Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Maddie took it in, knowing she ought to be somewhat mollified by this lack of complicity. But her fury—its source still somewhat unclear to her—was beyond any small resolution. She could push past Mrs. Adams and Justine, because she had anger enough for this.

  “What do you mean when you say you don’t know if you want to heal people?”

  “I mean I don’t know,” Vincent said, still calm, even—could it be?—almost amused. He smiled and shook his head.

  But his humor, even in something as small as a smile, provoked her further. What was funny about this?

  “Why not?” Maddie asked. “Why don’t you know if you want to heal people?” She had forgotten her own stake in it—what she had thought was their stake in it: sin preventing healing. At that moment she was aware only of Vincent’s words and amusement as some kind of betrayal, tied ineluctably to his argument with Justine in the cafeteria and his words—only days ago—about the paper cut. Again she felt a distance between them, felt herself swinging wide of him as if they were carried on different currents. He was impossible to reach. “Why not, Vincent?” she said again. Her tone had changed; she felt it. Her anger was shifting; it was lined with sadness, and her question, hanging in the small and terrible space between them, felt to her like a last hope at understanding him.

  “I just don’t know what God wants, you know?” Vincent said. His words were gentle, uncomplicated by anger or, Maddie now recognized, fear. It was the tone he always took when arguing with Justine: Vincent wasn’t afraid.

  Was Justine afraid? She was certainly angry, but was she afraid?

  Was Maddie herself afraid?

  Arguing like this with Vincent, Maddie realized that he talked with Justine as if, despite their disagreement, he wasn’t opposing her at all. It wasn’t personal.

  Yet Maddie felt most decidedly that it was. “Of course you don’t know what God wants, Vincent,” she said. “No one knows what God wants!” and she was quiet for a moment, believing that, for once, she had the theological upper hand, that these irrefutable words would settle something in his mind.

  Vincent handled the silence nicely, letting it continue longer than she liked and giving her time to see that she had simply agreed with him. He was already ahead of her; he knew what she meant.

  All of this was dawning on Maddie when he added,

  “It’s just a question of when.”

  When? Maddie was lost again.

  “What do you mean, Vincent?” She heard the anger in her voice, but could hear, too, that it was softer. Why must he always answer with riddles? Why always leave her in the dark?

  Vincent reached for her hand again, and this time she let him take it. He held it on top of the gearshift as he drove. “I just mean that I think God wants people to be healthy and everything, but sometimes he doesn’t want it when we want it, you know? Like some people get healed from terrible diseases, and some people die and then they are healed from terrible diseases. It’s a question of when.”

  Maddie took a moment to absorb this. Lost again in Vincent’s theology, she forgot about being angry. Why wouldn’t God want everyone to be healed all the time? Shouldn’t God want everyone to be healed all the time? “But Vincent,” she said, “that means that sometimes God does want a person to be sick.”

  “For a time, yeah, I guess so,” he said.

  “Well, that’s pretty mean,” Maddie said, and she felt her anger kick in again, but not as strong as before, and she wasn’t angry at Vincent.

  “No,” Vincent said, so quietly she wasn’t certain she’d heard him. He lifted her hand and kissed it, holding it at his lips for a moment. Then, “Never mean,” he said, and she didn’t argue. The space between them was contracting, pulsing to a close.

  Maddie was quiet, marveling at what Vincent seemed able to hold in tension: a God who could heal people but sometimes chose not to. She remembered the note Justine had passed to her on the day after the Pavlik potluck: God doesn’t want people to be sick! That was the God she believed in—or always had, at least. But now Vincent presented her with another option, one that might be more accurate if only because it seemed to explain some things, like the death of Justine’s brother. God doesn’t want people to be sick—unless he does, she thought. This was a difficult theology because it didn’t entirely make sense, and it also made things ugly. It made God ugly.

  “So that’s why you don’t want to heal people? Because you don’t know if it’s the right time to heal them?” she asked him.

  Vincent smiled. “No,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to heal people because if I do—or, you know, if God heals people through me—then people will never leave me alone.”

  “Vincent!” Maddie scolded. “See? That is mean!”

  But Vincent was still smiling. “I’m kidding!” he said, and he chuckled. “That would be mean.”

  “Are you really kidding?” she asked, only half-serious. She knew he had to be kidding—wasn’t he kidding? But his gift was extraordinary: what he seemed capable of offering was what anyone—everyone—would want. More than wealth, success, or beauty, people wanted to be healthy, and they wanted their loved ones to be healthy. If Vincent continued to heal people, then he was right: people would never leave him alone. The common experience of the last few weeks flashed before her eyes: this person and that stopping him in church, relating maladies, hinting at healing. It was only the beginning, and it was understandable that Vincent might not want to be able to offer it. “Really, Vincent?” she said again.

  Vincent had released her hand. He pulled into her driveway, set the car in park, and then turned to face her, one hand still on the steering wheel, the other on the key in the ignition. He turned off the engine and grinned at her. “I’m mostly kidding,” he said, “but praying for people all the time would be kind of a pain.” He leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked up through the windshield—at what? At the stars, maybe? “I mean, it would be a pain until every sick person in the world was healed, anyway. Which would be seriously awesome.”

  “Awesome.” It was the new word, one that had only recently crept into the collective vocabulary, and hearing Vincent use it in the context of healing and theology momentarily derailed her. The word seemed too young and immature for him—for them—somehow.

  Maddie studied him for a moment, the line of his profile, his head tipped far back so he could see the sky, his shoulders hunched near his ears. Since the beginning, she had always known Vincent’s seniority to herself. It was only a year’s difference, but in life experience, in wisdom—even, despite its short tenure in his life, in faith—she felt he was light years ahead, vastly older somehow. And now here he sat scrunched at the steering wheel, peering up at the stars like a little boy.

  “One thing’s for sure, Mads. If you think about it,” he said, “every time I’ve, you know, helped to heal somebody, you’ve been with me.”

  Maddie had to contemplate this for a moment. She ran through the short and astounding list of healings in her mind and found that he was right.

  “All I’m saying is I like that,” he said. He leaned away from her slightly, now peering out the side window as if tracking something, falling silent.

  Maddie smiled. Her anger, potent only minutes before, was gone. She had forgotten it. “You like that, huh?” she asked him, smiling.

  “Yes,” Vincent said. He was smiling broadly now, still gazing out the window. She could see the soft curl of his lip in profile. “I like that,” he said again.

  R

  Maddie sighed and shook herself. She tossed her head and ran her hands through her hair, which was long enough now to tuck behind her ears. She tucked it. Already this gesture had become a habit, a post-cancer behavior that helped her deal with the new, mild unruliness that her hair presented with. Which was fine. She couldn’t care, she told herself, and meant it.

  But that memory of Vincent—the one of him sitting in the car, staring out the windshield—that was a new one, or a new old
one, rather, one her mind hadn’t pulled from the annals in a long time. It was an unused memory like the Eucharistic adoration, which was, of the two of them, the memory she certainly preferred. She didn’t like to think of Vincent, didn’t like to see him so vividly next to her, didn’t care to recall the way his hair brushed the collar of his T-shirt as he sat there leaning forward, peering up at the sky.

  She shook herself again, irritated. Why should that memory be so painful? It had been nothing. An argument resolved, that was all. There were other, far more painful memories. Why should this one matter now?

  It was simply a matter of processing, of that she was certain. She had been over other memories of Vincent countless times—the one of him weeping at the altar, for example. That was a memory lacking all piquancy, holding no lurking danger.

  But this with the windshield. She laughed aloud at herself, again—so often—rueful. God, he was barely eighteen at the time; she was only sixteen. They had been children.

  What was that game he used to play in the halls at school? The game Justine had hated: Vincent playing his joke of surprise, running down an unsuspecting student in the high-school hallway. He did it in fun, and it always ended with Vincent coming to a stop split-seconds before a collision. It ended with a startled shout, books dropping, papers spilling to the floor. He had done it to Maddie a time or two. And to Justine.

  She had been right about it, in her way. Vincent couldn’t know how his victim would react. For the most part, he was indiscriminately choosing someone to receive his attention. He had no idea, as Justine once posited, whether the person in question had a heart condition. It could have been dangerous.

  But at the time, Maddie had laughed when it happened—either to her or to someone else. Because despite the momentary terror, in the end it was only Vincent standing there: grinning, harmless.

  23

  Many of the details—as significant as they might have been—were hazy. But in all of this unsolicited recollection, the adult Maddie began to recognize their selfish selectivity, and that this selection had always been her practice. Throughout those years of friendship with Justine, for example, her best friend’s deceased little brother scarcely came to mind. And she was pressed to recall much of anything detailed about Vincent’s family—the mother and little brothers who were always happy to see her. To Maddie they had been peripheral; they didn’t really come to church; the substance of their lives didn’t overlap with hers. But she had been many times to the Elanders’ tattered house where it sat against the trolley tracks, and she knew that Vincent’s mother held down two jobs to make ends meet.

  Maddie simply hadn’t cared about it at the time. She had been ignorant of parenting’s rigors, ignorant (this was still the case) of what it meant to be poor. And yet being poor had been the context of Vincent’s life. She knew that he shared the rusting Pacer with his mother. Maddie had been a little annoyed at how the car’s ceiling fabric sagged. She had given no thought to the Elander’s inability to afford repairs or to buy a new car—or to fix up their house or move to a different neighborhood or buy nice things.

  Vincent’s mother didn’t come to church—she insisted she wasn’t good enough for church people—and this had saddened him, but sometimes she let him bring his little brothers, Marty and Alex. Vincent always seemed older on those occasions. He would politely introduce them to people and keep an eye on their behavior. He was careful to teach them the ways of church, showing them to the right page in their hymnals and supervising how they took communion. When Marty turned eight that spring, Maddie and Vincent had taken him for a picnic and a game of catch in South Park. Alex had been six for much of that year, which was the same age as Maddie’s Eli now.

  Had Mrs. Elander known about the healings, Maddie wondered? She herself had never told her, assuming that Vincent would do so—but she was fairly sure he hadn’t. Vincent teased his mother; jokes seemed to be their primary mode of communication. She couldn’t imagine the two of them growing serious enough to discuss miracles. If he had told her, his mother would have thought he was kidding.

  At thirty-eight years old and at twenty years’ distance, Maddie saw the Elander family as if for the first time, on level ground with her rather than as she had seen them when she was a teenager: elevated by significance to Vincent, bathed in a Vincent-cast glow. Vincent had imbued them with the glory of his charisma and athleticism, his reputation at school tempered and enhanced by his faith. She saw now that they had been poor and struggling, perhaps mostly happy with one another but always straining beneath the weight of need. She never knew what had become of Mr. Elander except that he had left when Alex was a baby, and now she could imagine how Mrs. Elander had leaned on Vincent, how—with the other boys so young—Vincent would have been not only a son but also a companion to her. And how, between sports and school, church events and Maddie, Vincent had scarcely been at home.

  Then, for a frightening moment, Maddie had a glimpse of Vincent as a real person, a boy of eighteen. He had done well in school on top of maintaining his three-season sports schedule. During the summers, he took a job to help pay the bills and had volunteered to mow the church lawn. What had church-life—what had faith in God, sudden and novel to him when she knew him—meant to Vincent, Maddie wondered. He had lost some friends over it, but he had explained it away: they just didn’t like it that he wouldn’t party with them anymore. It hadn’t seemed to bother him, so Maddie had let it drop. In truth, they hadn’t talked much about Vincent’s faith at all, she thought now. He always seemed to assume that Maddie already knew.

  Yes, she thought, her memory had been selective.

  And there were things of which, even at the time, she had been ignorant. She had not, for example, been consulted as to how the church should proceed once they were certain—or almost certain—that they had a healer in their midst. The fact of it was practically undeniable. Mrs. Adams did not limit her joyous news to the youth group, and there was the case of Dean Pavlik to reconsider in light of it, and the story of Joey Amoretti to revisit. Apparently Pastor McLaughlin, the elders, and unknown others had to respond to this, had to make faithful use of this gift that, through Vincent Elander, had apparently been bestowed on the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness.

  No, Maddie was not privy to the plan until after it was made: a small healing service the following Sunday at five p.m., just prior to the regular evening service. And only for a few people, a select and invited number who said they would like Vincent to pray for them.

  Again Maddie recognized her selfish lens on the world. For while she frequently envisioned Vincent with the anonymous children in the imagined oncology ward, she had never given real thought to the names listed as prayer requests in her own church bulletin—or to the lives those names represented. Yes, months earlier she had pointed out the column to Vincent, eager for him to see the potential for healing. But many of the names had been there for a long time, and Maddie had stopped noting them as individuals long ago.

  Now the healing service was planned, and two names regained identity, their physical ailments clearly presenting urgent need.

  Roland Taylor was in imminent danger of losing his second leg to diabetes. Maddie vaguely remembered news of his first amputation, which he had suffered while she was in grade school. The idea had been troubling to her, and she was relieved when he appeared post-surgery with a prosthesis, as she had feared confrontation—even hidden by a pant-leg—with a stump.

  But Mr. Taylor had been cheerful about the enterprise and, other than a slight limp, seemed unaffected by it. After his recovery, he continued to volunteer in the two-year-old class every Sunday just as he had done when Maddie was two and as he had been doing, so the story went, for the past thirty years. He was in his late sixties now or maybe early seventies and was generally acknowledged as the church-wide grandfather. With regard to the potential second amputation, Mr. Taylor reportedly claimed he didn’t mind it so much—but if God wanted to heal him of his suffering cir
culation and, better yet, his diabetes, then he was certainly open to it. He would be more than happy for Vincent Elander to pray for him.

  Maddie hadn’t seen Doris Senchak for a long time. The last time she had been in church—perhaps a year ago—she had been in a wheelchair. Her multiple sclerosis had progressed quickly, and now her suffering was acute. It had been Mr. Senchak who answered the invitation for this special healing prayer—he and their two little girls.

  Roland Taylor and Doris Senchak were names Maddie was accustomed to seeing—or overlooking—in the church bulletin, but Susan Sweet’s name had never been on the list of prayer requests. Thus she was surprised to learn that Susan was the third person Vincent would be praying for. Surprised and embarrassed. The fact of Susan Sweet was always embarrassing to Maddie, who hoped Susan had put out of her mind those days when, with her family, Susan had first started attending the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness. Maddie and Justine had been in the fourth grade at the time, hardly enough to know better—or so Maddie now told herself. Susan had made them uncomfortable and they, mere children, hadn’t known how to react. Now Maddie regretted making fun of her strange walk: a severe limp and sweeping gait, her right leg swinging out to the side before bearing her weight.

  Susan was the daughter of missionaries who had returned to the U.S. when Susan was a teenager. She had been born in Africa—Kenya or Botswana or someplace equally foreign to Maddie’s mind—at a mission outpost with no doctor. It wasn’t until Susan was trying to walk that her parents realized she had hip dysplasia, and by that time, it was too late to correct it. So Susan had learned to walk badly: her hip’s permanent dislocation forced the rotation of her leg, hence the limp and sweep, limp and sweep marking every step.

  Susan’s response to their teasing had been to ignore it red-cheeked, and eventually Maddie and Justine had dropped it. Maddie liked to tell herself that they hadn’t bothered Susan because she was so much older than they were: How could the witless teasing of nine-year-olds have any impact on a girl of seventeen? But Maddie knew that it must have hurt.