11

When finally Maddie heard from God, it wasn’t what she expected. Neither was it what she would have wanted: a scene far more public than a response to the altar call, in front of what felt like the entire school. One moment she was walking with Justine across the parking lot, the next she was lying flat on her back, her view of the cloudless sky partially impeded by the bumper of Tommy MacDonald’s Camaro.

She told herself that it was all Tommy’s fault. That was what Justine said, as did the principal and the baseball coach and several of the bus drivers who had witnessed the incident and come running to her aid. It was Tommy’s fault for going so fast through the parking lot just minutes after school let out, when everyone was walking to a bus or waiting on one or crossing the parking lot to their cars or baseball practice. And besides (Justine said this more than once), Tommy MacDonald was an idiot. Anyone could see that he was an idiot. (“Idiot” was a signature word for Justine; her world was rife with idiots.) This speeding in the school parking lot, showing off his new Camaro, served as the latest example of Tommy MacDonald’s idiocy.

So Maddie armed herself with the fact of Tommy’s culpability and told herself repeatedly—quoting Justine—that he was an idiot, but she remained unconvinced. Justine hadn’t been hit by his car. Justine had had the excellent sense to get out of the way when she saw one coming, while Maddie herself had just stood there and then paid for it by what should have been a broken femur, far too much attention, and the embarrassment of exiting school property in an ambulance.

Of course she couldn’t tell anyone why she hadn’t noticed the car. What was there to say? That for the first time she had seen Vincent Elander looking at her? That after almost a week of covertly seeking him out, his gaze had met hers?

She wasn’t spying, and she didn’t have a crush on him. It was innocent curiosity. Anyone would be curious—anyone should be curious—after that last Sunday night. She wondered, frankly, why her parents didn’t talk about it, why everyone who had been at the church that night didn’t talk about it. Vincent Elander, local football hero, partier and wild run-about, suddenly shows up in church—their little church—on a Sunday evening and then makes his way to the altar, prostrating himself before what was generally agreed to be God. And there he proceeds to go into a kind of convulsive weeping in a prayer lasting so long that Pastor McLaughlin has to dismiss the congregation before he is finished.

Anyone would be curious. Everyone should be—or so Maddie thought. And she certainly was— despite Justine’s reaction.

“Wait and see,” Justine had said. She knew Vincent Elander’s reputation better than Maddie did. She had been to a party or two where Vincent had been in attendance. In her opinion, the staying powers of altar-going repentance—especially and perhaps even most of all for those under-exposed to church tradition—were weak. “Time will tell, Maddie,” Justine had said.

But Maddie had looked for him anyway, and had studied him in the limited way that was available to her: watching him talk with his girlfriend in the hallway and laugh with his friends at lunch, get books out of his locker, head to class. There was nothing striking in any of it. Nothing different from the life of any high school student. On Wednesday she heard he had broken up with his girlfriend—Maddie had even seen her crying in the girls’ room. But this, too, seemed within the realm of normal. It all seemed like a typical day in high school.

And maybe that was all there was. Maybe in this case, as it would seem in so many others, experience with God amounted to this: public, perhaps weeping, prayer, and then back to the business of every day.

Part of the business of Vincent Elander’s every day—so far as Maddie could see—was baseball practice. And part of the business for Maddie was riding home with Justine, which brought them to Thursday afternoon.

Tracing their path’s trajectory, she could see that she and Justine were going to walk right past him. It would be the closest she had been all week. She held her breath: he was standing there in his white practice uniform on the corner of the sidewalk; he was pressing the tip of a baseball bat against his toe; he was wearing his red baseball cap. He looked directly at her, and she had never until that moment noticed that his eyes were blue. He had seen her looking at him and she hadn’t looked away, and that was when she was hit by the car.

Of course, on impact all thoughts of Vincent Elander were instantaneously shoved aside. It was a screech of brakes, a blow to her leg, and a bounce off the hood of a car, followed by a face-first confrontation with the asphalt. All of this diverted her nicely in the short term, a distraction sustained by searing pain in her left thigh and the less notable but insistent pain from multiple abrasions on her face. These things were all she knew for a time, and they were enough to make her only dimly aware of the rushing and panic around her, the careful turn of her body so that she was staring at the sky, the cries for an ambulance and that Tommy MacDonald please shut off his car. Justine was crouching next to her and asking her how she was, and all Maddie could contemplate was the violent pain. In rapid succession, the faces of Tommy and the principal and various bus drivers swam into and then disappeared from view. The baseball coach appeared and tucked something under her head; soon her body was covered by the slick polyester jackets of the baseball team.

This was in the first few minutes, and then Maddie shut her eyes and kept them that way, thinking only of the pain and trying not to cry. At one point she managed to ask Justine if she would just take her home. But Justine’s answer was disappointing: it was best that they wait it out until she could be seen by somebody.

Maddie was confused. Wasn’t she being seen by somebody? Someone was close by her left side and beginning to tend to her injured leg. She released a low moan.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she heard Justine ask, and then Maddie opened her eyes and raised her head. There he was, reintroducing himself to her consciousness: Vincent Elander was kneeling next to her on the pavement, gently moving the jackets and then—she could hardly believe it and wanted to cry out against the pain—placing his hands on her thigh.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Justine asked again. Vincent didn’t answer. He just knelt there with his hands on Maddie’s leg. His head was bent, and he had taken off his baseball cap. His hair was pressed into a ring.

“Vincent Elander, you had better stop that. What do you think you’re doing?” Justine tried yet again. When he did not respond, she loudly informed him that he didn’t know what he was doing, and she insisted they wait for an ambulance. She told him again to stop that, he shouldn’t be allowed over here, and he might make Maddie’s injury worse. Her voice grew shrill.

But Vincent still didn’t answer, and, strangely, no adult interfered. Vincent just rested his hands lightly on Maddie’s throbbing thigh, kneeling on the pavement as so recently he had knelt at an altar.

This was when Maddie discovered her embarrassment. It was seeping through her like the pain seeped through her leg and face. It reached for her from the crowd of onlookers who stood at the periphery of her vision. She couldn’t make out who they were and she didn’t want to know. She closed her eyes. She lay there between a stranger and her best friend and closed her eyes against them both. She closed them against the principal and the baseball coach, against Tommy MacDonald and the students who were looking at her, against everything but the pain.

And she kept them closed. Even when the ambulance came and they transferred her to the body board, when they lifted her inside and shut the ambulance doors. Even when Justine, riding next to her in the ambulance, asked her how she was feeling and Maddie answered in all honesty that the pain in her thigh was subsiding. Yes, she said, her eyes still closed, she was definitely feeling better.

R

She wished she could say she was not feeling better. She protested to her parents that, despite the doctors’ confident encouragement, she really ought to stay home for at least one day. She had been hit by a car! Surely that was enough to grant her a day propped on the sofa.

But her parents insisted. She was feeling fine. She walked without a limp. Even the scrapes on her face were better than anyone would have expected. You could barely see them. There was no reason at all for her to stay home. They called her recovery a miracle. She had been divinely protected! Her father called the church to spread the word.

But Maddie didn’t like to think of the incident as a miracle. Instead of feeling gratitude for benevolence from the divine, she was full of dread at the bus stop. Passing through the halls at school, she perceived herself the subject of whispered conversations and the object of unfriendly stares. And when, on entering the cafeteria at lunchtime, she was greeted with a chorus of ambulance sirens, she burst into tears and fled to the girls’ room.

Justine—dutiful, faithful, best-friend-Justine—followed her.

The girls had been best friends since they were in the church nursery together, since (both of their mothers loved to talk about it) little Justine stood beside Maddie’s baby swing and poked Cheerios into Maddie’s mouth. They had ascended together through the ranks of Sunday school classes, sung together in the children’s choir, labored over crafts during uncounted Vacation Bible School sessions.

And they went through the same public school system—which wasn’t true for all of the kids at the Bethel Hills Church, which drew its congregation from various neighborhoods and school districts throughout that region of Pittsburgh.

This overlap and other mundane commonalities (both of them loved to read; both had brown eyes; in the first grade, their favorite color had been lime green) fostered the bond between them. But it was primarily the overlap that knit them, that provided them with a shared gaze. At school, their perception of others was filtered by what they had learned at church (so-and-so behaved badly, was in want of moral improvement); at church, so-and-so couldn’t understand how it “was done,” what things were like at their school. Which wasn’t, in all likelihood, terribly different from how things were elsewhere.

At fifteen, Maddie believed this bond to be unyielding, even stronger than the one she shared with her parents. She and Justine had been friends all their lives. They stood by one another through everything. Not that there had been much in the way of “everything”—Maddie’s own life had been quietly safe, and the death of Justine’s four-year-old brother to leukemia (when the girls were six) was very much in the rear-view. Still, Maddie had been around when it happened, and so they shared that traumatic experience and everything else besides.

Had she thought about it, Maddie might have allowed little Matthew’s death as the perpetuator of Justine’s slight but definite superiority in their relationship. Despite its being long behind them, Maddie implicitly understood that Justine had known a darkness and loss inconceivable to her, and so therefore had a greater wisdom. Not that they talked about it. Instead, there was Justine’s opinion, confidently and sometimes loudly proclaimed. And there was, too, her family’s long history at the church (her great grandfather had been a founder) and her more outgoing nature. People knew Justine at school: she ran the box-office for the theatrical productions; she played the clarinet in the marching band; she was on the newspaper staff. And Justine knew people. She was always providing Maddie with the lowdown on everyone—both at church and at school. She knew the gossip, knew who was dating (or dumping) whom, knew who was suspended and why.

Maddie frankly acknowledged Justine’s superiority. It was undeniable. Never mind that, between them, Maddie had the collateral of superiority (prettier face, better hair, thinner body). How could such things matter between friends? There was an uncommon bond between them, one that set them apart from all others when the need arose. As it did that day in the girls’ room.

It was there, during the first half of their lunch period, that Justine helped Maddie put things in perspective: she wasn’t getting nearly the attention over this that she imagined. The ambulance sirens were only coming from one part of the cafeteria, namely a small group of their friends who were trying to be funny. Besides, didn’t Maddie remember the incident with John Griffin? The defensive end who split his pants in the middle of a football game? That was the whole school. That incident had been much worse. And nobody even remembers that anymore.

They were standing in the girls’ room, in front of a bank of sinks that stood in front of a bank of mirrors, and Justine had presented these reassurances to her own reflection.

Maddie listened, leaning against the wall and staring at her shoes, until she said with a suddenness that surprised her that she certainly did remember John Griffin splitting his pants—as did Justine. What were the chances that people would so quickly forget her ambulance incident?

Despite the fact that this point didn’t argue in her favor—from an overall perspective anyway—Maddie had nonetheless felt a little pleased with herself. The argument was sound.

But Justine sustained this without flinching and told Maddie that even if people remembered it, nobody talked about it anymore. Which was the point.

Maddie silently wondered if it was, in fact, the point, and also considered that John Griffin had graduated and maybe that was why nobody talked about him splitting his pants anymore. She pondered this briefly and decided to change the subject. She told Justine that she hadn’t even wanted to come to school that day.

Justine had been working on the pores of her chin, leaning over the sinks to get a closer look, a posture that appeared uncomfortable in every way. She said yes, it was impressive that Maddie was at school that day. She couldn’t believe it, in fact. Maddie’s presence at school was almost more surprising, if possible, than the accident had been in the first place.

Here Maddie explained: her parents had made her come; and she mentally reviewed the events of the night before: the long wait in the emergency room, the x-rays, the conversation with the doctor. “They think it’s a miracle,” she added.

Justine snorted impatiently. Despite her continued devotion to their church, she had been distancing herself from it in some ways. Within the last year, she had refused to attend church twice on Sundays (“The morning service is enough,” she said). And she had become impatient with the willingness—on the part of many congregants—to attribute coincidence to acts of God (“Relax, people,” she said).

“It is impressive that you don’t need crutches.” She turned away from the mirror and came close to Maddie, scrutinizing her face. “You were a bloody mess yesterday. I thought you were going to need stitches.”

Maddie laughed at this. “Maybe it’s a miracle,” she said. She was unmoved by Justine’s newfound sense of coincidence. She would have loved a miracle—but she wasn’t terribly pleased with this one—if that’s what it was.

But Justine wasn’t laughing. “The accident seemed bad,” she said, “but I guess it actually wasn’t.”

Maddie found this vaguely insulting. “Yes it was,” she answered. “It was serious. I could have broken my femur. That’s what they did the x-ray for.”

Justine acquiesced: “True,” she said, and then silence.

This felt shallow, so Maddie underscored it for good measure: “You saw it happen.”

“I saw Vincent Elander fussing over you, that’s for sure,” Justine said. She was nonchalant, fluffing her bangs.

Maddie was confused. She had forgotten about Vincent Elander, and she suddenly didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, what was that all about?” she mustered, while inside she courted the question: Why had Vincent, of all people, come to help her?

“Tell me you didn’t enjoy that,” Justine said.

Maddie was incredulous. “Enjoy what? Being hit by a car? Lying on the ground in front of everyone? Enjoy what, exactly?”

But Justine only smiled at her in that knowing way she had. “Tell me you didn’t like that Elander attention,” she said.

“You think this was about attention?” Maddie said.

“Well,” Justine said, still smiling, “why don’t you need crutches?”

Maddie found herself facing off with her best friend in the girls’ room, but she wasn’t sure why. She dreaded that somehow Justine knew there was more to the story—or that there was a story at all, one Maddie knew nothing about. But Justine just grinned at her until Maddie knew she was teasing.

They left the girls’ room together, and Maddie was relieved that the ambulance sirens did not have a reprise on their re-entrance to the cafeteria. At the lunch table, she found some comfort in hearing Justine regale their companions with the story of the accident. But when the bell rang and everyone went on to class, Maddie found that the sense of ostracism—worse than her previous anonymity—had taken on a new loneliness.

R

It was the last period of the day when she was headed to Spanish class that it happened. In the normal clamor and busy-ness of a high school hallway, she felt and heard it nonetheless: a hand intentionally and briefly clasping her elbow, a low voice speaking directly into her ear, “You shouldn’t worry about what other people think.”

It was then that Maddie reconsidered. Sitting in Spanish, her book open on her desk, she awaited her turn to conjugate a verb and revisited Vincent’s attentions to her. She saw him kneeling next to her, saw him watching her before that as she walked past him in the parking lot. Saw him smirking at her, moments before, at the other end of the hall.

Maybe her parents were right. Maybe it was a miracle. Vincent Elander—recent convert, pray-er at altar and on parking lot pavement—had healed her.

She didn’t mention it to anyone yet, but by the end of class she knew for certain what had happened.

R

And that was the beginning of Vincent. After that, he waited for her bus to arrive outside the school every morning; he walked her to class. Soon enough his lunchtime entourage was crowding her table in the cafeteria. And there he was at church, too. Sunday morning at 9:30 for Sunday school, walking into the class without hesitation, making his way through the rows of aluminum chairs to the empty one next to her, even asking Justine, when he needed to, if she wouldn’t mind scooting over so that he could sit by Maddie. There he was for Sunday school; there he was for the worship service. There he was again on Sunday evening and at Wednesday evening youth group and at school the following morning and also on the phone at night.

If she had been the sort of girl who was wise to this kind of thing, maybe she would have known what was happening. Justine seemed to.

“You know you’re next,” she had said in their World History class. The bell had rung; Maddie had just sat down. She was opening her notes; she was smiling without realizing it; Vincent had walked her to class.

“What do you mean?” Maddie’s question was innocent, perhaps unbelievably so.

“Are you kidding me?” It was Justine’s tone, her signature inflection of faint ridicule that took under survey all the idiocy around her. “Are you kidding me?” she asked again, but she was smiling.

“Next for what?”

“For Vincent Elander, God’s gift to the female world.”

“What are you talking about?”

Then the late bell rang and Mr. Carson resumed yesterday’s lecture, the one for which he had prepared the corresponding outline and in which Maddie was dutifully penciling notes. Justine sent her a note of her own as means of explanation: You are Elander’s next girlfriend. Obviously.

Maddie had felt her face turn red, but less with embarrassment than pleasure. She wanted to pursue this line of reasoning. At that point, she couldn’t imagine it to be true. But she couldn’t discuss it with Justine because Vincent had been waiting for her after class, and then he walked her to lunch.

R

The days ran together, and who knows exactly when it was? Sometime after the school year had ended, certainly, sometime early in the summer.

Maddie had fixed it on the Elander’s back porch. Of course it could have happened elsewhere. The summer had been long. It could have happened as they were sitting on the wall next to the roller rink where they went many times. Or it could have happened as they walked together back to the trolley stop after a baseball game. Or sitting in church, waiting for the service to start. Standing on the top of Mount Washington and looking down on the city. Sitting on the front stoop of her house, not his.

But Vincent’s back porch is where she set it, where she would say it happened. A leaning plum tree extended branches between them and the streetlight; its leaves cast their moving shadows over them, shifting with the continual breeze. She was sitting with Vincent on the top step; the night was balmy: summer, crickets. And they could also hear the cars going by on the street in front of the house; maybe they heard a trolley sliding past.

The television was on inside the house. Mrs. Elander had the window open, and the canned laughter of a sitcom drifted out to Vincent and Maddie, but they weren’t listening. Vincent was holding her hand; she rested her head on the firm round of his upper shoulder. He smelled like bath soap and clean laundry, and all of it was ahead of them: Willy’s changed appearance, the coming school year, the football game, the incident on the parsonage lawn, and everything that would come after that.

Maddie didn’t raise her head from his shoulder to ask him, but studied the way he held her hand, his fingers thick between hers. She asked him what she’d been wondering for weeks now: why he picked her, of all the girls he’d had before, of all the girls he could have.

His answer: something about that day in the school parking lot. The mystery’s evocation stilled them both. For a moment they seemed to observe the strange incident as though it were occurring once again, this time on the Elander’s back lawn all encumbered by crabgrass. Then Vincent breathed a low chuckle and Maddie winced, remembering: she thought of the chorus of ambulance sirens in the cafeteria and how she had shivered, lying there on the pavement.

What were they to make of it, aged fifteen and sixteen, so new to life and to each other? They could speak of it now, the flirtation (his) and shyness (hers) of their earliest days, but it would take some nerve for Maddie to inhale and then speak her suspicion. He was the first she told: “Vincent, I think you healed me.”

It all felt like magic—that first time, perhaps every time people fall in love. Coincidence becomes destiny: unstoppable forces are at work. Why not, too, a miracle thrown into the metaphysical wonder?

Vincent said yes, he had thought that before. The idea had occurred to him.

He had seen the accident happen; the only thing he could think to do was to pray for her. Newly acquainted with God, flooded with newborn devotion, he had gone to her immediately (and wasn’t that what it meant to follow Christ—to be present in the midst of suffering?) and prayed for her. He couldn’t tell her how he knew to pray for her leg; he just knew. And when the coach and the principal and everyone else had been sent away, he had—another miracle?—been allowed to stay, overlooked almost, as he knelt beside her. He hadn’t known she was being healed, he was just praying for her. What else was there to do?

They were silent for a moment, the crickets singing. And the vision of it lingered in the yard as Vincent spoke again, offering a question of his own. He asked what good it would be resisting her? He knew it; he was certain: God had chosen them—Maddie and Vincent—for one another, because why was it Maddie who was hit by Tommy’s Camaro? Vincent knew he had a gift when he had knelt next to her in the parking lot. Maddie was the gift, he told her, and he said he had never known a girl like Maddie—untouched, unsullied, and committed—as now he was—to God.

Maddie had asked why me, and God was Vincent’s answer, spoken into the top of her hair as they sat together in the lamp light. God was his answer, which would preempt any argument. Not that Maddie would ever argue, for here was the answer to her prayer: Please, God. He had brought her a miraculous healing, and he had brought her Vincent.

Then Vincent said he loved her, and in the subsequent kiss Maddie could no longer distinguish whether Vincent loved her because God had chosen her or God had chosen her because Vincent loved her.

She supposed it didn’t matter.