Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  At most then, the landscape of the Bethel Hills of Pittsburgh was to her an arbiter of sunlight. But not even that, not really. She wasn’t aware of these things. Pittsburgh, with its winding and weary roads, was home to her.

  The fact of its weariness, too, made little impression. To Maddie’s inexperienced eye, the suburbs of all cities were like this one: buckling, potholed roads; small businesses housed in tired buildings; pitted and gravelly parking lots. Renovation never would have occurred to her. Such things were reserved for places like downtown, which was, at the time, in the very process of remaking itself. But the world of the suburbs—Maddie’s world—was in the business of daily life, of doing what had to be done.

  Which is admirable. And the people of Pittsburgh’s Bethel Hills were cheerful about it. Maddie was raised among cheerful people, by cheerful people. What is the relative weight, anyway, of a neglected pothole in the scheme of life? Pittsburghers seemed to keep these things in perspective.

  Maddie’s life turned on three specific plots in that landscape: her home, which was in the aforementioned valley; her school, which was on a hill; and her church—the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness—which was about three-fourths of the way down an uncommonly gentle slope. In the early spring, the neighborhood’s melting snow ran to the church’s parking lot.

  Like the rest of the neighborhood and that hill-ridden suburb, the church building was a tired one, but like Maddie’s house and neighborhood, it was somewhat newer than what was planted around it. Constructed sometime during the 1960’s, the architecture suggested that attention had been given to its design. But a low budget and persistent flaws in that design (the church basement flooded at least twice annually) relegated anything beyond basic maintenance to the realm of the inaccessible. As a result, the Bethel Hills Church matched the fatigued appearance of its neighbors—which likely helped it fit in.

  But fatigue did not characterize the people—neither the suburban dwellers nor the congregants of Maddie’s church. The people of the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness were, in fact, an energized congregation, having taken to heart long ago that which they claimed to believe: that God, in his mercy, took human form in the person of Jesus Christ and died to save his people from their sins. Moreover, they took seriously that this same Jesus had been raised from the dead, an impossibility that served to galvanize their faith: if God, because of his love, would do something like this, invading the world for its own salvation, forgiving people of their sins, and performing innumerable miracles besides, then his continuous acts of mercy were not to be doubted. They ardently believed that one could and should expect God to act at any moment: communicating to the faithful, hearing and answering prayer.

  Such potential, if truly believed, was staggering, diminishing issues such as leaky basements. Belief such as this generated tremendous energy, reflected in myriad ways: multiple services held weekly, annual community outreach programs by the dozens, and an unrelenting willingness to consider and re-evaluate the church’s own tenets—not its fundamental doctrines, but those rules and bylaws which might, from time to time, be found to have been in error.

  The advent of HBO, for example, had been problematic, as the church had historically held a hard and fast rule against its members seeing movies. Hollywood, said church founders, apparently held to moral boundaries far removed from those at Holiness. On seeing a movie, the faithful might readily be confronted with ideas and images offensive and potentially corrosive to their beliefs, tempting them away from moral purity. But the rule had been made long prior to the ubiquitous presence of HBO and, more recently, VCRs, and so had to be reevaluated.

  The upshot was a reassessment of the film industry in general, which led to the acknowledgement that some movies were, in fact, good. This meant a new freedom for the church: see and enjoy movies, but use discretion when deciding which ones. Everyone felt good about this. It discouraged the view that Hollywood—or any amoral cultural entity—was the bad guy, and it allowed for more of what the church said it wanted in the first place, which was understanding from God—not simply rules—of what one should or shouldn’t do.

  Other rules, too, had been revisited. There was, for instance, the rule about swimming: persons of the opposite sex were not to swim simultaneously in the same body of water. This was a rule that had been nearly impossible to enforce on the various shorelines of the continent, but which became a plain hassle in backyard swimming pools. Church leaders rethought the issue and decided that the temptations afforded by bathing suits in aquatic proximity would not irrevocably lead to sexual engagement. And so it was that, for Maddie, the rule about swimming was only a rumor of a long-dead law, and she and her friends enjoyed respite from the summer heat in any number of pools in any number of backyards—with both boys and girls, men and women in the water at the same time.

  Which, again, wasn’t to say that church leaders or congregants shifted their attitudes toward moral law. These beliefs were intact. One ought to be wise about what one read, listened to, watched—all of which had the power to influence. And one was responsible to avoid temptation, to keep one’s behaviors right and good. Which included sexual purity: fornication, promiscuity, any sexual behavior outside the bounds of marriage was sin. It was rarely preached on, but it went without saying.

  Yes, the people of the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness were striving after God, who could not and would not abide sin. If one desired to know this loving and gracious God, then one’s behavior ought to reflect that desire; one’s life ought to be transformed by that desire—and by the active, engaged God they sought.

  It was in this context that Maddie spent a significant portion of her waking life. Her parents, her lifelong best friend Justine—this was their world, too. The church community was like Maddie’s extended family. It was hardly something that she could get away from.

  But of course she did not think of getting away from it then, any more than she thought about climbing out of the folds of Pittsburgh’s skirt and living elsewhere.

  Nonetheless, the Sunday evening altar-going experience—apparently a common way in which church members pursued God—eluded Maddie. She didn’t know why most people—people without ailments or evident struggles of some kind—knelt at the altar to pray; neither did she feel the need to pray there herself. Her questions to her parents about it (“What were you praying about?” “Why did you go to the altar?”) were met with a pleasant and confounding vagueness (“I’m just listening to God”); her questions to Justine (asked only a time or two) were met with a chariness (“That’s none of your business”) that seemed decidedly annoyed. She found both off-putting. Moreover, just as had been the case since she was very small, before she could even name why, the whole altar thing was not entirely to her taste. There was a showiness about it that made her hesitate. It was far too public.

  The result was Maddie’s understandable sense of exclusion when it came to the expected interaction with God, but not—not yet, anyway—a sense of impossibility.

  Maddie looked for him elsewhere. As a very young child, she imagined he could be anywhere. She had been told as much. Entering an otherwise empty room, Maddie was careful with doorknobs and silence: she thought she might come upon him visibly present, and swept the room for a glimpse of a retreating sandal or the edge of a departing robe. She thought she’d found Jesus one day when, age five, she took refuge during hide-and-seek in the D’Angelos’ rhododendron hedge next door. He was smaller, certainly, than she had expected, and Maddie was disappointed, coming around to his front, to find it was not Jesus but rather his mother. A statue of the placid and beautiful Mary, arms lowered, hands extended in blessing. Lovely—but not him.

  She was certain that she’d found him a few days later, hiding in yet another corner of the D’Angelos’ garden. This statue was decidedly male, and why wouldn’t Jesus have a bird perched on one shoulder and another in his hand, a small fawn pressed against one knee? But his face was bare and his hair wasn’t quite rig
ht: she didn’t know until she was much older that it had been a statue of St. Francis.

  Maybe these early interactions were what drew her to her family’s nativity set, that familiar Christmas-time decoration. The flaps of its box were soft from repeated folding and unfolding, and Maddie removed the tissue-wrapped figures slowly: shepherd, wise man, sheep. She palpated each in its wadding, identifying it before opening and saving for last the holy family themselves: the overlooked Joseph with his lantern; Mary and her impenetrable air of unassailable peace; the baby.

  They were so like statues, this little set. Like the statues in the D’Angelos’ garden, they were pure white. They looked like they could have been exhumed from ancient Greece, except that they were so small. Jesus was her favorite: his swaddling clothes confined to his waist, knees bent, hair curly, hands open and reaching. Perfectly formed, but with his back forever adhered to his manger. She studied his face. What was that expression? It was more open than that of his mother, his chin raised. He looked up at her from her palm; up at the sky from the stable floor. What did he see, she wondered? There he lay, God incarnate—she had been taught to believe. What miraculous powers were lent him even here at the beginning? Did he see through the roof to the chorus of angels? Did he already long for home? Could he see Maddie, two thousand years later, her hand cradling him in the living room?

  Year after year she gazed at him, making multiple visits over the course of the Christmas season, bringing her face close to his. Unlike the altar calls at church where people knelt before an invisible God, she held him here, in a way, enfleshed. She had got hold of the body—almost. And there is something, isn’t there, universally accessible in a baby, something fresh and unfiltered? If God were to interact with her at all, it seemed most likely he would do it through this unassuming infant. She craned her ear, listening: the world was almost magical at this time of year. Please, God. Surely, if she was still and quiet enough, she would find he had something to say to her.

  But in the end—always and every time—the infant Jesus was as impenetrable as his mother. Figures and faces as of stone, mute and faintly smiling, in the otherwise empty room.

  11

  When finally Maddie heard from God, it wasn’t what she expected. Neither was it what she would have wanted: a scene far more public than a response to the altar call, in front of what felt like the entire school. One moment she was walking with Justine across the parking lot, the next she was lying flat on her back, her view of the cloudless sky partially impeded by the bumper of Tommy MacDonald’s Camaro.

  She told herself that it was all Tommy’s fault. That was what Justine said, as did the principal and the baseball coach and several of the bus drivers who had witnessed the incident and come running to her aid. It was Tommy’s fault for going so fast through the parking lot just minutes after school let out, when everyone was walking to a bus or waiting on one or crossing the parking lot to their cars or baseball practice. And besides (Justine said this more than once), Tommy MacDonald was an idiot. Anyone could see that he was an idiot. (“Idiot” was a signature word for Justine; her world was rife with idiots.) This speeding in the school parking lot, showing off his new Camaro, served as the latest example of Tommy MacDonald’s idiocy.

  So Maddie armed herself with the fact of Tommy’s culpability and told herself repeatedly—quoting Justine—that he was an idiot, but she remained unconvinced. Justine hadn’t been hit by his car. Justine had had the excellent sense to get out of the way when she saw one coming, while Maddie herself had just stood there and then paid for it by what should have been a broken femur, far too much attention, and the embarrassment of exiting school property in an ambulance.

  Of course she couldn’t tell anyone why she hadn’t noticed the car. What was there to say? That for the first time she had seen Vincent Elander looking at her? That after almost a week of covertly seeking him out, his gaze had met hers?

  She wasn’t spying, and she didn’t have a crush on him. It was innocent curiosity. Anyone would be curious—anyone should be curious—after that last Sunday night. She wondered, frankly, why her parents didn’t talk about it, why everyone who had been at the church that night didn’t talk about it. Vincent Elander, local football hero, partier and wild run-about, suddenly shows up in church—their little church—on a Sunday evening and then makes his way to the altar, prostrating himself before what was generally agreed to be God. And there he proceeds to go into a kind of convulsive weeping in a prayer lasting so long that Pastor McLaughlin has to dismiss the congregation before he is finished.

  Anyone would be curious. Everyone should be—or so Maddie thought. And she certainly was— despite Justine’s reaction.

  “Wait and see,” Justine had said. She knew Vincent Elander’s reputation better than Maddie did. She had been to a party or two where Vincent had been in attendance. In her opinion, the staying powers of altar-going repentance—especially and perhaps even most of all for those under-exposed to church tradition—were weak. “Time will tell, Maddie,” Justine had said.

  But Maddie had looked for him anyway, and had studied him in the limited way that was available to her: watching him talk with his girlfriend in the hallway and laugh with his friends at lunch, get books out of his locker, head to class. There was nothing striking in any of it. Nothing different from the life of any high school student. On Wednesday she heard he had broken up with his girlfriend—Maddie had even seen her crying in the girls’ room. But this, too, seemed within the realm of normal. It all seemed like a typical day in high school.

  And maybe that was all there was. Maybe in this case, as it would seem in so many others, experience with God amounted to this: public, perhaps weeping, prayer, and then back to the business of every day.

  Part of the business of Vincent Elander’s every day—so far as Maddie could see—was baseball practice. And part of the business for Maddie was riding home with Justine, which brought them to Thursday afternoon.

  Tracing their path’s trajectory, she could see that she and Justine were going to walk right past him. It would be the closest she had been all week. She held her breath: he was standing there in his white practice uniform on the corner of the sidewalk; he was pressing the tip of a baseball bat against his toe; he was wearing his red baseball cap. He looked directly at her, and she had never until that moment noticed that his eyes were blue. He had seen her looking at him and she hadn’t looked away, and that was when she was hit by the car.

  Of course, on impact all thoughts of Vincent Elander were instantaneously shoved aside. It was a screech of brakes, a blow to her leg, and a bounce off the hood of a car, followed by a face-first confrontation with the asphalt. All of this diverted her nicely in the short term, a distraction sustained by searing pain in her left thigh and the less notable but insistent pain from multiple abrasions on her face. These things were all she knew for a time, and they were enough to make her only dimly aware of the rushing and panic around her, the careful turn of her body so that she was staring at the sky, the cries for an ambulance and that Tommy MacDonald please shut off his car. Justine was crouching next to her and asking her how she was, and all Maddie could contemplate was the violent pain. In rapid succession, the faces of Tommy and the principal and various bus drivers swam into and then disappeared from view. The baseball coach appeared and tucked something under her head; soon her body was covered by the slick polyester jackets of the baseball team.

  This was in the first few minutes, and then Maddie shut her eyes and kept them that way, thinking only of the pain and trying not to cry. At one point she managed to ask Justine if she would just take her home. But Justine’s answer was disappointing: it was best that they wait it out until she could be seen by somebody.

  Maddie was confused. Wasn’t she being seen by somebody? Someone was close by her left side and beginning to tend to her injured leg. She released a low moan.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she heard Justine ask, and then Maddie opened
her eyes and raised her head. There he was, reintroducing himself to her consciousness: Vincent Elander was kneeling next to her on the pavement, gently moving the jackets and then—she could hardly believe it and wanted to cry out against the pain—placing his hands on her thigh.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Justine asked again. Vincent didn’t answer. He just knelt there with his hands on Maddie’s leg. His head was bent, and he had taken off his baseball cap. His hair was pressed into a ring.

  “Vincent Elander, you had better stop that. What do you think you’re doing?” Justine tried yet again. When he did not respond, she loudly informed him that he didn’t know what he was doing, and she insisted they wait for an ambulance. She told him again to stop that, he shouldn’t be allowed over here, and he might make Maddie’s injury worse. Her voice grew shrill.

  But Vincent still didn’t answer, and, strangely, no adult interfered. Vincent just rested his hands lightly on Maddie’s throbbing thigh, kneeling on the pavement as so recently he had knelt at an altar.

  This was when Maddie discovered her embarrassment. It was seeping through her like the pain seeped through her leg and face. It reached for her from the crowd of onlookers who stood at the periphery of her vision. She couldn’t make out who they were and she didn’t want to know. She closed her eyes. She lay there between a stranger and her best friend and closed her eyes against them both. She closed them against the principal and the baseball coach, against Tommy MacDonald and the students who were looking at her, against everything but the pain.