Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Yet Susan never confronted them about it. To Maddie’s mind, Susan was the picture of accepting one’s lot in life. While her peers went away to college, Susan had studied at Allegheny Community. She had a job—something along the lines of a social worker, Maddie was pretty sure—but still lived at home. She served the church in quiet ways, helping out in the kitchen for showers and potlucks and, on Communion Sundays, filling the plastic cups with grape juice. She smiled often but never said much, and on Sunday evenings, she often made her limping way to the church altar.

  With her humility, service, and apparent contentment—and in comparison with Mr. Taylor and Mrs. Senchak—Susan’s request for healing now surprised Maddie. “What’s wrong with her?” she had asked Vincent.

  “What’s wrong with her? You’ve seen her walk, haven’t you?” he said.

  But that was not the limit of Maddie’s blindness. There were other things of which she had been ignorant—or to which she had willingly closed her eyes. In the few weeks leading up to the healing service, what had been the general consensus regarding it? Had all of the Bethel Hills congregants been universally expectant, fine with the notion that Vincent—a boy of eighteen, a new attendee and recent convert, a relative nobody—could heal people? Yes, Maddie had been present for those hallway encounters, those halting conversations in the foyer in which belief in healing had been implied, but what of the many people who had not sought him out?

  How did they feel about these upcoming, hoped-for healings when, prior to this, many people they had prayed for simply hadn’t been healed? Yes, occasionally miracles had taken place among them, enough to stoke the flames of belief, but these were few and far between. Many hadn’t been healed; many had died—and again Justine’s little brother came to mind. In the thoughts of the Bethel Hills congregation, what marked Vincent as a likely minister of healing? Did they assume that he simply had more confidence than others, the kind of New Testament faith that could truly move mountains?

  And did any of them venture mentally beyond this upcoming service and into the wake of its potential success? Or was Justine alone in her visions of the media and publicity and all these might mean: the descent on their congregation of television crews, the ensuing clamor for more miracles, a parking lot full of the wounded and weary, traffic winding around the block, each sufferer understandably longing for thirty seconds with Vincent?

  Maddie had considered none of this. Her vision had been decidedly of the tunnel variety, true only to her own concerns. In the short days leading to the healing service, Maddie deserted her carefully cultivated concern for Justine. She set aside the theological debate that had churned in her mind and conversations. The disciplines that had so recently marked her life were abandoned by reason, she decided, of fatigue and fruitlessness. She simply hadn’t liked staying away from Vincent, and even when doing so hadn’t been able to keep him out of her mind—and could she be at all sure of the impact of her restraint? Her most recent conversation with him on that matter, the one that ended with his staring at the stars, certainly suggested that her actions—or those of anyone else—had precious little to do with anything. God decided on the when and who of healing. It was that simple.

  Looking back on this more than twenty years distant, Maddie considered what she had long told herself about those days: of course she had been self-absorbed, and this was understandable. Maddie had not been unusual. She had exhibited thinking and behaviors that were common, normal, even expected for a teenager. She hadn’t been aware at the time that the stakes were so high. But this didn’t make her any less sorry for it now.

  It was a Sunday, the very afternoon of the healing service, a confluence of events that didn’t matter to Maddie at the time. This wasn’t premeditated. Vincent’s mother and brothers had been at home when they got there; it wasn’t anyone’s fault that Marty had a Little League game, and there wasn’t time before the service for Maddie and Vincent to go along: they had to be a back at church in a little over an hour. But they wouldn’t need the car. Nicky would stop by and pick them up on his way.

  Alone together in Vincent’s house for an hour. What could anyone expect of them? Maybe they should have spent their time in prayer. That’s probably what God would have wanted, the adult Maddie thought. But was that all the help he proffered? She had looked for him in the DiAngelos’ garden; she had whispered to him in the family crèche. And he had shouted his reply through a Camaro’s bumper, a blue-eyed boy, and her own weak, instinct-driven flesh.

  What, exactly, did he have to say?

  That afternoon, alone together in Vincent’s house for an hour, they had sex for the first time. Or was it the first time, when so many times before they had come so close? What difference, exactly, did fractional distance make or where, exactly, their clothes lay? Up to their ankles in the shallow end or over their heads in the diving well, wasn’t it all the same? Maddie had been losing her virginity by degrees, over a period of months. This latest development, this moment of stunning satisfaction, this consummation was mere technicality.

  Oddly, she thought, Maddie didn’t remember much in the way of details. There was more flesh this time, that much she knew. The complete nakedness had surprised and pleased her; she had taken it for granted then that this time there was to be no stopping. They weren’t even going to try.

  The tears and prayers of repentance were the same, as was Vincent’s ardent belief that those prayers had been heard and answered.

  But God’s answer to Maddie was in what came next, in the slow but certain slippage, the rock fall that found her scrambling for escape. And she had escaped, eventually. It had been a painful extraction, but it wasn’t—not according to God, apparently—anything that she didn’t deserve.

  What saddened her, what pained and alarmed her, was that it still didn’t seem to be over. She had put it behind her. She was a faithful Catholic now. She was married to Frank. She was a loving if imperfect mother to their three sons. Yet here was Vincent, insistently present to her beyond all reason, when she had given him up long ago.

  Despite its significance, there was only a single vivid memory of that afternoon, and this came to her now. Between their gasps of pleasure and the obligatory prayers of repentance, Maddie had stood up from the sofa and walked naked to the bathroom. She knew that Vincent watched her go; she could feel his gaze; she was proud, in that moment, of her brazenness, of their now undeniable intimacy. Moments later, Vincent came to the door and grinned at her where she stood at the sink, several feet away. He didn’t say a word, but she saw that he had her bra in his hand. Still grinning, he snapped it across the room at her as one might do with a rubber band, and they had both laughed.

  It had been over twenty years, but Maddie could still see him standing there. Vincent, full length, naked. There were the lines and the turn of his arms and thighs, his torso, the color of his skin. The taut musculature of his calves. The thickness of his neck and the breadth of his shoulders. The vein of hair that darkened and ran down below his navel. The way he planted his feet in the hallway carpet, with the toes of his left foot over the threshold of the bathroom, touching the cracked tile, the second toe just longer than the first.

  There it was: God’s answer. And immediately she was angry that it was so obvious, so true and so maddeningly impossible. It was the long memory of the body, the claim on the tangible by the untouchable. Any effort she might make to be rid of it was fruitless; it was inscribed somehow in her genetic code: the insoluble, incomprehensible bond between body and soul.

  Instinctively, Maddie reached for the breast she had lost. Under her shirt, under her bra strap, raising with her fingers the prosthetic pad that balanced her appearance. She ran her fingertips over the scars, following them to that knot in the field of flat skin.

  Numbness answered her there, mute, honest.

  24

  The request showed up in Frank’s email: Francesca asking to be his friend on Facebook. He was all wry criticism. Friends? This seemed
a strange proposition when they hadn’t spoken in years. In all honesty, he couldn’t say that he knew her even a little now, and he could definitely make the argument that he hadn’t really known her in college, when they were dating, when they were sleeping together. So would he agree, through social media, that they were friends? It seemed disingenuous, at best. The entire Facebook enterprise—he had come to believe—was by its very nature disingenuous, scratching itches people didn’t realize they had, itches they might do better in exploring with a therapist rather than posting their daily thoughts and impulses on the world-wide web or, worse, critiquing those of their so-called “friends.”

  He and Francesca weren’t friends at all. Not really. They had parted amicably enough—if one could call her hasty, mid-semester departure amicable. It had been a Monday morning. Only the night before they had enjoyed a particularly amorous evening together, all candlelight and incense in her dorm room. And now here she stood under an umbrella on the sidewalk just next to a campus mailbox, calling to him as he was walking to class, telling him that she was going.

  He hadn’t understood what she meant as there had been no warning, no contextual conversation that might precipitate her withdrawal from her classes, from the college, from his life. He had answered her, understandably (though later he felt foolish for it; he had replayed his foolishness in his mind more times than he cared to remember, how he hadn’t carried an umbrella that morning, and then she had made her announcement and walked away, and he, absent all rational thought, suddenly absent all emotional mooring, stood there like a fool in the rain), “Where?”

  And she had said matter-of-factly: “New York. Civilization.”

  So he couldn’t agree that they were friends actually, because there was that event in November 1986 to point to and then Francesca’s consistent failure to respond to any phone calls or letters he sent to her parents’ house. The rumors he had of her were not entirely believable ones, considering their sources: those she had called friends and sometimes drank with and who had been victims of her vicious derision behind their backs. It was Father Tim who had helped him see that the recovery of his own life was far more likely than any recovery of this relationship and also far more worthwhile. It was just as well to think of Francesca as having fallen off the map, so to speak—a cliché not without its appealing images, and these made Frank smile.

  What to do, then, with this invitation of “friendship?” He had assumed for years that she was out there, carrying on with life. But was contact worth inviting—or, in this case, accepting?

  He had spotted her for the first time at the beginning of his freshman year. She was hard to miss. In a sea of baggy sweatshirts and pegged jeans, Francesca’s bohemian look caught his eye. But even if it hadn’t, he would have spotted her lustrous hair, all long and shining ringlets that suggested themselves as having naturally occurred—unlike the teased, overworked hair of so many of the girls he knew at the time.

  She radiated naturalness, he thought. Makeup free, fair-skinned. Her complexion had a dewy clarity and seemed also full, almost buoyant. In truth, he had wondered how she could be real: so beautiful, so without artifice. Her only ornaments were jewelry, which she wore in abundance. That first time he saw her, she’d been wearing a long, flowing skirt (this was almost always the case) and a loose tank-top, and her right upper arm had been adorned with armbands, like something out of Egyptian mythology.

  Frank was smitten.

  The miracle (for in this instance he would need one: she was a junior, he a mere freshman; how to effect an introduction?) was that he was unable to get into the lit survey course he should have been taking, and so found himself enrolled in one at the 300 level, something on literature of the Caribbean. He wasn’t terribly interested in it, but then here came Francesca, jingling her way into the room. Enrollment was low, and she was a vibrant participant in the discussion. The professor seemed to know her from other classes, and she was extraordinarily well-read, making comments about the writing of so-and-so on such-and-such, citing “seminal works” on the impact of colonialism, reading obscure but fascinatingly relevant passages aloud. Frank found himself taking extra care when preparing for the class, and soon enough Francesca took notice of him.

  One day he managed to walk out of the room with her, managed to keep conversation going across the quad, told her (lying) that he had eaten and enjoyed plantains. That became a joke between them; it was their private euphemism: “plantains” became code for sex, and for years after Francesca left, Frank wanted nothing to do with them—with them or with anything having to do with the Caribbean, because it always made him think of Francesca.

  For a long time after Francesca left, there had been a lot he wanted nothing to do with because it made him think of Francesca.

  But it wasn’t fair, he now realized, and he shouldn’t have thought of it as so completely awful. Yes, there had been serious immaturity on both their parts, but it hadn’t been all bad. Like himself, Francesca was a writer. She was passionate about writing, and where Frank had decided to major in journalism, it had been a decision based less on passion for writing and more on the fact that he would never make a professional tennis player, and he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life giving lessons.

  Francesca had made him passionate about writing. Lying with her head in his lap, her blouse open too far and exposing more of that dewy skin, the rounding swell of a breast, she read aloud to him, brilliant paragraphs by Chandler, Lessing, even Dickens. She waxed rhapsodic over aptly worded phrases and the mot juste, that perfect word that shaped the tone of everything. “If you can find that,” she would say to him of his work, of her own, “then everything takes care of itself.” It was Francesca who had gotten him reading the dictionary.

  At the same time, she was fiercely critical of the writing of her peers. Such criticism was the subject of much of her discourse, especially on Tuesday afternoons after her writing class met for workshops.

  “God, it’s awful,” she would say as soon as Frank was in her sights, even if he was several paces down the hall. She processed it all aloud to him, launching immediately into complaints of miserable syntax and no ear for rhythm and subject matter that sounded like it was “to a person,” she said, “coming from old men on their deathbeds recalling lost love. There’s more to life than love,” she said, and Frank thought she was right.

  There was, for instance, travel and politics and excellent writing, which made Frank wish he had more travel under his belt than the summer-after-eighth-grade trip that his family had taken out West. Francesca disdained even that. “What good is a geyser?” she had said, and Frank wondered the same thing. It had been a long trip in a hot car and everyone had gotten cranky, and then they arrived just after the geyser did its predictable spew and so had to wait around and everyone had been hungry. What good was a geyser when places like Florence were in the world? Florence and all of Tuscany, for starters, or Budapest, or Nepal?

  Francesca was going to all of these places. She was destined for them and then some. She, for one, wasn’t going to be stuck all her life in the bread-basket of America. Pittsburgh, she said, Cleveland—these were outposts, barely civilized. Frank’s offered arguments signified nothing. So what if each city had art museums and symphonies? The closest the United States came to being civilized was New York, and maybe L.A.

  Chicago? Frank had suggested, but Francesca countered that Chicagoans were too caught up in football (problems shared, by the way, with Pittsburgh and Cleveland and the host of other mid-sized cities that might otherwise claim to be civilized). Football she characterized as thinly veiled brutality; sport in general lacked art. The base competition of most sports, she held, was demeaning to human potential.

  Frank thought she might be among the most competitive people he had ever known, but he certainly never voiced this opinion, able to argue against it even within himself: she simply held herself to high standards; she held everyone to high standards. What could be wrong wit
h that? On the contrary, it was admirable.

  Sometimes Frank felt afraid of her. He had a prescience of her capacity to devastate him. She had claimed there was more to life than love, and in his eagerness to please her, Frank had agreed. He couldn’t possibly tell her now that he loved her, but he was relatively sure it was true. He had never felt this way about someone before, but he wasn’t sure she’d like it. In truth, he was never sure that she was his girlfriend in the first place. It wasn’t that he saw her with other men; it wasn’t that they weren’t intimate in every way. It was just that she seemed—in every way—so dissatisfied.

  She relentlessly begged him to let her read his writing. She had discovered his dog-eared journal where he had failed to hide it on his dorm-room desk. But there was no way, he told her, that he was going to let her. He didn’t say what he ardently felt: it was too early in their relationship for this kind of exposure; they had been dating—if that’s what it was—for less than two months.

  “What do you write?” she had asked him coyly, her fingertips planted on the wire-bound notebook, wrist arched.

  That had been a frightening moment. Yes, he loved her teasing him, her kittenish grin, the tendril of hair that fell in front of her left eye. But he was terrified of exposure and certain rejection, of the inevitable post-reading critique.

  “What do you write?” she had asked him again, and he answered he didn’t know. It wasn’t a diary. It was, he didn’t know, reactions to things. Responses.

  “Poetry?” she asked.

  “God no,” he said, and she was pleased. Poetry was to be left to the experts. Real poetry, Francesca had said, months, weeks, days before, was only written by genuine talent.

  It was late October when he gave in, and he saw in retrospect how absurdly foolish this was. He was less than ten weeks into his college career, but it had felt to him like a long time already, and his relationship with Francesca (discussing poetry, drinking wine and smoking pot, breathing incense and listening to Joni Mitchell into the small hours of the morning) had seemed to him remarkably sophisticated. At the time he felt he had aged a decade; he was light-years beyond the pimply adolescence of high school—and so much of this was due to Francesca’s influence.