Maddie saw him still: the sleek wetness of his hood, his stumbling progress, the traffic that was against them and so had them all hanging back at the curb, waiting for the walk signal.
He had made it more than halfway to them when the car came from their left to round the bend. It wasn’t going very fast, but it hit him with a screech of brakes and a loud and dreadful thump. The faceless figure bent a little bit and rolled up onto the car’s hood, then slid to the ground.
Here, Maddie’s audience would usually gasp: what a terrible thing to witness! What a dreadful accident! But Frank would silence this interruption with a raised finger and a slight smile. There was more.
Maddie continued: the figure didn’t remain in a crumpled heap, but instead began immediately to uncoil. A hand and legs extended from it as it began to make its way into an upright position, reaching with one hand for the curb, then grasping Vincent’s sneakers and then the leg of his jeans, reaching as if this frame were leverage by which to draw himself up.
And there was Vincent not stepping away from this man but leaning forward to help him, bending forward at the waist as one might do to take up a small child. He grasped the crumpled figure by the upper arms and helped him to his feet.
In telling the story aloud, this was the part she would emphasize—and Frank, the writer, the real storyteller of the family, might break in to underscore it further: “The kid was holding the guy by the arms.”
“Right. By the arms,” she would repeat again with a knowing grin. She was nodding and complicit, fostering the story and Frank’s clear enjoyment in it, pausing to let this moment have its full effect.
Maddie had no memory of the crowd, of the comments of onlookers; she only barely remembered how the car that had hit the man was now parked at the curb. She could see streaks of rain in its taillights. Was the car white? The driver had gotten out and was standing anxiously next to the climbing man. Was there mention of the police? Surely someone ought to have called the police.
Drawn fully now to his feet, the man gained identity. He was Willy, the homeless man, the one with the crippled arm who had accosted them earlier in the hopes of selling them tickets to a game they already had tickets for. He raised his chin and looked Vincent in the eye, with Vincent’s hands still gripping him by the shoulders.
“Willy, you okay, man?” Vincent asked.
But Willy’s only answer was to reach back, take hold of his flung-back hood, and pull it again over his face. He exhaled heavily, sounding as if being hit by a car in the dark rain was for him—what with all the climbing to his feet—a great bore or perhaps (and this did seem more likely) an exhausting enterprise. He exhaled directly into Vincent’s face while seeming also to take no notice of him and then stepped up onto the curb only to continue walking, making his way through the waiting crowd as if it were nothing to be hit by a car. Nothing at all.
That was when Vincent turned to Maddie and said that that guy was seriously drunk. There was nothing more to the incident.
Here her audience invariably laughed: the group at the party, heads leaning in, faces alight; Frank, bemused, listening.
The inevitable question came: Had no one called the police? She herself had wondered this many times. Perhaps someone had done so, but she and Vincent, in their ignorance, had continued on their way without such responsible thoughts. What could she tell her fascinated listeners? The shock of it all had been enough. They were only children, really.
But they must have talked about it together, Maddie thought now. Surely they spoke to one another about it in low voices as they rode toward home in the trolley. They must have talked about it, because she was sure they both knew that it was Willy who had been hit by the car.
Which was why he had only used one arm as he had climbed to his feet.
She had asked Vincent about this; she recalled this part of the conversation—or did she reconstruct it, setting it there in the yellow glow of the trolley’s interior as it made its lumbering way into the dark and drenched suburbs? Because she could see him—Vincent—sitting in his wet jeans and T-shirt beside her, and she asked him if he had known it was Willy coming toward them in the rain?
Vincent said he hadn’t known it was him until Willy had looked him in the eyes and breathed all that alcohol into his face. He looked around the trolley car as he said this, not looking at Maddie because they were sitting side by side. She sat by the window and he held her hand; outside it was dark and wet, and all she could see was the occasional streetlight and the beaded water sliding down the pane.
R
The doctor said it wasn’t a very big mass—only about one centimeter—but the biopsy was clear: it was cancer. Suddenly all the conversation was of treatment plans and radiation and chemotherapy. A lumpectomy, a mastectomy (Maddie gasped at the mention of it; Frank squeezed her hand); she’d have her lymph nodes out. The doctor wanted to do some scans to be sure that the cancer wasn’t elsewhere. He would be sitting down to discuss her case with other doctors; they would decide together on the best course of treatment. And they had caught it early—very early. Good for her for doing her self-exams. Well done.
Maddie and Frank walked out into the day and, when Frank asked her how she felt, she said she didn’t know. Stunned, maybe. That was the best word for it. Maddie knew nothing of the return to their car; she felt she could take nothing in—not the feel of her feet in her own shoes. This news was enough to absorb for a day, enough to absorb for a month or longer, and already there was so much immediately ahead that was meaningless terminology: lymph system, CT scan, MRI. How to proceed in the vague unreality that was now to be her life?
Frank was talking. He hadn’t thought it would be cancer; he really hadn’t thought it would be.
Why not? Maddie suddenly answered aloud. What were the chances? No family history—but what difference does that make, honestly? They were far too happy. Things were going far too well. Of course the disaster must come to their family, the happy one, the family screaming for fate to hit them. It’s like, in all our happiness and contentment, Maddie said, we’d volunteered for this.
Frank reached over and took her hand and reminded her quietly that it might not be that bad. We found it early, he reminded her. We’ll get through this, he told her again.
Maddie said nothing more. For now there was the yard to face, the house, the sunlit kitchen. The maddening normalcy of the entire world lay cheerfully indifferent before her, immune to diagnosis and its terrors. Soon enough it would be time to get Garrett from school; soon enough it would be time to get Jake and Eli. She ought to call her mother. But all of the ensuing conversations would only make it more terrible: if no one talked about it, then surely it would be less true.
In the end, Frank was the one to handle all of that: telling her parents and his, The Priest, other friends and family. He did it gently, over a series of days. And as for their children, he said there was no sense in telling them more than they could handle or even understand. The five of them sat together on the living room sofa, Garrett in his father’s lap, Jake and Eli flanked by their parents. The boys listened with interested expressions: Mommy was sick, but she was going to get better. It just might take some time. They departed from the conversation with the pleasant instruction to “go play.”
Later, she considered her instant bitterness in the car, all of that anger about their happiness and fate. Frank had let it slide, eager, she thought, to soothe her, anxious to be of comfort, to let her respond with whatever shock this sudden grief might raise. All of it had been nonsense; both of them knew it. Cancer wasn’t a weapon in fate’s hands; this was no time to be feeling sorry for herself. She should move forward in strength; she should be optimistic. But Frank, wanting to be gentle with her, she supposed, hadn’t said any of that.
Still the thought pricked at her. She thought there might be something to it. There was something to the notion of fate here, or maybe vengeance. Don’t they say that everything happens for a reason? A kind o
f punishment, perhaps. How else to explain it? The ground shifting beneath her feet.
In any event, there it was: resolute fact. The certainty of the cancer rushed to the fore, obscuring everything else. Suddenly there were only possibilities that included cancer and its treatment, and for several days Maddie felt that the world had taken on an unaccustomed, terrible brilliance, its hard edges grown perilously sharp. For a time, thoughts of the future—both immediate and distant—were subsumed in the reality that was cancer. She could not remember anything having been so true as this.
R
The trolley in Pittsburgh’s Bethel Hills leaves the parking lot near the mall and follows the line of the road. Small businesses and suburban shopping centers top hills and climb the rises here, but soon enough the trolley slips behind these and is lost in a tunnel entrance lined with cement blocks, and then the dark tunnel itself. On emerging again, the view is all backyards whose far reaches are bounded by the trolley line.
In her childhood days, Maddie had loved this: the surprise of the landscape’s unfolding. What would lie behind that tree, beyond this rise, on the other side of the tunnel? It was delightful variance; each emergence meant new and sudden insight, all of it life-sized. But from the vantage point of the trolley, these yards and houses were magically diminished, somehow taking on the properties of the miniature. She liked to imagine that she herself had shrunk and climbed into the electric train display her father had once taken her to see, the one where the track ran through the artificial green grass and was here and there bordered by plastic trees; the one where the little houses had the occasional plastic dog or person in the front yard, and the houses, though small, were lit by electric light.
The houses from the perspective of the trolley gained this quality of stillness, of waiting to be seen, of having been prepared for this moment when the trolley would go sliding past. So whether the yard was newly mown or had, at the back, a neatly stacked pile of firewood, a swing set, or some things discarded—an old bicycle perhaps, a broken ladder, a pile of indistinguishable and clearly unused rubbish—Maddie imagined it whole and entire, established and set just so: this was how it was intended to be seen. A decoration, a life imagined, something distinct and safe, set apart just for the looking.
The houses were old and generally tired, but many were well-kept nonetheless. Yellow brick predominated here after the aluminum siding of her neighborhood, yellow and red brick and slate roofs. And then another tunnel, perhaps, and the green slope of a nearby hillside that, along with a row of trees, obscured the backyards and would have kept her guessing, except that there wasn’t time to guess, there was only the next thing to see, which was that now the houses were closer together, or here they were in what almost looked like the city but really was the suburbs more grown-up. So now there were storefronts with apartments above them, a bar replete with neon sign in the window, little restaurants, a tailor, a store for coin and stamp collectors, and all of it in yellow or red brick or very tired-looking aluminum siding. And everywhere, at every corner, the gray concrete of sidewalk, the black pavement, the cars lining the streets, and weeds and grass and gravel collected in the cracks between.
It all went by quickly enough; here was nothing permanent. It was a memory composed of impressions. That Pittsburgh’s suburbs should be spread like a wrinkled skirt on the other side of the mountain was nothing at all remarkable; every city might be like this. But there was always the last, dark tunnel, the long one at the nearly end, when they went through the mountain and then emerged into downtown—into the narrow, flat strip abutting water, and then the river, and then the city itself. That much Maddie knew or thought she knew—that and the day when she and her parents took the trolley into the city in the early autumn of her junior year and Maddie, fixed as ever to the view outside her window, saw the pedestrians going by and saw among them Willy, the man who had been struck by the car.
This was where she would resume the story, the miracle tale that Frank loved her to tell. It was months later, she would explain, and she really only caught a glimpse of him from the trolley window, but there he was: Willy, unmistakable. It was fall now, cool, and Maddie noticed first the mustard-colored parka as it moved down the sidewalk. She studied the figure wearing it as the trolley approached, observed the dirty blond hair, recognized the rapid walk. And as the trolley neared him, she watched for his face—the same set and focused gaze, staring straight ahead. Willy was pushing something—what?—a cart, something piled with garbage bags. But what held Maddie’s gaze was Willy’s arms: both of them straight and strong.
She would remind her small audience of the crippled arm, the muscles’ obvious atrophy; the preceding year or two during which Vincent had seen him multiple times, always in the same impaired state; the clear unlikelihood of medical intervention for a person like Willy; the inability, at that time or even now, for medical science to improve such a condition.
The glimpse had been fleeting even though she did what she could to hold it, sitting up in her seat and twisting round to stare at his disappearing figure. The bags on the cart were not so high as to obscure his hands: she saw them, well and whole—both arms, both hands, fingers strong and wrapped around the cart’s handle.
3
They were going in very early for the surgery, but Maddie was awake before the alarm went off. She didn’t think she had slept at all; she hadn’t slept much in the days and weeks between her diagnosis and this surgery. After this, she thought and had been telling herself. Things would be better after this. After this, they would know where they stood. The cancer would be out; it would be a simple process of discouraging it from ever returning again. She just needed to get through this.
Before the alarm sounded, Maddie reached over and shut it off. Frank stirred and turned over. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and marveled at his ability to sleep. Then she went into the bathroom.
The water was warm but still shocking: wet on a body that wanted to be dry, stimulating to a body that needed to sleep. Frank had encouraged her the night before to sleep later: Why get up so early tomorrow? You need your rest.
But he didn’t really know that she hadn’t been sleeping at all anyway. What is the point of lying there, thinking? And she wanted to get up early. She wanted to shower and do her makeup and hair and present herself to her surgeons in the best possible light. If she wasn’t going down without a fight—and she wasn’t—there was no need to be less than vigilant here in the first battle.
She showered, she shaved her legs, she washed her hair, and she allowed herself, for the first time since she discovered it, to feel for the lump. From the time of her diagnosis, she hadn’t felt for it again until now. The doctors knew it was there, and Frank had felt it too. What was the point of palpating it again, of closing her fingers once more around that tiny knot?
What if it’s gone, she wondered? Hadn’t she heard of stories like this before, of bodies riddled with cancer that, when opened on the operating table, were clean? Patients presenting with all sorts of problems and then, tests run, showing themselves to be pictures of perfect health.
The water streamed down her face, the pressure of the water ran over the lashes of her right eye. The lump would be gone now, she imagined, but she wouldn’t tell Frank. Let them put her out, put her under the knife, and let the doctor tell an amazed Frank, while she was still coming out of her anesthesia, that Maddie was clean, that they couldn’t find the lump, that his wife didn’t have cancer after all.
Standing there in the shower, she envisioned Frank sitting next to her in a sun-washed hospital room, and she opened her eyes, and Frank was smiling and telling her there had been a mistake, that she didn’t have cancer—that it was a swollen lymph node and, by the time they’d gotten in there, the swelling had disappeared and she was perfectly healthy.
But Maddie reached for it and the lump was there. She would finish her shower and get dressed. She would do her makeup and her hair and she would wake Frank, a
nd while he was getting dressed, she would walk silently into the boys’ rooms and kiss their heads. Jake would be sweating, and his hair would be plastered against his forehead. Eli would be lying on his back with his face turned toward the wall, and Maddie would have to lean over to reach his cheek. Garrett would be curled on his side, and when she kissed him, he would tuck up his legs just a little bit and his thumb would find its way back into his mouth.
In the kitchen she checked again to be sure that her list was on the table. She had typed it out for her mother, describing the boys’ routines and their favorite dishes and snacks and what they were allowed to watch on television. Her mother, arrived two days ago from Pittsburgh, would already be up, wrapped in her bathrobe and leaning against the counter, waiting to see them off. She would put her arms around her daughter, and she would hesitate only for a moment before beginning her audible prayer. Her voice would break only a little as she asked for God’s protection, for wisdom for the doctors, for her daughter’s complete healing from cancer.
The prayer over, Maddie would not need to resist any urge to cross herself: even after all these years, the old ways remained familiar. Then the two of them would talk for a few minutes while waiting for Frank to appear, and when he did, he would carry her bag for her and together they would go out to the car. Frank would not eat anything because he knew Maddie wasn’t allowed any food before the surgery and, to whatever extent it was possible, he wanted her to know that he was with her, that they were in this together.
R
Her mother liked Frank, but it wasn’t always that way. She had held a grudge against him for a while, believing him to be a frat-boy, party-animal, state-school kind of guy, and Maddie had some work to do in convincing her otherwise. But some stories are too good to be true, and maybe that was why her mother couldn’t believe it at first when Maddie told her that she’d met Frank in the library.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 3
