Healing Maddie Brees Read online

  Maddie had felt almost possessive about that scar. Other than his mother, she thought she might be the only person in the world who could see it, who got close enough to trace its faint white presence dividing his face at a cross angle to the line of his nose. We don’t get close enough to most people to know them like this, she thought, to understand the topography of the skin or to learn the landscape of a face.

  So how could she mistake Charlie Reynolds—whom she’d dated so briefly—for this boy she had known when he was seventeen?

  R

  Maddie had a hard time falling asleep that night. It was a weeknight; they were both tired. Frank had fallen asleep almost instantly, and Maddie was glad for him and slightly jealous all at once. She lay there in the faint glow of the alarm clock and listened to him breathe.

  Certainly the Petersons’ news didn’t bother her: Mrs. Peterson’s report—and Mr. Peterson’s nodding agreement—that they had seen Vincent Elander, that he was very well, married with three children and working for an accounting firm in Pittsburgh. It was fine news, normal news. It was not, in fact, news at all. Except for the fact that it had only been a week or two before that they had seen him.

  Was this what unsettled her? The imagined proximity? She and Frank lived 500 miles away. And besides, Vincent Elander and family could live anywhere they pleased. It made no difference to Maddie.

  Or was it the proximity of time that was somehow alarming? This person who was years removed, in terms of her history, had apparently progressed along with the rest of the world into the 21st century, had continued on with sleeping and waking and eating and so had arrived—along with the Petersons—in a shopping mall one day just a week or two before.

  Lying there in the near-dark, Maddie felt encroached upon.

  She told herself she was being irrational. She reminded herself, moreover, that none of this mattered at all.

  And yet her vague unease and sleeplessness persisted. The minutes slid by, time Maddie filled with heedless visits to long-neglected history and innumerable looks at the clock. Although she lay safely in her bed, Maddie nonetheless perceived a terrible instability beneath her. It was as if, treading carelessly in a field, she found her footing uncertain. Instead of grass and solid earth beneath her, she had slid suddenly on gravel that had given way and poured out from under her feet. As if she had stumbled upon the edge of a well, an invisible and deep space surrounded by stones.

  She moved closer to the sleeping Frank, pressing herself against his body, and was gratified by his impulse, even when sleeping, to wrap an arm over her. But the precarious sense of sliding stone continued, as if the edge of the mattress were the edge of the well.

  Maddie didn’t sleep until sometime after three a.m., and even then it was with a continued disquiet. She focused on Frank’s steady breathing; she stroked the familiar hairs of his forearm. And as she drifted into sleep, she told herself that she had slid but hadn’t fallen, that she could sit and catch her breath at the edge of the abyss and listen—for days, it seemed—to hear the loosened stones hit the bottom.

  2

  The lump, when she found it, was small. Like a raisin or smaller; a dried currant, only firmer; like a cherry pit, only less uniform in shape. Maddie stood dripping in the bathtub, the shower turned off, the curtain flung open, her voice breaking as she called Frank to come, come feel this, did he feel it, too?

  She waited anxiously—not breathing—to hear his verdict: nothing was there. She stood on the edge of his answer, knowing he wouldn’t lie, her mind not yet—still not yet—embarking on the journey it might imminently take: she was fine.

  He felt her breast and was detached, she thought, almost clinical in the way he probed for the lump, his eyes focused somewhere toward the ceiling, to where wall and ceiling met, maybe, trying to see with his fingers what she had discovered. Yes, he felt it, and immediately he took her in his arms and so had to find another shirt to put on for work, as the one he was wearing became soaked by her wet body, her wet hair. He had held her for a long time, saying nothing, waiting for her to speak, perhaps. And then finally, when she didn’t, he drew from some reservoir of confidence that he wasn’t entirely certain was there and told her it would be okay.

  The appointment was scheduled, a biopsy discussed, the possibilities alluded to and then put down. No need to worry about it before we know anything. Why worry? It’s probably nothing. You are far too young for this. Maddie steeled herself to believe him. Frank’s strength, for now, would have to be enough for both of them.

  And so the rest of the day was a matter of warding things off, of dodging the thoughts that flew at her like wild things, like wild, ravenous birds she had seen in a movie once. She called Frank countless times at work: Don’t worry, Maddie. Don’t worry. Whatever it is, we’ll face it together.

  For now, for the course of the day, Maddie was very much alone. How should she confront this unknowing, this waiting, except to counter it with a rational response? Should she tell herself that it is a gland, swollen? A duct, infected? The doctors will look and find nothing. They will diagnose it away. Or, after pre-school, when Garrett would be quietly watching a video on the living room sofa and the other boys still at school, should she go to her bed and let the wild thoughts come and then give in to crying? Or should she sit silently, not crying, a study in abject terror?

  R

  Frank pushed his chair away from the desk and leaned back, stretching his arms over his head. It was always a challenge to concentrate at this point in the writing stage, but today it was far worse. He had hated leaving Maddie that morning—despite her insistence that he go in, her reassurance that she’d be fine, that she had plenty to distract her. Already she had called him twice, and he could hear her trying to sound brave, apologizing—as if she needed to, as if she would ever need to—for interrupting him. No matter how she had protested, he thought, he should have stayed home. He should have worked from home today.

  He told himself it wasn’t time to get up: he knew without counting that he hadn’t yet written 400 words. At 400 words—even if he was in the middle of a sentence—he could get his third cup of coffee. It was a firm line he drew for himself when he first started working as a journalist, and he wasn’t about to break it over this column, a little weekday number about high school soccer.

  Frank gazed briefly at the small paragraphs on the screen, then closed his eyes and made a silent guess: 332. He leaned forward again and hit the keyboard, getting the official count: 348. Mixed reaction: glad he underestimated and disappointed that he had more than 50 words to go. 400 words. That was the goal. The office coffee wasn’t very good, but at least it gave him something to do.

  Meanwhile the cursor blinked steadily at him. Some might call it rhythmic, but Frank found it mind numbing. His deadline was 1 p.m., and it was now going on 10:15. The lucid cleverness with which he had sketched the column in his head last night (while doing dishes, while playing catch with the boys) had understandably dissolved, draining from him like so much bathwater as he had stood holding Maddie after her shower. She was a strong woman, but that morning as he held her naked and dripping, Frank had felt acutely aware of the smallness of her frame. When she folded her arms against his chest and tucked her head into his shoulder, his arms had easily spanned her back. He had grasped his own elbows behind her.

  The column, he thought, trying again. He was sure it had something to do with the history of the term “off-sides,” but whatever specific link it once held to this piece was gone.

  Of course, they should make no assumptions. The lump certainly did not spell disaster. Even if it was cancer—and it almost certainly was not cancer; what were the chances?—it would certainly be treatable. Almost certainly.

  At any rate, there was no need to get ahead of themselves here. The appointment was tomorrow, which was soon enough. There was no need to make more of this until they knew for certain what they were up against.

  Fifty-two words before that second cup of
coffee, and after that he would need to write a good 200 more before he could begin to know the shape of the thing. That’s how writing worked, he knew: you spit the words out and then you ground them down, picking the best ones, throwing away the bulk of it. With writing, Frank thought to himself, you had to make your own building materials before getting down to the building itself. Tedious discipline and necessary process: there was no way of getting around it.

  But this morning, discipline was hard to come by. His attention was snagged again and again by the black-and-white photo on his desk: Maddie reading to the boys. They were on the sofa together, Garrett on his mother’s lap, Eli sitting on her left and Jake, standing on the sofa cushions, on her right. All three of the boys looked unsmiling at the camera, their gazes just lifted from engrossed attention to the book. Only Maddie was seen in near-profile, her head still bent to the page, mouth open, reading, the photo snapped mid-sentence.

  Today that familiar photograph could nearly bring Frank to tears. Today he felt acutely, uniquely absorbed in love for his wife, and he focused for a moment on the slenderness of her bare arm in the photograph, imagined he saw the freckle above her left elbow that was invisible in the photo but that he knew was there.

  And in his memory he saw Maddie, cold and dripping, standing in the bathtub with fear in her eyes. In the back of his mind there echoed those conversations he’d had with Father Tim about “living the dream,” those late-night basketball-shooting conversations in the light of the alleyway lamp. He and Tim would head out there in the cold and dark in their sweat suits. The ball wasn’t so loud on the packed earth of the alley, and around shooting balls at the hoop, Tim had painted the picture of what a marriage could be: best friends, thick-as-thieves, an almost other-worldly union of body, mind, and soul. How the couple would be young together, would grow old together, would make a life out of working through tough times together.

  Maddie’s appointment was tomorrow.

  R

  She decided that she wouldn’t take Garrett home after pre-school. She had been home all morning, rattling around the house with the thoughts that rattled in her head. Perhaps being out was the thing she needed, something to distract her from the uninformed fears she had been entertaining all morning.

  They went out to lunch—she and her four-year-old boy—eating fast food that he loved and that she fretted over. She tried to lose herself in his pre-school prattle, his short-term delight over the toy that came with his meal. And inwardly she scolded herself again and again for her distraction: she didn’t hear much of what he’d said for competing thoughts of diagnosis and treatment, words like prognosis.

  She realized it had been months since she had taken Garrett to the playground, but the weather was growing warmer. It was a sunny afternoon. They could wait there for his brothers to finish school.

  Maddie sat in the shade and watched Garrett playing, first digging in the sandbox and then navigating the lowest rungs of the jungle gym. She listened as he negotiated the use of a toy dump truck with a little girl she’d never seen before. And she remembered there had been times like this with the other boys when they had been Garrett’s age and younger.

  Without working to summon the memory, she saw Jake, age two, legs spread wide, feet braced against the edges of the slide to slow his descent. Maddie hadn’t been able to help him. She had sat on the bench opposite, nursing a colicky Eli, coaching her cautious toddler from the sidelines.

  When he reached the bottom of the slide, Jake hadn’t acknowledged his mother with a grin or sat still for a moment in contented relief. Instead he had taken off immediately for other adventures, making his way to the see-saw, where he stood for a moment in mute admiration of two older children playing there. Maddie had fixed her gaze on him, watching his brown head and blue jacket move among the other children.

  That was the day she’d imagined she was knitting—though she had never actually learned how. But she had imagined that she could, and that as she sat, her knitting needles clicked in her hands, binding together the softest yarn into a ribbon and then a square, and then an oblong sheet that grew so long it fell to her feet. Still she knitted, calmly, efficiently, so that the blanket (for this is what it was) pooled onto the ground and then, by the force of her knitting, began to move away from her and toward her son where he sat in the sandbox or walked toward the swing. This great blanket of her affection followed him over the playground, flowing up the ladder behind him and then piling around him as he sat on the platform at the top. It followed him down the slide, too, and she could see in her mind’s eye the way that it surrounded his torso and flowed over his legs that, once again, he used to brace his body against gravity. Such was her love for this child, and such was the way that she willed it to cover him.

  Sitting watching Garrett, a lump newly discovered in her breast, Maddie again summoned the image of the blanket. It flowed after her son over the playground, it flowed through the fence-gate toward the parking lot, it flowed into the school and found her other sons, who any minute now would be dismissed.

  R

  It was after midnight. Frank had planned to call sometime after work, but ended up waiting until Maddie was asleep. Now he stood at their back door and looked into the darkness of the yard. He could make out the legs of the swing set and the saddles of the swings, but beyond that the lawn receded into nothing. There was no moon. The light from the door where he stood fell in the pattern of windowpanes down the steps, and there in the middle was his own distorted shadow—recognizable shoulders and torso, a head, a phone held to the ear. Beneath the door’s window hung his other hand, gripping a glass of scotch.

  He had already decided what he wouldn’t do when calling The Priest: he wouldn’t chat him up, wouldn’t catch up about things, wouldn’t describe what the kids were doing and then, just when it was time to hang up, mention that Maddie had found a lump in her breast. He would come out with it cleanly. He would tell him how it went with Maddie all day and evening and about the planned visit to the doctor tomorrow and how he was sure it was nothing, but God, he’s a little scared.

  The conversation went well. Just hearing Tim’s voice on the other end shored up in Frank the calm he’d been trying to impart to Maddie all day. And what else could The Priest bring him, really? He couldn’t administer a miracle through the phone lines, but he reminded him that perhaps this time a miracle wasn’t needed.

  He repeated to Frank the welcome, if overused, reminder that God is good, and he told Frank to get some sleep and to be sure and call him after they’d seen the doctor.

  Frank felt immeasurably better after this. He took in the last gulp of his scotch and forgot the feeling he had earlier, that sense he’d had, coming home in traffic, of being about to enter a tunnel, a long and winding tunnel whose other end was someplace new and conceivably terrifying, a place he’d never meant to go. No, now he knew he’d be able to sleep, and he was glad, when he climbed into bed next to his wife, to see that she was already sleeping soundly.

  R

  Once upon a time when she was a child, Maddie had watched Matthew, her friend Justine’s younger brother, suffer horribly in treatment for leukemia. From her perspective, Matthew’s two-year battle with the disease was marked only by pain for Matthew and a terrible sadness for his family—a sadness that extended well beyond his death at age four. Maddie had considered that the brief years of his illness might have been better lived in ignorance. What if they had simply let the disease take its course?

  The adult Maddie understood this to be foolishness. Of course the best approach was diagnosis and treatment. Who knew the efficacy of those painful treatments in also extending his life?

  But she wondered, too, at the time that might elapse while in ignorance of disease—the carefree days one might enjoy before an illness took noticeable effect. One could, for a time, live with the reality of the disease without suffering from its realization, so to speak. A thing could be true without one having to reckon with it.
r />   Take rain, for example. One could drink it, bathe in its overflow, close a window against its coming in without ever having to consider high or low-pressure weather systems, evaporation, condensation or the vital functions of the water cycle. The science of rain could be true and a person ignorant of it even while opening her umbrella.

  And anyway life—and rain—brought so much to consider without science or other truths weighing in. The night she told Frank about Vincent, it was raining. And it was raining the night she and Vincent watched Willy get hit by a car. Rain, both times. Pure coincidence. If any larger truth inhered in this fact, Maddie had never been bothered to find it.

  R

  She remembered well how it went. For starters, there were the many retellings: Frank had been fascinated by the story from the first, and it wasn’t uncommon for him, even now, after seventeen years of marriage, to ask for it again when at dinner with friends or the holiday office party, any time the conversation went the way of remarkable exes or the miraculous and strange. And, of course, Maddie obliged him. On the surface, at least, it was a great story and nothing more.

  But even if Maddie hadn’t rehearsed it for Frank dozens of times, even if she hadn’t told it at the occasional party, she wouldn’t be able to shake the memory if she tried.

  Rain in torrents had ended the game. The management had made a valiant effort: multiple delays, the field covered with tarps. Fans, players, officials alike watched the sky, hoping the game could be resumed. But hours passed and the rain was unrelenting, and finally they had to give it over. Maddie and Vincent left the stadium together drenched, walking without umbrellas or jackets into the sodden night.

  There was some light: glowing stadium, streetlights, ambient light of the city. And at the intersection was the light from the oncoming cars and the glow of their taillights behind them.

  Still, they didn’t see him right away. He came from the darker side of the street, and no one would have expected him. If you weren’t one of the fans spilling from the stadium, why would you be out in this weather? And yet he came, stumbling and anonymous, his face obscured by the enormous hood of a mustard-colored parka. By the time they noticed him, he was already weaving his way across the intersection.