Seven months in. Only seven months, and there was no changing course, there was no remedy, no experimental process that might be the escape hatch Frank sometimes thought of longing for.
The urge to call Father Tim was sudden and also the only thing to do.
“How’s it going?” Tim asked.
“It’s going,” was Frank’s reply.
“Cancer sucks,” Tim said.
Frank brought him up to speed, and Father Tim’s response was reassuring: deeply sympathetic and unsurprised. He had known his share of cancer patients. He had visited them at home, in hospitals, sometimes at their deathbeds. He knew the right questions to ask; he knew the terminology.
He also knew the theology but didn’t utter it. Instead, he said, “You’re living the dream, my friend.”
That was it, of course. The reminder—the kick in the pants, really—that Frank was needing.
And hadn’t he known it, even from the earliest days of Maddie’s diagnosis? This was the dream—this was it, what he and The Priest had talked about all those years ago, when they had moved on from theology and Catholic doctrine and started talking about marriage.
“A good marriage,” Tim had clarified, “is absolutely where it’s at.” And then he had gone on to paint a vision of marriage that was both stunningly beautiful and also somehow familiar: a friendship bound by sacrament, the mysterious union of husband and wife; unparalleled intimacy. Fierce, unbreakable commitment—no matter the circumstances.
Frank had been taken by this vision. He had really been enchanted. Around him, news reports were of divorce rates on the rise; his own parents had split when he was eleven. In a culture of potential societal decay, the thought of a sound, committed, “good” marriage struck him as a form of fantastic rebellion.
And he was buoyed in his thinking by romance—smitten, for example, by the sight of an elderly couple holding hands and walking feebly down the street together. Presuming them to have been married since their twenties, Frank saw in them something to strive for. His casual relationships with former girlfriends suddenly felt silly to him; Francesca’s eschewing marriage seemed the height of immaturity and foolishness.
Over the first months of dating Maddie, Frank recognized in her a woman who would be willing to do the sometimes “hard work,” as Tim had called it, of marriage: she wouldn’t look at frustrations or obstacles as reasons to quit; she would persevere through them. With Maddie, Frank realized, he could “live the dream.”
Now, after this phone conversation with The Priest, Frank felt both chastised and strengthened. “In sickness and in health,” that was how it went, right? Maddie needed him now, more than ever. And here they were, Frank and Maddie, working through the hard times together. Living the dream.
Frank felt it was fine to let his conversation with The Priest rest there. It was enough to have heard that much.
R
When their son was not yet two years old, Maddie and Frank took little Jake to the top of Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh. It was night, past his bedtime, and for that reason alone Maddie hadn’t thought it was the best idea. But they were returning to North Carolina in the morning, and Frank knew that Maddie loved the view of the city at night. They wouldn’t have to stay long; they could stand there for as little or as much time as they wanted to. And didn’t Maddie want to do this, even if it was just for a few minutes?
Maddie had yielded her practicality to Frank’s enthusiasm, to his ardent belief in the value of a great experience. In truth, she wanted it, too. They had both grown up in Pittsburgh, but on the opposite sides of town, and it was an early delight of their relationship to discover that the view from Mt. Washington was—for each of them—their favorite thing about the city. Maddie had assumed that Frank’s would be the stadium, but no, he told her. On their earliest date to the city he had surprised her with a picnic on one of the overlooks.
Of course it was a popular view with everyone: the mountainside disappearing under the feet and the rivers sliding past the city, which shot up from its widening slit of land in peaks and pinnacles. Maddie liked its contradictions: the glass and concrete against the glassy rivers, the whisper of the trees on the mountain against the drifting sounds of traffic. The city, so far below, simultaneously seemed within reach: if she wanted to, she could break one of the towers away between her fingers.
At night the city’s lights were softened in the black rivers. Folded over and through the landscape, the lesser lights of houses and buildings hugged the ground and pressed close to the city, growing up as they got closer in. And around it all and through it, the lights of the cars crawled along the city’s edge, slipped in and out of it, and poured, streaming, over the bridges. It was as if, Maddie once told Frank, everything around it—pavement and parking lot and tired steel mill—was a living thing, sustained by the bright heart at the center.
And so they took little Jake to see it, parking at the edge of the sidewalk and walking him between them to the overlook. It was a warm summer night, and a gentle breeze came up the mountain and gusted at their hair. There had been a baseball game that night; the stadium was still ablaze. The little family stood at the fenced edge and gazed out at the city.
Jake hadn’t lasted long. He began shrieking almost immediately, in such terror that Maddie felt certain he’d been injured somehow. Frank picked him up and held him close while Maddie peered at his extremities, looking for signs of what? She thought maybe a bee sting?
And still Jake screamed, clinging to his father, his legs working as though he would climb higher on his father’s chest.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Maddie was asking, trying to be soothing while also trying to suppress the panic she felt rising within her.
But then she realized Frank was laughing, a low chuckle. “He’s fine, Maddie,” he said. And he made her understand that Jake was simply terrified: he was trying to climb away from the city, to get back to the safety of the car.
Later, this was a moment in their parenting that amused them: the opposed efforts they hoped would help their son. For Maddie, the solution was obvious: get Jake back to the car and buckle him safely in his car seat, then get him to bed.
But Frank was all about helping their son overcome his fear. Walking deliberately with him back to the railing, he held the climbing, screaming Jake in his arms and pointed out to him the beauties of the view: “See the boat? That’s a barge. And look! There’s the stadium where the baseball players work.” All of it in his soothing, confident voice, and all of it effective—were it not for the terror in their little boy’s mind.
Yes, they could laugh about it later. But for Maddie, it now gained some significance. It was indicative, she felt, of the sometimes opposing ways she and her husband approached things. Take healing, for example, take God. Maddie knew that if she breathed a word to Frank about Vincent, her husband would say they should try it, ask for healing, pursue this remote chance.
Maddie understood it differently. She could see what Frank had, perhaps, not bothered to understand that night with little Jake: That the mountainside beneath their feet was lost in the darkness, and then there was the glowing river below them and the even more glowing city, burning like so many coals. Jake hadn’t known what was beneath them; perhaps he feared that, at any moment, the concrete would give way and he and his family would go sliding down, cascading into the river—or worse, into the hot bright center of the city.
Frank had taken Jake’s fears and tried to help him see beauty. And there was beauty, Maddie knew, in faith, in asking to be healed. But she wouldn’t ask, ever.
All too clearly, she understood Jake’s fears that night on the mountain. More and more often of late, she felt that she was standing on the edge of a precipice with a dark and plunging void below her. There was again the sound of sliding stones, faint but clear, like shale worked loose in a mine.
No, Maddie thought. She thought again of Mrs. Senchak. She thought of Mr. Pavlik. She thought of Vincent, and
then—wasn’t it simply a matter of practiced self-discipline?—she forced herself not to.
7
Dreams are unfair—that was Frank’s thought as he stepped into the shower. A person can’t possibly be held accountable for what he dreams about. Sure, Francesca had come to mind from time to time, but these were thoughts he had immediately rejected and would continue to reject. A vital discipline.
They had been in college again, making out on her parents’ sofa—not that he had ever been to her parents’ house (Francesca had hated Cleveland; she had hated going home; she never wanted to take Frank there). But dreams broke those rules, too. It didn’t matter that he’d never been to the place. In the dream it was all completely plausible: her parents’ house in Cleveland (a split-level); the two of them making out, naked on the couch and not remotely alarmed when her dad walked in to adjust the thermostat. Also plausible was the fact of the llama bleating (do llamas bleat?) just outside the basement door and Francesca’s crossing the room to feed it (still naked, of course. He watched her cross the room).
He felt guilty when he woke up, and the guilt was a second injustice. He had done nothing wrong, and he told himself this as he squeezed shampoo into his palm.
But on his way to work, there she was, haunting his thoughts before he was fully aware of them. It was her hair he found himself thinking of, long and curling, the golden highlights glinting in the sun. He had loved how long it was, how it almost reached the small of her back.
R
That was the same morning of the boys’ check-ups, the annual visit to get reassurance of regular growth and weight gain. Frank offered to take them: he had no pressing deadlines; it would be no problem. And Maddie—he knew without asking—was tired of hospitals and doctor’s offices. Wouldn’t she like to have a morning out on her own, maybe?
No, Maddie did not want this. She was well, she said. Well enough, anyway. And she had enough in the way of mornings on her own. That much she said aloud, her voice lined with irritation. But Frank could read the subtext of the ensuing silence: she was well until next Monday’s chemo infusion, after which they would start all over again with symptoms old or, if they were especially unlucky, new.
Frank’s response was to sigh and smile at her, and she deliberately ignored what she detected as controlled exasperation. She ignored it until she couldn’t, because she didn’t take her mind off it when she should have, and it was when he was on his way out the door that she brought it up again and explained to him that she wanted to be the one to take the boys to the doctor; she had always taken them and there was no reason for her not to, she felt perfectly fine. She might have cancer, but she was still their mother.
He went out. She remembered that he was just trying to be kind to her, and she felt sorry for the way she had talked to him.
But there was residual annoyance, too, leftover from the night before. She didn’t remember why at first, but she had awakened in a tempestuous mood that lay over everything like a fine dust. Maddie only recalled the reason on the way to the doctor’s office, at which point she sighed audibly, leaking her exasperation into the otherwise silent car. Eli, ever sensitive, said, “What’s the matter, Mom?” To which she had answered, “Nothing.”
It was the way Frank had kissed her in bed the night before: not an affectionate peck but something more hopeful. She had lain motionless as he kissed her—her mouth, her face, her neck—not knowing how to tell him she wasn’t interested, but also incredulous to think that she should have to. At best, it seemed profoundly insensitive of Frank, and at worst, completely blind.
The boys were pronounced healthy, their growth rates normal, and she drove them back to school. She remembered the way her very center used to fold in the crushing tenderness of Frank’s kisses in the early days of their relationship, the way he would be rushing, surprised, trying to keep up with her sense of urgency.
Now all of that seemed foreign, and she felt a twinge of guilt for this—which quickly turned to anger. How could anyone expect more of her, she thought, arguing with no one but imagining Frank on the receiving end. She had suffered an amputation and now was carrying on with treatments that impacted every system in her body. She couldn’t think about sex now and she shouldn’t be expected to. Resuming a sex life was somewhere down the line, well beyond the unknown day when she hoped to be declared in remission.
The last thing she wanted to do was think any more than she had to about her body. Frank, of all people, should understand that.
R
Maddie had never given much thought to her body before Vincent. There had been adolescent awkwardness when she was conscious of change, and the dominant feeling then was shame, or a fierce embarrassment at the very least. Middle school boys with their sidelong looks and humiliating comments made her consider going into hiding.
Later intimations of her sexuality went largely unanswered. She envisioned kissing a boy or two, but these intriguing exploits remained fixed in her imagination. And long before any of that, there was the presiding censure against giving into any sexual urges, a warning not spoken, per se, at the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness, but one that was abundantly clear: chastity before marriage, monogamy within marriage, sexual purity always. These were given.
It wasn’t until middle school that these concepts acquired something of a concrete vision: a vivid picture of a fenced-in swimming pool, an image painted in one of her earliest days as a member of the church youth group. The conversation had been mortifying. They were all together—boys and girls, grades seven through twelve—when the topic had turned to sex. Maddie’s first thought was that she was way too young for this (she was only twelve at the time), but Nicky Tedesco, their youth group leader, was easily in his thirties and had led the youth group forever. Surely he knew what he was doing.
It was brief; it was embarrassing; it made sense. Think of sex like a swimming pool, Nicky had said, matter-of-fact and grinning. Pools are fun, he said. Sex is fun. And both of them are dangerous.
They all knew the dangers, meted out to them via their parents, maybe, or after-school specials. Nicky didn’t need to go into the many pitfalls: pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, God.
Nicky went on. Sex was like a swimming pool, and by law a swimming pool had to have a fence around it because you want to keep people from accidentally falling in. But even inside the fence, Nicky pointed out, you generally have some space before you get to the pool’s edge—some decorative rocks, the pool deck, something. That way, even if someone should scale the fence, the next thing that happens won’t be that he falls into the pool.
Clear image so far, and Nicky went on to say that their approach to sex should be like that: they should erect a fence around the pool, so to speak. They should set boundaries as to what they would and wouldn’t do in terms of physical intimacy with a boyfriend or girlfriend. And those boundaries should be well outside the pool, he emphasized. That way, in case you should go too far, you won’t find yourself falling in, if you know what I mean.
Maddie did know what he meant, or thought so, anyway, and thus was armed to defend her virginity. The word even now made her shudder. It was one of those awkward words, one that wanted its own bastion of defense about it. And so it was an unassailable bastion she had built. She knew, long before even the hint of a boyfriend was on the horizon, what she would and would not do with a boy before she got married. There was no doubt in her mind.
And then Vincent had come along, and despite the good sense of the swimming pool metaphor, Maddie had unbuttoned her blouse that day. Just a little bit; not all of the buttons. An invitation—or not. Maybe, eyes closed in the bliss of feverish kissing, he wouldn’t even notice.
R
In chemistry class, Mr. Uzelac had explained the structure of the atom: the nucleus, containing its protons and neutrons. And buzzing all around the outside, negatively charged electrons. Negatively charged, he said again. “This means,” he went on with his eyebrows raised as if attempting
to highlight the significance of his words, “that nothing ever really touches anything else.”
Maddie was taken aback. What? She reached for the metal leg of her chair. Ice cold. She asked without raising her hand: Then how can we tell that something is hot or cold? Soft or hard? Mr. Uzelac said something about repulsion and the force of that repulsion, the density of the atoms or their structure. All the negative electrons repel all the other negative electrons. It was that simple.
For the rest of the day and sometime after that, Maddie had felt unnerved. Is it not the knob of the door I am feeling, but electrons pressing against my hand? Not the page of my textbook? Not the water from the faucet? Not my own hair?
She had pinched Vincent’s arm hard in the cafeteria. “Ow!” he exclaimed, pulling away. “What are you doing?”
She explained to him what Mr. Uzelac had said—that everything always ultimately repels everything else.
Vincent laughed. “So? What’s the big deal?” he said.
“It means that nothing ever really touches anything else,” she said.
“Oh,” he mimicked, “Nothing ever really touches anything else,” he said, teasing, his voice in a whine. And then he seized her sandwich from her hands and took a bite out of it.
“Vincent!” she’d yelled, and slapped him. But he took another bite and said with his mouth full that he hadn’t felt it because she hadn’t really touched him.
“Eat your own lunch,” she said, more quietly because people were looking at them.
“I didn’t touch your lunch. I can’t,” he said, smirking. “I didn’t just eat your lunch because I can’t touch anything.” Justine was rolling her eyes at them; Vincent’s friends were laughing.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 9
