Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  But later, when he walked her to Spanish class, he stopped her outside the door and took her books from her, setting them on the floor. Then he put his arms around her waist and hugged her tightly, holding her there for a long time, even though people were noticing, even though he never hugged her in public, even after she said she really had to go, after the late bell rang. When he finally released her, he picked up her books and handed them to her, then pecked her quickly on the cheek. “See what I did?” he asked her, walking backwards, calling to her down the hall. “I touched you!” He almost shouted it; he gave her his smirk again, then went into his German class.

  R

  Vincent did indeed notice the unbuttoning, and his reaction was almost immediate. He stopped kissing her. Then he reached up and closed the buttons again.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Now she could not imagine willingly exposing her chest. She dreaded when Frank saw her and, despite all the exams, was not inured to the exposure at the doctor’s office. It was months before she would allow herself to look, long after the mastectomy had healed.

  The scars might have been worse; they had tried to be careful. But how careful should you be when someone’s life is at stake? Her left side, from her armpit across her chest, was flat now and rivered with thin gray scars. They slid down her side and then across her chest; where her nipple had been, the scars rose in a slight twist. Sometimes she ran her fingers over these scars, following the lines where they had cut into her skin, tracing them like she might a road on a map. The skin here was numb, the nerves having been taken in sacrifice, her body refusing answer to her finger’s touch.

  Frank still said he found her beautiful. That was kind, Maddie thought—but she couldn’t imagine it was true. The weight gain, her bald head, one hemisphere of her chest hemmed ragged and uneven. She knew she was repulsive, no matter what Frank had to say about it.

  R

  The boys earned stickers from their visit to the doctor, and each bore the badge of honor in his own way: Jake’s was on his forehead; white traces of Garrett’s adhered to the front of his shirt; and Eli had laid his, still attached to its backing, on the kitchen counter, where he had promptly forgotten it in the interest of playing with Legos.

  “How did it go today?” Frank asked.

  “Good,” said Jake, and Eli said, “Fine,” and they barely looked up from their play on the living room floor. Garrett, only peripherally involved in the building projects, bounded up to his father.

  “The doctor says we’re all better, Daddy!” and Frank enfolded him in a hug, wondering how much of that was a four-year-old talking and how much was wishful thinking: the boys all wanted their mother to be well.

  Maddie was asleep on the sofa, one arm up behind her head and the other at her side. One small move and she would knock down a variety of Lego constructions, laid like offerings along the length of her body. Frank saw her wig was slightly askew, but he knew that when she awoke, she would adjust it before she sat up. He stood there holding Garrett, watching the bent heads and listening to the quiet chatter of his older sons, the rattle of the Lego pieces as they ran their hands over them. He thought of them admonishing one another to be quiet, of their tender awareness of their sleeping mother, of the gentleness of their gifts, deposited one after another next to her.

  Still holding Garrett in his arms, he headed into the kitchen, saying low into the boy’s ear that the two of them would make some dinner together.

  R

  More and more, Frank found himself thinking of Vincent. He had never met him, of course, and the scene his name conjured in Frank’s mind was somehow neither that of the episode with Willy in the pouring rain, nor of Maddie lying in the school parking lot, but rather of the football game. The game was a lesser-known event in the Vincent saga, not one that Maddie was given to repeat. It was less fantastic, less striking, less clear in terms of credibility. But it was the story that Frank saw most vividly. He imagined what it might have been like had it been true: that Vincent had actually healed one of his opponents. Frank would have liked to write about it.

  He sees Vincent now out near the fifty-yard line, where he bends on one knee over the injured kid on the football field. Frank himself stands on the sidelines, the chill of a Pittsburgh November seeping through his jacket as he watches the coaches clustered on the field.

  Then suddenly the knot loosens and expands, and the injured boy is on his feet, moving, walking away from Frank and toward his team. The stands erupt with cheering; coaches watch him go and then follow suit, moving slowly over the field. Only one figure remains: Vincent Elander, standing with his helmet under his arm, his right leg slightly bent, watching the boy he has just healed walk away.

  Frank imagines all of this, then sees himself walk out onto the field. Vincent’s back is to him, and Frank calls him by name as he reaches him and reaches for him. He takes hold of Vincent by the arm and Vincent turns and looks him in the eye.

  “Vincent,” Frank says to him without hesitation, “I need you to come heal my wife.”

  8

  Frank told Maddie he had a surprise for her, then presented her with the sheet of paper, the printout from Facebook. Pittsburgh’s skyline was spread across the top and, in the square where his face should be, sat the symbol for the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was in black-and-white, and the name was “Vincent Elander.”

  “What’s this?” Maddie’s voice was cold.

  “I found him,” Frank said, his tone less exultant than he had felt when, chuckling, he printed out the page at work. A little levity would be good for them both. “I found the Superhero,” he said. This was his sagging effort to bring the joke around, their age-old joke about forgotten lovers. They had laughed about this together, right? Frank remembered that, or thought he did—though now, standing in his kitchen with his wife, he wondered if he remembered it wrong.

  “What in the world,” Maddie said, her gaze on the sheet of paper. Then louder: “What in the world, Frank,” she said.

  “It’s a joke, Madeleine,” Frank said. Clearly she didn’t get it.

  “How’s that?” Maddie asked, looking at him. The piece of paper trembled slightly in her hand. “Were you wanting to contact him, Frank?”

  “No,” said Frank, suddenly uncertain of his intentions.

  “Were you thinking that maybe we ought to give him a call? Maybe we could pay him a visit?”

  Frank said no, no that was not what he was thinking. He didn’t know what he was thinking. It was a just a joke.

  But Maddie persisted in not getting it. She persisted, instead, in guessing his meaning: that he had thought maybe Vincent could be of help to them, that maybe he could pray for Maddie, maybe send a little healing her way—which of course would be pointless, because she had told Frank a thousand times if she had told him once that Vincent Elander couldn’t heal people. He never could. He never could, Frank.

  It was most definitely an outburst. She was yelling—and this was not at all what Frank had thought would happen. Then there came a pause, during which Frank decided not to say anything and Maddie stared at him, eyes cold.

  Then, more quietly, she said, “He’s just an accountant, Frank. He’s a stupid accountant.”

  As if it were impossible that gifts like healing would ever be imparted to a humble accountant. Or to a boy in high school. Frank thought that, but didn’t say it out loud.

  Anyway, Maddie had left the room and left the printout from Facebook where she dropped it, lying face down on the kitchen floor. Frank picked it up and threw it in the trash.

  R

  He should have known she wouldn’t like it, Frank thought, and then he wondered why. They had most definitely laughed about this together. They most definitely had—many times. But all and any of that seemed like a long time ago now.

  He felt like he needed to justify himself to Maddie, but didn’t want to raise the issue again. What would he say? Vincent had just been on his mind lately. Why that should be
the case was obvious to him. Why was it not obvious to her?

  But it had been obvious to her. It had been more obvious to her than it had been to him, he realized now, and he felt embarrassed by his ignorance—his inability to see what he had been thinking. In the guise of an old joke, he had been raising the possibility—er, rather, the impossibility—that she could be healed. Which he wanted, desperately. But he had also, thoughtlessly and unintentionally, called her a liar. Wasn’t that the argument, way back in the beginning? She had always insisted that the Superhero couldn’t heal anybody, and she had been there. She had seen it—or rather, hadn’t seen it—with her own eyes. It didn’t matter that some of it actually seemed plausible to Frank—and not just plausible because he had a penchant for believing in the miraculous, but plausible because, in some of the stories she told, it really did seem as though Vincent had healed people.

  It seemed that way. But Maddie insisted it didn’t happen, and she had been there.

  Then he remembered San Gimignano again, with its abandoned towers against the sky. He and Maddie had missed the last bus back to Florence, and so they had time to see the towers from every angle, in every light: from the maze of bricked streets running through the town; from the olive groves on the hills surrounding it.

  This was their honeymoon. Frank had always imagined taking his wife to Italy on their honeymoon, even before he met Maddie. Tuscany was their favorite part of the trip, and the quiet streets of San Gimignano had felt like a refuge from the Florentine crowds.

  Still, around the middle of the afternoon, when more buses deposited their tourists and the sun’s heat radiated from the streets, Frank and Maddie felt the need for an escape—and that was how they came to discover the statue, tucked in a shaded corner of a remote piazza, not far from the city’s north wall. Here, next to a fountain bubbling out of a building’s side, was the statue of Mary, her feet badly deteriorated.

  Maddie had expressed concern: How old was that statue? And how could they let it reach such a state of decay? Weren’t they afraid she would topple over? The statue’s toes were long gone; the feet shorn off—not broken—but sloping from mid-arch to the supporting pedestal, completely worn away.

  Frank had offered what he knew of such things, a potential explanation, probable: People believed the statue offered help or healing of some kind. You pass by it, you touch Mary’s feet, you say a prayer.

  Maddie sat on the lip of the fountain’s pool, silent for a moment. Overhead, swallows swung through the sky.

  “Still?” she asked.

  Frank didn’t know what she meant.

  “I mean, do people still believe that? Still do that?”

  Which marked a new conversation about healing, one less charged with emotion than when she had first told him about Vincent, but marked—Frank thought afterward—by a difference between them he hadn’t been aware of, a difference, fundamentally, in faith.

  Frank said he supposed they still did, and Maddie had questioned the practice, defending her incredulity with respect for the statue’s age. Couldn’t they see they were damaging it?

  He replied that it was a difference in perceived value. What made the statue valuable wasn’t so much its age or artistic merit, but rather its spiritual value. Here was a connection to God.

  Maddie said that sounded medieval to her, and Frank chuckled; they both chuckled. The town’s medieval towers were everywhere around them. Everything seemed medieval in San Gimignano.

  But Frank had pressed the issue. Yes, maybe it was a type of faith that was more dominant in the Middle Ages. But didn’t she agree that God could also work that way now? God—merciful, all-powerful, unchanging. If he chose to heal people in the ancient world, if he chose to heal people during the Middle Ages, even through a statue, could he not—would he not—do the same thing now?

  The fountain bubbled, the swallows wheeled, and Frank looked at his bride, waiting for an answer. He was interested, almost curious. He didn’t need her answer to be anything in particular; he knew what her answer would be: she would agree with him.

  Except that she didn’t. She told him with certainty that she just didn’t think God did things like that anymore. God didn’t go around doing miraculous healing. He didn’t do miracles these days. God worked through science; he let people figure it out. The problem came, she said, when people expected him to work magic, or when they looked at him as a means to an end, like they could use him to get what they wanted. Meanwhile, the Bible was clear on this: God was concerned with our souls, not our bodies. That was the whole point of the church, wasn’t it? Saving souls?

  Frank had been taken aback. He had honestly been surprised—and he hadn’t known exactly what to say. Some of what she said rang true to him; it was most definitely true. But some of it seemed empty or hollowed out, as if her words—were it possible—had dulled just a corner of God’s glory.

  Now, once again, Frank aligned this conversation with the others about the Superhero and Maddie’s adamant position on all of it. Souls, not bodies. In which case, of course, contacting Vincent while she was in this condition would be nothing but cruelty.

  He hadn’t meant it that way. Of course he hadn’t.

  R

  Later, Maddie told him more gently that the cancer was on its way out. It was the most she could do in reference to the Facebook fiasco and whatever Frank had meant by it. She felt she needed to say something; one of them did, and Frank seemed so sad.

  I’m getting better, she told him. Really, she said, I know I am. She laughed: If I’m having all these symptoms from the chemo, I think we can be sure it’s working! We just have to be patient.

  But she didn’t tell him what she actually thought, what she saw and heard in her head every time it occurred to her to call on Vincent just this once, if he could just do this one enormous favor. She couldn’t think of asking without seeing him there, leaning over his car in the parking lot, asking his question, receiving the silence that was his only answer: “Do you want to be healed of a paper cut?”

  R

  Mostly, Maddie really did think that the cancer was on its way out. But there was a fear lurking that countered that idea, and this was the power of cancer to skip the bounds of its diagnosed site and make its way to other parts of her body. Her lymph nodes were clean: this was good. But who was to say when they would suddenly cease to be so? Who was to say when cancer would invisibly and silently slip past the porous membrane of her breast tissue and invade lung, liver, brain?

  The only help for these thoughts was deliberate focus on the immediate: to tell herself that she was doing all she could, that she was undergoing excellent care, that the cancer was under attack. But at the end of the day, no one could promise her anything. She understood that.

  And maybe that was some of the appeal in the mothering, she considered. Here were three lives in her keeping. She had painted the boys’ rooms herself and had chosen the bedding. Their drawers were neatly organized by her hand, their meals and snacks prepared with her wisdom. Even their schedules were planned and then closely monitored by her eye. She knew who needed more sleep and who needed to spend more energy. There was some real enjoyment, she recognized, in caring so completely for these lives.

  There had been that terrifying moment when the boys went missing, when, absent her watchful gaze for only a few minutes (she had been washing the dishes; she was on the phone: Go in the other room and play, boys. Mommy will be done in a minute), Jake and Eli had wandered out of the house. How long does it take for a child to disappear—even two of them together, even if they are only four and two years old?

  She had gotten off the phone. She couldn’t have been on the phone for very long in the first place, but already the boys weren’t in the living room where she had sent them. And they weren’t in the playroom, or in their bedrooms. They weren’t in the backyard on the swing; they weren’t in the front yard.

  Maybe they were with the baby. With a start, Maddie raced up the steps, eager to pr
event the boys waking Garrett from his morning nap. But he was sleeping soundly, no big brother in sight. Maddie even checked under the crib, then made a more careful run through the house, this time calling for the boys, checking closets, checking Frank’s office. Where could they have gone?

  Outside? But the yard, front and back, was empty. She scanned the neighbors’ yards, the street. She walked to the end of the driveway while new fears arose. Their street wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t far from busy ones. The grid of roads appeared in her mind. Maddie began to call, loudly: Jake! Eli! Even now she could still conjure the sound of her voice in the silence. Jacob! Eli! Her voice broke, but still she called. The roads were far too busy out there and the boys were so little. Eli was still in his pajamas.

  Plucking Garrett from his nap, she then went from house to house, ringing the doorbells, constantly scanning the street behind her. How was it possible, on this day of all days, during this sudden emergency, that no one else was home?

  She called Frank: The boys are missing. Then Frank was on his way, but not before he asked her the question, and somehow his saying it out loud made it a thousand times more real and therefore worse than the thought of it had been: Had she called the police? She would call them, she would describe what they were wearing, she wouldn’t care that she sounded like an over-protective parent, or distracted, or neglectful.

  The waiting was the worst part. Waiting for Frank. Waiting for the police. Listening without meaning to for the sound of a siren. She could not bring herself to go inside the house. Please God. Please. Please. What else can one say?

  It couldn’t have been much time (the police hadn’t yet arrived) when the boys appeared at the top of the street, walking toward home, one on each side of a man she had never seen, a man who said he’d been cleaning gutters on a house one block away, and he’d seen these two little boys (one still in his pajamas) and he’d thought that something didn’t seem right. So he’d asked them where they lived and they had told him, and now he was walking them home.