R
At her house again that evening, Vincent walked her to the door. No one would know yet; they would take the next steps carefully. And it was late; Vincent wouldn’t come in. But he would stand with her outside the door; he would kneel down in front of her; he would press his face to her belly.
“Hello?” he would say. “Hello in there,” he said. “This is your father speaking.”
Maddie giggled. Translucent skin, sealed eyes. She buried her hands in Vincent’s hair.
“You be good to your mother,” Vincent whispered into her flat stomach, “and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”
R
On this side of the conversation, Frank could only ask himself how he had expected it to go. At least he had had the sense not to make a date out of it, taking her to a restaurant where the scene would have drawn spectators. Instead, by some rare wisdom (for clearly he lacked it), Frank had poured them both glasses of wine and invited her to sit on the couch with him after the boys were in bed.
“There is something I need to tell you.” He wondered now if that was true. Had he needed to tell her? Wouldn’t it have been better if he had left the tiny detail of his infidelity out of their lives? Because now, in the full-blown hindsight of that short and devastating conversation, he felt it would have been better—far better—to have left well enough alone.
It had been ugly. She had been furious. If he had missed conversation with his wife about real, meaningful things, then he had gotten it full throttle that evening as Maddie had insisted, with a kind of sick malice, on hearing every detail. She read the emails that remained in his account and then poured over the messages on Facebook; she called him terrible names—all of them earned.
“I’m sorry,” Frank had said. “I’m sorry.” Quietly, sincerely. He begged her to forgive him, to see how deeply he regretted it, how wrong he knew he had been, how less-than-nothing Francesca meant to him. How much he loved Maddie. And if they could somehow get past this like they had the cancer.
The silence that followed made Maddie’s earlier withdrawal seem like sweet companionship. The only time she said anything was when she told him, as he was coming to bed, that she wanted him to sleep in the guest room. Of course he complied.
And he cast about him for something more he could offer, something more he could say, only to again assent to the reality that there was nothing more. How pitiful, he thought to himself, that “I’m sorry,” is, after failure, the best we can do.
27
Maddie was angry. She was always angry these days. No, not that, she thought. She was bitter.
Frank had told her all about Francesca—years ago, back when he was honest. He had told Maddie about her sudden going, about how he hoped it was a joke at first and had gone to her dorm room only to find it cleaned out: the books, bedding, everything—gone. The faint scent of incense and, in the corner by the bed, a thin web of her hair curled in the dust.
Maddie had listened to him talk about her, jealousy mixing with awe: awe that he would be this open and raw about how he had thought he was in love with her, but that what she offered had been, in the end, empty. He confessed sheepishly that he had written a bad poem about it once, a parallel between the incense that Francesca loved and the love that Francesca offered: both of them vaporous and dissolving. Nothing real there.
Maddie had loved him for that. The poem might have been bad, but the metaphor was beautiful, and she had said so. For a time, she had thought that maybe it was the metaphor itself that had made her fall in love with him—but that hadn’t been it. It had been his honesty and what the metaphor said about him—what he wanted: he wanted his friendship with his wife to be the best of his life, and he said it would have to be built on honesty. Honesty and trust.
Both of which were badly broken now, Maddie thought to herself. Beyond repair. As if she didn’t already feel fractured, sometimes barely holding the pieces of herself together, clutching them in her cracking fists as she went about the day and trying with all her might to keep afloat what he said he wanted: this joke of a suburban dream. The breast cancer had been more than enough; this infidelity was unbearable. And he had cheated on her with Francesca, of all people! Francesca, the insidious and conniving vapor! How was Maddie to trust him now, or ever?
She wouldn’t speak to him. She found she couldn’t. He had apologized once, a thousand times. Every time he caught her eye; in a sticky note on the bathroom mirror; catching her by the arm on his way out the door: “I’m sorry.” As if those words could ever be enough. To accept them felt like instant complicity; it felt like acquiescence, like joining him in his crime, as though she were guilty, too.
No. Maddie had had enough with the cancer. That effort had taken all her energies; she had to focus now on staying healthy. And the boys.
Because the cancer could come again. That was undoubtedly true. And it didn’t have to come in the breast; it could appear elsewhere. Daily she pressed her pill through its foil backing, swallowing it past the lump of fear in her throat. If the cancer were to come again, she was sure she couldn’t manage quite so well—and she hadn’t really managed it all that well in the first place.
In those days of her silent protest, other fears came. Taking the boys to school, suddenly she was overwhelmed by remote possibilities. The kidnapper lurking during recess at the edge of the schoolyard; the freak in-school accident (she filled in the blanks with spills on the stairs and a son slipping, a fight in the cafeteria, a fire). She wouldn’t let Jake go on the class field trip to the natural history museum downtown, and of course this raised a ruckus that led to Frank’s questioning her: Why, Maddie? Why? I know you won’t speak to me, but would you just tell me why?
Jake was dismayed. He wanted to go on the field trip. Who wants to miss a field trip? And he, too, questioned Maddie: Just tell me why I can’t go, Mom.
Maddie considered telling him. On the day of the field trip she almost told him when she took him, as a pitiful peace offering, to McDonald’s for lunch. But in the end she wasn’t willing to explain that the reason he was at home, the reason he had missed this opportunity to go to into the city with his entire class, was that she was afraid of accidents on the highways and thoughtless drivers downtown. Anything might happen—that’s what life had taught her. If breast cancer could come out of nowhere, if Frank Brees would cheat on his wife, if everything in that year of Vincent had really happened the way she had so recently remembered, then absolutely nothing was safe. Yes, maybe her fears for her son sounded irrational, but the news is full of this kind of disaster, and what mother doesn’t hear it with a mixture of horror and gratitude that this time, at least, it wasn’t her child?
Maddie felt sure she couldn’t handle another loss. Before this—before her marriage, before she even knew Frank—there was so much lost already; and now her body was mutilated in its absolute way, and Frank was lost to her, too. She could never trust him again.
Frank, who had believed so resolutely in marriage. It would be them against the world.
She had bought it. She had still been raw from Vincent and everything else, hemorrhaging on the inside and trying to stop the loss in alcohol and avoidance and the shallowest of friendships. What hope she’d had for God was replaced by harrowing memory. She practiced new narratives and dismissed the old as error and deception. None of it could be perceived as being her fault.
And then she had met Frank and his honest, unapologetic faith in her, in them, in God. She had known a kind of salvation in building a life with Frank and a home for their boys. If nothing else, this was compensation for the devastation of Vincent’s year. Better still, it was an assertion of faith: that this good could come to them, to her, despite everything else.
How blind she had been! Blinded by Frank, who blindly believed in God’s goodness, in healing. Fool! She hadn’t been healed—that had been science. And the marriage was a lie, too. Seventeen years destroyed in a matter of minutes. It shouldn’t be that easy.
She never assumed that life would be easy. Vincent’s year had taught her that much.
Involuntarily Jake’s birth came to mind. She had wanted to see him be born. She had written it, along with so much else, into her extraordinarily detailed birth plan—and then Frank was the one to realize somewhere in the midst of her contractions that the mirror hadn’t been carried in. He dispatched one of the nurses: “She wants a mirror!”
Later, after the birth, in a rare moment of looking up from the newborn boy in her arms, Maddie noticed the mirror standing in the corner, pushed out of the way when the moment had passed. She thanked Frank, remembering his demand for the mirror even as her eyes were closed tight against everything that didn’t have to do with birthing a baby, and he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “guess we didn’t need it.”
Neither of them had seen Jake be born. Maddie, pressed into her husband’s chest, had been too busy to look. There, in those last minutes, her body had taken over. Everything in her had suddenly been subjected to this instinctive need to push, and with the only agency she had left, she held onto Frank. Clinging to him and feeling his arms around her had locked her in, she thought, securing her in herself when most of her body seemed to be all about birthing this child.
She told him that she was sorry he had missed it, too. His back had been to the baby and his head had been bent to her hair, and the two of them together heard Jake before they ever saw him: Jake’s newborn, indignant squall. Later, Frank smiled at her and then at their son from where he sat exhausted, slumped in the chair at her side. “It’s okay,” he said to her. “It really is just fine.”
Now Maddie carried the laundry up the stairs: the chores would persist in the midst of their losses. It was mid-morning, and the sunlight flooded Garrett’s room and into the hall. She carried the laundry basket up the stairs and had to catch her breath at the top. Just a pause, a brief interruption in this quotidian task. And there it was: a new wrinkle in the landscape. Was she in fact to begin it all again?
They said they had got it all. Two surgeries, multiple scars, bandages and drainage tubes and they had got it all—but who can be so sure? Gowned and masked, carefully probing the layers of her tissue, the surgeons could only do their best. Now, a year later, here she was at the top of the stairs, leaning, the laundry basket pressed between her body and the wall. No matter that she faithfully swallowed her pill: it was no guarantee that some cancer cells hadn’t torn loose and made a mad dash for the nearest blindly obliging artery or vein. Caught up in the pulsing stream of blood, the cell would course with other cells through her body. It would be borne along unsuspected, traversing the lanes and highways of her circulatory system, pressed by her throbbing heart to the system of bronchial tube, pleural cell, membrane of alveoli. And here. Here was as good a place as any. A cancer cell can find a home here, can take root, can live its private hellish dream of multiplying with greedy abandon and taking up all the real estate, killing the very thing it feeds on.
Maddie imagined it. She could see it all in her mind. She forced a cough and scoped her mouth with a wad of toilet paper. Red? Please, God, don’t let it be red, she heard herself praying, and instantly thought of Frank. She hadn’t talked to God since Frank dropped his little bomb, his curly-haired editor bomb. The vapors of that mushroom cloud lingered in the family room, the bedroom; they hovered over the entire house. Please, God, she said again, and thought again of Frank, saw him squatting to coach their son at first base, smiling at her over the top of his glowing computer screen. Please, God, she said yet again. The mucous on the toilet paper was clear—no, maybe just tinged with pink.
She leaned against the bathroom door, waiting for the pain in her chest.
R
Maddie had wanted to cover him somehow. Were there no swaddling clothes? Newborn Dominic Tedesco lay exposed on a small, padded table under a heat lamp. Didn’t they want to put a railing up, something to keep him from falling off? But baby Dominic wasn’t going anywhere. He was flaccid, grounded by his own weakness, a ventilator, and IV tubes housed in the stump of his umbilical cord.
There was the pump and sigh of the ventilator, the beep of the monitor, and Amy’s cry: a soft and high-pitched keen that filled the room.
Where, exactly, had the problem begun? At what point in Dominic’s invisible development did the lines of communication break down and, just here, collapse, causing this little system, this little corner to set itself up so poorly? And should it matter? Why should it be that the fault of these few, microscopic cells should make such a difference in a body otherwise so flawlessly formed?
It was his heart—and then just a part of it: the left ventricle, to be precise, which meant that his blood wasn’t getting to his body. His feet and hands—so perfect in shape—bore a pale bluish hue.
“What will they do?” Maddie asked Pastor McLaughlin, who stood at the far side of the room, out of the way, leaning against the window sill.
“There’s nothing,” he said, and wiped at tears with his handkerchief.
Vincent had called her both times: first, to say the baby had been born, and then again, to say they were wanted at the hospital. They were needed right away, he said.
Everyone had been waiting for this. Little Dominic was the most anticipated baby the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness had ever known, and next to Amy and Nicky themselves, Maddie and Vincent likely anticipated him the most. Graduation was behind them now; they were waiting until the baby came to make their little announcements (a wedding soon; a move, as soon as possible, north, to Vincent’s college town; a baby of their own sometime next January). They would wait just a little while to allow everybody to settle in and be happy over the Tedescos’ baby.
The night before, Vincent and Maddie had been over at their house. Vincent had helped Nicky put the crib together; Maddie had sat on their bed and listened as Amy debated what to include in her hospital bag. Later they sat out on the backyard patio. Nicky grilled steaks, and he and Vincent teased Amy’s girth: “Whale!”, “House!”, the tired, overused expressions that delighted the men to inexhaustible ends. Maddie scolded them, mindful of her own fate, but Amy endured it with smiling patience, knowing it was in fun. She rubbed the sides of her abdomen with her fingertips.
As it grew dark, Vincent and Nicky had taken to throwing their forks into the air, luring bats. They had talked—again—about whether it was a boy or a girl, about whether they would call when they went to the hospital (Vincent made Nicky promise). They made bets on the length of the labor.
And then morning and two phone calls, early. The Tedescos’ baby boy on the prayer chain.
Maddie couldn’t say when the dread began, but she would venture it was before the hospital itself. She would venture that it was before Vincent’s tearful embrace in the driveway (he was getting out to come to the door and she was hurrying out to meet him; it was a beautiful summer morning with the lawn spun in dew-filled webs and the air full of birdsong). She would venture that it began shortly after the news of the second phone call had hit her, that the Tedesco’s baby was sick, that they were wanted at the hospital.
Of course they would ask Vincent to pray for him.
And of course he would do so. No matter the fates of those who had gone before (Mr. Taylor getting along nicely, thank you, on two prosthetic legs; Mrs. Senchak buried at the beginning of May, and Susan Sweet swaying around the church kitchen, helping prepare food for the funeral reception), the small number was gathered around baby Dominic’s comfortless bed, ready to beseech the Almighty—despite his uneven track record—for this, another miracle.
Amy was in a wheelchair, wearing the bathrobe she had last night decided to pack, and Nicky stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders. There, too, were his parents, her parents, Pastor McLaughlin, each of them red-eyed, subdued and desperate, all focused on the nearly perfect new baby who breathed with the help of a ventilator. Maddie thought the room could barely contain so much faith. Was she the only one, she wondered, who was terrifi
ed of God’s “when”? Or was Vincent wrong about that, after all? Maybe it was far simpler; maybe she herself had been right: maybe God’s gift to Vincent was long since gone, taken in some cosmic breath of justice for the baby growing in Maddie’s unwed womb.
And yet she and Vincent stood in the room with these faithful: Maddie joining Pastor McLaughlin in his station at the window, and Vincent laying his strong hands over that small, pale chest, the broken heart.
The ventilator was the only thing keeping the baby alive now. The doctors, as Pastor McLaughlin had said, could do nothing, giving them free reign for this last effort. The monitor, the IV tubes, the ventilator—all of it waited on Vincent’s prayer, a last hope.
Maddie didn’t like to revisit it. She forced her mind away from it; she had become good at that. But something in baby Dominic’s death (coming so soon after the prayer, when they turned the ventilator off and his little chest grew still and Amy folded over into herself, wailing and crying) forced itself into her awareness as Maddie stood in the kitchen, her phone in her hand, receiving the news from the doctor: the cancer was back; it was in her lung. It would seem to be a very small spot, but it was cancer nonetheless, and all around her, everywhere, the world was sliding gravel, and she couldn’t find a foothold if she tried.
R
The cancer was back and Frank was flying down the interstate toward home. He had scarcely believed to hear her voice on the line; it was impossible to reconcile the feelings of elation and dismay: that it was her voice calling him, giving him this terrible news.
He couldn’t get home fast enough. He hadn’t known about this new threat; she had made and attended the appointment alone. But now that she knew, she said, now that she knew for certain that the cancer was back, she knew, too, that she wanted him, that she didn’t want to do this on her own.
Healing Maddie Brees Page 32
