24

The request showed up in Frank’s email: Francesca asking to be his friend on Facebook. He was all wry criticism. Friends? This seemed a strange proposition when they hadn’t spoken in years. In all honesty, he couldn’t say that he knew her even a little now, and he could definitely make the argument that he hadn’t really known her in college, when they were dating, when they were sleeping together. So would he agree, through social media, that they were friends? It seemed disingenuous, at best. The entire Facebook enterprise—he had come to believe—was by its very nature disingenuous, scratching itches people didn’t realize they had, itches they might do better in exploring with a therapist rather than posting their daily thoughts and impulses on the world-wide web or, worse, critiquing those of their so-called “friends.”

He and Francesca weren’t friends at all. Not really. They had parted amicably enough—if one could call her hasty, mid-semester departure amicable. It had been a Monday morning. Only the night before they had enjoyed a particularly amorous evening together, all candlelight and incense in her dorm room. And now here she stood under an umbrella on the sidewalk just next to a campus mailbox, calling to him as he was walking to class, telling him that she was going.

He hadn’t understood what she meant as there had been no warning, no contextual conversation that might precipitate her withdrawal from her classes, from the college, from his life. He had answered her, understandably (though later he felt foolish for it; he had replayed his foolishness in his mind more times than he cared to remember, how he hadn’t carried an umbrella that morning, and then she had made her announcement and walked away, and he, absent all rational thought, suddenly absent all emotional mooring, stood there like a fool in the rain), “Where?”

And she had said matter-of-factly: “New York. Civilization.”

So he couldn’t agree that they were friends actually, because there was that event in November 1986 to point to and then Francesca’s consistent failure to respond to any phone calls or letters he sent to her parents’ house. The rumors he had of her were not entirely believable ones, considering their sources: those she had called friends and sometimes drank with and who had been victims of her vicious derision behind their backs. It was Father Tim who had helped him see that the recovery of his own life was far more likely than any recovery of this relationship and also far more worthwhile. It was just as well to think of Francesca as having fallen off the map, so to speak—a cliché not without its appealing images, and these made Frank smile.

What to do, then, with this invitation of “friendship?” He had assumed for years that she was out there, carrying on with life. But was contact worth inviting—or, in this case, accepting?

He had spotted her for the first time at the beginning of his freshman year. She was hard to miss. In a sea of baggy sweatshirts and pegged jeans, Francesca’s bohemian look caught his eye. But even if it hadn’t, he would have spotted her lustrous hair, all long and shining ringlets that suggested themselves as having naturally occurred—unlike the teased, overworked hair of so many of the girls he knew at the time.

She radiated naturalness, he thought. Makeup free, fair-skinned. Her complexion had a dewy clarity and seemed also full, almost buoyant. In truth, he had wondered how she could be real: so beautiful, so without artifice. Her only ornaments were jewelry, which she wore in abundance. That first time he saw her, she’d been wearing a long, flowing skirt (this was almost always the case) and a loose tank-top, and her right upper arm had been adorned with armbands, like something out of Egyptian mythology.

Frank was smitten.

The miracle (for in this instance he would need one: she was a junior, he a mere freshman; how to effect an introduction?) was that he was unable to get into the lit survey course he should have been taking, and so found himself enrolled in one at the 300 level, something on literature of the Caribbean. He wasn’t terribly interested in it, but then here came Francesca, jingling her way into the room. Enrollment was low, and she was a vibrant participant in the discussion. The professor seemed to know her from other classes, and she was extraordinarily well-read, making comments about the writing of so-and-so on such-and-such, citing “seminal works” on the impact of colonialism, reading obscure but fascinatingly relevant passages aloud. Frank found himself taking extra care when preparing for the class, and soon enough Francesca took notice of him.

One day he managed to walk out of the room with her, managed to keep conversation going across the quad, told her (lying) that he had eaten and enjoyed plantains. That became a joke between them; it was their private euphemism: “plantains” became code for sex, and for years after Francesca left, Frank wanted nothing to do with them—with them or with anything having to do with the Caribbean, because it always made him think of Francesca.

For a long time after Francesca left, there had been a lot he wanted nothing to do with because it made him think of Francesca.

But it wasn’t fair, he now realized, and he shouldn’t have thought of it as so completely awful. Yes, there had been serious immaturity on both their parts, but it hadn’t been all bad. Like himself, Francesca was a writer. She was passionate about writing, and where Frank had decided to major in journalism, it had been a decision based less on passion for writing and more on the fact that he would never make a professional tennis player, and he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life giving lessons.

Francesca had made him passionate about writing. Lying with her head in his lap, her blouse open too far and exposing more of that dewy skin, the rounding swell of a breast, she read aloud to him, brilliant paragraphs by Chandler, Lessing, even Dickens. She waxed rhapsodic over aptly worded phrases and the mot juste, that perfect word that shaped the tone of everything. “If you can find that,” she would say to him of his work, of her own, “then everything takes care of itself.” It was Francesca who had gotten him reading the dictionary.

At the same time, she was fiercely critical of the writing of her peers. Such criticism was the subject of much of her discourse, especially on Tuesday afternoons after her writing class met for workshops.

“God, it’s awful,” she would say as soon as Frank was in her sights, even if he was several paces down the hall. She processed it all aloud to him, launching immediately into complaints of miserable syntax and no ear for rhythm and subject matter that sounded like it was “to a person,” she said, “coming from old men on their deathbeds recalling lost love. There’s more to life than love,” she said, and Frank thought she was right.

There was, for instance, travel and politics and excellent writing, which made Frank wish he had more travel under his belt than the summer-after-eighth-grade trip that his family had taken out West. Francesca disdained even that. “What good is a geyser?” she had said, and Frank wondered the same thing. It had been a long trip in a hot car and everyone had gotten cranky, and then they arrived just after the geyser did its predictable spew and so had to wait around and everyone had been hungry. What good was a geyser when places like Florence were in the world? Florence and all of Tuscany, for starters, or Budapest, or Nepal?

Francesca was going to all of these places. She was destined for them and then some. She, for one, wasn’t going to be stuck all her life in the bread-basket of America. Pittsburgh, she said, Cleveland—these were outposts, barely civilized. Frank’s offered arguments signified nothing. So what if each city had art museums and symphonies? The closest the United States came to being civilized was New York, and maybe L.A.

Chicago? Frank had suggested, but Francesca countered that Chicagoans were too caught up in football (problems shared, by the way, with Pittsburgh and Cleveland and the host of other mid-sized cities that might otherwise claim to be civilized). Football she characterized as thinly veiled brutality; sport in general lacked art. The base competition of most sports, she held, was demeaning to human potential.

Frank thought she might be among the most competitive people he had ever known, but he certainly never voiced this opinion, able to argue against it even within himself: she simply held herself to high standards; she held everyone to high standards. What could be wrong with that? On the contrary, it was admirable.

Sometimes Frank felt afraid of her. He had a prescience of her capacity to devastate him. She had claimed there was more to life than love, and in his eagerness to please her, Frank had agreed. He couldn’t possibly tell her now that he loved her, but he was relatively sure it was true. He had never felt this way about someone before, but he wasn’t sure she’d like it. In truth, he was never sure that she was his girlfriend in the first place. It wasn’t that he saw her with other men; it wasn’t that they weren’t intimate in every way. It was just that she seemed—in every way—so dissatisfied.

She relentlessly begged him to let her read his writing. She had discovered his dog-eared journal where he had failed to hide it on his dorm-room desk. But there was no way, he told her, that he was going to let her. He didn’t say what he ardently felt: it was too early in their relationship for this kind of exposure; they had been dating—if that’s what it was—for less than two months.

“What do you write?” she had asked him coyly, her fingertips planted on the wire-bound notebook, wrist arched.

That had been a frightening moment. Yes, he loved her teasing him, her kittenish grin, the tendril of hair that fell in front of her left eye. But he was terrified of exposure and certain rejection, of the inevitable post-reading critique.

“What do you write?” she had asked him again, and he answered he didn’t know. It wasn’t a diary. It was, he didn’t know, reactions to things. Responses.

“Poetry?” she asked.

“God no,” he said, and she was pleased. Poetry was to be left to the experts. Real poetry, Francesca had said, months, weeks, days before, was only written by genuine talent.

It was late October when he gave in, and he saw in retrospect how absurdly foolish this was. He was less than ten weeks into his college career, but it had felt to him like a long time already, and his relationship with Francesca (discussing poetry, drinking wine and smoking pot, breathing incense and listening to Joni Mitchell into the small hours of the morning) had seemed to him remarkably sophisticated. At the time he felt he had aged a decade; he was light-years beyond the pimply adolescence of high school—and so much of this was due to Francesca’s influence.

It was one of those unbelievable Pennsylvania autumn days when the sun is shining and the warm air returns and one imagines that maybe this winter, for once, won’t be a hard one. They had been alone in Francesca’s dorm room for a long while, and for about half an hour had been leafing through her atlas. They were plotting the course of their future travels, Francesca having told him she thought they should spend the summer backpacking in Europe.

Drunk on Francesca’s assumption that they could make plans for next summer, that they would still be “together” then, Frank hadn’t concerned himself with his need for a summer job or the potential expense of such a trip. Neither had he considered how very un-Francesca-like such an enterprise seemed. “We’ll stay in youth hostels,” she had said; “We’ll eat on the cheap.” He hadn’t entertained the image of her skirts tangled in her ankles on the dirty floor of an Italian train station. Instead, he had fallen more completely in love with Francesca than before (if, indeed, this was love), his mind swelling with what his life would be with this woman: how they would live together in Europe and both of them would be writers, and the dust of their middle-America upbringing would be washed away by European rains and snows on the steppes of central Asia. Because Francesca had convinced him of this, too: middle-America was dusty; it had little more to offer than dust.

It was this Francesca-intoxication, the spoken possibility of a future together that propelled Frank to new heights of intimacy. Francesca suddenly announced that it was a gorgeous day and they should haul a blanket out on the quad and lie there in the sun, and Frank had immediately agreed and then gone off to get his journal. Still riding the incandescent vision of his future, basking in the gift of late October warmth, Frank had read aloud from the journal to her, who lay with her head in his lap, the glorious mane of her curls spread out over his thighs and her shoulders and the blanket beneath them both.

She had listened with her eyes closed, and then she had listened with them open, and in stolen glances Frank saw reflected in her eyes the branching articulations of the oak tree that he leaned against, their leaves already gone to rust. She listened without comment for a long time, and Frank, still intoxicated, stopped reading excerpts and instead read an entire piece, a non-fiction narrative about building a model airplane with his grandfather. After weeks of being afraid to share his writing, he was now emboldened by this very daring act he was undertaking, as if in reading to her he was showing her that he wasn’t afraid of her or anything else. He would take her to Italy that summer and would impress her by suggesting they go further east: Prague, Budapest. They wouldn’t just visit Nepal someday; they would live there. As he read, images of Nepal rose in his vision: the green steppes, the folds of the mountains. He would be the one to take Francesca there.

He finished reading and closed the journal with finality, laying it beside him on the blanket, on a tendril of her hair. Her eyes were closed again. She had listened, immobile. And now, without opening her eyes, she said to him, “If you can write like that, you can write anything.”

Over the course of his career, Frank had certainly received praise for his writing. His professors had lauded his work; his editors loved it. He had received various awards; he had been quoted on the news and in trade journals. He had been asked to speak at conferences; he had contributed articles to national magazines; he had recently been invited to write a book. He had also made up stories for his sons, creating a cast of characters both fantastic and familiar; his sons asked for news of them by name. And Maddie loved his writing, even clipping his column regularly from the newspaper and squirreling it away in an album somewhere.

And yet this phrase from Francesca was the one he heard most often in his head. Sometimes he said it to himself, hunched over his laptop, pondering a column or article that wasn’t coming. He had wrestled with it over the years: Was it okay to be encouraged—even inspired—by something that an ex-lover had said to him once? Her words—like any trace he might have of her—should have been banished long ago, right? They should be discarded as less than useless, as insignificant and meaningless compared to what he and Maddie had right now.

Besides, he had long ago decided that most—if not all—of what Francesca said was bunk. Her estimation of nearly everything had been rooted in profound insecurity; she had perceived the world through an insatiable need to promote herself.

And yet she had said this to Frank: “If you can write like that, you can write anything.” There was no self-promotion there, no wry critique. Just praise.

Frank had decided that it was okay. Francesca’s words, detached from the source, could resonate with as much meaning as any encouragement made by a writing professor or an editor. They were just words, and they were sometimes helpful—especially in the pits of emptiness that every writer faces, those appalling moments when he felt beyond doubt that he had nothing to offer as a writer, nothing for anyone to read at all. Those words were very helpful, especially because Francesca—vehement critic of her college writing group and the world at large—had said them.

Frank clicked, “Accept.”

R

They had arrived with Nicky at the healing service to find the small group cheerfully waiting for them: Pastor McLaughlin, the three candidates for healing, a few family members and elders. In truth, Maddie supposed this much. Beyond the three people Vincent was to pray for, she wasn’t sure who had been there; her memory of this event, too, was vague, as if there had been many subsequent ones like it and routine had bred oblivion.

She was certain that the service itself was brief—Vincent never prayed for long—and afterward Maddie had only a few lasting impressions. The first was the sound of Mrs. Senchak’s breathing, or her effort to breathe. It was low and scraping, monstrously heavy. Every breath sounded as though she was lifting something, hoisting with great strain something that clearly wasn’t meant for her to carry. The thought was distressing: Mrs. Senchak didn’t look as if she had any strength at all; her body was shrunken, curled crookedly into her wheelchair, and every breath came at the price of that tremendous effort. Maddie had a fierce desire to help her, a sense that all of them should be rushing to her aid, and she wished that Mrs. Senchak were fighting against something outside herself so that any of them, somehow, could help.

But all they could offer was prayer: this gathering around her, laying their hands on her frail limbs and then mentally pressing—was that what prayer was?—their best hopes toward God. Throughout that prayer, throughout the ensuing church service, it was Mrs. Senchak’s scraping breath that resounded at the back of Maddie’s mind. Any perhaps appropriate thoughts of guilt were submerged in the noise of that grinding effort.

And it was likely that Mrs. Senchak’s breathing was what almost made her—and therefore Vincent—miss her other recollection of that event. Susan Sweet had called his name several times already before Maddie registered it. The prayer was finished; everyone was standing around, chatting casually because they had put all their most earnest and important thoughts into praying. Maddie hadn’t engaged in the small talk; she wanted desperately to get out of there, and in looking toward the door she noticed that Susan was standing behind Vincent, looking up expectantly at him. “Vincent,” she was saying. Her voice—Maddie had seldom heard it—was almost unbelievably soft and high-pitched.

Immediately, Maddie tugged at his arm: “Vincent,” she said, smiling at Susan and nodding Vincent in her direction.

“Oh, hey Susan,” Vincent said.

“I just wanted to say thanks,” Susan said, and she reached out to shake his hand.

Vincent grinned and took her hand in his. “Well, you’re welcome,” he said. “Always glad to pray.”

“Thank you,” Susan said again, and Maddie, already agonized by Mrs. Senchak’s strain for air, was newly discomfited by this interaction. She longed more fervently for the exit.

“You’re welcome,” Vincent said again, unfazed by the awkwardness, still shaking Susan’s hand, still smiling.

Susan was blushing. Maddie could see it: that awful and embarrassing blush she had noticed before on certain complexions, that started all in blotches on the throat and climbed its way up the neck.

“Thank you,” Susan said, one more time. In a motion, she dropped both her gaze and Vincent’s hand. He returned to another conversation, and Maddie watched Susan make her limping way toward the door.

R

This time, Maddie didn’t think to wait for news. Instead, she tried to wrench from her mind the terrible memory of Mrs. Senchak struggling for air. The sound was like an earworm, an odious, arrhythmic, tuneless song her brain wouldn’t release. In any break in conversation, any lull in classroom noise, or—most horribly—lying in her bed at night, Maddie found that this ragged effort at breathing was a constant in her ears.

Once or twice over the course of those days, the thought of her recently lost virginity also occurred to her, and Maddie considered that she ought to feel guilty, but this she angrily dismissed. At best, guilt seemed self-centered and, at worst, an unreasonable demand. She felt that her sin (if that is what it was), weighed together on some cosmic scale with an agonized Mrs. Senchak, was decidedly tipped in Maddie’s favor. She found it inconceivable that God should demand repentance if—rather when—it seemed clear that he was clearly culpable for such suffering.

More calmly, she again considered Vincent’s understanding, the eternal when which would mean resolution, health, peace. It sounded good in theory, but she found it fell short of comfort when one considered the three very real people he had prayed for. “When” in God’s mind, in the perception of the eternal, was to the time-bound a rather hopeless proposition. There were no guarantees.

And if there were no guarantees, then there was certainly no safety. Yet God insisted on repentance and devotion: Vincent, Pastor McLaughlin, Mr. Gillece all agreed on that. The God of Sunday school, of lisping “Jesus Loves Me,” was more and more certainly becoming—to Maddie’s mind—a charade.

So she turned her mind again to the suffering ones they had prayed for on Sunday. She imagined Susan’s recovery—it seemed by far the easiest. A mere realignment of the bones, just as her own healing had been. Maddie envisioned it: Susan waking, opening her eyes, remembering the prayer and still feeling the warmth from Vincent’s hands on her hip. She would sit up and slide her feet to the floor; she would stand; walking would suddenly be effortless.

But there was no news of this—and on Tuesday she learned that Mr. Taylor’s amputation had been scheduled for Thursday morning.

“What does your boyfriend make of this scenario?” Justine asked her, leaning in at Maddie’s locker.

“Sometimes these things take time, Justine,” Maddie answered her, putting her off. She knew what Vincent thought (“it was a question of when”), and she herself was still holding out some hope. For Justine’s sake, for her own, she could point to Mrs. Adams and Mr. Pavlik both as examples of delayed reaction—until Justine clarified that they didn’t know exactly when Mrs. Adams had been healed.

“It might have happened that very day,” she said. “It’s just that we didn’t find out about it until Wednesday.”

Justine would have to plague Vincent about it, too; she couldn’t reserve her little comments to conversation at Maddie’s locker. She talked about it openly during Wednesday’s lunch.

“So, it would seem that Mr. Taylor’s going to have that other foot off after all,” she said, and Vincent didn’t say anything—which, apparently, wouldn’t do.

“What do you make of that?” she asked, and she tapped Vincent’s hand twice with a sharp index finger.

Vincent looked at her blankly. “Am I supposed to make something of it?”

“Well, I would think you would—” Justine paused, leaning in, and Maddie detected something akin to smugness, something like I-told-you-so, “have an explanation or something.”

“I guess I’m not the guy to explain everything that God does or doesn’t do,” Vincent said.

Justine was unsatisfied. “Well, who is, then?”

“I’m not sure anybody is,” he answered her.

“Shut-up, Justine,” Maddie said, surprising herself. She was sick of the antagonism, and now that she knew—if she didn’t exactly understand—Vincent’s perspective, she found she couldn’t defend it. Neither did she want to. Anyway, if anyone should be taken to trial here, it was God, not Vincent. But she still hadn’t the nerve to propose this, and Justine wouldn’t buy it, anyway.

“Excuse me,” said Justine, annoyed and then, perhaps, taken aback. Maddie had never spoken to her like this, and immediately she regretted it. Her voice softened.

“Besides,” Maddie said, “who is to say that Mr. Taylor isn’t healed already, anyway?” Again, her own words surprised her. Even as she was saying them, she knew she didn’t believe them, hope as she might that they were true. Her question, she realized without looking at him, was directed as much at Vincent as Justine. Would she forever be caught between sides? She wished that Vincent would take up the argument, would offer an explanation for God, would address for all of them this question of when. What was he suggesting? Did one, in asking for healing, have also to be specific, to throw in the details so that God would know what you were talking about? “Please heal Mr. Taylor, and kindly do so before Thursday. This Thursday.” Maybe that would do the trick.

But Vincent did not seem to conceive of Maddie’s anger and so didn’t receive the subtle dig implied in her question. Maddeningly, he simply agreed with her: “Who’s to say?” he repeated.

Justine stared at Vincent, then looked at Maddie, and then back at Vincent again. Finally, “Who’s to say,” she said, and again left the lunch table.

Maddie decided not to be bothered by it. She was even glad to see her go. There was more at stake here than Justine’s friendship, and time enough—if she had the willpower, if she could ever grasp understanding for herself—to explain it to Justine. Meanwhile, her mind relentlessly replayed Mrs. Senchak’s breathing. And on Wednesday evening, when Maddie arrived for youth group, Susan Sweet still had her limp. Maddie walked a safe distance behind her into the church building, not at all wanting to follow up or engage. The limp, she observed, made every step look like an interrupted stagger; her view must pitch horribly over the course of even a few feet.

It was a question of when. Mr. Taylor’s surgery was scheduled for the next morning. “This Thursday.” There had been no word about Mrs. Senchak.