It was one of those unbelievable Pennsylvania autumn days when the sun is shining and the warm air returns and one imagines that maybe this winter, for once, won’t be a hard one. They had been alone in Francesca’s dorm room for a long while, and for about half an hour had been leafing through her atlas. They were plotting the course of their future travels, Francesca having told him she thought they should spend the summer backpacking in Europe.
Drunk on Francesca’s assumption that they could make plans for next summer, that they would still be “together” then, Frank hadn’t concerned himself with his need for a summer job or the potential expense of such a trip. Neither had he considered how very un-Francesca-like such an enterprise seemed. “We’ll stay in youth hostels,” she had said; “We’ll eat on the cheap.” He hadn’t entertained the image of her skirts tangled in her ankles on the dirty floor of an Italian train station. Instead, he had fallen more completely in love with Francesca than before (if, indeed, this was love), his mind swelling with what his life would be with this woman: how they would live together in Europe and both of them would be writers, and the dust of their middle-America upbringing would be washed away by European rains and snows on the steppes of central Asia. Because Francesca had convinced him of this, too: middle-America was dusty; it had little more to offer than dust.
It was this Francesca-intoxication, the spoken possibility of a future together that propelled Frank to new heights of intimacy. Francesca suddenly announced that it was a gorgeous day and they should haul a blanket out on the quad and lie there in the sun, and Frank had immediately agreed and then gone off to get his journal. Still riding the incandescent vision of his future, basking in the gift of late October warmth, Frank had read aloud from the journal to her, who lay with her head in his lap, the glorious mane of her curls spread out over his thighs and her shoulders and the blanket beneath them both.
She had listened with her eyes closed, and then she had listened with them open, and in stolen glances Frank saw reflected in her eyes the branching articulations of the oak tree that he leaned against, their leaves already gone to rust. She listened without comment for a long time, and Frank, still intoxicated, stopped reading excerpts and instead read an entire piece, a non-fiction narrative about building a model airplane with his grandfather. After weeks of being afraid to share his writing, he was now emboldened by this very daring act he was undertaking, as if in reading to her he was showing her that he wasn’t afraid of her or anything else. He would take her to Italy that summer and would impress her by suggesting they go further east: Prague, Budapest. They wouldn’t just visit Nepal someday; they would live there. As he read, images of Nepal rose in his vision: the green steppes, the folds of the mountains. He would be the one to take Francesca there.
He finished reading and closed the journal with finality, laying it beside him on the blanket, on a tendril of her hair. Her eyes were closed again. She had listened, immobile. And now, without opening her eyes, she said to him, “If you can write like that, you can write anything.”
Over the course of his career, Frank had certainly received praise for his writing. His professors had lauded his work; his editors loved it. He had received various awards; he had been quoted on the news and in trade journals. He had been asked to speak at conferences; he had contributed articles to national magazines; he had recently been invited to write a book. He had also made up stories for his sons, creating a cast of characters both fantastic and familiar; his sons asked for news of them by name. And Maddie loved his writing, even clipping his column regularly from the newspaper and squirreling it away in an album somewhere.
And yet this phrase from Francesca was the one he heard most often in his head. Sometimes he said it to himself, hunched over his laptop, pondering a column or article that wasn’t coming. He had wrestled with it over the years: Was it okay to be encouraged—even inspired—by something that an ex-lover had said to him once? Her words—like any trace he might have of her—should have been banished long ago, right? They should be discarded as less than useless, as insignificant and meaningless compared to what he and Maddie had right now.
Besides, he had long ago decided that most—if not all—of what Francesca said was bunk. Her estimation of nearly everything had been rooted in profound insecurity; she had perceived the world through an insatiable need to promote herself.
And yet she had said this to Frank: “If you can write like that, you can write anything.” There was no self-promotion there, no wry critique. Just praise.
Frank had decided that it was okay. Francesca’s words, detached from the source, could resonate with as much meaning as any encouragement made by a writing professor or an editor. They were just words, and they were sometimes helpful—especially in the pits of emptiness that every writer faces, those appalling moments when he felt beyond doubt that he had nothing to offer as a writer, nothing for anyone to read at all. Those words were very helpful, especially because Francesca—vehement critic of her college writing group and the world at large—had said them.
Frank clicked, “Accept.”
R
They had arrived with Nicky at the healing service to find the small group cheerfully waiting for them: Pastor McLaughlin, the three candidates for healing, a few family members and elders. In truth, Maddie supposed this much. Beyond the three people Vincent was to pray for, she wasn’t sure who had been there; her memory of this event, too, was vague, as if there had been many subsequent ones like it and routine had bred oblivion.
She was certain that the service itself was brief—Vincent never prayed for long—and afterward Maddie had only a few lasting impressions. The first was the sound of Mrs. Senchak’s breathing, or her effort to breathe. It was low and scraping, monstrously heavy. Every breath sounded as though she was lifting something, hoisting with great strain something that clearly wasn’t meant for her to carry. The thought was distressing: Mrs. Senchak didn’t look as if she had any strength at all; her body was shrunken, curled crookedly into her wheelchair, and every breath came at the price of that tremendous effort. Maddie had a fierce desire to help her, a sense that all of them should be rushing to her aid, and she wished that Mrs. Senchak were fighting against something outside herself so that any of them, somehow, could help.
But all they could offer was prayer: this gathering around her, laying their hands on her frail limbs and then mentally pressing—was that what prayer was?—their best hopes toward God. Throughout that prayer, throughout the ensuing church service, it was Mrs. Senchak’s scraping breath that resounded at the back of Maddie’s mind. Any perhaps appropriate thoughts of guilt were submerged in the noise of that grinding effort.
And it was likely that Mrs. Senchak’s breathing was what almost made her—and therefore Vincent—miss her other recollection of that event. Susan Sweet had called his name several times already before Maddie registered it. The prayer was finished; everyone was standing around, chatting casually because they had put all their most earnest and important thoughts into praying. Maddie hadn’t engaged in the small talk; she wanted desperately to get out of there, and in looking toward the door she noticed that Susan was standing behind Vincent, looking up expectantly at him. “Vincent,” she was saying. Her voice—Maddie had seldom heard it—was almost unbelievably soft and high-pitched.
Immediately, Maddie tugged at his arm: “Vincent,” she said, smiling at Susan and nodding Vincent in her direction.
“Oh, hey Susan,” Vincent said.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” Susan said, and she reached out to shake his hand.
Vincent grinned and took her hand in his. “Well, you’re welcome,” he said. “Always glad to pray.”
“Thank you,” Susan said again, and Maddie, already agonized by Mrs. Senchak’s strain for air, was newly discomfited by this interaction. She longed more fervently for the exit.
“You’re welcome,” Vincent said again, unfazed by the awkwardness, still shaking Susan’s hand, still smiling.
Susan was blushing. Maddie could see it: that awful and embarrassing blush she had noticed before on certain complexions, that started all in blotches on the throat and climbed its way up the neck.
“Thank you,” Susan said, one more time. In a motion, she dropped both her gaze and Vincent’s hand. He returned to another conversation, and Maddie watched Susan make her limping way toward the door.
R
This time, Maddie didn’t think to wait for news. Instead, she tried to wrench from her mind the terrible memory of Mrs. Senchak struggling for air. The sound was like an earworm, an odious, arrhythmic, tuneless song her brain wouldn’t release. In any break in conversation, any lull in classroom noise, or—most horribly—lying in her bed at night, Maddie found that this ragged effort at breathing was a constant in her ears.
Once or twice over the course of those days, the thought of her recently lost virginity also occurred to her, and Maddie considered that she ought to feel guilty, but this she angrily dismissed. At best, guilt seemed self-centered and, at worst, an unreasonable demand. She felt that her sin (if that is what it was), weighed together on some cosmic scale with an agonized Mrs. Senchak, was decidedly tipped in Maddie’s favor. She found it inconceivable that God should demand repentance if—rather when—it seemed clear that he was clearly culpable for such suffering.
More calmly, she again considered Vincent’s understanding, the eternal when which would mean resolution, health, peace. It sounded good in theory, but she found it fell short of comfort when one considered the three very real people he had prayed for. “When” in God’s mind, in the perception of the eternal, was to the time-bound a rather hopeless proposition. There were no guarantees.
And if there were no guarantees, then there was certainly no safety. Yet God insisted on repentance and devotion: Vincent, Pastor McLaughlin, Mr. Gillece all agreed on that. The God of Sunday school, of lisping “Jesus Loves Me,” was more and more certainly becoming—to Maddie’s mind—a charade.
So she turned her mind again to the suffering ones they had prayed for on Sunday. She imagined Susan’s recovery—it seemed by far the easiest. A mere realignment of the bones, just as her own healing had been. Maddie envisioned it: Susan waking, opening her eyes, remembering the prayer and still feeling the warmth from Vincent’s hands on her hip. She would sit up and slide her feet to the floor; she would stand; walking would suddenly be effortless.
But there was no news of this—and on Tuesday she learned that Mr. Taylor’s amputation had been scheduled for Thursday morning.
“What does your boyfriend make of this scenario?” Justine asked her, leaning in at Maddie’s locker.
“Sometimes these things take time, Justine,” Maddie answered her, putting her off. She knew what Vincent thought (“it was a question of when”), and she herself was still holding out some hope. For Justine’s sake, for her own, she could point to Mrs. Adams and Mr. Pavlik both as examples of delayed reaction—until Justine clarified that they didn’t know exactly when Mrs. Adams had been healed.
“It might have happened that very day,” she said. “It’s just that we didn’t find out about it until Wednesday.”
Justine would have to plague Vincent about it, too; she couldn’t reserve her little comments to conversation at Maddie’s locker. She talked about it openly during Wednesday’s lunch.
“So, it would seem that Mr. Taylor’s going to have that other foot off after all,” she said, and Vincent didn’t say anything—which, apparently, wouldn’t do.
“What do you make of that?” she asked, and she tapped Vincent’s hand twice with a sharp index finger.
Vincent looked at her blankly. “Am I supposed to make something of it?”
“Well, I would think you would—” Justine paused, leaning in, and Maddie detected something akin to smugness, something like I-told-you-so, “have an explanation or something.”
“I guess I’m not the guy to explain everything that God does or doesn’t do,” Vincent said.
Justine was unsatisfied. “Well, who is, then?”
“I’m not sure anybody is,” he answered her.
“Shut-up, Justine,” Maddie said, surprising herself. She was sick of the antagonism, and now that she knew—if she didn’t exactly understand—Vincent’s perspective, she found she couldn’t defend it. Neither did she want to. Anyway, if anyone should be taken to trial here, it was God, not Vincent. But she still hadn’t the nerve to propose this, and Justine wouldn’t buy it, anyway.
“Excuse me,” said Justine, annoyed and then, perhaps, taken aback. Maddie had never spoken to her like this, and immediately she regretted it. Her voice softened.
“Besides,” Maddie said, “who is to say that Mr. Taylor isn’t healed already, anyway?” Again, her own words surprised her. Even as she was saying them, she knew she didn’t believe them, hope as she might that they were true. Her question, she realized without looking at him, was directed as much at Vincent as Justine. Would she forever be caught between sides? She wished that Vincent would take up the argument, would offer an explanation for God, would address for all of them this question of when. What was he suggesting? Did one, in asking for healing, have also to be specific, to throw in the details so that God would know what you were talking about? “Please heal Mr. Taylor, and kindly do so before Thursday. This Thursday.” Maybe that would do the trick.
But Vincent did not seem to conceive of Maddie’s anger and so didn’t receive the subtle dig implied in her question. Maddeningly, he simply agreed with her: “Who’s to say?” he repeated.
Justine stared at Vincent, then looked at Maddie, and then back at Vincent again. Finally, “Who’s to say,” she said, and again left the lunch table.
Maddie decided not to be bothered by it. She was even glad to see her go. There was more at stake here than Justine’s friendship, and time enough—if she had the willpower, if she could ever grasp understanding for herself—to explain it to Justine. Meanwhile, her mind relentlessly replayed Mrs. Senchak’s breathing. And on Wednesday evening, when Maddie arrived for youth group, Susan Sweet still had her limp. Maddie walked a safe distance behind her into the church building, not at all wanting to follow up or engage. The limp, she observed, made every step look like an interrupted stagger; her view must pitch horribly over the course of even a few feet.
It was a question of when. Mr. Taylor’s surgery was scheduled for the next morning. “This Thursday.” There had been no word about Mrs. Senchak.
25
Frank was taken off guard by how the communication between them blazed up immediately, like dry leaves taken to a match. He would swear Francesca posted something to his public “wall” within seconds of his accepting her “friendship.”
“Hey, stranger!” it said, all breezy, so familiar. Was it possible that things should be familiar after so much time and through the artifice of social media? And they were different people now. She hadn’t really known him in college; he hadn’t been then the person he’d become. How familiar could they be? And yet there it was, and Frank was quietly impressed by how, yes, familiar it felt. Within the first few days of this public conversation, they were hinting at old, private, long-forgotten and now suddenly clear jokes that would be nonsense to people reading from the outside—and yet it all felt okay to him because it was right there on his Facebook wall, out there in plain sight for anyone to see. He wasn’t hiding anything.
She said she was doing great, loved Seattle, worked in publishing and made time for some writing of her own on the side, had been published here and there, mostly local. She had been married once (this was surprising) but it hadn’t worked out (less surprising), one daughter (aged 12) who was, she said, “very much her own person,” leaving it to Frank to interpret. In fact, she left a lot for Frank to interpret. Nearly everything she said underscored his earliest intimations: she wasn’t the person he remembered; they didn’t know one another at all. And yet there were those old jokes, those echoes of familiarity, as
though, in communicating with her, Frank was hearing strains of songs he had once been accustomed to listen to. And she was eager to hear about Maddie and the kids, so sorry about Maddie’s battle with cancer. He could imagine her laughter when he told her about his adventures as the Little League coach: he hadn’t thought she would be interested in such things.
But she seemed glad to tell him she had come to appreciate sports; was actually embarrassed to report that her current favorite was cricket (“I know: I’m ever the anglophile, right, Frank?” she wrote); still couldn’t quite stomach the self-absorbed pageantry of the Olympics, but what are you going to do. To which he responded that her critique of self-absorption was amusing. She caught his drift and wrote, “It was that obvious, was it?”
She said she loved his articles; he was pleased to learn she had tracked his career somewhat and now read his work from time to time by way, of course, of the Internet. And she apologized for being such an “absolute fool” in college (they had moved the conversation, by this time, to the private messages because it seemed simpler; it was merely practical to do so, Frank told himself). “You were wise to be shed of me,” she said. But Frank didn’t respond to that comment specifically, in part because he didn’t know what to say. She had left him, he wanted to argue. There had been no wisdom about it, not on his part. The wisdom had come later.
Via email (Francesca had switched it to email; it was more convenient for both of them), he asked about her marriage, and she said that it hadn’t lasted very long. It was when she was living in Italy (Oh, thought Frank, so she did manage to live internationally for a while). An honest-to-goodness Italian (which, he supposed, meant not an Italian-American, ubiquitous in pockets of “uncivilized” American cities) whose machismo had turned out to be more than she’d bargained for. “Anyway,” she wrote, “I’m not very good at relationships.” He left that comment alone, too, and instead made some jokes about the Mafia, to which she replied, intriguingly, “Don’t get me started.”
Healing Maddie Brees Page 28
