Healing Maddie Brees

by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

  Her actions had been intense and deliberate, and he wondered if it meant something. He considered feeling hopeful—but then was caught again in the irony: his betrayal was both absolute and dismayingly recent: only two nights before. Sometimes he feared he could still smell Francesca on his skin.

  The weight of it appalled him. Over the past two days, trying to go through the motions of normal life, he had time and again felt sidelined by memories of his time with Francesca: her toothy grin at the bar, her naked shoulder under his palm, the fall of her hair on the pillow. In the short work of a single evening, he had succeeded in multiplying his demons; they overwhelmed him, innumerable.

  Still, his tired hope was relentless: How ought he respond to this affection from Maddie? If in fact it meant something, then certainly she would tell him. And wouldn’t that conversation, leading (he hoped, he imagined) to renewed intimacy with his wife, serve to frighten those demons away?

  He had waited. She was quiet on the return home from church, which was not unusual. She was busy through dinner, preoccupied with what their sons were eating (it was always a battle with Garrett), and then, after the boys went to bed, it was the same quiet evening. They watched some television; they talked about nothing in particular, and throughout, Frank was waiting, afraid to ask questions lest he be accused of making too much—anything—of nothing. They read for a while in bed, and then it was lights out, backs turned.

  Frank was unsurprised to find himself thinking of calling Father Tim, but the thought was paired with regret. How to open that conversation? Certainly there had been lapses in communication between them before, but this time he could link it to his reconnection with Francesca. Of course he hadn’t wanted to talk with Tim. Frank had known, no matter what he told himself, precisely what he was doing.

  He wondered now, though, what Tim would say. Always, before that night with Francesca, he knew what The Priest would say, and he would call just to hear him say it. Now when he thought of confessing to his friend, he couldn’t imagine what Tim would say. It was a conversation that Frank didn’t want to have, not ever.

  Anyway, would he need to tell him? Would he need to tell anyone? He had gone to confession before Mass. He told himself that it was all over.

  That night, unable to sleep, he rose from bed and went downstairs. He sat at one end of the sofa and looked around the room. The familiar room, lit only by the hallway lamp, looked strange in this light, as though it wasn’t his house despite being furnished with all the right things in all of their standard places. Frank had been up late and alone before, but tonight the room felt emphatically lonely.

  Across the room, the boys’ toy bins were lined up carefully along the wall. Maddie had labeled them, marker on index cards, in her careful print. The boys always put their toys away before bed; Jake was particularly fastidious about this (“No, Eli, no Playmobils in this one. This one has the blue lid.”), and Frank wondered what element, if any, of household life didn’t somehow bear Maddie’s mark, didn’t somewhere reflect her attentive eye. This with the bins was a perfect example: “An opportunity to teach the boys responsibility,” he could hear her say, or something like that.

  Father Tim would appreciate this, Frank thought. How often he had admired Maddie’s organized pantry and her color-coded calendars! Frank thought they were helpful, cute, sometimes amusing—even, occasionally, problematic (one can be too devoted to organization, he would say playfully to Maddie, because he knew how its lack could eventually vex her). But The Priest showed genuine appreciation for the way she managed things.

  “You got a good one,” he would say to Frank. That, and a smile. It wasn’t that Tim himself was a lover of organization; it was, rather, that he looked for opportunities to praise Maddie to Frank, and vice versa. These were tacit reminders of the quiet splendors they had in one another. Tim would say, “These things shouldn’t be overlooked.”

  Just seeing Tim’s smile in his mind’s eye was enough to make Frank wince.

  He decided that he shouldn’t call Tim. What would be the point? Tim couldn’t understand what they’d been through—what he, Frank, had been through, he thought. Sure, sure. Tim thought he knew, and certainly, to an extent, he’d been right about how marriage “worked,” about how you stayed true to your commitment to each other and worked it out. Over their seventeen years of marriage, Frank and Maddie had had their share of arguments that rose into genuine fighting; the seemingly irreconcilable differences that sometimes made them feel worse than strangers; the opposite perspectives that, to each of them, seemed the only possible way. Tim would say that all of these could be resolved, and they had been. True, sometimes the fighting got worse before it got better. Sometimes one of them went for a long walk, or a beer, or a coffee. Sometimes it was a good night’s sleep they needed, or sex. But always, they had gotten over it or past it or through it. And that, Father Tim said, was what it meant to live the dream.

  But, given their current situation, Frank now understood that Tim didn’t know what he was talking about. The Priest didn’t know first-hand about cancer and, in their case, its requisite mutilation, and the way that mutilation might alienate a person from her own body, from her own husband. The Priest didn’t understand holding his wife’s hair back so she could vomit repeatedly into the toilet, about helping her shave her head, about silence in the form of months—not hours, not days. He didn’t know about Francesca and her smooth body, unmarred by cancer or anything else. Father Tim could talk all he wanted about living the dream, but what Frank and Maddie had was a nightmare.

  And Father Tim didn’t know about the loneliness, because how could he be expected to imagine it? The loneliness, Frank thought, shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t be possible that, sitting in his own living room, his sons and wife at home, Frank could feel this alone.

  But Frank knew that he was lying to himself. He knew that Tim would understand more than he was giving him credit for. At the very least, Frank knew—because Tim had told him—that sexual temptation was a familiar demon for a priest, too. And if Tim had a wife with cancer, Frank was certain he would hold her hair as she leaned over the toilet bowl.

  All that about Tim being unable to understand was guilt talking, plain and simple.

  Frank had so much guilt.

  Right now, Maddie’s careful print in marker on index cards made his heart ache. She had used blue markers on all of the cards; she had made them match, and Frank had teased her. Well, she had said, not failing to see how it could be amusing but explaining herself nonetheless, it’s a small room, she had said. This makes it, in a way, just a little bit neater at least.

  Jake had come along sometime after his mother and drawn on the index cards: awkward drawings, a child’s hand. On this card, a picture of a Lego; on this, a wooden block. All of them now bore a pictorial representation of the kind of toy contained within—his own effort to ensure that his less literate siblings could do it right.

  Jake. Such an earnest boy. So like his mother that way. He loved a good laugh, but he was generally serious, generally trying so hard. He had been serious even as a baby, looking all about him with those wide eyes and almost stern countenance. Observing everything, taking everything in.

  His birth had been the hardest. Thirty-six hours or something awful like that. Well beyond average. It wasn’t surprising, the doctor had said, given that he was the first baby. She had assured them that the next births wouldn’t be so difficult, and they hadn’t been.

  But at the time and even since then, Frank had praised Maddie’s success, bragging about Jake’s difficult birth. “That’s almost a full work-week,” he said to her of the labor, and for a moment that day she had seemed to take it in: a little pride in her own effort, when mostly what she was proud of and glowing over was their newborn son, pink, wrinkled, beautiful, and sleeping in her arms.

  Maddie had chosen the difficult option: no medication unless absolutely necessary. Then the labor had kicked in and she had tried everything to
manage the pain: walking, lying on her side, perched on the delivery table on her hands and knees.

  Frank had hated it. Pacing, standing by, offering the best he could in moral support. She didn’t want him to touch her, then she was reaching for his hand. He had remembered the mirror (in their excited birth-plan stage, Maddie said she wanted a mirror so she could see the baby be born) and was almost thrilled to realize it wasn’t yet in the room. Asking for the mirror, seeing it rightly positioned—these were things Frank could do for Maddie while, otherwise, all help was beyond him.

  Then Maddie got to sitting. She had asked him to set the back of the bed upright and he had sprung at yet another chance to do something. She sat at a near ninety-degree angle, knees bent and feet planted wide, and she reached for Frank. He took her hands, but she pulled him closer, wrapping her arms around his waist. She had buried her face in his shoulder, his chest.

  It was natural to wrap his arms around her also, his hands sometimes stroking her back or her hair, sometimes holding for dear life to her taut body. He thought to turn and watch the doctor, to get some sign from the nurses of her progress, but Maddie clung to him, and so he held her fast in his arms. He buried his face in the top of her head and inhaled the perfume of her shampoo mixed with sweat. He tried to provide—with his hands, his arms, his murmured support—all the strength and comfort he could impart to this woman, his wife, who was giving everything she had to this birth. She breathed into his shirt; his chest was warmed and cooled by turns with every breath; with each push she exhaled her screams into him.

  That was how Jake was born: the two of them so wrapped up in one another that neither of them actually saw the moment when he entered the world.

  Frank wondered now if that was an option. Was it possible to go through an ordeal like cancer in the way Maddie had birthed Jake? It was Maddie’s cancer, yes, but couldn’t they have done it together? Because that was what Frank had wanted. From the outset, it was what he had wanted—and he remembered the moment of the lump’s discovery and the way Maddie had clung to him in the bathroom. It had been a painful beginning, certainly. Cancer was nothing but painful—but he would have endured it with her somehow, if she had let him. Instead it had felt, much of the time, as if she had labored through it alone while he waited, desperate, in another room.

  But he had meant it: “In sickness and in health.” And he thought again of Francesca, some twenty years before, smug, perhaps brilliant, and an absolute fool. “There’s more to life than love,” she had said.

  What more? Frank wondered now. What good, in the end, was publishing, was sport, was political theory, was an airport—domestic or abroad? Sitting in his deserted living room, toy bins lining the wall, Frank knew that Francesca had been precisely wrong. There’s no more to life than love. Love fueled and animated all the rest.

  Then, with a pang, he thought again about how he had marred it. That even if Maddie had wanted this isolation, his efforts to close the gap had gone badly awry. For all those months that he had worked against their seeming separation, he had also managed to make an enormous breach between them—one that Maddie didn’t yet know about.

  Frank knew then that he would tell her. It would be terrible; he knew it. But he also knew that honesty was the only way forward now—or, perhaps, it was the only way back. He would tell Maddie what he had done, and he would ask for her forgiveness, and maybe it would start them toward each other again.

  He was resolved. He turned off the light in the hall and made his way to his wife in the dark.

  R

  The adult Maddie considered that here—right here—she might have made a clean break. A short time, a little nerve, and she would have found the courage to end her relationship with Vincent. Sure, it would have been difficult. She had loved him; he had loved her. But they were teenagers; it was only high school—right? Eventually they would have gotten past it. They would have come to realize signs from God in school parking lots could mean lots of things—or nothing at all. They could have parted ways on the basis of an irreconcilable difference: Vincent’s ardent trust in an inscrutable God and Maddie’s mistrust of the same.

  Except that there had been a new obstruction in the landscape. Maddie wasn’t going to be allowed to get away, not via an endless walk through the Appalachians and on, at length, to Kansas; nor by breaking things off with Vincent and, eventually, the entire church. Maddie was pregnant, the news manifesting via the slender white stick in her hands, there in the upstairs bathroom of the house she had grown up in. She was pregnant, and the simple sign on the test couldn’t possibly have carried with it all that came next, but suddenly there were the terrors: her father’s anger, her mother’s tears; telling the Tedescos and then the youth group finding out and all that talk revisited about the swimming pool; and Pastor McLaughlin and the entire church. They were always expectant, that church, but this they would not be anticipating. This they would not have imagined in hundreds of Sunday evening services strung together, even if Vincent or the pastor or anyone had right there at the altar called down fire from heaven.

  The only one who would not be surprised, Maddie thought, would be Justine—she had known all along that Saint Vincent was anything but.

  Yet these thoughts were secondary to the certainty, the stunning pressure of irrevocable truth. First, there were thoughts of a baby—the translucent skin, the sealed eyes.

  R

  Vincent took her out. She fled the house when he pulled in the driveway; he had only just climbed out of the car when she reached the passenger side and pulled at the door handle—strange reversal of the night only a few days before. Now she was calling to him to never mind, get in, get in, let’s go, let’s just go.

  She hadn’t cried yet (not even when she whispered it to him—the only one she told—on the phone, cupping the receiver with her hand), and she didn’t mean to cry now. Maybe it was the relief of being with someone else who knew that opened all the stops. She saw nothing of the drive and had no idea where they were headed; she was just crying hard and unrelentingly, the kind of crying that means eyes and nose all running. Vincent handed her a sweatshirt from somewhere, and she buried her face in that.

  He took her to see the city. Up onto Mt. Washington, where the ground dropped away below their feet and then ducked under the river, coming up again to form the glass and glowing wedge of land. For a long time they just stood and looked at it, and Maddie was grateful for their anonymity, for Vincent next to her, for the distraction of this familiar landscape that had nothing to do with why they were there.

  It had grown dark already, and the lights were on below them. A warm breeze flowed up the mountain from the rivers. They stood at the railing overlooking the city, and Vincent began talking quietly, his head bent to her, his lips near her ear.

  They would get married, he said. Soon. Right away. Next month, right after he graduated. Sure, everyone would know that she was pregnant, but who cared? They loved each other, didn’t they? They would be married, and who cared if people were angry at them or if they thought they were too young! And she would come to his college town with him and she could graduate from the high school there, and Vincent would get a job and soon they would be going to college together. Even if they went part-time and also had jobs and the baby, that wouldn’t matter, because they would be together. Yes, it would be difficult at times, but so what? They would be lying to themselves if they thought—even for a minute—that it wouldn’t be difficult.

  Maddie listened. She had reasons for protest but she didn’t muster argument. What she knew now was what overwhelmed her imagination: the tiniest slip of an embryo, red veins, the beating heart. And then there was Vincent on one knee in front of her, indifferent to the passers-by, the people who paused at a distance to watch him—so young!—asking Maddie—too young!—to marry him. She said yes (a shy nod; a broad, teary smile) and Vincent stood to kiss her, just very gently. The small audience offered quiet applause and moved off.

  Maddi
e and Vincent stayed for a while longer and looked down on the city, at the pinnacled glass, lights beading the bridges, lambent rivers. She stood with her hands on the railing and Vincent stood behind her, his hands next to hers on either side. He hemmed her in and she felt safe there, deliberately putting from her mind everyone but the two of them and the idea of this third, unknown.

  Now mother to three children, Maddie remembered that night and all nights together that she spent looking down on the city. This one had been in spring, but there had been other spring nights—before and after—and summer nights and winter ones and fall. That night with Vincent it had been warm; the new leaves on the mountainside had rustled invisibly beneath them. But other nights (with her family, perhaps; with guests from out of town) it had been cold and she had been bundled in her coat zipped up to her chin, and the bare branches had rattled below their feet. Or it had been summer and windless, the leaves hanging limp in the close air. She had spent many nights—before and after—looking down on this city.

  There was a time—was it that night or one of the others?—any of the others, all of them—that she had wanted to start running. When was it she wanted to find out where the concrete sidewalk gave in to solid earth? The hillside itself was thick with trees; it was a small forest rooted and upright against the incline of the mountain. Her legs would have worn the blood-streaked marks of her mindless descent, and yet she had felt compelled to run.

  The glowing core of the city moored that madness. She had wanted to run to it, to run into it, despite the terror of the blind plunge. For just here on the mountain she could see the bottom of the abyss, and for all its being foreign—light, glass and wire—it was also beautiful.

  She never let herself run to it, of course. There was certainly no easy point of access from the concrete walkway lining the hilltop road to the forest of trees below it. And eventually, the urge to run to it had faded and then altogether disappeared. She had gone to college and then had moved away. The abyss had grown deeper and fearsome. The cathedral dissolved in the dark.