Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Which wasn’t to say that it wouldn’t return. Frank knew better than to imagine that this infidelity would act as a purging. He was a man, only human. He sat on the end of the bed, his head in his hands, while his wife slept innocently behind him.

  He vowed to try harder. Discipline, he told himself. Discipline and focus and commitment. And he loved his wife.

  R

  Maddie had left Vincent standing on the front step. She had shut the door in his face. “Everybody just wants God,” he said. But what Maddie wanted that night was escape: to enter the front door of her parents’ house and then close it behind her, to get away—finally—from Vincent. She wanted to walk through the entryway, through the living room, make that hard left into the kitchen and on into the family room, ignoring her parents’ greetings, the questions: Where’s Vincent? How is Mrs. Senchak?

  How could she have answered them without having them slow her down? Mrs. Senchak is dying, she would have said, she’s holding her own but wishes she didn’t have to. It looks like it’s a matter of time, but hasn’t it always been a matter of time? It’s a long, long time that she’s known this was coming and now it’s killing her for certain, but slowly. Very slowly.

  And Vincent? Well, thank you for asking. I hate to disappoint you; I know you wish he’d come in like he normally does and chat with you and maybe accept, Mom, whatever it was you would have offered him to eat. But he hasn’t come in with me and I think he won’t be coming in with me anymore.

  Moreover, I’m not really home myself. I’m headed out.

  All of that would have taken too long, because what Maddie wanted was to walk through the house to the sliding glass door that opened to the deck. She wanted to open it and then close it again behind her and walk away from it all through the backyard—the most readily available route for escape.

  The walk would have been a long one, and hard. Hadn’t she mentally rehearsed it once before? They were in a Pittsburgh suburb, where flat real estate is nearly impossible to come by. And so her walk would have meant the slow climb in the crowned vetch that comprised the McGarvey’s backyard, and then walking on through their front yard and onto the neighboring street.

  Here was flatness, but only for a space. Her escape would mean another descent and then ascent again, this time through wooded land and through the neighborhood park. And beyond that, what did she know? Her childhood explorations had taken her no further. Likely more neighborhoods, as the view from the roads would suggest. At some point, the ground would open onto a parking lot somewhere. A strip mall, a business. But on that night, she thought she would have gone as far as her feet would take her, as long as she could have willed her legs on those climbs and descents.

  Surely somewhere there lay land that was flatter than this, land unobstructed by itself, by the endless succession of hills that rose to block the view.

  She did not go walking that night. She fielded, as briefly as she could, her parents’ questions, laying it all out in the mildest of terms. How is Mrs. Senchak? Not too good. And Vincent? Well, he had to get home.

  She went to bed early, unwillingly entertaining visions of her yard, her neighborhood, the hills that hemmed her in.

  How would it be if someone could lay hold of it, just pick it up at two proverbial corners, like a bed sheet, and shake it all out? That Maddie would like to see: the hills and valleys of the landscape, in a shocking jolt, whipped suddenly sky high and then laid down even and flat. The dust would take a long time to settle. The rivers would fall into haphazard lines; they would pool and then grow stagnant or, bereft of bed, would seep into the earth. The slag and shale of the strip mines would drift into sliding piles; the buildings (houses of brick and aluminum; skyscrapers of steel and glass) would slam into the earth and buckle, becoming indiscriminate mounds of rubble. It would be a mess that a body could pick her way through; she could make her way out of it, find the level field that existed somewhere at the outskirts of this mess.

  Maddie remembered this now, more than twenty years since that earth-shaken vision. Destructive, yes, and dramatic—but she found the longing was the same: an endless field, the waving grass. The only sound would be the sighing wind and the grasses rustling like paper. No hills to climb, no presumptuous upstart comprised of the very earth itself, as if it were the plotting enemy, waiting to catch you up with the reminder that you are made of earth, of dust.

  She remembered that vision of the grassy flatland, just as she remembered the glowing cathedral of the city at night, and Vincent on the football field, at the rain-drenched curb. And in the oncology ward with the sunlight falling over his shoulders—that last memory based on nothing, composed of her own imagination, because that was the one that had never happened.

  And these memories, of course, informed the vision, altered by her cancer, altered by all the fearful possibilities that, once upon a time, she had never imagined: the grassy field was not so much a refuge anymore, because who knew where the pit might be, invisible in all that grass? One false step and you are gone. The hole—for all she knew—was bottomless.

  R

  Saturday evening Mass, and Maddie was the last of her family in the pew. Jake had led the way and now the boys sat side by side, in order of age, with their parents to their left. Out of habit, Maddie looked over Frank and checked on her sons: faces scrubbed, hair only somewhat smoothed. Jake especially was a relentless resistor of smoothed hair; he had opinions of his own on the subject. That afternoon, he had announced to his mother that he planned to “grow it out.”

  Her sons, for now, were behaving themselves, and Maddie settled in. She thought this might be the first time they had all been quiet together in what felt like days. Games and practices had once again upended the mealtime routine. Last night Jake had had a game, and afterward the team had gone out for ice cream, which had bumped bedtime back an hour. The night before that Frank had been so late at work, none of them had even seen him. He had come home after she was asleep.

  But the stillness of waiting for Mass to begin did not feel good to her. Busyness felt good to her these days. She liked having something to do with her hands at the very least. If it was distracting enough, it could quiet the contents of her mind and displace the sadness.

  And now was the hour for Mass and there he was, agonized and dying: the crucifix looming over them all. The universal image—and when was this, exactly, in the chronology of events that comprised the crucifixion? Was he dying? Was he dead? Last words, bowed head, then silence.

  This Catholic insistence on the body. Maddie found herself wishing for an empty cross, the plain wooden cross-beams that had hung at the front of the Bethel Hills Church. But body or no, she realized, the idea was the same: the reminder of his death. And to what end, she asked herself. Catholic or Protestant, there was no escaping this inscrutable, suffering God.

  Maddie couldn’t help it. Her thoughts turned, relentlessly and irrationally, to Vincent. Now it was their last conversation she was recalling, and she wouldn’t let him speak. She didn’t give him room, as she didn’t want to hear whatever he might have come up with. And anyway, what could he have said? Any argument would have been futile. She could see him still, how slowly he walked down the driveway, got into his car and was gone.

  She had been abrupt and cruel; she knew that now. At the time, it had seemed her only option, but for the first time she felt that she might like to speak to him—not about healing, not about cancer—but by way of some sort of apology. She hadn’t been able to stay with Vincent; did he understand that? Vincent and his impossible theology. It was God I rejected, Vincent, she would like to say, if she could find him in the Peterson’s fabled shopping mall.

  The sob hit like a spasm, involuntary language of heart and mind, and Maddie heard it—or imagined and feared she heard it—echo through the sanctuary. Panicked, she turned to Frank, who didn’t seem to have noticed, but she couldn’t believe that and so turned to look in other directions, certain to find people staring at he
r. No one was.

  Frank must have felt her restlessness. “You okay?”

  “Didn’t you hear that?” Maddie was afraid to ask him, but the sound had been so loud; there was no sense in denying that she had cried out. She would have to field his questions and come up with an excuse.

  “What?” he asked her. Amazed, she didn’t reply. “Hear what?” he asked again.

  “Nothing,” she managed, and smiled at him, hiding her relief. She had heard herself sob; she had felt the cry shake her—her windpipe and chest, her ribcage and shoulders. And yet, by some miracle, she had managed to keep it to herself. She had cried, but she hadn’t cried out. She hadn’t, after all, given herself away.

  The service was beginning. Next to her, Frank was reaching for the missal. They were all standing now, and Frank was leaning over Garrett to whisper something in Eli’s ear. When he straightened again, his left arm rested against Maddie’s right shoulder, and Maddie remembered sitting next to Vincent in church years ago, before they were dating. The warmth of his arm on her sleeve had been all she knew for the length of an entire church service, and she had imagined she still felt it on the ride home.

  Oh, Maddie thought, this was absurd. All of this was absolutely absurd. The familiar anger rose in her stomach, and she silently scolded herself. Here she sat in church with her family—husband and three beautiful boys—and all she could think about was this boy she had imagined she loved when she herself was practically a child. It had been a brief year; it had been puppy love; it had been childish and meaningless and should be long dead. She suppressed an exasperated sigh. For crying out loud, soon enough Jake would be the age Vincent had been when his star first swung across her horizon. This was unaccountable obsession, and it was blinding her to the gifts all around her. Far worse than the cancer, this prolonged meditation on Vincent was making her miss everything else.

  Sitting again, Maddie reached for Frank’s hand, holding it first with one and then with both of her own. She rested her right hand inside his left, and she knew that it felt the same as it always had: the calluses on the inside of his palm, not thick; the texture of his skin. The nails, neatly trimmed; the length of his fingers; the hair on the first length of each knuckle. Even now, in the length of his fingers, she knew them as different from Vincent’s. Vincent’s hands had been rougher than Frank’s, busy always with a baseball, a football, or healing people.

  It had been so long, she thought, since she had held Frank’s hand. She took it for granted that she could do so anytime she wanted to. He would gladly respond to her affection; he would gladly listen. And he would come home to them from work every night; he would make pancakes on Saturday morning. Years ago she had told him about Vincent, and while Maddie hadn’t been able to tell him the whole thing, she had always known that of all people, Frank was someone she could tell.

  She had wanted to tell him. She truly had. She remembered the paths around campus, the long walks they had taken after dark, the periodic pools of lamplight; she heard the clack of the empty branches blown by the wind overhead. This was before Frank had kissed her, before he had even touched her, and yet she had felt closer to him than to anyone she knew or had ever known. He told her about learning to play tennis, about competing with his older brother on the high school tennis team, about riding Big Wheels in the woods near his house when he was five. He told her about Father Tim and about why he was Catholic which, for Frank, was different from the fact he’d been raised that way. He had talked honestly about Francesca; he had said he thought he was in love with her; he had said he also might be wrong, that he wasn’t sure what it meant to be in love with someone, but that he wanted very much to find out.

  And Maddie had told him about being partially raised by the congregation of the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness and about Sunday night’s endless altar calls. She told him about Justine and her little brother who had died when he was only four. She told him about her parents; she told him about her neighborhood; she told him that she had wanted to go to a college as far away from home as possible—in the Pacific Northwest, maybe—but that she had also been pretty depressed during her senior year and so hadn’t really been on the ball when it was time for college applications.

  Frank said he was glad she had ended up where she did, and Maddie blushed in the dark.

  And of course she had told him about Vincent, about Vincent and the other boys, the brief series she had dated in the earliest weeks of college, trying them on one after another like one might try pairs of jeans. Frank brought the subject back around to Vincent, and so she told him about the church’s blind faith in a God who might do anything and the unarguable fact that Vincent couldn’t heal people.

  Over the years she had considered it. After a dinner party, maybe, when somehow the conversation had gone to car accidents or injuries or near escapes from them, and Frank had volunteered Maddie’s story of the drunken man hit by a car in the rain. After times like that, Maddie had considered just telling Frank the rest of the story, but she could never bring herself to do it. And wasn’t it a happier ending, anyway, to think that Vincent’s going to college had brought things to a close? Everyone, Maddie imagined, was happier this way.

  Except for this year. This year Maddie couldn’t claim to be happier. This year she had revisited all of it, even pieces she had thought she’d forgotten. This year the whole thing had played out in her mind too many times, and now sitting in church she made mentally to turn on it, to simply confront head-on the invisible force that funneled the awful narrative again and again through her mind. Was it possible? Could she just stop thinking about Vincent? Couldn’t she put it down now and be finished with it? Why couldn’t she simply walk away?

  No, Maddie thought. Clearly, she wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t do it alone. God knew she’d tried.

  Her gaze returned, automatically, compulsorily, to the crucifix. Strange outcome, this, she thought: she had rejected God all those years ago. She had deliberately torn herself free of him and of that foolishly expectant church; she had escaped his whims and demands. And now here she sat in a church.

  “Everyone really only wants God.” That’s what Vincent had told her, and Maddie remembered standing in her parents’ living room, the infant Jesus from the nativity crèche nestled in her palm. Please, God. Long before Vincent. Long before Frank. She wasn’t willing to meet God at an altar; she invited him instead into her living room. She had always wanted him on her own terms.

  Please, God, she had said. But had she meant it?

  She wasn’t sure it mattered. Staring at the crucifix, she considered that God had already lost it all and so was willing to wait. He would come when invited, but would take a backseat to Maddie’s pride. He could sustain her exchanging an expressed desire for God for the attentions of a high school football player. He would tolerate—for a time—Maddie’s abuse of Vincent’s remarkable gift.

  But in the end, the crucified God would take all of that away. Everything but himself—which is what she had asked for in the first place.

  The sadness crowded her throat. She felt it swelling there, threatening to choke her. She had asked for this God, but in the end she hadn’t wanted him. And when it came time to cut this God from her life, Vincent had not been the greatest of losses.

  Maddie looked down at where Frank’s hand still rested in hers. It was so casual a thing, this holding hands, wasn’t it? Maddie realized she could tell Frank. She realized, moreover, that she should tell him, that—if he knew—he would want her to tell him. And it occurred to her that there might be something in it, some magic trick of honesty—like a confession.

  And then it was Vincent again in their last conversation together, sitting on the sofa in her parents’ living room. For a while he had met her gaze, his blue eyes had looked into hers and then, as she had talked, had begun to traverse her face. She had watched him study her—her eyes and brows, her forehead, her lips. Once or twice he opened his mouth to speak, but Maddie had talked
over him, and eventually he had dropped his gaze to his hands. She saw them now again, Vincent’s hands, the square nails, the ragged edges of the gnawed nail beds, the tanned skin, hairless knuckles. Vincent had studied his own hands while Maddie had talked as if reading out his verdict, and Maddie could still see—so clearly—his bent head, his brown arms, his hands dangling between his knees.

  Her long memory of the body.

  Sitting in church under the closed eyes of the crucifix, Maddie felt a second sob, thicker than the last, rising in her throat. Would she have to tell Frank even about that—Vincent’s hands idle between his knees in the living room? Which details were the essential ones, and which would be too many? Once she started, Frank would insist on knowing it all.

  Could she bear to say it aloud? She had never said it all, never heard the sound of her voice telling the rest of the story. And what would it be to look Frank in the eye afterward? And what would he say?

  The sob was thicker now. This one, she feared, would out. She felt tears swelling in her eyes and blinked hard, panicked and angry that she would have to wipe them away—a gesture impossible to misinterpret. It was an essential effort at self-preservation to withdraw her hand from Frank’s and press it—just subduing a cough—to her throat.

  26

  Uncanny, Frank thought, that after months of almost no affection from his wife, Maddie should choose the Saturday after Francesca to hold his hand in church.

  Immediately, that thought embarrassed him. As if holding hands were a big deal. He and Maddie weren’t in middle school.

  And yet it was a big deal—not only because it illustrated in bold strokes the absence of his wife’s affection towards him of late, but also because of the way in which she had held his hand: she had clasped it, traced his fingers, sometimes held it with both of her own, rotated her hand again and again inside his palm. She had very nearly rubbed his skin away, he thought.