But Justine cut him off: “‘His eye is on the sparrow,’ Vincent. God cares about everybody. Everybody. Even sparrows, and even Mr. Pavlik, who is dying, as we speak, of a brain tumor.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Vincent said.
“Really? Then what do you mean by, ‘God has bigger things on his plate’?” She was furious, her voice lined with contempt.
Vincent remained calm, but he seemed to be reaching for words. “Not on his plate,” he said. He was looking around him as if trying to find a way to explain himself. “That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean, then?” Maddie asked, and she heard her voice, coaxing, a little desperate, trying to make peace and also trying to understand.
Justine answered for him. “You mean that God is busy dealing with other issues,” she said. “Maybe like world peace? Or the arms race.” Her words were coated in sarcasm. “Is the arms race on God’s plate, Vincent? Is that what it is? He has so much on his plate that he can’t be bothered with human life. He can’t be bothered with stuff like Mr. Pavlik. That’s what you mean.”
Maddie wanted to break in. She wanted to defend Justine’s anger, to remind them all about Matthew, to defend Vincent’s defenseless position, to defend Vincent. But she was afraid to try. She was afraid to say anything. Her situation—in every way—felt frighteningly precarious.
Everyone else at the table was frozen, listening, surely horrified at the ramifications of Vincent’s words, because anyone would be horrified at Vincent’s words—even an atheist.
“No, Justine. Give me a minute to say something,” Vincent said.
“I’ve given you more than enough minutes, Vincent Elander,” Justine said. “Everybody has. And I’m more than just a little tired of you thinking you know so much.” She was gathering her lunch things. A dramatic exit was in the making, and Maddie couldn’t blame her. She herself wanted to walk away, if only to collect her thoughts, to mentally align Vincent’s words—so empty of compassion—with his ability to heal people.
Couldn’t he heal people?
Justine stood to her feet, a stack of books in one arm and the remainder of her lunch in the other. Maddie braced herself for the parting shot.
“I’ll remind you of something, Vincent,” she said, “or maybe you don’t even know: Mr. Pavlik is a really good man. I’ve known him my whole life. Now he’s dying. And everybody is sad about that—including God.”
They all watched her go. She walked quickly, swerving between the round cafeteria tables and their occupants, never looking back.
No one said a word.
Maddie surveyed the table: a chocolate bar wrapper, two crumpled lunch bags, a few folded paper footballs, crumbs. And there, lying potent if invisible among them, an invulnerable brain tumor, God’s caprice, Vincent’s inscrutable theology, and sin—insistent, unavoidable.
Maddie didn’t know where to begin, but she thought she might try in defense of Justine—someone who had never, until that moment, seemed in need of defending. “You have to be more careful, Vincent,” she said.
“I am careful,” Vincent answered, his voice heavy with an unfamiliar frustration. “She wouldn’t even let me talk—Ow.”
The paper football had hit him in the cheekbone. Bryan had thrown it, or maybe Brad—two of the lunchtime entourage who had silently suffered through this loaded philosophical debate, now clearly looking for a little levity. Maddie was sure they were glad Justine had swept up her anger with her lunch.
The dutiful thing was to follow her friend, but how to move toward resolution? She herself was reeling with confusion and a dreadful fear.
She found Justine fuming in the Student Commons, sitting on a bench against the wall, her arms and legs both crossed, right foot twitching at the ankle. There she sat, her church and family history inextricably combined and wedged against her chest. There was no room for Vincent in that complicated knot, no room for him or his unconventional—and disturbing—ideas.
“Sometimes that boyfriend of yours is a real asshole,” Justine said, staring stonily over the room. Maddie sat down.
Surprising, yes. Confusing, absolutely. But asshole? Maddie was perplexed by Vincent, but she was also perplexed by Justine, by her friend’s persistent mistrust of Vincent. And now they’d had this terrible conversation. Justine wouldn’t want to hear anything spoken in his defense. Frankly, Maddie couldn’t think of anything, except the unexpected memory of her asshole boyfriend in Pittsburgh’s pouring rain, helping a drunk and crippled man stand to his feet. Maybe if she could get Justine to see Vincent differently, then she could hear—they could both hear—whatever it was he was trying to say.
“He cares about Mr. Pavlik,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”
“Justine,” Maddie said, as gently as she could, “I don’t think he even knows about Matthew.”
“What does Matthew have to do with it?” Justine’s eyes filled with tears. They never talked about Matthew.
“I just mean that Vincent was talking—he was probably talking—you know, in theory. Theoretically. He didn’t realize—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Justine cut her off. She was searching in her pocket.
Maddie tried again. “He doesn’t realize how this feels to you.”
“It’s not a question of how it feels to me,” Justine said, wiping angrily at her nose with a tissue. “It’s a question of what he’s saying.”
“About Matthew?” Maddie prodded.
“About Matthew, about Mr. Pavlik. About anyone.” She raised a hand in a gesture loosely resembling a wave. “About God,” she said.
Maddie was quiet for a moment, again wondering what Vincent meant. In her mind, she saw him running through the church parking lot toward screams on the parsonage lawn, leaning over the football player lying on the field, kneeling beside her—when was it?—almost a year ago now. He hadn’t even known her name.
And so Maddie felt she had no other choice but to tell Justine. She told her all of it—about how he had prayed for her that day in the school parking lot, about Willy, about the football player, about Joey Amoretti. And then she told her about Mr. Pavlik and how Vincent had spent a Saturday morning in prayer for a man he hardly knew.
It seemed a wise choice. See? She was trying to say. See? Vincent does care about other people.
This was not Justine’s take.
“So you’re telling me that your boyfriend can heal people?” Any sadness over Matthew’s mention, any softened edge, was gone.
“Yeah.” There was nothing left to say. Maddie’s small hope began to dissolve.
“Vincent Elander can heal people,” Justine said, flatly, sarcastic, annoyed.
“Yeah,” again. Maddie didn’t want to mount another defense, and it occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to. Where was the proof?
“And Nicky and Pastor McLaughlin and all the elders believe it?”
“Well, yes, I guess so. They were beginning to.” She paused. And then a last, feeble effort: “They think it’s possible, anyway. Nicky does. And Amy.”
Justine sighed. She straightened. She uncrossed her legs and looked around the room, taking in a couple making out on a bench across the way, a loud game of ping-pong, two members of the boys’ basketball team sauntering through the room. Then she looked squarely at Maddie.
“I think that everyone needs to think long and hard about this, Maddie. Everyone. Has anyone even bothered to notice that Mr. Pavlik is dying? He isn’t healed, Maddie. He’s dying.” She took a deep breath and sighed loudly, slowly, then bent her head to her open palms.
Maddie waited a long moment. The music was loud in the Student Commons.
Justine spoke again, looking at Maddie earnestly, her anger set aside. “Vincent can’t heal people, Maddie. It’s great that he’s coming to church. It’s great that he seems to have become a Christian. And he’s a great athlete and fun to be with and all that. But like ever
ybody else, he’s a person. He’s just a normal person.” She looked away from Maddie again, around the room, addressing these final words, so it seemed, to anyone. “For God’s sake, everyone needs to wake up.”
And she stood and walked off—to the bathroom, maybe, or the student store, abandoning her books and her lunch. This time, Maddie felt no obligation to follow her. She was glad, even in the din of the Student Commons, to be alone with her thoughts for a moment.
Steeling herself against Justine’s words, Maddie took stock of what she knew, reciting it as she might a Bible verse in fourth grade Sunday school. Vincent had most certainly become a Christian. Vincent could heal people. Vincent had healed people. Maddie said it to herself as much as to Justine’s retreating back. Regardless of what Vincent had said in the cafeteria, regardless of how he had sounded, she knew that he cared about them all.
And Maddie decided that she knew—or thought she knew—that God also cared about Mr. Pavlik. Certainly he did. And also Mrs. Pavlik. Here again she heard the cheerful, bubbling voice going on and on unanswered.
It wasn’t that God didn’t care, Maddie reasoned. It was simply that he cared more about sin, maybe, and it was sin he was punishing.
God punished sin.
She felt the realization, heavy and true, an ache in the middle of her chest. That was it. God was punishing her sin—and Vincent’s—and he was doing it by taking Vincent’s gift away. Which meant letting Mr. Pavlik die.
That must be how it worked.
R
The adult Maddie, weak from cancer and its treatment, sat at the computer. Its screen glowed with a satellite view of North America. The entry of her parents’ address at the prompt found her plummeting toward earth, and immediately the roads and treetops of the familiar suburb rose into existence. It was a strange view, like one from a plane, stretched flat. A bird’s-eye view, or God’s. But the roof of her parents’ house looked right, as did the lay of the land around it. There was the deck her father built during the summer after eighth grade, replacing their concrete patio.
Just down the street, inches away, was where she had waited for the bus, and now she traced the bus’s route to the high school. She revisited, turn for turn, length for length, the road to church. She followed the way to the mall, the way to the grocery stores, the hardware store, even the free-standing butcher where her mother had shopped when Maddie was very young. Maddie made all these outings while sitting at the computer desk, again and again venturing out of her parents’ driveway, noting by their rooflines the houses and businesses that landmarked the way.
She adjusted the satellite’s view to a horizontal gaze and with it gained the sense of spying, looking into a moment of life on the street when she had not been there, watching unseen. These actual, street-line views occasionally made her gasp: the scenes were vivid and life-like, for the most part exactly as she had left them. Her house, the paved driveway; her parents were not at home. The church, its parking lot empty. She found Justine’s house: it had been remodeled. Vincent’s house, still tired.
Maddie shuddered with recollection. Those spring days had been dark ones. The whole congregation had been stricken spectators of Dean Pavlik’s pending death. Maddie had felt pinned in the front row, and also a tragic and unwitting background player, guilty both of his demise and of a blighted effort to heal him.
Once upon a time, she had looked for interaction with God, but he had left her blissfully anonymous, sitting unbidden in her pew. Prior to Vincent, she had been chosen by no one, for no one—and so also was innocent of Justine’s doubt, Mrs. Pavlik’s loneliness, and the wanton, perplexing urges of her own body.
A body designed by God, purportedly given to her by God in some kind of holy game that she could never win.
She had been only sixteen years old, and she was convinced that a man’s imminent death was her fault. She’d had faith in God, and she had acted on it. If God wanted holiness, then she would do what she could to muster it. How had Vincent said it? They might want each other, but they needed to want God more.
If she were to tell this part of the story—and she never had—then she would admit that here—just here, perhaps—the sixteen-year-old Maddie had been admirable.
18
In the first place, she would try to spend more time with Justine. The memory of Justine’s little brother, surfacing in the midst of that theological debate, had taken Maddie by surprise. Now she realized that Matthew was likely never far from Justine’s mind. More painfully, she realized her own ignorance of this fact had been, at best, insensitive, even blind. She hadn’t been a very good friend to Justine at all, and she was resolved to do better.
She was also resolved to avoid solitude with Vincent.
It was their only hope—that, or some mortifying display of repentance at the Sunday evening altar. It was making sense to her now, the light slowly dawning after a lifetime of church, that this living, interactive, and just God should not only bless the good, but punish the sinful. She finally understood this as fundamental truth in the Bethel Hills Church. How else to explain the droning organ, the protracted wait, the kneeling displays of repentance and need?
She now knew that the consequences of sin were profound and terrible. In her case—or in that of her and Vincent—it was a gift suspended. And why should it not be? The punishment ought to match the crime. They sinned with their bodies, so shouldn’t bodies suffer? Never mind that it wasn’t their own bodies but was, instead, someone else: Mr. Pavlik propped at death’s threshold, Mrs. Pavlik’s tear-streaked loneliness.
But it wasn’t too late. There was room for hope, Maddie thought. If she could not bring herself to pray openly at the altar, then she could at the very least avoid temptation, which meant avoiding Vincent: “cutting off the hand that causes you to sin”—which, in this case (she was under no delusion), was herself. Vincent, at least, had made efforts toward obedience.
And yet this, too, felt like a risk. She understood too well Vincent’s devotion to God. Yes, it was a devotion embattled by Maddie, but Vincent always repented and then affirmed his resolve, willing to forge ahead and—next time—to avoid temptation. If Maddie were to suggest to him that successful obedience lay only in his cutting her off from his life, she feared he would actually do it.
No, this was not a conversation to have with Vincent.
Besides, she reminded herself, this understanding of sin and consequence was a theory. She wasn’t sure she was right. It was conceivable that their sin had nothing to do with Mr. Pavlik’s continued decline. It was possible that something else was at play here, that Mr. Pavlik might still recover, or that he would die because it was the way of the world and, ambiguous as it might be, the evil that inhabited it. That was what Justine had suggested, anyway.
And so Maddie decided to test her theory: she would avoid sinning with Vincent, and would plead with God for Mr. Pavlik’s recovery. It was her own little spiritual discipline, the first she had ever attempted.
To her pleased surprise, her efforts were eased somewhat due to the last week of basketball season and, when that had ended, the excuses Maddie could muster: a test to study for, some extra chores at home. One Saturday night, she suggested that they spend the evening at the Tedescos—something not altogether unusual, something Vincent enjoyed.
If he suspected anything, he never said so, but at the suggestion of the Tedescos he had given her a look, quick but focused, even though they were walking together down the hall. She wondered if he understood—if, without their ever discussing it, he knew what she was up to. She was grateful that he didn’t ask.
And she was glad to spend more time with Justine. She had forgotten how witty her friend could be, and she found herself enjoying Justine’s sarcasm, those sotto voce critiques that made Maddie once again feel it was them against the world. Yes, Maddie decided, she had missed her friend.
Of course, nothing was lost on Justine, who was almost unbelievably observant. These observational skills wer
e, clearly, the foundation of those sarcastic comments. And so she would be the one to notice that Maddie was spending less time than she used to with Vincent, and she would be the one to say something.
Maddie knew that she had successfully kept up almost every appearance. She and Vincent were clearly together at school, and they sat together during youth group, just like they always did. But now Maddie stood with Justine in the church parking lot, watching Vincent drive away alone, and Justine said,
“You two okay?”
Maddie actually felt annoyed at Justine’s question. Avoiding sin was difficult enough without having to endure scrutiny.
“Yes,” she answered. “We’re fine.”
Justine pushed it—the smallest nudge. Was she merely curious? “But doesn’t Vincent always give you a ride home?” she asked.
Yes, he always did give her a ride home, but what was a small lie when trying to save Mr. Pavlik’s life? “No, not always,” she said. “Sometimes I ride with my parents.”
Justine had no idea how difficult it was. Maddie wasn’t merely working to change external practice, she was trying to change her mental focus, too. She was trying to be more mindful of others, especially of Mr. and Mrs. Pavlik. She still prayed, even when hope was virtually gone, for Mr. Pavlik’s healing. She prayed for Willy and thought about little Joey Amoretti and sometimes the nameless patients in the children’s oncology ward.
Time without Vincent was a worthwhile sacrifice, Maddie thought, especially if it could be sustained.
But let her mind relax for any time at all, and she would discover she was thinking of Vincent again—and not just of the way he made her laugh or the things he said. She found herself thinking of kissing him, of being alone with him, of all the times they had needed to repent. And far more than usual, during those two weeks, Vincent would surface in her dreams.
She was trying to follow Vincent’s wisdom. What had he said? They might want each other, but they should want God more. It should be simple supplantation, replacing want with want. In her better moments, she felt this was right: that above all things, God should be what she most desired.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 20