23

Many of the details—as significant as they might have been—were hazy. But in all of this unsolicited recollection, the adult Maddie began to recognize their selfish selectivity, and that this selection had always been her practice. Throughout those years of friendship with Justine, for example, her best friend’s deceased little brother scarcely came to mind. And she was pressed to recall much of anything detailed about Vincent’s family—the mother and little brothers who were always happy to see her. To Maddie they had been peripheral; they didn’t really come to church; the substance of their lives didn’t overlap with hers. But she had been many times to the Elanders’ tattered house where it sat against the trolley tracks, and she knew that Vincent’s mother held down two jobs to make ends meet.

Maddie simply hadn’t cared about it at the time. She had been ignorant of parenting’s rigors, ignorant (this was still the case) of what it meant to be poor. And yet being poor had been the context of Vincent’s life. She knew that he shared the rusting Pacer with his mother. Maddie had been a little annoyed at how the car’s ceiling fabric sagged. She had given no thought to the Elander’s inability to afford repairs or to buy a new car—or to fix up their house or move to a different neighborhood or buy nice things.

Vincent’s mother didn’t come to church—she insisted she wasn’t good enough for church people—and this had saddened him, but sometimes she let him bring his little brothers, Marty and Alex. Vincent always seemed older on those occasions. He would politely introduce them to people and keep an eye on their behavior. He was careful to teach them the ways of church, showing them to the right page in their hymnals and supervising how they took communion. When Marty turned eight that spring, Maddie and Vincent had taken him for a picnic and a game of catch in South Park. Alex had been six for much of that year, which was the same age as Maddie’s Eli now.

Had Mrs. Elander known about the healings, Maddie wondered? She herself had never told her, assuming that Vincent would do so—but she was fairly sure he hadn’t. Vincent teased his mother; jokes seemed to be their primary mode of communication. She couldn’t imagine the two of them growing serious enough to discuss miracles. If he had told her, his mother would have thought he was kidding.

At thirty-eight years old and at twenty years’ distance, Maddie saw the Elander family as if for the first time, on level ground with her rather than as she had seen them when she was a teenager: elevated by significance to Vincent, bathed in a Vincent-cast glow. Vincent had imbued them with the glory of his charisma and athleticism, his reputation at school tempered and enhanced by his faith. She saw now that they had been poor and struggling, perhaps mostly happy with one another but always straining beneath the weight of need. She never knew what had become of Mr. Elander except that he had left when Alex was a baby, and now she could imagine how Mrs. Elander had leaned on Vincent, how—with the other boys so young—Vincent would have been not only a son but also a companion to her. And how, between sports and school, church events and Maddie, Vincent had scarcely been at home.

Then, for a frightening moment, Maddie had a glimpse of Vincent as a real person, a boy of eighteen. He had done well in school on top of maintaining his three-season sports schedule. During the summers, he took a job to help pay the bills and had volunteered to mow the church lawn. What had church-life—what had faith in God, sudden and novel to him when she knew him—meant to Vincent, Maddie wondered. He had lost some friends over it, but he had explained it away: they just didn’t like it that he wouldn’t party with them anymore. It hadn’t seemed to bother him, so Maddie had let it drop. In truth, they hadn’t talked much about Vincent’s faith at all, she thought now. He always seemed to assume that Maddie already knew.

Yes, she thought, her memory had been selective.

And there were things of which, even at the time, she had been ignorant. She had not, for example, been consulted as to how the church should proceed once they were certain—or almost certain—that they had a healer in their midst. The fact of it was practically undeniable. Mrs. Adams did not limit her joyous news to the youth group, and there was the case of Dean Pavlik to reconsider in light of it, and the story of Joey Amoretti to revisit. Apparently Pastor McLaughlin, the elders, and unknown others had to respond to this, had to make faithful use of this gift that, through Vincent Elander, had apparently been bestowed on the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness.

No, Maddie was not privy to the plan until after it was made: a small healing service the following Sunday at five p.m., just prior to the regular evening service. And only for a few people, a select and invited number who said they would like Vincent to pray for them.

Again Maddie recognized her selfish lens on the world. For while she frequently envisioned Vincent with the anonymous children in the imagined oncology ward, she had never given real thought to the names listed as prayer requests in her own church bulletin—or to the lives those names represented. Yes, months earlier she had pointed out the column to Vincent, eager for him to see the potential for healing. But many of the names had been there for a long time, and Maddie had stopped noting them as individuals long ago.

Now the healing service was planned, and two names regained identity, their physical ailments clearly presenting urgent need.

Roland Taylor was in imminent danger of losing his second leg to diabetes. Maddie vaguely remembered news of his first amputation, which he had suffered while she was in grade school. The idea had been troubling to her, and she was relieved when he appeared post-surgery with a prosthesis, as she had feared confrontation—even hidden by a pant-leg—with a stump.

But Mr. Taylor had been cheerful about the enterprise and, other than a slight limp, seemed unaffected by it. After his recovery, he continued to volunteer in the two-year-old class every Sunday just as he had done when Maddie was two and as he had been doing, so the story went, for the past thirty years. He was in his late sixties now or maybe early seventies and was generally acknowledged as the church-wide grandfather. With regard to the potential second amputation, Mr. Taylor reportedly claimed he didn’t mind it so much—but if God wanted to heal him of his suffering circulation and, better yet, his diabetes, then he was certainly open to it. He would be more than happy for Vincent Elander to pray for him.

Maddie hadn’t seen Doris Senchak for a long time. The last time she had been in church—perhaps a year ago—she had been in a wheelchair. Her multiple sclerosis had progressed quickly, and now her suffering was acute. It had been Mr. Senchak who answered the invitation for this special healing prayer—he and their two little girls.

Roland Taylor and Doris Senchak were names Maddie was accustomed to seeing—or overlooking—in the church bulletin, but Susan Sweet’s name had never been on the list of prayer requests. Thus she was surprised to learn that Susan was the third person Vincent would be praying for. Surprised and embarrassed. The fact of Susan Sweet was always embarrassing to Maddie, who hoped Susan had put out of her mind those days when, with her family, Susan had first started attending the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness. Maddie and Justine had been in the fourth grade at the time, hardly enough to know better—or so Maddie now told herself. Susan had made them uncomfortable and they, mere children, hadn’t known how to react. Now Maddie regretted making fun of her strange walk: a severe limp and sweeping gait, her right leg swinging out to the side before bearing her weight.

Susan was the daughter of missionaries who had returned to the U.S. when Susan was a teenager. She had been born in Africa—Kenya or Botswana or someplace equally foreign to Maddie’s mind—at a mission outpost with no doctor. It wasn’t until Susan was trying to walk that her parents realized she had hip dysplasia, and by that time, it was too late to correct it. So Susan had learned to walk badly: her hip’s permanent dislocation forced the rotation of her leg, hence the limp and sweep, limp and sweep marking every step.

Susan’s response to their teasing had been to ignore it red-cheeked, and eventually Maddie and Justine had dropped it. Maddie liked to tell herself that they hadn’t bothered Susan because she was so much older than they were: How could the witless teasing of nine-year-olds have any impact on a girl of seventeen? But Maddie knew that it must have hurt.

Yet Susan never confronted them about it. To Maddie’s mind, Susan was the picture of accepting one’s lot in life. While her peers went away to college, Susan had studied at Allegheny Community. She had a job—something along the lines of a social worker, Maddie was pretty sure—but still lived at home. She served the church in quiet ways, helping out in the kitchen for showers and potlucks and, on Communion Sundays, filling the plastic cups with grape juice. She smiled often but never said much, and on Sunday evenings, she often made her limping way to the church altar.

With her humility, service, and apparent contentment—and in comparison with Mr. Taylor and Mrs. Senchak—Susan’s request for healing now surprised Maddie. “What’s wrong with her?” she had asked Vincent.

“What’s wrong with her? You’ve seen her walk, haven’t you?” he said.

But that was not the limit of Maddie’s blindness. There were other things of which she had been ignorant—or to which she had willingly closed her eyes. In the few weeks leading up to the healing service, what had been the general consensus regarding it? Had all of the Bethel Hills congregants been universally expectant, fine with the notion that Vincent—a boy of eighteen, a new attendee and recent convert, a relative nobody—could heal people? Yes, Maddie had been present for those hallway encounters, those halting conversations in the foyer in which belief in healing had been implied, but what of the many people who had not sought him out?

How did they feel about these upcoming, hoped-for healings when, prior to this, many people they had prayed for simply hadn’t been healed? Yes, occasionally miracles had taken place among them, enough to stoke the flames of belief, but these were few and far between. Many hadn’t been healed; many had died—and again Justine’s little brother came to mind. In the thoughts of the Bethel Hills congregation, what marked Vincent as a likely minister of healing? Did they assume that he simply had more confidence than others, the kind of New Testament faith that could truly move mountains?

And did any of them venture mentally beyond this upcoming service and into the wake of its potential success? Or was Justine alone in her visions of the media and publicity and all these might mean: the descent on their congregation of television crews, the ensuing clamor for more miracles, a parking lot full of the wounded and weary, traffic winding around the block, each sufferer understandably longing for thirty seconds with Vincent?

Maddie had considered none of this. Her vision had been decidedly of the tunnel variety, true only to her own concerns. In the short days leading to the healing service, Maddie deserted her carefully cultivated concern for Justine. She set aside the theological debate that had churned in her mind and conversations. The disciplines that had so recently marked her life were abandoned by reason, she decided, of fatigue and fruitlessness. She simply hadn’t liked staying away from Vincent, and even when doing so hadn’t been able to keep him out of her mind—and could she be at all sure of the impact of her restraint? Her most recent conversation with him on that matter, the one that ended with his staring at the stars, certainly suggested that her actions—or those of anyone else—had precious little to do with anything. God decided on the when and who of healing. It was that simple.

Looking back on this more than twenty years distant, Maddie considered what she had long told herself about those days: of course she had been self-absorbed, and this was understandable. Maddie had not been unusual. She had exhibited thinking and behaviors that were common, normal, even expected for a teenager. She hadn’t been aware at the time that the stakes were so high. But this didn’t make her any less sorry for it now.

It was a Sunday, the very afternoon of the healing service, a confluence of events that didn’t matter to Maddie at the time. This wasn’t premeditated. Vincent’s mother and brothers had been at home when they got there; it wasn’t anyone’s fault that Marty had a Little League game, and there wasn’t time before the service for Maddie and Vincent to go along: they had to be a back at church in a little over an hour. But they wouldn’t need the car. Nicky would stop by and pick them up on his way.

Alone together in Vincent’s house for an hour. What could anyone expect of them? Maybe they should have spent their time in prayer. That’s probably what God would have wanted, the adult Maddie thought. But was that all the help he proffered? She had looked for him in the DiAngelos’ garden; she had whispered to him in the family crèche. And he had shouted his reply through a Camaro’s bumper, a blue-eyed boy, and her own weak, instinct-driven flesh.

What, exactly, did he have to say?

That afternoon, alone together in Vincent’s house for an hour, they had sex for the first time. Or was it the first time, when so many times before they had come so close? What difference, exactly, did fractional distance make or where, exactly, their clothes lay? Up to their ankles in the shallow end or over their heads in the diving well, wasn’t it all the same? Maddie had been losing her virginity by degrees, over a period of months. This latest development, this moment of stunning satisfaction, this consummation was mere technicality.

Oddly, she thought, Maddie didn’t remember much in the way of details. There was more flesh this time, that much she knew. The complete nakedness had surprised and pleased her; she had taken it for granted then that this time there was to be no stopping. They weren’t even going to try.

The tears and prayers of repentance were the same, as was Vincent’s ardent belief that those prayers had been heard and answered.

But God’s answer to Maddie was in what came next, in the slow but certain slippage, the rock fall that found her scrambling for escape. And she had escaped, eventually. It had been a painful extraction, but it wasn’t—not according to God, apparently—anything that she didn’t deserve.

What saddened her, what pained and alarmed her, was that it still didn’t seem to be over. She had put it behind her. She was a faithful Catholic now. She was married to Frank. She was a loving if imperfect mother to their three sons. Yet here was Vincent, insistently present to her beyond all reason, when she had given him up long ago.

Despite its significance, there was only a single vivid memory of that afternoon, and this came to her now. Between their gasps of pleasure and the obligatory prayers of repentance, Maddie had stood up from the sofa and walked naked to the bathroom. She knew that Vincent watched her go; she could feel his gaze; she was proud, in that moment, of her brazenness, of their now undeniable intimacy. Moments later, Vincent came to the door and grinned at her where she stood at the sink, several feet away. He didn’t say a word, but she saw that he had her bra in his hand. Still grinning, he snapped it across the room at her as one might do with a rubber band, and they had both laughed.

It had been over twenty years, but Maddie could still see him standing there. Vincent, full length, naked. There were the lines and the turn of his arms and thighs, his torso, the color of his skin. The taut musculature of his calves. The thickness of his neck and the breadth of his shoulders. The vein of hair that darkened and ran down below his navel. The way he planted his feet in the hallway carpet, with the toes of his left foot over the threshold of the bathroom, touching the cracked tile, the second toe just longer than the first.

There it was: God’s answer. And immediately she was angry that it was so obvious, so true and so maddeningly impossible. It was the long memory of the body, the claim on the tangible by the untouchable. Any effort she might make to be rid of it was fruitless; it was inscribed somehow in her genetic code: the insoluble, incomprehensible bond between body and soul.

Instinctively, Maddie reached for the breast she had lost. Under her shirt, under her bra strap, raising with her fingers the prosthetic pad that balanced her appearance. She ran her fingertips over the scars, following them to that knot in the field of flat skin.

Numbness answered her there, mute, honest.