That was when Maddie got it, the realization dawning slowly, a little light for her blind eyes.
Amy was smiling so hard it almost looked like she was crying. Nicky said he was absolutely positive it was a boy. Maddie was jumping up and down and clapping. Vincent wiped tears from his cheeks, and everybody laughed at him.
R
“I just hope she doesn’t lose this one,” Justine said. They were coming out of history class. Nicky had announced the pregnancy just days before, and it was all anyone at the Bethel Hills Church was talking about.
Maddie’s response was pure confidence. “She won’t,” she said.
But Justine told her not to be too sure. “It’s dangerous,” she said, “telling people this early.”
Maddie’s answer was that the Tedescos had waited three months. That’s how long you’re supposed to wait, she said. She had learned a lot about pregnancy in the last few days.
“Still,” Justine said, “They’ve had so many miscarriages. Anything could happen.”
Maddie said again that Amy Tedesco wouldn’t miscarry. Everything was going to be fine, she said.
Vincent had said so, too, when she had asked him, coming home from the Tedescos on the night Nicky had told them. Maddie had raised the question: What if she miscarries, Vincent? Because in the few hours they had known about the pregnancy, the thought of this baby’s loss had already become unbearable.
Vincent answered, “She won’t.”
She looked at his profile, his face brightening and then going dark again with the passing cars. He was focused on the road ahead; the line of his forehead, nose and chin was strong.
“Well,” Justine was saying, “of course I hope they don’t miscarry. Of course I hope they don’t. But you never know.”
“They aren’t going to lose this baby, Justine,” Maddie said. Once again, just as it had when she first told Vincent about Willy, the assertion of her own confidence had a strengthening effect. Maddie felt more reassured than ever.
Justine was quiet in response to this, but the halls were crowded and each of them was maneuvering around people. It wasn’t the best place for a conversation.
As Maddie made her way alone to sixth period, she reflected on how far she had come, how much she had learned about faith since those whispering days with the nativity Jesus cradled in her palm. How could she explain it to Justine, who didn’t yet know that Vincent had healed Maddie or Willy, who couldn’t be expected to have seen or believed the miracle during the football game?
And now Vincent had healed Amy, and that was why she was pregnant. None of them had talked about this; if the Tedescos were thinking it, they weren’t saying anything. But could it be otherwise? All those years of miscarrying babies, and then the Tedescos befriend Vincent, and within months, Amy is finally pregnant.
No, Maddie wanted to say to Justine, the baby was going to be absolutely fine. But Maddie knew, too, that she couldn’t make Justine believe it. Faith, she was discovering, was something learned and then practiced. It took time. Justine would come to understand.
15
Amy had a new book on her coffee table: photographs of unborn babies. At every visit, Maddie would leaf through it, sometimes reading the brief text, always studying the images that glowed yellow and orange against a black ground. Baby after baby—or maybe it was all the same one—photographed over the course of nine months’ gestation. Maddie was fascinated by the images, the tiny fingers and tiny toes, the translucent skin, the sealed eyes.
The baby in this photo was very young, hardly human. The curved head was elongated in its extension from spine to forehead, and then came the bulge of the nose. Veins traversed the skull, thin red lines that branched and extended like roads on a map. The ribs were regular pleats along its side but not nearly long enough: they came to a stop just at the rise of the abdomen, looking more like gills than protective bone. The fingers and toes were stubs; the appendages of hands and feet drifted in front of the baby on foreshortened arms and legs, unused or useless.
Several pages further and here was a baby farther along. The fingers of an open hand extended toward the camera, attenuation evident in joints and fingernails. The thumb rested just inside the mouth, as though pressed against the upper gum. Maddie could see downy hair on the baby’s face, thicker at the eyebrows, and the indentation at the center of the upper lip.
What was it like in there, she wondered, before knowing began? All sounds would be muted in the water. Floating like that, there might be no sense of gravity, no necessary sense of direction. All motion would be comfort, a kind of rocking, and the darkness would be absolute.
In that case, Maddie thought, these pictures must have been stunning to the unborn baby: the obligatory use of light, the intrusion of the camera. How to take pictures like these? How to ensure that it was safe?
Any baby she had ever known would be frightened by something like that. Such a surprising experience would be sure to bring terror and tears. But the babies in these photos seemed unamazed. Their expressions were the picture of peaceful calm and uninterrupted repose.
Or were these expressions of dismay and fear? And if that were the case, Maddie wondered, then in the moments just before the camera’s flash, what had the peacefulness looked like?
Vincent teased her about the book. He said she was obsessed.
“Looking at it again, huh?” He sat down close beside her and grinned.
“It’s a beautiful book, is all,” she responded, and turned the page.
“I wouldn’t call it beautiful,” Vincent said. “That book is plain weird.”
“Why do you think it’s weird?” She didn’t look up at him, but continued leafing through.
“That doesn’t even look like a baby. Look at it!” and he pointed to the five-month-old fetus with stubby fingers and eyes tightly shut.
“Yes it does, Vincent.”
“Not like any babies I’ve ever known.”
Maddie laughed. “You generally don’t see them when they look like this.”
“And why is that?” Vincent straightened, mocking interest in a spirit of “now-we’re-getting-somewhere.”
“Because when they look like this, they aren’t born yet.”
“Ex-ACT-ly,” Vincent said, and relaxed his posture: he rested his case.
“What do you mean, ‘exactly’?”
“I mean, you’re not supposed to see babies when they look like that, and that’s why that book is weird.”
“I think it’s weird, too,” Nicky said, coming in from the kitchen. He tossed Vincent a bottle of Gatorade. “Amy!” he was calling to her in the other room. “Vince thinks the book is weird, too!”
“You two are peas in a pod,” Amy answered. She was laughing.
Maddie didn’t try to explain or defend her fascination. She didn’t fully understand it herself, but knew that Vincent’s comment hit close to home. The secrecy of it appealed to her, that sense of spying. There was pleasure in this circumvention: through these pictures, she gained a view onto something that, until recently, no one had ever seen.
Moreover, here was an education, something that made high school biology concrete. She had not remembered much from that brief introduction during her sophomore year to the mysteries of the reproductive system. How seriously could she be expected to take into account a body’s biologically driven urge to further the species? What, to her, were mitosis and meiosis? What were those winding ribbons of DNA?
And what, in truth, was pregnancy to her but a happy announcement made about someone else? It was something to be observed from a distance, a mystery responsible for the steady population of the church nursery, of the world.
But this book—and Amy’s pregnancy—cast all of it in life-sized terms, making imaginable not only the Tedescos as parents, but also, somewhat more remotely, herself. Now Maddie realized she would likely someday become a mother, and that she wanted to be one. As she leafed through the book’s glossy pages, she imagined a new li
fe taking shape within her. She could almost conjure inside herself the sensation of what, for now, she felt only by stretching a palm over Amy’s abdomen: the gentle pressure of a knee, a foot, an elbow. This child, as yet unseen, gaining life in the dark.
Yet all of these revelations seemed formalities in light of what she had been learning already for some time, those ways of her body taught her by Vincent. Those ways, she now knew, were the reason for the swimming pool conversations, the warnings about sexual purity and the temptations that would assert themselves against it. Maddie now understood that one had to construct the boundaries before the fact, because when the passion came—those biological, natural, primal, and necessary urges—it was nearly impossible to withstand them. Her own body, Maddie realized, was truly a force of nature.
What flummoxed her was that these impulses should somehow be wrong. Confronting them for the first time in her life, she was hard-pressed to accept that acting on them was sin. Why should it be? She could discern no practical reason. The fortress she had so carefully built against fornication was, it turned out, nothing more than chicken wire. She found she could deconstruct a fence in so small a gesture as an unbuttoning.
And yet there was Vincent, resistant. Closing buttons again, returning her hands to his waist. Experienced and also opposed to this sin. If anyone could instruct Maddie in the mysterious ways of God, it was Vincent—and in this regard, Vincent stood firm.
Except, of course, when he didn’t. Increasingly, he didn’t. Incrementally, by degrees, they moved together past the fence’s boundary, dipped their toes in the pool’s shallow end. And always it ended—without real satisfaction—in Vincent’s call to repentance.
He held Maddie in a grip lacking all sensual tenderness, her face pressed to his arm, his chest, and in a broken voice or one filled with confidence, he called on God to forgive them of their sin and strengthen them to withstand further temptation. He might pray it in a whisper, he might—with tears reminiscent of that night at the altar—plead in a choked gasp. And if Maddie was certain of anything, it was that Vincent was convinced of their sinfulness, of their need for God.
In light of this, she found herself consistently relieved that their relationship should persist. After all, she had lured him into sin (wasn’t it always at her initiation?) countless times. Her knowledge of the Bible implied—if it didn’t directly mandate—that their best course of action would be to break up. How did the passage go? “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off,” or some horror equally conclusive. And yet, post repentance, Vincent could look at her clear-eyed, could—and did—tell her again that he loved her. The adequacy of his contrition or, more distantly, God’s forgiveness, seemed absolute.
And Vincent would occasionally remind her that his faith was planted in the school parking lot, where, Vincent said, God had made it clear that he had chosen them for each other. “He gave us a miracle,” Vincent chuckled, “as if he wanted to be sure we’d notice.” As if Vincent wouldn’t have noticed and loved Maddie otherwise, Vincent would say. And Maddie would add that she had noticed Vincent before that.
They talked about temptation, of course. There were moments of objective discussion, merciful moments when, somehow, they had circled wide of the danger and could again assert their posture of purity. They could stand circumspect and thoughtful, together studying the landscape of temptation, the swimming pool behind its concrete and barbed wire. They could laugh at the lie of stolen intimacy, that the union of their bodies would mean anything other than the potential destruction of their souls. They could affirm in blind faith that God’s plan for sex only within marriage had ramifications beyond what—so limited, so young—they could be expected to understand. Maddie affirmed all these things with Vincent, reciting by rote what she had been told all her life, what he had only so recently and so fully adopted. If Vincent believed it—Vincent the miracle-worker, newborn child of God—then Maddie was sure it was right.
But there were those other moments, too, when Maddie knew they were pitted against forces beyond their strength or comprehension. At those times, even what Vincent said he wanted was not reflected in his behavior. Who was to say whether, in his car on this abandoned street or in that empty parking lot, Vincent would draw them to prayer or instead to the marvel of skin on more skin—each experience bearing something of the holy about it, something indefinably beautiful.
But no, the skin was better. Who could argue that anything but skin was better?
And then Maddie was again in Vincent’s grip, her face pressed into his chest, the tears of his remorse dampening her hair. Vincent prayed aloud and then fell silent, continuing to hold her, and Maddie wondered if he was waiting for her to say something, to join her words with his in looking to God for help.
Always she was silent, listening—for what, exactly? For God to move her, to bring her, like he had Vincent, to an attitude of remorse? But if God was speaking, then she never heard him, hearing instead only Vincent’s breathing, that gentle pressure which moved her with the rise and fall of his chest.
16
Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital was in the heart of the city’s downtown. Constructed of steel and concrete, it was nonetheless designed to let in light: from both inside and out, it appeared to be made of plate glass. There was not a room on any exterior wall that did not have one length composed of window. Thus designed and situated on the Monongahela River, the founders’ hope was that the children undergoing treatment should have a view of the world around them, and the hospital’s sickest patients would have rooms with a view of the river and the mountain beyond it.
Seeing beauty like this could only aid in the healing process.
Such was Maddie’s imagination, anyway, of the famous children’s hospital in her city, but she had never actually seen it. Had she known its actual design and setting, she would likely have been disappointed that it wasn’t actually downtown, that it enjoyed only regular views of a rolling, house-dotted landscape, and that these were obtained through standard-sized windows. No river, no mountain, no plate-glass.
This might have required reassessment of her assumptions; but as they were untried, she could carry on with the images that, more and more of late, were readily coming to mind. Most vivid was the oncology ward, home to the sickest of the hospital’s patients. Maddie imagined it as a long room lined with beds against one wall; and opposite the beds, providing the children with their first and last sights of the day, a wall made of windows. The windows were sloped, dropping away from the ceiling at a seventy-degree angle, coming all the way to the floor. Through them the children watched birds, planes, helicopters, traffic moving across the top of Mount Washington, and the city’s famous incline making its way up and down the steep hill.
Maddie’s imagination provided further details: sun streamed into the room through these windows; the beds were covered in sunlight. Each bed was different, bearing gifts sent by friends and worried families: over-large teddy bears, and Mylar helium balloons that glinted in the sunlight. Each bed was occupied by a child in some degree of terrible illness. They were bald. Their eyes were large and haunted or pinched behind swollen cheeks. Some of them had tubes attached to their arms. Some were too weak to sit up.
But hope was there, too. For Maddie imagined Vincent among them, tall and handsome, walking slowly from bed to bed, touching each child on the head or the arm, bending down to speak to them. Tousling heads where hair might once have been. He would talk to them, sit on their beds, make them laugh. And then after sitting with a child for a while, he would just tell her that he was going to pray now, and that this prayer was going to make the child better, that soon after this she would be able to get rid of the tubes forever and grow her hair back and play in the backyard just like she used to.
Vincent would move through the ward and the children would love him, and within days the news reports would be about how every child in the oncology ward at the Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital was recovered, discha
rged, sent home. She could see the photographs: empty beds, wrapped tightly in sheets and a single blanket, walls clean of ornament, all of it soaked in sunlight that poured through the plate-glass.
To Maddie, and given what she had seen in Vincent, this vision was not unreasonable. Though she would not be likely to admit this—never aloud and not even to herself—it was somewhat of an expectation.
R
It was a Sunday, this time in January. The day was cold but snowless, and a handful of children escaped outdoors after the church service to play on the parsonage swing set. Some of the youth group, too, had come squinting outdoors, Vincent and Maddie among them.
They were standing on the church steps when they heard the ear-splitting scream. Maddie was confused but Vincent reacted immediately, racing toward the parsonage lawn, and then the rest of them followed.
The child was still struggling to his feet when they got there, but the blood was already dripping down through his hair and over his forehead. Little Joey Amoretti was no older than three, and it was his sister Hannah who was screaming, standing up on one side of the glider-swing, her knuckles white around the handles. The other seat was also occupied, and that child stared back over his shoulder, horrified at the bleeding on the lawn behind him. The glider-swing itself was still in motion, coming slowly to a stop.
Vincent went straight to Joey, who reached up to wipe the blood out of his eyes and, seeing it on his hands, also started screaming. Maddie didn’t think to close her eyes against the blood, and so she had a clear view of Vincent’s hands along the top of Joey’s head, making a seam of the split in his hairline, pressing closed the cut in the skin over his skull.
This was the next miracle: the skin fusing the way it did, coming together tidily and binding instantly, stopping the blood, canceling the pending emergency room visit and the stitches that would have inevitably followed.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 17
