Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Justine stared back at him. Finally, “You’re a jerk,” she said.

  Vincent didn’t miss a beat; the insult apparently held no traction for him. “Fine, Justine, but that’s not the point. The point is that she doesn’t really want to be healed of arthritis. When she’s healed of arthritis, she’ll just want something else. She’ll want to be cured of a toothache. Or of her aching knees. She’ll just want something else. Everybody will always just want something else.”

  Maddie didn’t know what to make of this. “What do you mean, Vincent?” she asked.

  Vincent turned to regard her, and Maddie gazed back. How could he be Vincent, so familiar, the features of face and body so well known, and yet, in that instant, be so utterly foreign? “I mean,” he was saying, “do you want to be healed of every little thing?” He paused for a moment, and then, “Do you want to be healed of a paper cut?”

  All three of them were silent for a moment, and the rainwater thundered down the drain.

  “Mrs. Adams’ hands are nothing like a paper cut,” Maddie finally managed to say.

  Justine chimed in with raised voice: “She has a crippling joint disorder, Vincent! She’s not rubbing a magic lamp here. She wants to be able to use her hands, for crying out loud!”

  “People get things,” Vincent said. He had raised his voice, too, heedless of congregation members around them walking to their cars. “People get sick. People die. People have crippling arthritis.”

  “Yes! And you can heal them!” Justine answered.

  “No. I. Can’t.” Three short syllables, and Vincent separated them, making each word painfully distinct.

  “Fine. Fine! God can heal them. God can heal them.” Justine was exasperated. She lowered her voice in suppressed fury. “But he uses you, Vincent.” She paused, as if trying to accept the truth of what she was about to say: “For no good reason I can think of, he uses you.”

  “Well, it’s not up to you to think of a good reason, is it?” Vincent said, finally meeting her insult. He was angry.

  Vincent and Justine regarded one another in silence. Maddie no longer felt torn between them. She couldn’t care what they thought of each other. She was instead cut adrift, mentally exhausted, no longer trying to tease compassion from Vincent’s hard and heartless words.

  Vincent looked steadily at Justine, perhaps waiting for an answer—and Maddie wondered at this. Why did he try with her? And why did it not seem to occur to Vincent that she, too—his girlfriend—was at the very least put off by what he had to say? Did it register at all with him that Maddie herself was dismayed by his words?

  Justine was silent, now looking coldly about her, refusing to meet Vincent’s gaze. Finally, she turned to Maddie. “I’ve gotta go,” she said. She began to walk away, and Maddie was more than happy to let her.

  But Vincent called after her: “Justine.” He didn’t sound angry anymore.

  She pivoted to look at him, one hand on her hip, silent.

  All anger was gone from his voice. “Paper cut, arthritis, cancer,” he said, “it’s all basically the same thing.”

  R

  That was the end of the conversation. Now Maddie sat again at the computer desk and stared at a satellite image of that very parking lot, but the aerial perspective, as ever, was disorienting. From this odd view, she had to rethink the familiar space, searching the flat gray shape on her screen for its three-dimensional parameters. She would have to recreate the details: the determined slope and the sealed cracks in the macadam that spread like random arteries, the loose gravel here and there that rolled under the feet. On the far edge was the grate abutting the strip of lawn that bordered on the auto-mechanic. All the rain in that Pittsburgh sky had poured through the grate that day—but it was rain that had dried up years ago.

  For a while she continued searching, but the house she could not find belonged to Nicky and Amy. For all the times she had been there in those days, she had been unable to discover it. She wouldn’t know it by its rooflines, and she was uncertain of the neighborhood. She didn’t remember the address; she didn’t want to look it up and wasn’t sure she’d be able to. She had hunted down a few streets once or twice—her core tense with what might be described as fear—turning off the main drag and hoping a familiar street name would assert itself, but to no avail. And then she decided it was just as well. She could do without seeing that house again.

  Maddie switched off the computer because she would like to switch off the images of that well-traveled suburb, but another parking lot swam into mental view: the drama of Tommy MacDonald’s Camaro instantaneously replayed itself, unaided by satellite image. There was the unbidden Vincent kneeling next to her, and Justine scolding him, and the ambulance doors closing at her feet.

  There were her parents meeting her at the emergency room, and already the pain was inexplicably dissipated. And here was the impressed doctor, who was explaining that she was a very lucky young lady indeed, because her bone should have been broken: from all descriptions he’d received, she should be in incredible pain and a cast to boot. It should be a wheelchair and then a slow graduation to crutches for her. He was talking about the break that—by chance—didn’t happen and also another one—the one that healed a long time ago. His comment made them all lean in to study the x-ray glowing on the screen.

  Here, he said to them, here is where she broke it the last time, gesturing to the faint white line etched across her femur. It healed nicely, he said to her. He told her she should know better than anyone—as she’d been through it before—that recovering from a break like this is no picnic. You, he said to Maddie, are a very lucky girl.

  But Maddie knew—and her parents knew—that she never broke her femur before. She had never broken a bone before. This faint white line, this mended fracture, so fully healed that it looked like an old break, was only hours old.

  Sitting there in the emergency room, Maddie didn’t think to tell her parents about the boy who tried to help her. The three of them believed in a miracle, but it didn’t yet include a kid in his practice uniform. As yet, it was—to their minds—a miracle extended from God himself and not through a seventeen-year-old boy. In the fuss and the wait at the hospital, Maddie had forgotten him again for now.

  She left the hospital on her own two feet. No wheelchair, no crutches.

  The healing was that complete.

  Part II

  20

  And then it was over. The days, weeks and months, bound and disguised in cycles of treatment, finally resulted in a verdict: remission. Maddie was clean of cancer.

  The return to normal had been full of promise: the port’s removal, her hair’s regrowth, her system’s slow shed of chemotherapy toxins. But until she had the doctor’s pronouncement, Maddie hadn’t allowed herself to accept that she would actually be well.

  Now the biggest trauma of her life—of their lives—was finished, sealed with a clean bill of health and a little pill to be taken daily for the next five years. Something to ensure it never came back again. To try to ensure it never came back. They couldn’t promise.

  Maddie understood this.

  Frank was jubilant. We did it, he told her, and tears came to his eyes. On the afternoon of the news, he swept their unsuspecting sons into a dance around the kitchen. Together they paraded through the first floor of the house.

  Maddie stood smiling in the midst of this silliness. The boys had endured her treatment just fine; she and Frank had weathered it well—well enough, anyway, that much of the time (lately, at least) their sons were barely aware their mother was sick. The dancing parade, then, was really for her and Frank. They were the ones who were celebrating, who were still waiting for the word “remission” to sink beneath the skin. It was they who had been granted new life.

  Maddie joined the parade.

  And she relished their weekend trip to the beach, Frank’s surprise for her and the boys. It was time away from all the distractions of home, time to reconnect as a family, he said. As she
and Frank sat on the sand, watching the boys flirt with the waves, Frank told her he thought she would be needing this.

  He was right. Maddie told him that cancer had distracted her. She felt as if her gaze had been held for too long at something on the periphery of their lives. Now she could see their boys full-on again and had noticed, as if she had been away, their gains in height, their changes. Garrett was suddenly older, more likely to play with his big brothers, less likely to have his stuffed kitten in tow. Eli had learned to ride his bike without training wheels that spring, which made him also seem somehow older: he walked with a big boy swagger now. And Jake, who had barely tolerated tee-ball the previous summer, was suddenly looking ahead to Little League with exhausting enthusiasm: almost every day he asked Maddie how many weeks it was until the season started.

  Yes, she told Frank, it was a good idea to get away. She thanked him.

  She sat close to him on the sand, their shoulders just touching each other. She told him again that she was deeply grateful for his thoughtfulness, for the tenderness with which he had cared for her during her illness. But beyond these things, she could find nothing more to say, and despite his kind response and the way he gently kissed her forehead, Maddie perceived a formality in their exchange. It felt, she thought, as if they were simply being polite.

  She recalled the days just before their wedding, with Frank living in Raleigh and Maddie travelling between Pittsburgh and their little college town, making final preparations. They were to be married in Father Tim’s church, with Father Tim officiating.

  During that wedding week, Maddie was dismayed to find herself in frequent arguments with her parents. The day before the wedding itself, Maddie’s mother had a fit about the pew bows, of all things. She didn’t want plain bows; she wanted them to include fresh flowers. This readily resolved dilemma had to become an ordeal, impacting several members of the bridal party and requiring no fewer than three trips to the florist and one to the grocery store.

  None of it mattered anymore. Maddie’s mother had long since apologized to both of them for the trouble she had caused that day. But what Maddie remembered keenly was the sense she’d had when Frank arrived. It was fifteen minutes before the wedding rehearsal, and she was standing in the middle of the aisle with her mother. The floor at their feet was covered in pew bows and a pile of baby’s breath, and Maddie had felt profoundly alone. The problem with the pew bows was multiplying in her mind, becoming a complex list of problems and failings that would ruin the wedding and, likely, her marriage.

  Then Frank had come in. Hearing his voice at the end of the aisle had filled Maddie with exquisite relief. She turned and saw him standing there: his curly hair and glasses, T-shirt and shorts, his bagged tuxedo flung over his shoulder, and she remembered that she was not, in fact, getting married by herself. She was marrying her best friend.

  But now things felt different. Yes, Frank had been amazing throughout the cancer ordeal. Yet, as with the boys, Maddie sensed a distance from him, as though they had lived apart for a long time and now must become reacquainted.

  She wondered if it was simply the fact of her illness—a persistent sense of isolation. No matter how kind Frank might be or what he might say, she knew—and he knew—that her body had harbored disease. Cancer had lived just below the surface, and the invisibility of the disease only exacerbated what she imagined—in herself—to be a kind of detachment. She had crossed a divide, and it had been impossible for him to join her there.

  She understood that she should be happy now, and for the most part, she thought she was. She relished the growing strength she felt in her core and limbs, sometimes taking a purposeful inventory: a mouth not full of sores, food tasting the way it was supposed to. She ran her hands through her hair. Curlier than it used to be, and shorter, but she decided to embrace the change.

  And mothering her sons. Preparing their snacks, reading with them at bedtime, even folding their laundry, Maddie again felt the soft weight of the yarn in her hands, the knitting that spilled from her arms and followed her active and noisy boys through their days.

  Yet she knew that she was also deeply sad. She didn’t often feel it during the day, busy as she was. But many times she would awaken early to find herself already crying, as if grieving unaware. Her face, her hair, her pillow would be saturated by tears.

  R

  Frank was eager for the return of normal. He was well-enough warned against it. Sometimes there were permanent changes for a woman when recovering from something like this. In addition to the pill Maddie was taking daily, they had been armed with resources: several books on recovering from breast cancer, a list of websites, names of support groups, a directory of services they might find useful. All of this reminded him they were still in process, and keeping this in mind was important.

  And Frank did keep it in mind. Without meaning to, he had created a mental timeline and watched it hopefully as milestones rose into possibility. Already Maddie seemed like herself again—physically, at any rate. She certainly had her energy back, and (he knew she was glad of this) her hair. In terms of daily life things had definitely settled into their pre-cancer patterns of work and carpool and the boys’ various needs. In many ways, Maddie seemed to have landed on her feet. For much of what Frank and Maddie had yet to weather, the guidebooks and websites said the same thing: communicate. This made sense to Frank, and he was eager to do his part. He wanted to know how Maddie was feeling, what she was thinking. He was ready to listen at absolutely any time.

  But she didn’t seem to share his eagerness. The inwardness that had accompanied her cancer treatment persisted. He had tried what he hoped might draw her out: setting the living room with lit candles, making dinner, surprising her with dates and the babysitter already hired. He talked with her; he tried silence. He said what the websites told him about the sex part (as if that was what mattered to him): he knew it would take time, and that was fine, and she shouldn’t feel any pressure. Not from him, anyway. He told her what he knew—that she was beautiful.

  Often he was visited by a memory they had always enjoyed. It had been a strange, almost marvelous experience, one they talked about with some amazement even years after it occurred: it was before the boys were born, and Frank and Maddie had had business trips at opposite ends of the week. She arrived home less than a half-hour before Frank had to leave for the airport and Maddie had been dealing with a challenging co-worker. She wanted to tell him about the most recent developments in person, and they had missed one another deeply in a purely physical way. The upshot was an intense twenty minutes, Frank greeting her at the door and then crushing her against it as it closed behind her. She commenced talking through their kisses, responding motion for motion to his desire. They removed one another’s clothes as they moved together toward the sofa.

  Later, Frank had been impressed at his ability to follow and verbally respond to what she had been saying; they laughed at how she had maintained her narrative. The conversation only stopped briefly when no relevant words were really possible, and then—breathlessly, at first—resumed. They had continued talking together as they dressed again, as Frank checked his jacket pocket for his boarding pass, as they headed out to the car. By the time they reached the airport, Maddie felt herself satisfactorily unburdened and understood. It was on the phone late that night when Frank called her from Phoenix that they first chuckled together at the perfection of that twenty minutes in their apartment, a vital deposit of intimacy.

  Frank knew this scenario wasn’t likely to be recreated. Not any time soon, anyway, as the boys were sure to impede such spontaneity. But he held it as an ideal nonetheless; it pictured precisely what he longed for: the two of them, body and soul, belonging to each other.

  Sometimes it occurred to him that this was impossible, that Maddie’s physical changes had made her withdraw from him both physically and emotionally.

  Then he told himself that this would not be the case. That if it was the case, it was not perma
nently so. They would get past this, too, wouldn’t they? Believing—no, deciding—that their intimacy would be restored was a kind of faith, he realized.

  But he was fine with that. This restoration would surely be something God wanted. Wouldn’t it?

  And then Frank put the question out of his mind, because he wasn’t certain of the answer.

  R

  Maddie believed that looking forward was her best option. She should forget her cancer year. But what kind of mental power would it take to block out a year of her life? How, for example, to disremember the moment of discovery? The sun had been coming in the window; the steaming bathroom was lit with it. Frank had come in and felt the lump, searching her flesh with the warm pads of his fingertips. She hadn’t wanted him to find it; if he didn’t find it, then she would know she was mistaken.

  But Frank had found it.

  And how to forget the transformation of her body from private, personal, sexual, into a medical object? The poking, the prodding, the flattened stretching for mammograms? Sitting topless on examining tables while doctors read over files and then turned to her and detachedly handled her breasts, first one, then the other? Lying motionless, half-exposed and alone while waiting for the invisible powers of radiation to take their effect? How does one begin to bury such memories?

  She could do what she may to block out the images. She could reject—as soon as the memory crested—those moments that wanted to relentlessly replay themselves in her mind. But no matter what kinds of mind games she employed to keep those memories at bay, she still had her body: a breast gone, skin puckered and scarred by the surgeries and, for now, darkened by radiation. She had been assured that the discoloration would resolve, but she had seen the before and after images, and she knew just how much hope to retain.

  Even if she were to permanently repress all the appointments, treatments, and side-effects of the past year, she would have this body to confront daily, a reality in vivid contradiction to images on the glossy covers of magazines. She felt herself removed by infinite degrees from all that society might find desirable. And while she could and did hide her scars under clothing, she couldn’t rid herself of that abiding sense of isolation.