to weigh in on all of it. She felt sure that, better than any of them—Nicky and Pastor McLaughlin included—Justine would know what to do.
And then Maddie corrected herself: What was there to do? No one, it seemed, could stop Mr. Pavlik from dying. The latest report had come to her mother via phone that very morning: Mr. Pavlik had been unconscious for two days. The end was certainly near, likely in less than a week.
So instead, Maddie tried to feign nonchalance. She agreed with Justine that Mr. Pavlik was a nice guy and said something about how she had loved having him for Sunday school. But she didn’t actually remember details of that year; she just remembered the lessons. It was Justine who reminded her of the candy jar he kept in the classroom as incentive to memorize Bible verses. In a sudden burst of laughter, she recounted the story of the Sunday when Tim Douglas had gagged on a butterscotch, and a panicked Mr. Pavlik lunged across the room to give him the Heimlich.
“Remember that, Maddie? Do you remember that? Mr. Pavlik was hilarious. I can still see the look on his face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so scared in my life.”
Maddie recalled the incident and laughed with Justine, but inside she felt sick. She thought through the previous Saturday morning, all of them around his body, with Vincent standing by his head. Was it because she herself hadn’t prayed? She hadn’t meant not to pray, but she had been distracted. Was there a secret to how it was done? Were there hoops to jump through? Right things to say—like a magic trick?
Worse still, she recounted how she had been distracted during the prayer. It had been Vincent’s body. She hadn’t meant to think about it. The thoughts and memories were always empowered by wills of their own: thoughts of him kissing her, touching her.
She was suspended by sudden horror, hearing Mrs. Pavlik’s cheerful voice bubbling on and on. Her house would be empty: the hospice nurse, their family, Mr. Pavlik gone. Who would she talk to? She talked all the time; who would Mrs. Pavlik be without her unceasing chatter? Maddie imagined it, heartsick: Mrs. Pavlik would continue to talk; her voice would fill the silent rooms of the house, percolating in kitchen, bath, bedroom, and no one to hear her.
“God doesn’t always heal people, you know,” said Justine, who believed that Maddie’s interest in Mr. Pavlik turned on butterscotch and peppermints in the fourth grade. “Think of Mrs. Moorland. She was on the prayer chain for years, and she died.”
Mrs. Moorland had indeed died. What was it? Congestive heart failure or something like that. Maddie knew that Justine was right, and besides, no one lives forever. But given Vincent’s gift, there was something vulgar in mild acceptance. Maddie had seen four people unaccountably healed—none of whom had needed healing the way that Mr. Pavlik did. If healing was a possibility, then it was wrong for it to be withheld. Mr. Pavlik’s dying smacked of cruelty.
“It’s true,” Vincent said. “People pray for people to get better all the time, and they die anyway.” It was his turn with the paper football now, and he hunched down to align his eye with its projected path. Maddie was amazed by his apparent indifference. He had laid his hands on that scarred head. He was the one with the gift. How could he be so casual about this?
But she wouldn’t question him about it. Not now, in the middle of this terrible situation, and not at the lunch table filled with their friends. Maddie would sooner pick a quarrel with anyone else.
“Doesn’t it make you kind of wonder about God?” She ventured the thought quietly, surprising herself. She hadn’t realized that she was wondering about him, and now that she knew, she wished immediately she hadn’t said so aloud.
“No,” said Justine and Vincent, simultaneously. Impressive, really, their coming together like this now, of all times.
“It depends on what you believe about God. I mean, you have to believe he’s good,” Vincent said.
Of course Maddie believed he was good. She had been told all her life that God was good. It was wrong to think otherwise.
“Yes, God is good,” Justine answered Vincent. “It’s not a question of him being good. But there’s evil in the world. Bad things happen. People get sick. People die. It’s part of life.”
Maddie digested this. Justine was right, she reasoned, but it was a terrible state of affairs. Again she heard Mrs. Pavlik’s voice going on and on, unanswered. And she thought, too, of Matthew, Justine’s little brother. They had prayed for him to be cured of leukemia. They had asked for wisdom for the doctors. They had said all the things they always say, she was sure of it. She herself had prayed for him at the time, lisping six-year-old that she was, when her parents came to tuck her in at night. He was only four years old when he died.
Maddie remembered his funeral. The coffin had been small, engulfed in white flowers. Was God good?
“So are you saying that stuff happens without God in control of it?” Vincent was asking.
“All I’m saying is that there’s evil in the world,” Justine said. The other conversations at their lunch table had grown quiet, and Maddie caught sight of the absurdity: high school students, some of them church-goers, some completely disinterested, entertaining this conversation in the cafeteria.
“I know there’s evil in the world,” Vincent was saying, not dispassionately, but with something reserved, his energies given to reason. “I’m asking is God in control of the evil?”
What is evil exactly, Maddie wanted to know. Death seemed a likely suspect. She had one strong memory of Matthew: he was sitting in church next to Justine, his legs straight out in front of him, his heels coming just to the edge of the pew. He was driving his toy pick-up truck over his knees and making puttering sounds with wet lips.
Did God make Matthew die? Did God let evil make Matthew die? What was the difference?
“God doesn’t make bad things happen, Vincent,” Justine said. Maddie had missed something. The shift was almost imperceptible, but she knew they had squared off—or Justine had, anyway. There was a defensive edge in her voice, her gaze locked on Vincent. Their common ground had evidently been a very small territory.
“What I’m saying is, is God in control or isn’t he?” Vincent maintained his conversational tone, as if this debate over God’s authority was suitable for casual banter.
No, Maddie thought. Not always, anyway. He hadn’t been in control on Saturday night—the very same day she and Vincent had prayed for Mr. Pavlik. On Saturday night, God had been nothing but a pitiful afterthought, while she and Vincent had been alone in her living room, her parents gone to bed.
And then a new thought came: the church altar on Sunday evenings, people kneeling there weeping. Sin was evil, Maddie realized, and you had to be sorry for your sin—or else suffer and be punished for it.
Was
that what this was? Punishment? God was taking Vincent’s gift away—Mr. Pavlik was dying—because of their sin?
“No, Vincent. You are saying that God makes people sick and he makes people die.” Justine was angry now, and Maddie felt that familiar impulse to defend Vincent.
“But Justine,” Maddie said, “You yourself said that people get sick and people die. Remember Mrs. Moorland—“
“Right,” Justine said. “Because there’s evil in the world. That’s not what Vincent is saying. Vincent is saying that God makes it happen.”
Maddie didn’t need the summary. She got it. She had arrived there along with Justine, but to say so would be—wouldn’t it?—to make some terrible accusations. How could Justine’s words possibly be true—about God? About Vincent? And yet she couldn’t bring her own growing realization to the conversation: evil, punishment, death—all of it as consequence.
“No,” Vincent said. He was quiet a moment. “I’m not saying God makes it happen…” His voice trailed off, but Maddie nonetheless felt some relief in his words. Surely Vincent would have an explanation.
Justine wasn’t waiting, and she wasn’t mollified.
“Then what?” she asked, and Maddie again remembered Matthew. Would Vincent argue that God allowed Matthew’s death? That he let it happen? Even that he wanted it to happen?
Vincent, rational, quiet, seemed determined to meet Justine’s anger with calm. “I’m just saying that God has bigger things on his plate, is all,” he said.
Justine expelled a stunned gasp. Maddie grasped for meaning. This was appalling! Matthew had died, Mr. Pavlik was dying—and God had bigger things on his plate? How could Vincent say that? Didn’t he know that Justine had lost her baby brother? Surely Maddie had told him. Hadn’t she told him?
“What?” she said, shocked and in unison with Justine.
“I mean—“
Healing Maddie Brees Page 19