Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  He asked if her new appreciation for sports had induced her to try any. Her response, again, was full of amused self-critique: “The most I am able to muster is an occasional yoga class,” she said, which he replied was fitting. “No,” she replied, “there’s no athlete to speak of in this body.”

  It made him glad—it truly did, in what he told himself was a pure-hearted, friendly way—to be in touch with her again. It was healing, he might say, suddenly wondering if he had been quietly wounded by Francesca and so, in ways he hadn’t realized, had been limping along all this time. Yes, Father Tim had helped him to get past Francesca. His had been essential help at that time. But there was nothing like this contact—this friendship—to bring him past the something-or-other of pain that he was newly aware had existed all these years.

  If someone had asked if they were in contact again, he would gladly have admitted it. He meant to say as much in an assuring note to The Priest, who, on seeing his friendship with Francesca on Facebook, had sent him a pithy text: “Francesca = friend?” it had said.

  Frank meant his response (“Yep”) to be followed by a phone call, but the kids had kept him busy that night and he had forgotten to follow through. He found that texts, emails, Facebook messages all had the tendency to drop below one’s sight-line, so to speak, which was what happened with this one. The upshot: by the time Francesca had that layover in Raleigh—maybe months after initial contact—by the time he had agreed to meet her in an airport bar (“Just for an hour or so. I don’t want to be too late getting home”), he hadn’t spoken to Father Tim in several months.

  Not that he needed to talk with Father Tim. Frank knew where he stood. And there was something (he wouldn’t be smug) satisfying about Francesca’s life as she described it. Simply seeing her would affirm for him—and perhaps, for her, too—what he had long ago decided was true: the sufficiency of a quiet life. One needn’t live in Milan or Tibet. One could write for a more humble newspaper. And one could have a perfectly good life.

  Frank was amazed at how much she looked the same. Despite the business clothes and the lines around her eyes. Despite the changed hair—considerably shorter now, but still all in curls—he would have known Francesca anywhere.

  R

  Thursday came, and Mr. Taylor’s amputation was carried out as planned. Thursday—a mere four days after the prayer service. Maddie never knew if he had asked for a delay. Did Mr. Taylor want to wait on the healing that might, as yet, take effect? But doctors concerned with the gangrenous effects of lost circulation have understandable limits to their patience, and Mr. Taylor had run out of time.

  He was cheerful during their visit, not quite sitting up in bed, but with the foot of the bed raised, and the lump of his legs under the sheets coming to an abrupt end just past his knees. The sight of this sickened Maddie; she grew dizzy and her vision began to blur.

  It was Mr. Taylor who noticed her pallor and instructed Vincent to get her a chair. Maddie slid into it, bending her body in half and resting her head on her knees, not looking up when the nurse came in, embarrassingly, to check on her, and barely recovering before it was time to leave. Throughout the visit she remained in her somewhat crippled position, listening to Vincent and Mr. Taylor laughing and chatting together, wishing she had more strength—from what, for what? How could either one of them, disappointed by the unpredictable unkindness of their God, find room for laughter?

  Within the month, they found themselves pulling up in the gravel driveway of the Senchak’s raised ranch. Mr. Senchak had asked them to come pray again and Maddie had felt some small hope: Who could know the effectiveness of repeated prayers? Mr. Gillece—his altar-going issue still a mystery—came to mind. And spring was fully arrived then; the crabapples were in bloom. But Maddie had felt her hope’s foolishness in the driveway, where the basketball hoop leaned at an infirm angle, its net come loose on one side.

  Inside, the atmosphere was one of weary endurance. The curtains were drawn in the living room, staining everything a muted red; a hospital bed consumed the far wall, and there, in its center, lay the shrunken form of Mrs. Senchak. Her knees were drawn up, her body curled, further diminished, if possible, since the prayer service a few weeks before. There was only the sound of her labored breathing, slowed since Maddie last heard it, and cruelly heavier. The sense of any lifting was gone; her breath was something dragged now: a deep rasp like a shovel drawn over pavement.

  Vincent crossed the room to her right away. He laid one hand on her shoulder and her eyes rolled up to his face; with his other hand, he stroked her hair. Maddie followed but held back, standing near the foot of the bed, pained by Mrs. Senchak’s worsened state. Arms like sticks, her flesh limp. The disease was consuming her; there would be nothing left soon but the angular lines of her skeleton and the flaccid husk of her skin.

  Vincent had prayed for her, and Maddie had fixed her gaze on the drawings, the construction paper tacked haphazardly to the wall. A garden, a snowman. An airplane flying through clouds and birds right up there with it, as if flying at 30,000 feet were not extraordinary for the common seagull. The inscription, in an elementary scrawl, For Mommy Love Sarah.

  It was on their way home that Maddie had found the nerve to voice what she was feeling. She wouldn’t take it to her parents or to Pastor McLaughlin, not to the Tedescos—who were preoccupied by the last month of Amy’s pregnancy. It was Vincent she would ask, because he had been there with her, Vincent and his comfort with not knowing when. She wondered how that was working out for him. Was he unimpressed by the suffering, standing there next to Mrs. Senchak’s bed? He who had helped Willy to his feet, who had healed his opponent in the middle of a football game. The when in each of those instances had been obvious. Was that not also the case with Mrs. Senchak? Yet he could calmly descend the crooked concrete steps of the Senchaks’ split-level ranch, swinging his keys on their ring, clear-eyed and quiet.

  Maddie waited until they were in the car to speak.

  “So this is it,” she said quietly.

  Vincent asked what she meant.

  “Mrs. Senchak is going to die.”

  “Unless God works a miracle,” Vincent said.

  Maddie was furious. “Vincent,” she said with a raised voice, “you asked for a miracle, remember? And not just you, but also all of those people praying at church all those weeks ago now, and the whole church for several years, not to mention Mr. and Mrs. Senchak—and their children! They have been praying constantly, I’m sure of it. I’m sure they’re praying even now. If she could breathe,” Maddie was almost yelling, “if she could just catch her breath for even a minute, I am sure Mrs. Senchak would be asking for a miracle, Vincent!”

  Vincent didn’t answer her.

  Maddie had spent it all. She was silent for a moment, gazing unseeing at the weary Pittsburgh suburbs lining the road. “I don’t get it,” she said, her voice quiet now. She studied her impassive boyfriend in the driver’s seat. “Did you see what little Sarah made for her?”

  “Yes,” Vincent said.

  “I don’t get it,” she said again.

  “What don’t you get?” he asked her, very gently, not looking at her.

  Maddie marveled: impossible that he should not know her confusion, that he should not be confused, too.

  With what felt like a tremendous output of energy, she offered him Mr. Taylor. “Why should it be so hard?” she asked him. “Why can’t he just have his legs? Why not let him keep even one?”

  “Maddie,” Vincent said, “Mr. Taylor is old.”

  “So?” Her anger flared again. This was old territory. Here was the conversation about the paper cut and Mrs. Adams—why shouldn’t she want to use her hands?

  “So?” she said again with bitterness, daring him to use the same reasoning.

  “So, what do you want for him?” Vincent went on, “That he gets to keep his legs? That he doesn’t need a prosthetic one? That his diabetes disappears?”

  “Any and all of the above,�
� Maddie said. What could be wrong with this?

  “We all want that,” Vincent said. His voice was calm next to hers, so composed. “We want our hearts to work perfectly and our lungs to work perfectly and our legs and our arms and everything. And we never want to get sick and we never want to get hurt—and if we do, we want it all to go away.”

  “Yes. Yes! Yes, of course we do,” Maddie answered. He was making sense now. He understood, it seemed. But Maddie dreaded that there was more to it. “And why shouldn’t we want that, Vincent? It’s what everybody wants. Shouldn’t we want that, Vincent?” She could feel, under the vehemence, near-panic in her own voice.

  He was silent for a moment, focusing on driving, perhaps, or just letting her calm down. Or waiting for the right moment to drop the next terrible thing, a new and awful truth about God. He said, “I just don’t think that’s what we really want, is all.”

  “It isn’t?” Maddie was incredulous. What could Mrs. Senchak want more than strength in her arms to hug her little girls? Or Susan Sweet to walk across a parking lot like a normal person, to go from here to there without the entire horizon at a tilt?

  “People don’t really want to be healed, and that’s why healing doesn’t work, Vincent? Because they’re asking for the wrong thing? After people pray and ask God, after they have tried all the doctors and the doctors can’t help, after they’re so sick they can’t walk and they’re shriveled up on the hospital bed parked in their living room? After they know that they have to say goodbye to their legs or normal life or their kids that they’ll never see grow up—but they can’t say goodbye because they can’t actually talk because they can’t breathe? You’re telling me these people aren’t healed because they’re asking for the wrong thing? That it’s not what they actually want? They don’t actually want to get better?”

  Maddie said these words and then knew she was finished. She knew that his answer—whatever it was—wouldn’t be enough, would ask more from her than she would ever be able to muster. She knew at that moment that she couldn’t track with Vincent anymore. If her aim (what was her aim?) was to stay with Vincent and somehow ignore or someday absorb his enigmatic God, then it was time to give up the fight.

  He pulled into her driveway, and she opened the door while the car was still moving. He asked her to wait, but she was already headed to the house.

  “Maddie,” he called to her. He was following her, jogging, and he caught up with her as she reached the front door. “Mads, Maddie,” he said, his hands on her shoulders, gently. His voice was conversational, as if their argument had been resolved, or as if he didn’t know they were having one, as if he was just going to point something out to her, something in the yard, or something that had just come to mind.

  She turned to face him and looked into those blue eyes.

  “No matter what anybody thinks they want,” he said, “everybody just wants God.”

  R

  Maddie Brees was almost thirty-nine years old and a cancer survivor. She was a wife and the mother of three. Today, she waited in the van during carpool and looked at her hands. She spread her fingers; her eyes glazed over the wedding band and engagement ring that—chemo-induced edema gone—she could wear again.

  A paper cut. She would have given anything, back in that April, in that spring of her junior year in high school, to see Susan Sweet walk straight. With a shudder she thought of the Tedescos. And then mercifully the school’s doors opened and Eli was sprinting toward the car.

  R

  Frank’s first conscious thought as he drove away—because he hadn’t really been thinking for the past several hours, had he?—was disbelief that it had been so easy. Was it always that easy? If it was always this easy, then it certainly wasn’t practical complexity that kept people from cheating on their spouses.

  But then Frank reasoned that the ease, in his particular situation, was limited to this one experience. Maddie didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t know he was meeting Francesca; she had no idea that Francesca was in town. It was perfectly reasonable that he might be detained at work. That Francesca’s layover would turn into an overnight (something about thunderstorms over Atlanta; the airline had provided the hotel room) was happenstance. None of this had required strategy. He had fallen into it, so to speak. Despite what he had just done, he couldn’t be accused—not fairly, anyway—of plotting or calculating.

  It had been so easy.

  And, for her part, Francesca had made it easy, too: the light-heartedness of her greeting, her fluent conversation, the genuine interest in him and his work. She laughed at his jokes, reminding him that he was witty. They had laughed together. He and Maddie hadn’t laughed together all that much of late, not so much in the past year or so. For understandable reasons.

  It felt good to laugh.

  Yes, Francesca had made it easy. Her accustomed haughtiness was gone, replaced by what appeared to be genuine regard for Frank and his choices in life. She said she admired his sense of commitment. It was all so affirming. It was refreshing to be with her, and also, again, familiar—and it had seemed harmless to go to the hotel with her for another drink, because the airport bar was growing so loud and crowded. Those storms over Atlanta were apparently delaying lots of flights up and down the east coast.

  Francesca had even seemed to try making Frank’s going easy: no asking him to stay, no implied guilt about the hasty departure (the need to leave had suddenly been an overwhelming imperative; he had pulled his clothes on as if—absurdly—he had only in that instant realized his nakedness and was now appropriately embarrassed). It was Francesca saying she understood, saying she knew he needed to get home to his family, and those words—hearing Francesca say “your family”—had offended him: he didn’t want to hear Francesca, of all people, make reference to them, even when in that moment they were a hazy reality.

  Now he recognized that that was how he had managed for the duration of his time with Francesca: by somehow mentally wedging his family into a remote cell at the back of his mind. The heightened emotion leading up to their meeting (he had been distracted by it all day, all week) and the charged nature of their interaction had successfully cast the rest of his life in a muted light. Even talking with her about work had felt like a stretch for him until he miraculously gained some composure.

  Now, pulling onto the highway, Frank was caught on the idea of his composure. Yes, he had been composed. He had been charming. He had charmed and entertained Francesca, had, at her request, humbly revisited work that had led to some journalist awards. He had been scolded for being too humble, and then, as if to prove her wrong, he had talked about being invited to write a book. He had even discussed possible approaches to the book with her, fellow writer that she was, would-be colleague.

  And in her hotel room, he had had sex with her. Despite the intervening years and the history, sex with Francesca had felt incredibly easy, as if they were back in her dorm room again with incense and Joni Mitchell and no responsibilities to anyone.

  At the door of the room, clad only in a T-shirt, she had made light of it. Old time’s sake, was what she had said. So good to see him again after such a long time. Composed, smiling (belying that new and powerful urge to get away), Frank had simply agreed with her: So good to see you, too.

  Remarkable composure.

  Composure which, Frank thought, certainly required thinking. If nothing else, composure was dependent on presence of mind—which meant he could hardly claim to have been thoughtless. There had definitely been plotting involved in this little tryst. He could have told Maddie that he was going to see Francesca, but Maddie didn’t know, either, that he was back in touch with Francesca in the first place.

  The thing that Maddie always said she loved the most about Frank was his honesty. Ironically, this was something he had learned to value from Francesca, who had been—in those days and perhaps even now (how could he know?)—so heartlessly dishonest.

  As Frank himself had been: heartlessly dishonest.r />
  He drove down I-40 with all the windows wide-open, wind blasting through the car to drive the smell of Francesca from his skin and clothes. He could smell it; Maddie would, too, and so he stopped at a smoke-filled bar close to home, calling Maddie to let her know he’d be later still, trying to sound more tired than he felt so that he might match any discouragement he heard in her tone. Good! The boys were already in bed; Maddie herself was tired.

  I’m sorry, Madeleine, was what he heard himself saying: sorry to have missed an evening with the boys, an evening when he could help her with the after-dinner busyness. Maybe Jake had had a lot of homework; he didn’t know.

  Maddie, too, was asleep when he got home, and so he was glad for a chance to shower and to throw his smoke-smogged clothes in the hamper. Glad for a chance to collect his thoughts, despite the fact that they condemned him.

  Incredulity. Was it possible he had done this? He couldn’t believe he had given in. Years of fidelity, of committed adherence to all he believed about marriage vows and what really mattered in life. And now, in the span of a few hours, he had managed to undo it all. Amazing how easily it could be accomplished—and it was impossible to reverse.

  At the very least, he would never see Francesca again. He would never communicate with her. He wouldn’t open her emails; he would unfriend her (the base immaturity of such a gesture was now suddenly essential) on Facebook. Already she had lost her appeal—and for a bizarre, confused moment, he tried to catch a strain of that appeal, to see her naked back, arched, next to him. But it was gone.