He would never be able to remember that drive home. Years later, he wouldn’t be able to recall seeing the road—but there is where familiarity is enough to get you, by rote, by habit, to your house again. Because the whole way home, his mind was on Maddie, on terror mixed with joy, and there was something in it of his pell-mell run to church all those years ago, his mad dash to the little Catholic church in their college-town that April, his grinning, breathless first communion.
He hadn’t been able to control his joy as Tim handed him the wafer. Now he remembered what it was that compelled him that day. It was a small, frail thing, nearly translucent, that with unimaginable strength bound profound loss and the richest gain together—a body torn, again and again, in sacrifice, in payment, for all the pain, and for everything Frank had done and would do.
Maddie met him at the door and he took her again—so grateful—in his arms. She wasn’t crying, but she was shaking, trembling, her whole body quaking against him, rattling as though she would fly apart. Frank had felt he was holding her together, gathering the edges of herself closer to her core, and again and again he whispered in her ear that he was sorry and he loved her, until finally Maddie stopped shaking and was able to let herself cry.
R
“One of yours for one of mine,” Frank said, and Maddie turned to look at him from where she lay on their bed. She was curled on her side; the white bedspread was rumpled over and around her. This time, for this surgery, the boys had gone to her parents’ home in Pittsburgh. The house was quiet. She hadn’t heard Frank come in.
“One of yours for one of mine,” Frank said again, holding his open laptop toward her so she could see a photo of Vincent’s family and, a small square, Vincent himself, smiling and older. His blue eyes. Frank was smiling, too.
Of course he was smiling. Dear Frank. He saw no threat in letting Maddie contact Vincent, now or ever; why should he? Wasn’t that the point all along? Tell each other everything; no skeletons in the closet. They could be the other’s best friend that way. They could drown their temptations in the tangled sheets of their bed; they could laugh about old loves because old loves didn’t matter anymore. “Frankie and Frankie.” They had laughed about that; it was ridiculous.
And Frank had been right about the honesty. Maddie could see that now. She had seen it, or known it anyway, when she stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and the diagnosis coming through the signal. Somehow, hearing that the cancer was back had brought a concurrent sense of her need for Frank. They had to do it again. They had to do it again. She wouldn’t do it without him.
He had left work and come home to her immediately and now, post-surgery, he offered her Vincent.
Maddie shook her head.
Frank wanted to know what it could hurt? “What can it hurt to ask him, Maddie?” he asked her. “He healed you once before,” he said. Somehow—Maddie saw it now—he had seen through it. He had understood that Maddie hadn’t told him the whole story, and he had trusted her anyway.
But he closed the laptop when he saw that she was crying, the tears rolling into the small well at the bridge of her nose and then falling into the pillow. Carefully, she told him the rest of the story, all the parts she didn’t tell him all those years ago, all the parts she hadn’t told him since then—even though he had asked for honesty. He had said they would be needing honesty. And then, when he had failed her, he had been honest about it.
Maddie began with Dominic’s death, a fact Frank had known before. But he couldn’t possibly have known its weight: that this was, for Maddie, the final straw with God. The last sigh of Dominic’s ventilator was either an act of divine retribution or one of wanton cruelty: punishment for sexual sin reaching far beyond the guilty, or benevolence capriciously withheld. And how was Maddie to countenance faith or trust in a being so decidedly unjust or unkind? She told Frank all of it, searching for details and speaking slowly, skipping back sometimes to tell him things she’d left out. It was like turning over rocks; like she was walking in a quarry and turning every stone over, making sure she’d left nothing to his imagination, no detail unexplored. She wanted to make an earnest go of honesty this time.
On that awful day, she and Vincent rode home from the hospital in silence and then she told him she needed to be alone. Within hours, she had known she had to call Justine. Much to her surprise, Justine hadn’t had much to say. Maddie had anticipated an earful against Vincent and she hadn’t wanted to hear it; it had taken desperation to get her to call Justine nonetheless.
But Justine had surprised her. She had understood completely, even though Maddie had (she was learning to do so quickly) withheld some details. Justine could see that an abortion was the only way to go. They were too young to be married. How could Maddie be sure she wanted to spend the rest of her life with the guy? Connie Baskin, who just graduated, had an abortion last summer. Did Maddie know that? Sometimes you’re just kind of trapped by these things, you know?
This exposure to Justine’s worldliness wasn’t even shocking. Somehow, Maddie had suspected it all along, and anyway, she was too desperate just now to be anything but grateful. She had teared up a little, sitting there in the booth at the Eat ‘n’ Park, and Justine had handed her a tissue from her purse.
And maybe Justine, certainly compassionate to the Tedescos, understood without discussion the impossibility of Maddie’s continued pregnancy. Maddie didn’t need to delineate for Justine just how unreasonable and even cruel it would be for Maddie to carry and then deliver a potentially healthy baby, when they had lost every child.
Yes, that much was enough. There was no need to go into the rest of it. Justine had her own issues with God; she didn’t need the burden of Maddie’s guilt over Vincent, and likely she wouldn’t understand it. How could she understand that, for Maddie, the abortion was her only means of escape—both from Vincent and from God? In this final act, Vincent would know that she wanted nothing more to do with him. And Maddie would have no obligation borne of miracle to compel her toward God.
Bitterly, she reasoned further: God had given his gift to Vincent, his insight to Vincent. Shed of Maddie and the bond of a child between them, Vincent could have his gift restored, perhaps. He could have his life with God.
Maddie didn’t tell Vincent until it was over. She had missed little Dominic’s funeral because of it and so had Justine, who had taken her to the clinic and then brought her home again. Maddie told her mother she was sick—and she was sick: she just wanted to sleep and sleep forever. Vincent had come and sat at the foot of her bed for a while, and Maddie had pretended to be sleeping. But soon enough she had to tell him.
She asked him to come to the house; her parents weren’t home. It was summer but there was a pallor under his tan; there were dark circles under his eyes. When she opened the door, he reached for her and held her without saying anything, weeping silently into her shoulder—she understood why—for Dominic, for Nicky and Amy and their unspeakable loss.
She kept it brief; she talked quickly; she gave him no time to answer. She told him that she wouldn’t be marrying him—there was no need—and that after everything that had happened, she didn’t think she loved God and she didn’t think she loved Vincent and this just needed to be over.
And then it was over. It was finally done.
Vincent had stood and walked to her, then bent and kissed her forehead. Without a word, he walked out of the house to his car. She did not see him to the door, but after it closed behind him, she went to the window and watched him go. He walked slowly. Short strides, bent head. He didn’t look at the house before he drove away.
She hadn’t gone back to church after that, which her parents—since she’d broken up with Vincent—seemed to understand: perhaps they knew it would be too painful. She hadn’t seen Vincent again, hadn’t seen the Tedescos. Her friendship with Justine slowly faded—they didn’t seem to know what to say to each other—and then they’d been off to college. And immediately Maddie had begun the reevalu
ation of everything, which was why, among other things, she had insisted that Vincent could never heal people.
Long before she was finished, Frank had lain down with her, behind her, his body curling into and behind hers: chest to back, thigh to thigh, knee to knee. Under the white bedspread, his hand rested over hers where it was lying on her thigh; she felt him breathing into her hair. He made no sound; he said nothing; and a long time went by before she was done with the telling. When she reached the end of the story, the sun had swung around and was low in the sky, and the shadows of the birch branches lay tangled all over the bed.
Frank never seemed surprised. Not that he had surmised what she told him, but that nothing she had done would change what was true all along. “I love you, Madeleine,” was all he said. Over and over again he told her he loved her, as if those words could be sufficient, as if love—in light of death, cruelty and loss—could ever be enough.
Maddie was still crying at the end. Her pillow was drenched and still she cried into it, eyes, nose, mouth all streaming, her back warm against Frank.
Epilogue
It is later than that now, a Saturday, the middle of the day, and Frank is home. He and Maddie both, in fact, are in their bedroom on a Saturday afternoon. They had managed an excuse (what was it?) and the boys are satisfied and playing happily, for now, in the room below them. Maddie can hear their voices: Jake helping Garrett with something, and Garrett, loving the attention of his older brother, chattering happily, his voice coming to her like the chirp of a bird.
They’d had to be clandestine and quick: stolen moments like these in the middle of the day are risky at best, but she and Frank have discovered they love the risk. They think it’s even a little bit funny, and they both are so often tired at the end of the day that the risk of an afternoon is more than worthwhile.
So it was quick but also richly satisfying, and Maddie now turns to watch Frank sleep, to watch his chest fall and see the sun make the skin of his shoulder almost incandescent. She imagines she can see the individual cells, each of them refracting the light. Frank is naked; they are both naked, and the sheet covers Frank haphazardly. His left leg hangs over the edge of the bed, exposed. Maddie’s own body is marked with new scars and old, but she lets the sheet fall where it will, and her bare arm lies next to Frank’s. In his sound sleep, he is holding her hand.
The voices downstairs begin to rise. An argument. Any moment one of them will knock on the door, seeking arbitration. But Maddie doesn’t move just yet. Frank is sleeping soundly and he is holding her hand.
Then she hears Eli shush his brothers and his voice, measured, comes in tones too low for her to decipher words. Ah, she thinks to herself. They are working it out. She feels a rush of gratitude and closes her eyes. Maybe she can get a little nap.
She is doing so well, everyone says. Despite the new diagnosis, they say, you are doing so well. And Maddie smiles, thanks them, agrees.
What is cancer, anyway? she might ask, if the conversation went that way. What is cancer in the scheme of things? A paper cut, maybe? She smiles to think of Vincent struggling for words to name his faith. He’d had remarkable vision for a boy of seventeen, a boy who had known suffering in ways she—never abandoned by her father, for instance—couldn’t have understood. She had never understood Vincent; she hadn’t really tried.
A paper cut, he had said, and she had been angry. Now she wonders what he had seen as he gazed across the parking lot that day, what vision of sacrifice and eternity had cast itself there, imbuing all hurt and loss with far greater significance than she had cared to see.
Again she sees the tilted parking lot, the crack-scarred macadam, the thin sheets of rainwater sliding toward the drain. She imagines herself walking toward him—she at thirty-nine years old—climbing the gentle slope of pavement and water to his teenage self. She doubts she would have much to teach him, even now, but who couldn’t stand to be reminded of gentleness? She would like to tell him: let’s not call it a paper cut, Vincent.
And then she realizes that he probably didn’t even need that from her. Baby Dominic had probably taught him as much. Not that she could be certain: she didn’t know Vincent after Dominic.
She didn’t know Vincent after he was eighteen.
Eyes still closed, she sees his house: yellow brick with peeling paint around the windows. A wooden front porch, the boards split under their several coats of paint, curling downward at the top of the steps. The wooden steps themselves, cracked and softened; the bottom step gone altogether, replaced by a cinder block. The leaning plumb tree, lawn of crabgrass.
She had ridden past his house on the trolley dozens of times before she knew him, and now she wondered who else lived along that route, what other lives she had spied on, imagined, diminished while riding that electric vein into the city. Susan Sweet, perhaps. Maybe the Gilleces?
She saw Susan, Mr. Taylor, the Tedescos continuing on—as she heard they’d done—without the miraculous healings they had so boldly asked for. And yet they were content, persistent in faith despite God’s answer to their requests.
Maybe they already had what they really wanted. “Everybody just wants God.”
The sun falls through the window and warms her skin between the networked shadow of the birch. Half-dreaming, she sees an aerial view of her hometown, the grid of trolley lines and roadways, the branching streets and intersections, the lawns and green spaces, and the grit and dirt, the broken glass and waste of city life. The rise and fall of the city’s wrinkled skirts, Mount Washington, the glint of the rivers. The city. And at night, the limitless breadth of stars.
All of it of a piece. The realization coming softly, like sleep, heavy and sweet. Roadways like arteries, like veins, the landscape of a body, torn and torn and torn again into this small plot and that, this life and that. And all fed by the bleeding heart of the city: beautiful, terrifying, enough.
Acknowledgements
I owe many debts of gratitude for this project. First, my deepest thanks to those friends who shared their experiences with breast cancer. Thanks, too, to Dr. Allen Liles and Dr. Sascha Tuchman for invaluable medical insight. Ken and Debbie Tunnell, Paul and Tracey Marchbanks, Carolyn and Mike Shipley, and Emily and Byron Williams for very real support in making spaces for me to write. Thanks to Bonnie Liles and Walker Hicks, for taking the risk of an early reading. Daun Whitley, Laine Stewart, Tori Lye, Keith Newell and Annie Hawkins, for your prayers. Beth Wessels, Rachel Stine, and Lynne Liptak, for listening. The staff of Light Messages for all the expertise I do not have. Betty Turnbull for your tenacity and delightful sense of humor. Elizabeth Turnbull for insight, gentleness, and so much hard work. The incomparable Jamie Schneider, who understood and believed in this project in its infancy. Bill and Carolyn Stevenson and Linda Tulip, for your patience. My parents, Richard and Susan Brewster, for your constant love. My sisters, Meghan Bowker and Emily Brewster, for your encouragement. The South Hills Church of the Nazarene, for being my second home while I grew up into the world. And Bill, Will, Everett, and Emma Grace, who endured with laughter, dancing, and confident hope.
About the Author
Rebecca Brewster Stevenson was raised in Pittsburgh. She has a master’s degree from Duke University and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and three children. Healing Maddie Brees is her first novel. Rebecca can be found online at rebeccabrewsterstevenson.com.
Reading Guide
A discussion guide for readers is available online at:
lightmessages.com/rbstevenson
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