Mrs. Amoretti was there in an instant, lifting Joey from the lawn, soothing the child and, as she hurried toward the parsonage, taking under her arm the inconsolable Hannah, who blubbered on about the accident and how Joey had insisted on crawling under the glider-swing even though she had told him not to. It was a few steps and then they were gone, disappearing behind the aluminum and screen door, with Mr. Amoretti and Pastor and Mrs. McLaughlin hastening behind them.
The rest of them were left on the lawn: the small number from the youth group, the few congregants who heard the news when, breathless, it had been carried to the Amorettis. There was a brief silence among them after the door closed. Maddie stood still with Vincent, who studied the blood on his hands for a moment, then wiped them on the grass.
Around them, the small crowd divided into various circles and ellipses of concern, one of which—comprised of teenagers—gathered around Vincent. What happened? What did it look like? Vincent described the injury and exclamations erupted, followed by more questions or stories of their own.
The adults, too, put questions to Vincent, who again described the accident as he had come upon it.
Thoughtful, they recalled incidents requiring stitches for their own children; they retold stories of their own children’s swing set accidents and moved on to those involving bicycles and trees. They recounted visits to emergency rooms. They discussed who might accompany the Amorettis to the hospital; they determined who might take Hannah Amoretti home with them for the afternoon so her parents would only have to worry about Joey.
Then, armed with purpose or even the simple awareness that they needed to get out of the way, the clusters redistributed themselves and most of them dispersed. The teenagers, called by their parents to waiting cars, moved off. They went home to pot roasts warm in timed ovens, to afternoon naps, to plans for casseroles quietly delivered later in the week to the Amorettis’ kitchen table.
Cars were still starting and pulling out of the parking lot when the parsonage door opened and the Amorettis emerged. Hannah and Joey were no longer crying, though their faces were still red, and each of them was enjoying a lollipop. Joey’s shirt was bloodied but his face was clean, and he seemed unaware of the blood matting his hair or even that he’d been hurt at all. He rode peacefully in his father’s arms and busied himself with his candy.
The Amorettis thanked Vincent for trying to help them out, for comforting Joey when he got there.
“No problem,” Vincent said, “no problem at all.” Despite the remnant of blood along his palm, he shook Mr. Amoretti’s extended hand.
And then the abbreviated and relieved conversation. They would not be going to the hospital: the bleeding had stopped; the cut seemed to be closed. It was amazing, really. Like a miracle. And now—here, with laughter—everyone could go home and get a nap, and Mr. Amoretti could watch the Penguins game from the comfort of his living room.
The family was moving away now. Vincent and Maddie were walking toward his car. Behind them, Pastor McLaughlin emerged from the house and said something about getting rid of the swing set, something about it being nothing more than a rust heap, anyway.
That was the end of it—and who would have expected anything more? It was merely a playground accident, the unfortunate result of a child’s foolishness. Yes, there had been a lot of blood, but the bleeding had stopped on its own. Clearly the cut wasn’t all that deep.
Except that it wasn’t right. Not at all. Not to Maddie, anyway, who had seen it with her own eyes.
“What’s not right about it?” Vincent asked. It was Monday or Tuesday and they were talking on the phone.
“It’s not right that a miracle took place right there in front of everyone, and all Mr. Amoretti can say is that he’s glad he can watch the hockey game at home.”
Vincent chuckled. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a hockey game, Maddie.”
“That’s not my point, Vincent. This has nothing to with hockey.”
“So what’s the matter, then?”
“You healed his son and he’s not even grateful.”
“How do you know he isn’t grateful? He seemed grateful. He said thank you.”
“Yes, but Vincent, he’s not grateful that you healed him.”
“I didn’t heal him.” This quiet reply from Vincent was vexing. In the split second between their two sentences, she knew he was going to say this. She knew, too, that Vincent knew what she meant, and now she had to steer around her annoyance.
“Fine, okay. I know. God healed him. But he’s not grateful that God healed him.”
Vincent was quiet for a moment, giving Maddie time to consider that Vincent was attending less to her words than to what her words said about her. She didn’t like this thought, and reassured herself of her intentions—which were, of course, good.
“You know, Maddie?” he answered her. “I think there’s lots God does that we don’t thank him for, that we don’t even know or recognize he does. I’m not saying we should necessarily celebrate that, but we don’t have to make it our mission in life to make sure that everyone is paying attention, you know? And anyway, Joey’s okay, right? And Mr. and Mrs. Amoretti are really happy that he’s all right. So is everybody. They are grateful. Why isn’t that enough?”
Maddie couldn’t articulate why it wasn’t enough—but it wasn’t. Over the ensuing days, her irritation with the Amorettis spread to the congregation members who had stood waiting on the lawn, to the teenagers who had come up right behind Vincent, even to the Tedescos. They hadn’t been there, but certainly they should put two and two together.
It was almost enough to make her tell Justine who, like everyone else, had heard about it. Justine would be sympathetic to Maddie’s frustration. Injustice, deception, willful ignorance: Justine had no tolerance for any of it.
She didn’t have tolerance for a lot of things. “What possesses a kid to crawl under a glider? While it’s moving?” She refrained from calling Joey an idiot—he was only three—but suggested that he should be taken to the hospital. “Might be a good idea to have him checked out,” she said. “You know, get that kid’s head examined.”
No, Maddie knew her friend was an unlikely candidate in championing Vincent as healer. For starters, she had increasingly found fault with her congregation’s claims of a miracle—or any tangible act of God. Short of watching one unfold before her eyes, Justine was unlikely to believe that any healings had actually taken place.
More problematic was her persistent mistrust of Vincent. She spent time with him, certainly—but as Maddie’s best friend, she might have found this obligatory. And she was certainly friendly towards him. But she really didn’t seem to like him.
There was, for instance, a game Vincent played at school, one he had made up. He was the only one who could play, as the fun lay in the element of surprise. Maddie had seen him at it once or twice before they had ever spoken, and it had made her laugh even then: Vincent would choose his “victim” unawares, someone he knew most of the time, but occasionally someone he didn’t. He would spot this person at some distance down the hall and then, at breakneck speed, would run the person down, his feet loudly pounding only in the last few steps of his approach. He would come to a windy and sudden halt mere inches from his victim’s face, and he would shout, “Ha!”
That was it. Brief and shocking. It wasn’t what one could call violent; he never touched his victim. But the recipient of his attentions was invariably startled, sometimes terrified, and would often respond with a scream, a shout, a dropping of books and papers.
Justine hated it. He had done it to her several times, and every time it made her furious. But she was angered, too, in defense of his other victims, about whom, Justine pointed out, he didn’t seem to care at all.
“You’re going to make somebody pee themselves, Vincent!” she shouted at him once. She hadn’t been the victim that time, but was helping an unfortunate soul retrieve scattered papers. “What if someone has a heart condition?”
Vincent laughed this off, and Maddie tried to help her see the humor in it, but Justine wouldn’t hear it. “It isn’t funny, Maddie,” she said. “He should watch out. One of these times, somebody’s going to get hurt.”
No, Maddie couldn’t imagine Justine promoting Vincent’s gift at all.
She couldn’t be sure that Vincent would want her to tell Justine anyway. He seemed perfectly happy never to speak of these things—a fact Maddie didn’t understand.
There was a lot about Vincent that Maddie didn’t understand, and his attitude about healing people was only the beginning. His attitude, Maddie thought, was a kind of assent, submission to something that he hadn’t chosen and wouldn’t have chosen, if asked. He seemed to regard his gift with disinterest, as if it were a gift equal with his many others, and one he didn’t care to foster.
Vincent was interested in sports and friends, Maddie, and church and God, not in any particular order, but in some strange Venn diagram of contentment.
Maddie had to correct herself. There was an order: it was God first, and then came everything else.
How had he expressed it? Here was a new gambit, a surprising tactic to defeat the temptation facing them in every private moment. Vincent explained it to her, and she, of course, did not comprehend it.
“It’s not that I don’t want you,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t want each other. It’s that we want God more.”
This also had been a conversation over the phone, safely distant from one another, where they were able to regard the swimming pool and its enclosure with rational scrutiny. Maddie had agreed with Vincent at the time. It didn’t sound very different from church-talk and discussions of sexual temptation in the youth group. Of course we want God more! We want to obey him because we should. Because it pleases him. Because it’s right.
Maddie had hung up the phone warmed by the conversation. Their mutual affirmation of this truth fortified her; their shared commitment to obedience felt like confession and redemption both. She was awed by a sense of renewed devotion to God, awed, too, by Vincent’s faith and their being chosen for one another, by the unique blessing of their relationship: its maturity, strength, wisdom.
All of which was lost days later, thrust somewhere under the car’s dashboard along with Maddie’s sweater and—would have been—her jeans, had not Vincent reasserted his new-found wisdom, that of their wanting each other, yes, but wanting God more.
And here the solution failed her. Vincent’s formula broke into meaningless pieces. He had stopped kissing her and was in every way resisting her, urging her to God as if believing that Maddie understood and wanted him, too. But God, in that moment, was nothing to Maddie; she couldn’t countenance the possibility of his presence or even, were she honest, his relevance.
Vincent could and did. Again he was the repentant one, asking forgiveness for both of them, and telling Maddie on the way home that they had to be strong for each other, that neither of them could expect to be strong every time and that this time he was glad he could be strong enough for them both.
Later Maddie felt glad of that, too—or, at the very least, that she ought to be. External restraint—in the form of Vincent, in the form of anything—seemed the best she could hope for when it came to resisting temptation. The verse again skirted the back of her mind: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.” It was something terrible like that, and she didn’t have to think hard to see how it applied in their situation, how Vincent, full of God, might be better off without her.
She was glad she didn’t know exactly where to find that verse in the Bible, and she wasn’t about to go hunting for it. Neither would she mention it to Vincent—ever. Were Vincent to contemplate that verse about cutting off your hand, Maddie feared he would end their relationship.
Yes, sometimes her Sunday school education felt like more trouble than it was worth. But it was those years of church, too, that served Maddie now, bringing to mind what bothered her about the Amorettis’ ignorance: the glory of God. They were all supposed to be about praising God, about acknowledging and, where possible (it was rumored to be everywhere possible), celebrating Him—His words, His works, His goodness. This was what they taught you in church. This was the purported ambition of every Sunday gathering and, supposedly, their lives.
She told Vincent, “It isn’t that they aren’t grateful. It’s that they aren’t aware of what God has done. You said it yourself. You didn’t heal Joey. God did. People should be praising God for that miracle.”
Vincent was quiet, and his apparent thoughtfulness fueled her certainty. “God should get the credit for this,” she went on, “and if no one noticed it at the time or knows about it now, then he isn’t really getting any credit, is he? Not much, anyway. Not enough.”
That was how they left it for a while. Maddie’s confidence contented her for the time being, and meanwhile there were no more incidents or further opportunities for Vincent to miraculously heal anybody. He seemed to feel this was fine.
But Maddie began watching for opportunities, almost hoping someone would cut himself opening a can of mandarin oranges at lunch or stumble when walking down the stairs. Sometimes as she sat next to Vincent in church, she pointed to the list of prayer requests in the church bulletin—not saying anything, just pointing. See? She was trying to say. You could heal all of them.
They were leaving church one Sunday when Vincent was the one to bring it up: “You’re right, Maddie,” he said. “There are a lot of sick people in the world.”
This was what she was hoping for: Vincent was ready to put his gift of healing into active—not simply reactive—use. Maddie was very pleased and tried, in a quiet moment, to articulate to herself why. She reconsidered Vincent’s words about the Amorettis. She told herself again that their complacent appreciation was not enough. A gift like Vincent’s shouldn’t be hidden; it shouldn’t be overlooked. Vincent’s gift was evidence of God himself—of God’s choosing Vincent, of his choosing Maddie and Vincent for one another.
She wanted everyone to know about that.
R
It wasn’t until she was getting ready for bed that night that Maddie found herself revisiting the episode with Joey Amoretti. She remembered it all: Vincent’s familiar hands around that dreadful cut; the stout fingers and square fingernails, bloodied as they closed the wound.
But she saw it, too, from a distance. Some kids had been talking about it again after church that evening, revisiting their recent history as teenagers are wont to do. Lisa Wells mentioned that she was standing with Maddie when they first heard the screaming, that she and Maddie had hurried together to the parsonage lawn, and Vincent had gotten there ahead of them.
Standing at the bathroom sink, Maddie remembered. They arrived at the scene, but she hadn’t run to Joey. Horrified by the screaming and instinctively fearful of the blood, Maddie had hung back and watched Vincent with the boy. She saw him standing over the child, his hands curved and resting on the top of his head. And then Mrs. Amoretti coming, and the retreat into the house. That was it.
She hadn’t actually witnessed the miracle at all.
17
Maddie didn’t think through how things might play out. How to skip from convincing Vincent to visiting the Children’s Hospital cancer wards?
But apparently there was to be an order. There were chains of command, or lines of communication, anyway. Vincent wasn’t to be a rogue healer hitting the streets of Pittsburgh with his stunning blessing. To Maddie’s displeased surprise, it wouldn’t be done like that. Rather, Nicky Tedesco must—with Vincent’s permission—have a conversation with Pastor McLaughlin, which resulted in Vincent’s subsequent conversation with Pastor McLaughlin, which then resulted in a conversation with the elders and deacons. Vincent requested Maddie’s presence in both of these and she—how could she say no?—complied.
The upshot was no heroics (yet) in the oncology ward, but definite expressions of quiet astonishment, s
ome of bold belief and none of doubt. “Proceed with caution” seemed to be the order of the day, by which was meant that Vincent’s gift would be kept—for now—a secret.
What this did not mean, apparently, was starting small, testing out the miraculous in doses, where there wasn’t much at stake. Instead Vincent was to join an already-planned prayer for a man very nearly on his death-bed.
And why not? This was the Bethel Hills Church of the Expectant, after all.
Maddie didn’t like the smell of hospitals, and she had a vague discomfort at the idea of entering the room where Mr. Pavlik lay with a tumor expanding in his brain. There was something unpleasant about the whole thing: the body making something destructive to itself, the tumor growing beyond control, pressing against the brain, making the head swell. She imagined the inescapable closeness of a tumor in her own head. It was distressing.
Vincent teased her about this aversion: “It isn’t contagious, Mads,” he said, and she answered him swiftly and annoyed:
“I know you can’t catch a tumor.”
He had asked her to come along, had promised her silly things like a ride in the first vacant wheelchair they could find or going out for ice cream afterwards even though it would only be ten o’clock in the morning.
She gave in, because when did she not want to give in to Vincent? But she agreed to go, too, because she felt their coming here was her fault, borne of her confidence. Yet so quickly it had taken on a life of its own, with players she hadn’t intended to include: Pastor McLaughlin and the elders would be there. And, again, when she had imagined the hospital visit, it had been for sweet little children in an oncology ward—not for an old man’s brain tumor.
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder around Mr. Pavlik’s bed, a wall of resolve built on cautious hope, and Pastor McLaughlin had asked if Vincent would reposition himself up by Mr. Pavlik’s head, there by his right shoulder. Maddie had been summoned from her position at the window: Pastor McLaughlin called to her, and Mrs. Pavlik beckoned, smiling, gesturing with her plump hand.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 18
