3

They were going in very early for the surgery, but Maddie was awake before the alarm went off. She didn’t think she had slept at all; she hadn’t slept much in the days and weeks between her diagnosis and this surgery. After this, she thought and had been telling herself. Things would be better after this. After this, they would know where they stood. The cancer would be out; it would be a simple process of discouraging it from ever returning again. She just needed to get through this.

Before the alarm sounded, Maddie reached over and shut it off. Frank stirred and turned over. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and marveled at his ability to sleep. Then she went into the bathroom.

The water was warm but still shocking: wet on a body that wanted to be dry, stimulating to a body that needed to sleep. Frank had encouraged her the night before to sleep later: Why get up so early tomorrow? You need your rest.

But he didn’t really know that she hadn’t been sleeping at all anyway. What is the point of lying there, thinking? And she wanted to get up early. She wanted to shower and do her makeup and hair and present herself to her surgeons in the best possible light. If she wasn’t going down without a fight—and she wasn’t—there was no need to be less than vigilant here in the first battle.

She showered, she shaved her legs, she washed her hair, and she allowed herself, for the first time since she discovered it, to feel for the lump. From the time of her diagnosis, she hadn’t felt for it again until now. The doctors knew it was there, and Frank had felt it too. What was the point of palpating it again, of closing her fingers once more around that tiny knot?

What if it’s gone, she wondered? Hadn’t she heard of stories like this before, of bodies riddled with cancer that, when opened on the operating table, were clean? Patients presenting with all sorts of problems and then, tests run, showing themselves to be pictures of perfect health.

The water streamed down her face, the pressure of the water ran over the lashes of her right eye. The lump would be gone now, she imagined, but she wouldn’t tell Frank. Let them put her out, put her under the knife, and let the doctor tell an amazed Frank, while she was still coming out of her anesthesia, that Maddie was clean, that they couldn’t find the lump, that his wife didn’t have cancer after all.

Standing there in the shower, she envisioned Frank sitting next to her in a sun-washed hospital room, and she opened her eyes, and Frank was smiling and telling her there had been a mistake, that she didn’t have cancer—that it was a swollen lymph node and, by the time they’d gotten in there, the swelling had disappeared and she was perfectly healthy.

But Maddie reached for it and the lump was there. She would finish her shower and get dressed. She would do her makeup and her hair and she would wake Frank, and while he was getting dressed, she would walk silently into the boys’ rooms and kiss their heads. Jake would be sweating, and his hair would be plastered against his forehead. Eli would be lying on his back with his face turned toward the wall, and Maddie would have to lean over to reach his cheek. Garrett would be curled on his side, and when she kissed him, he would tuck up his legs just a little bit and his thumb would find its way back into his mouth.

In the kitchen she checked again to be sure that her list was on the table. She had typed it out for her mother, describing the boys’ routines and their favorite dishes and snacks and what they were allowed to watch on television. Her mother, arrived two days ago from Pittsburgh, would already be up, wrapped in her bathrobe and leaning against the counter, waiting to see them off. She would put her arms around her daughter, and she would hesitate only for a moment before beginning her audible prayer. Her voice would break only a little as she asked for God’s protection, for wisdom for the doctors, for her daughter’s complete healing from cancer.

The prayer over, Maddie would not need to resist any urge to cross herself: even after all these years, the old ways remained familiar. Then the two of them would talk for a few minutes while waiting for Frank to appear, and when he did, he would carry her bag for her and together they would go out to the car. Frank would not eat anything because he knew Maddie wasn’t allowed any food before the surgery and, to whatever extent it was possible, he wanted her to know that he was with her, that they were in this together.

R

Her mother liked Frank, but it wasn’t always that way. She had held a grudge against him for a while, believing him to be a frat-boy, party-animal, state-school kind of guy, and Maddie had some work to do in convincing her otherwise. But some stories are too good to be true, and maybe that was why her mother couldn’t believe it at first when Maddie told her that she’d met Frank in the library.

It was the beginning of her second semester at college. He worked in the media department and she’d had to do a paper on propaganda during World War II. Frank had helped her locate a few newsreels and then held her in conversation, pushing his glasses up with his forefinger as he turned his head and pointed her in the direction of the microfilm desk. He’d asked her out some time later, after she borrowed some films by Leni Riefenstahl, and she’d been completely caught off guard. She had fumbled around until she hit upon a way to say no: she had a test on Monday that was going to be huge; she would be studying all weekend (All weekend? Really? Not even time for dinner? After seventeen years of marriage, Frank still teased her about it).

Of course, what she couldn’t have told her mother was that detail about the conversation in the bar—that shouting match over the band’s din that convinced Maddie to give Frank another chance. She couldn’t tell her mother about that until later.

But at bottom, Maddie knew that her mother’s resentment—and, indeed, her father’s initial caution—was Frank’s Catholicism, which made no difference at all to Maddie. And, thinking further, this was ultimately her explanation to Frank himself: her parents were disappointed that she wasn’t “taking her faith seriously.” Catholicism, they felt, wasn’t taken seriously by anybody. Catholics just pick and choose when they go to Mass, they said; they squeeze it in on a Saturday evening, getting it out of the way before they spent the rest of the night drinking, sleeping in (and sleeping it off) on a Sunday morning. They felt that her interest in Frank despite his Catholicism was symptomatic of Maddie’s “backslidden” status, of her disinterest in God.

Frank’s response to this was baffled amusement. Catholics don’t use words like “backslidden,” and Catholics are Christians, does your mother know this? Catholics were the first Christians, for Pete’s sake. And also, of course you do take your faith seriously, don’t you, Maddie. The last bit coming as more of a statement than a question, to which Maddie had responded nonetheless: yes.

More privately still, Maddie realized that all of this was symptomatic of her parents’ resistance to change. They hoped that, having started a family, Frank and Maddie would be like themselves: attending a Protestant, evangelical, even fundamentalist church, and gathering with the faithful at said church every time the doors were open: Sunday morning for two hours and again on Sunday night for one and again on Wednesday evening for the prayer meeting, not to mention the bridal showers and baby showers and all other events in-between. But Maddie knew better. It was unreasonable to think that life could carry on like this for her own family, and unreasonable, too, to go to church so often. She liked it that Catholics—many of them, anyway—went once a week: confession and Mass, said and done.

In truth, Maddie felt there was something refined and tidy about Catholicism, something less-than-filled with expectation that had its appeal. To be sure, there was the incense, the sing-song sort of chanting, the statues and icons that lent an air of mysticism to one’s basic Sunday morning (or Saturday evening) experience—an air so different from anything she had known at the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness. But there was something, too, that she found less intrusive about the Catholic faith, as if Catholics understood something more about God than other people did: that He was doing His own thing and was, for the most part, letting you do yours. Maddie had observed and felt strongly and honestly preferred that, with the Catholics, God was never on the brink of getting involved.

He was forever getting involved with the people of the Holiness Church. Or they expected him to, anyway.

R

By the end of the fourth grade, Maddie had memorized the knots in the pine ceiling of the church sanctuary. Had she been old enough or perhaps a more artistic child, she might have appreciated their beauty, too: the parallel blond planks, the dark veins and swirls of the timber. She might have admired the modern austerity of the room’s architecture, a Puritanical plainness influenced by a 1960’s sensibility surfacing in modest touches: narrow windows glazed in amber glass, white cylindrical light fixtures where, in another building, with a different aesthetic, one might expect chandeliers.

But these thoughtful details were lost on her. Instead, her powers of observation were put to preventing boredom. During the long Sunday evening services, she counted rather than admired the light fixtures. Lying down the length of a pew, her head in her mother’s lap, she studied ceiling planks and traced constellations among the knots in the wood. She knew she was too old to be lying down during church by the time she hit fifth grade, and shortly after that she knew without looking that there were sixteen ceiling planks between the far wall and the first support beam, and then sixteen more to the next. She guessed this was the pattern throughout, but here again maturity prevented her turning around and craning her neck to count them, so she focused her energies on the number of pews or people in them, the number of hymnals per row, the number of Christmas hymns (or Easter hymns or Thanksgiving hymns) in the hymnal.

It was here, during the Sunday evening service, that the Holiness belief in God’s imminent involvement reached its feverish pitch. Every week, the sermon wound to its emotional conclusion. The organ began to throb the quiet strains of a familiar hymn. And then the pastor made his plea: that anyone—anyone at all—who felt the need to draw close to God come to the altar to pray.

Pause. Collectively, the congregation made an almost indiscernible turn from passive and listening receptivity to one of poised expectation. The room took on a silence distinct from that experienced during the sermon, which was one that accepted cleared throats, shifted weight, or whisperings, and instead became gravid and still. The organ’s intonation continued, and the pastor rephrased: If you feel a need of God—any need at all—just slip out of your pew and come forward.

This was the part Maddie dreaded, for who could know how long the wait might be? The movement of God’s Holy Spirit was, at best, unpredictable. Sometimes a dozen or so came forward, sometimes only two or three. Sometimes the needy ones came forward immediately, and sometimes multiple hymns were required to elicit a response. Meanwhile, the organ poured forth one hymn after the other in plodding succession, dying down at the end and then, just when Maddie thought it was over, resurging with yet another refrain.

She was young—maybe nine?—when she learned to hope against God’s involvement in this portion of the service. Her ideal Sunday would find the congregation sated by the sermon, joining their voices in a single, upbeat closing hymn, and making their way to the parking lot within five minutes.

Unfortunately, someone nearly always did feel a need for God, and then a new kind of waiting began, for the custom was that the entire congregation sat it out, presumably praying along in their seats, until the one or ones at the altar were finished. And some pray-ers needed more time than others.

For a time, Maddie could and did find in this a distraction: guessing what the praying might be for. A transgression against one’s neighbor, a spat with a spouse—these might only require a few minute’s kneeling before the red-eyed return to one’s seat. But larger issues—long-term battles against pride or lasciviousness maybe, the release of one’s soul to the saving powers of Jesus—these could take a very long time indeed.

Some of the needs were relatively obvious. There was Mr. Taylor, grossly overweight, at risk of losing his left leg to amputation and diabetes. For a time, Mr. Meyers could be expected at the altar because he’d lost his job, and it was understandable to see Mrs. Wahler up there because her husband had left her for his secretary. And there was Susan Sweet, a young woman in her early twenties, possessed of an awkward gait due to a birth defect. She might pray for her leg to be healed or for a husband—both were fair guesses.

That people like these should be praying out in the open was, to Maddie, somewhat reasonable. But there were weeks, too, when it seemed—for some precious, hopeful moments— that the altar would remain empty.

Except for Mr. Gillece—and Maddie would swear to you even now that Mr. Gillece was kneeling at that altar every blessed Sunday night. He really was. It got to the point that she would count, eyes closed, to see how long it would take Mr. Gillece to make his way to the front.

She liked Mr. Gillece. As was true with almost everyone in their small congregation, she had known him all her life. From all she could see, he was a successful and happy man: two healthy children, an apparently happy marriage, a successful business career, good health. He was always friendly, greeting her by name, sometimes chatting with her father after church, doing his part by serving as an usher on Sunday mornings. So his weekly Sunday evening vigils mystified her. What could he possibly be praying about? What was the issue that had to be raised again and again with the Almighty, as if He might have forgotten, from week to week, whatever it was that drove Mr. Gillece to his knees right in front of everybody?

This irritation incited her, with all the daring she could muster, to ask John Gillece about it once. She was in the fifth grade at the time, and John was in seventh—a significant difference in age that Maddie felt keenly. But this was also the height of her annoyance with Mr. Gillece’s prayers, and John Gillece was kind of an awkward kid, so it was with some boldness that she asked John flat-out about it one Sunday morning after church, when a bunch of the kids were hanging out on the rusting swing set over on the parsonage lawn.

“Why does your dad pray so much?” she had said to John from the swing, calling him into dialogue with her when they had been minding their separate business.

“What do you mean?” John answered.

“On Sunday nights, at the end of church. Why does he always go up front and pray?”

John’s face had reddened, and Maddie detected within herself a rising confidence. She had not anticipated his embarrassment, and now it occurred to her that John was harboring a family secret. Perhaps she was on the verge of discovering something; perhaps John would come out with it.

“What do you mean?” John said again, faltering. Other kids around them were noting the conversation.

“I mean he always goes forward for the altar call.” She was pleased by the attentive listeners who, she suddenly imagined, might also be irritated by Mr. Gillece’s insistent praying. “Why does he do that? Why does he need to do that? Every time?” Somehow, adding the “need” to her question empowered her further; it suddenly and clearly made her father superior to John’s father; it even made her superior to John. John looked weak. The whole Gillece family looked weak, and Maddie was more successful than she had imagined, and she pumped her legs harder on the swing.

John stammered and fell silent.

It’s probable that Maddie would have forgotten this conversation, along with countless other childhood conversations in which she exerted subtle domination over others. But this conversation was burned in her memory due to Mrs. Gillece’s sudden and dismaying presence. Unknown to Maddie, Mrs. Gillece had been coming up behind Maddie to call John to go home.

“What was it you were asking, Maddie?” she asked.

On hearing her voice, Maddie suddenly grew hot—and this despite the near constant breeze from the swinging. “I just asked John a question,” she said, all innocence.

“What was it you wanted to know?”

Maddie considered silence: What would happen if she said nothing? She pumped her legs.

“Maddie,” Mrs. Gillece said. Maddie had to answer.

“I just wanted to know why Mr. Gillece always goes up to the altar to pray,” Maddie said, and she was glad that the swing kept carrying her away from Mrs. Gillece so that she didn’t have to look at her face.

Mrs. Gillece responded with the same patient tone she had used since she appeared on the parsonage lawn.

“Prayer is a conversation between a person and God,” she said, “and so I guess you could say that this is none of your business.” She said it gently enough, but Maddie felt the reprimand. She had been put in her place, and before so many witnesses, which left her no option other than to scud her swing to an almost halt and walk away without saying a word.

She had a hard time talking to—or even looking at—Mrs. Gillece for a long time after that, while Mr. Gillece persisted in his weekly vigils, which now managed to incite guilt in Maddie along with the original irritation.

By the time she was in high school, she was relatively sure that Mrs. Gillece had forgotten the incident, though recalling it still made her insides twist. Occasionally she found herself in mental discourse with Mr. and Mrs. Gillece or John or even Pastor McLaughlin, presenting a kind of defense: she wouldn’t deny anyone the opportunity to pray. She knew that praying was a good thing. But why make everyone else wait it out? The altar call extended the Sunday evening service to unpredictable and sometimes dreadful lengths. People have to work and go to school on Monday morning. Perhaps Mr. Gillece—and the others—could do some of their praying at home, or more privately, at the very least?

She rehearsed this many times in her head, but never voiced it to John Gillece or anyone else. She feared her practical argument would ultimately be indefensible. For what was there to doubt in such focused and fervent prayer? Certainly God loved prayer like this: the humility, the kneeling, the apparently earnest emotion that so often seemed to accompany those bent at the altar. More precious still the members of the congregation who, moved by compassion or God Himself, left their seats to pray for and with the one so kneeling. Moreover, she should want these people to come forward for prayer. She should be actively praying for the people who were praying themselves. She should consider going forward herself—at the very least in repentance for bullying John Gillece—except that she couldn’t bear the thought of the exposure.

And she couldn’t imagine—or understand—what would come of it.

But if she had needed convincing of God’s genuine involvement in all of this, then there was that singular Sunday night to show for it, sometime in the spring of her sophomore year of high school, the night that Vincent Elander came to church.

She hadn’t seen him come in. Neither did she notice him right away when the service began. But somehow in the course of things—maybe when they all stood to sing the first hymn?—she saw him there across the aisle, just a row in front of hers. She had a clear shot of his profile, and the moment of recognition was a spasm through her core.

Vincent Elander. She would recognize him anywhere. The football quarterback, the baseball team’s star pitcher, heartthrob crush of most of her friends freshman year—until each of them realized with a slowly dawning despondence that he was fixedly out of her league. As a freshman, he had been the starting quarterback. As a sophomore, he had steadily and somewhat predictably—except for the age difference—dated the captain (a senior) of the cheerleading squad. The best parties always included him. Recognition by him—no matter how small the acknowledgement—was the quickest route to the fast crowd. The most intriguing rumors—imparted to her by the all-knowing Justine—always included his name in its cast of characters.

Now Maddie was wrapping up her sophomore year and he was ending his junior, and if she was certain of anything at all in life, it was that Vincent Elander had no idea of her existence. Yet here he sat in the fifth row on the left-hand side of the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness on a Sunday evening. Moreover, he was alone, a truth almost as strange as his presence, because Vincent was always surrounded by a coterie of friends and friends of friends, ex-girlfriends and hopefuls. Tonight he was an island, alone in a pew that had, otherwise, four hymnals to show for it.

Maddie was stunned. How had he come to be here? Had someone invited him? His solitude argued against that. Then what was he doing here? How had he come to choose—of all available Sunday evening church services in Pittsburgh’s Bethel Hills—hers? Her persistent disbelief brought nothing to bear on the situation. Vincent was unmistakably present. Certainly she could get confirmation from Justine.

Except that Justine wasn’t there. She had given up Sunday evening church some months ago. After years of church-twice-on-Sundays, Justine had told her parents, the pastor, Maddie, and anyone she perceived might question her decision that twice a week was enough. Which meant that Sunday nights were out.

And now here sat Vincent Elander. How could Maddie ever get Justine to believe this?

She spent the remainder of the sermon convincing herself, casting careful looks in Vincent’s direction, taking care that they were balanced with looks elsewhere: the ceiling, the preacher, even her hands. Meanwhile, it seemed nothing could distract Vincent from the church service—not even the prolonged crying of little Tony Martin, whose mother finally carried him out of the sanctuary. But Vincent never even turned his head at the height of that ruckus, when half of the congregation watched Tony’s red-faced departure from the room. Instead, Vincent seemed fully focused, taking part in singing hymns and then, when the preaching began, never shifting his gaze from the pastor’s face.

Maddie began to entertain the options, trying to figure out what drew him: he was here to do research, some assignment from sociology class; or—horrifying and far more believable—he was here on a dare, a strange bet of some kind. It was all a huge joke, and later he would laugh about it with his friends: the hymns, the standing, the sitting, the preaching, the wails of Tony Martin, the endless altar call.

She resolved that she would need to escape quickly after the service. If Vincent Elander were ever going to recognize her, it couldn’t possibly happen tonight. If he saw her tonight, if she were to register at all in his wonderful mind, it would most certainly be as “that girl from that church that one time,” an identity that would brand her in a most undesirable way, almost as ignominious as if she’d been wearing glasses, or straight hair, or bell-bottomed jeans.

For perhaps the first time in her life, Maddie wished that the Sunday evening service would not come to an end. As the pastor reached his sermon’s conclusion, she felt her palms grow sweaty and her heart begin to pound. She supposed she could exit the pew on the far side of the aisle and avoid eye contact. She would have to urge her parents out in that direction too, hastening them before her with no explanation, and then she would make for the exit and wait for them at the car. It felt like terrible cowardice, but also her only option.

With dismay, she realized that the hymns had begun. The pastor was making the first entreaty, inviting anyone who might think he needed Jesus to just step out of the pew and come forward. Maddie stole a long look at Vincent, watching for a tell-tale smirk, but he sat as before: straight, still, inscrutable.

Then a new hymn surged from the organ and the pastor made the next appeal. This Sunday night ritual that she had always found annoying had just become an embarrassment. Maddie rolled her eyes and buried her face in her hands. In all of the Sunday nights she had endured, never had there been one as dreadful as this. She stole another look at Vincent, just between her fingers, wondering how he was managing.

He was gone.

He’d had enough; Maddie was sure of it. She turned to watch him walking away down the far aisle, but he’d already left the room. That was fast. He might be halfway to the parking lot by now. He might have reached his car.

Maddie felt envy, and also sweet relief. She returned her gaze to her hands, folded in her lap. He hadn’t seen her; she hadn’t been recognized. Her greatest fears went unrealized.

And then the sounds began—sounds of committed crying, somewhat akin to those of Tony Martin, but deeper, and adolescent in their breaking. The crying was enclosed somehow, coming to the congregation as out of a tunnel, the cries of a young man in the throes of grief. It was a horrible sound, a second shock on what had become a very surprising Sunday evening. Involuntarily, Maddie looked around to see where it was coming from.

Her fellow congregants seemed unmoved. They were in their typical altar-call attitude of prayer and expectation. A few men had left their seats and were making their way to the front, and Maddie’s gaze was automatically drawn there, to what she realized was the source of the sound.

It was Vincent Elander, crying between his hands. His body was bent at the altar, head down between his shoulders. He alone was kneeling there, but already a few men stood near him, their hands resting on his head, his arms, his shoulders. Maddie was stunned, her mind blank. She knew only this tableau: his broad shoulders and bent head, the golden turn of his splayed elbows, his red T-shirt, his jeans.

More men came forward to pray alongside him—even Mr. Gillece found a place nearby—and together they formed with their bodies a kind of shield or covering for Vincent. Soon enough, all that appeared of the stranger was the soles of his shoes.

Maddie had forgotten her fears of Vincent’s seeing her. Awareness of his potentially recognizing her between the pews fell away. Instead, the boy at the altar wept on in pain that quietly awed her, and soon enough the pastor dismissed the congregation—something he did only rarely, when it appeared that the one praying at the altar would be doing so for a very long time. Vincent was still praying when she left.

R

From the distance of time, Maddie could see how characteristic, how typical this was. Not that Vincent prayed in such a way every day, but that Vincent should shock or surprise her should have ceased to be a shock or surprise. For surprise was integral to his language; shock seemed to have been a means to his being. He certainly surprised them all when, just a few weeks later, he came to church again. That Sunday morning, Vincent Elander entered her Sunday school class with every confidence, not even stopping in the doorway to ascertain that he was in the right place. He entered as though he had done this every day, all his life.

And that, right there, was the beginning of everything. Vincent had sat next to Maddie in Sunday school and also in the ensuing church service, and afterwards had walked with her into the spring sunshine, squinting and holding her in conversation while he leaned against the side of his car.

She and Justine had parsed it all out on the phone that afternoon, Maddie was sure, but she no longer remembered the conversation. She could recall the novelty of it and the excitement, but the feelings themselves were long gone. Human beings have that uncanny knack for becoming accustomed to almost anything, and a year or so of dating Vincent Elander had been enough to erase the squeals and elation of a first love. And if that hadn’t been enough, that strange year, then other years had ensued, years full of novelties of their own.

There was Frank, for example, and her boys.

And cancer.

R

The surgery had been going on for some time when Frank remembered the book in his lap. It was almost weightless there, having become like an extra appendage over the hours that had seen Maddie’s check-in and subsequent wait in pre-op. He had forgotten it even before that endless hour in which they had light-heartedly talked about the boys and about Maddie’s mother, about Jake’s tee-ball season, and even, somewhat, the surgery, which he had assured her again would be over in no time. Only now did he realize that he was worrying the book’s cover, pulling it and the pages back repeatedly as one might play with a flipbook.

He had wondered whether to bring it. He didn’t know the protocol. What does one do in the waiting room while one’s wife is undergoing surgery for breast cancer? Surely one doesn’t read. It seemed to Frank that it wouldn’t be right to sit by reading something unconcerned with anesthesia and incisions, something indifferent to the sudden, unforeseen turn their lives had taken—or might soon be taking. His wife lay unconscious on a steel surgical table just down the hall while he sat on comfortable upholstery in a waiting room, perusing a sweeping, brilliant work that took nothing else than the whole of human history under study.

Yes, the book suddenly struck Frank as irrelevant, and he wished he’d brought something different, something on art or theology—even science would have been preferable to this. Reading this history of the world seemed callous, at best. How to escape into a meta-narrative of human civilization while this intimate and staggeringly significant story of his wife’s illness unfolded before him?

Calm reading of any sort with Maddie in surgery seemed callous. He wanted to be there for Maddie. Even in his best efforts, he didn’t know how better to say it: he wanted to be present with and for her throughout this process—if dealing with cancer could be thought of as a process. Yet he didn’t know if it was thought of as a process; he rather wished it were a process—but if he had learned anything about the disease in these incipient weeks of Maddie’s diagnosis, it was that cancer seemed to call the shots, and the doctors decided how to deal with it as they went along. He felt very keenly—without ever saying so to Maddie—that they might only just be at the beginning of dealing with cancer, though he hoped he was wrong. Once again, as had frequently been the case in this past week, the image of a tunnel came to mind, and he was standing with Maddie at its threshold, peering into the dark.

But they had found it early, right? They had found it early. So yes, these recent days had been difficult ones, as it was clear that Maddie was afraid. He, too, was afraid. And who wouldn’t be? Though he was sure—he was quite sure and so must tell himself—it would be nothing. They would get through this, as he had said to her time and time again. It would be quick and relatively simple. They had found it early.

He sat on the upholstered chair in the waiting room and the book was unopened in his lap and Maddie was not helped by his sitting there, moping. To sit and do nothing was to acquiesce somehow—to what? To fear, to worry, even to sadness—and there was certainly no guarantee that this story would be a sad one. To sit and ponder—that was a kind of giving in. To read, as one might do in one’s living room, or in one’s bed, or on the beach—this was to continue life in the face of sadness, or in the face of potential sadness, or in spite of it. It was living with hope.

Hope was what Frank had been championing all week. Hope and, of course, a sense of humor. “Well done!” he had said to her when they were talking of the diagnosis. “Well done,” he said, because he perceived the slightest softening of her mood and he had been watching for it—the crack where some light might come through. “They’ll be wanting to take your picture, I would think,” he said.

“What for?” she had asked him, and he should have noted her subdued tone.

But he had plowed ahead, foolish, thoughtless, so strong a believer in this best medicine. “To take your picture, Madelyn! Haven’t you heard? You’re the new poster child for self-exams!”

Her stony reaction spawned his immediate and continued regret. So early in the process and already he had blundered. That premature effort at hopefulness—for that was what humor was, wasn’t it? Hopefulness? And he and Maddie had hope. They had a great deal of hope, didn’t they? Frank cast about him. Surely, he felt, there was reason for hope, there was reason for faith. Now, here at the beginning, was not the time to give in to fear.

The diagnosis—as anyone would expect—had been very hard on her. She was scared, and it was hard—unreasonable, even—to argue with her. Cancer—the big “C”—is frightening for everyone, and Frank had told her this. Of course you’re scared, he’d said to her countless times, taking her into his arms the way he’d done it that first day when she stood dripping wet from the shower, her whole body curled into him. He tried to be understanding—he was understanding—but he also wanted to be sure that she didn’t give in to fear. He wanted to keep her hopeful, keep her positive.

That said, Frank had also thought more than once that, if indeed hope and a positive attitude were the best way to approach her diagnosis, Maddie was maybe not a great candidate for cancer. It wasn’t that she was a negative person; he wouldn’t say that. It was just that she was so thoughtful about things. She took things almost too seriously. It was chronic with the boys. Everything would be going fine. The boys would be going to school without complaint, getting to bed on time, cheerful—and Maddie would come to Frank with a random concern, such as how Jake hadn’t learned to floss his teeth yet. Frank’s bemused reply would be casual but sensible, something like how he had plenty of time to learn to floss his teeth and how he hadn’t flossed his teeth when he was Jake’s age, and Maddie would counter that she was concerned the boys weren’t developing good habits in general, of which flossing was just an example. Frank would then trouble his brain a bit to bring forth comforting evidence: Jake makes his bed, Eli puts his dirty laundry in the hamper, and Garrett has already learned to hang up his bath towel. See? Good habits. But then Maddie would respond with something about how Frank wasn’t all that faithful a flosser himself and she wanted them to have good gums.

It was exasperating. Things were really going so well; they had so much to be happy about: the boys were healthy and happy—and she had to trouble herself about tooth decay. Always something.

Frank teased her that she was a pessimist; she answered that she was a realist; Frank said that all pessimists say they are realists: people never want to call themselves pessimists.

But he didn’t think she was a pessimist, he really didn’t. Yes, she sometimes approached things in a way that seemed negative, but in fact, she was trying to get at the heart of the thing, and she didn’t want to be blinded from what was true by some Pollyanna-rose-colored self-deception and so miss it—miss what mattered. It was like when Eli had colic as a baby and he would cry for hours at a time, usually in the middle of the night. It was unbelievable how awful it could be. Frank would cover his head with the pillow, or he would get up and offer to take the baby, but Maddie was up with Eli from the minute the wailing began, pacing the floor with him in her arms. She wouldn’t let Frank take him from her—she said it wouldn’t make any difference to her if he did; she still wouldn’t be able to sleep. But through the three months or so that this crying went on—and all the while with two-year-old Jake to parent during the day—she never minded, she never complained.

Frank marveled at it. It wasn’t that Maddie was always cheerful; it was just that she was accepting. Some babies have colic, and this is what you do to help them, she said. There was nothing more to the matter. And she said she was glad that she couldn’t sleep through it—even though, God knew, she was exhausted—because she wanted to experience it. If this was what it meant to be Eli’s mother, she told him, then this was what she would do. Period. And anyway, some parents have far worse to deal with. I’ll take a colicky baby, thank you very much.

That was Maddie in a nutshell. She recognized that bad things happen, that things don’t always go the way you want them to, and that you deal with it, because dealing with it is part of life, and you don’t want to miss part of life, do you? It was, in a way, Maddie’s own way of living with hope.

Frank had liked this about her from the outset—her serious way of looking at things. After the girls he’d spent time with in high school, after the girl he’d dated in his first year of college, Maddie was refreshingly earnest. Of course Francesca had served to bridge the gap, in some ways. In many ways, really, Francesca had prepared him for Maddie. But he didn’t want to think about Francesca now.

Maybe the classic example of Maddie taking things too seriously was the story of consuming the host. God, even now it made him smile. Maddie, not yet confirmed in the church, unfamiliar with Catholic ways; the priest all aflutter, his robes swirling about him as he turned to go after her, pursuing her in that small interval as she made her way to the wine. Frank had laughed, and later Father Tim had chuckled about it, but it had been a challenge to get Maddie to find the humor in it. She was so appalled at herself; she was angry at Frank: “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me, Frank?”

He had told her. He had coached her, albeit hurriedly, as to how Catholics received communion, but this likely had come too late. By the time he had explained it, they were already standing in the aisle of the church, waiting their turn to receive the host. He told her over her shoulder, whispering into her ear, and he had forgotten some essential details.

“It was your own fault, Maddie,” he had tried saying to her, a small defense against her mortification.

“I don’t see that, Frank,” she said. “I wasn’t raised Catholic. You know it. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Which was when Frank tried to explain to her—and Father Tim—that if she had only agreed earlier in the day to receiving communion, he wouldn’t have been in such a hurry when telling her how to go about it. As it went, they had argued about it in hushed voices throughout the entire homily, and she had only finally agreed while the priest was blessing the host. Frank hadn’t meant to leave out any important details. It was an accident.

That was spring break of her junior year in college, and against her parents’ wishes they had gone to Florida together for the week, where they were amazed to find themselves talking about getting married. Maddie had determined that she wouldn’t marry until her mid-twenties at the absolute earliest, but their casual dates had turned into something very nearly overwhelming, and suddenly it seemed that marrying Frank—and soon—was the only thing to do.

It was Frank’s idea that she should go to Mass with him then. It was like asking for a blessing somehow, he said—like a tacit agreement before God, a submission of their plans to his blessing—and it couldn’t matter to God that she hadn’t been confirmed yet.

But Maddie had hesitated about the receiving communion bit. She would go to Mass with him. She had done it a time or two already, and now, their plans laid, they would find some Catholic church neither of them had been to before, something—she specified—looking Floridian and missional, overhung with Spanish moss. They would go to Mass together, this time with the intention of her conversion and of their becoming husband and wife. A beautiful, vaguely symbolic plan.

Maybe it was beautiful. Maybe some symbolism inhered in it, but this was lost to them now, the entire event devolving instead into the frantic priest and Maddie’s ensuing mortification. It had all gone well enough at first: she stood before the priest as she was supposed to, hands open. He said what he was supposed to say (“The body of Christ”), and Maddie said what she was supposed to say (“Amen”), and then she had turned to get the wine—without the all-important ingestion of the bread. Which led to the now famous line from that episode, delivered by the priest who had come after her, abandoning his post and whispering loudly enough that Frank—and perhaps others in the congregation—heard it: “Aren’t you going to consume the host?”

“It’s not such a big deal, Maddie,” Frank had tried to reassure her as they resumed their seats, as they drove away from the church, as they revisited this episode and her embarrassment time and again. Maddie went on about how she must have seemed disrespectful at best and at worst sacrilegious, how she had no business receiving communion before her conversion and how her error had made her sin apparent to everybody and how it wasn’t fair to laugh at the priest, it really wasn’t.

Father Tim had helped at both ends, which was his way. He agreed with Maddie: she really should have been confirmed first; and he chuckled with Frank: the whole scene was amusing; and he defended the priest’s panic: “One can’t have one’s parishioners carrying the host around with them in their pockets!”

But ultimately he sided with Frank. He told Maddie to relax about it. He reminded her that her intentions had been nothing but good. And he encouraged her to remember that God has a propensity for looking at the whole picture, a view far larger than any of us are accustomed to—or even able to see. He felt certain that the Almighty was not offended by Maddie’s error, and that she should probably let it go.

Eventually Maddie was able to laugh at it—it just took her a while. And that was the way it was with Maddie, Frank knew. She thought hard about things, she prepared herself for the worst, and she believed, ultimately, in the best. Sometimes Frank found it bewildering, sometimes it drove him crazy, but he loved her for it.

R

Frank did not think about the weight of Maddie’s body in his arms as he climbed the stairs. He did not consider that the first time he had carried her was laughing through the door of their hotel room on their wedding night. He thought only of her comfort, of the site of her incision and the potential of his arms to pull against it, and of the doctor’s injunction that she do nothing—not climb the stairs, not push a vacuum, not drive a car.

He hesitated a moment when reaching their room: the bed was made, and now he wanted to lay her down, but not on top of the covers. He stood there just looking at the bed, his arms laden with his wife’s body, and then she spoke to him in a faltering laugh, “Anywhere will do.”

When he was certain Maddie was asleep; when he had fully debriefed his mother-in-law on their enlightened understanding of the cancer; when he had ensured himself, through a careful inspection of refrigerator and pantry, that they had healthy and good foods that Maddie would like to eat; when he had dispatched his mother-in-law to get the boys from school and had once again checked on his sleeping wife, Frank sat down heavily at one end of the living room sofa.

On the coffee table stood a glass of lemonade and the sandwich his mother-in-law had made for him. Condensation beaded on the glass, its base fringed in water. They kept the coasters tucked into a drawer in the end table, just next to the TV remote. Maddie was forever after him to use a coaster, and now Frank looked toward that drawer, suddenly too tired to get up from his seat.

What was so fatiguing, he wondered. He had slept well enough. It was only just three in the afternoon, but it had been an enormously long day.

Remaining seated, Frank stretched toward the drawer, pulling it open awkwardly, at an angle and with his middle finger. With the tips of his fingers, he prized a coaster from the stack and then slid it under the sweating glass, wiping at the ring of water with his palm. For now, this, at least, was something he could do for his wife.

R

Maddie slept for a long time, dreamless. When she awoke in the late afternoon, it was to a quiet house, and she herself lay motionless on her side of the bed, wondering where the children were, but not wanting to call out to anyone yet: they thought she was asleep.

At four o’clock the shadows from the birch tree in the front yard played across her bedspread. She was never in bed at this time of day, except maybe in the earliest days of the boys’ lives when, after her difficult deliveries, Frank insisted on her getting rest. Lying there, she remembered Frank carrying Jake in, how his hair stood up over the top of his blanket. She remembered him in his newborn infant skin, how a scratch in that soft and perfect flesh, accidentally inflicted in the morning, would by noon be only a reddish line and, at his bedtime, would have all but disappeared.

The healing from this lumpectomy shouldn’t take too long; she’d be feeling much better within a few days; it was too early in the process for her to be an invalid. She would be on her feet and managing things in a day or two; tomorrow afternoon Jake had soccer practice and she would ride along in the car. She would drive him herself next week. She had to do these things now, because it was likely (so now it seemed) that times were coming when she would not be able to.

She hadn’t been free from anesthesia long when the doctor came in. He had stood by her bed, grasping his clipboard and frowning faintly, speaking in low tones. Frank sat next to her, his fingers tracing the tape that secured her IV, absorbing the news without looking up: the cancer was much larger than they’d thought; they hadn’t got it all. They would revisit her case and make a new plan of treatment. And when the doctor left, closing the door softly behind him, Frank had leaned over her bed and rested his cheek on hers. She felt his breath in her hair.

The dim and inevitable future asserted itself: more surgery and yet another recovery, chemotherapy and its sickness, radiation, maybe hair loss, nausea, exhaustion.

It was unwise to dwell on such things.

Dust clung to the picture frame and crucifix on the wall. She liked the picture—a cross-stitch celebrating their wedding—and the crucifix paired together, as if Jesus was keeping watch over their marriage. Now she could see that Jesus’ bent knee was, yes, dust-caked. She sighed audibly, a small sound in the silent house.

The shadows moved over her body—never a distinct, serrated birch leaf, but only suggestions of leaves and branches. The shadows had dark centers and paler edges, but a shift in the breeze made the shadows seem to exchange those dark hearts again and again, passing them back and forth to one another in untraceable, effortless action.

Her body was a strange constant in this mutable light: solid, motionless, and block-like under the white bedspread. Present and invisible. This body under the blankets could belong to any number of women. She could be almost anyone.

Yet there it was again, the fact of the cancer lying over top of everything, unavoidably true. Here under the spread was her body and no one else’s, invisibly diseased, potentially dying. The calendar she kept in her mind, labeled like the one on the refrigerator with color codes for lessons, field trips, practices and games, now appeared before her in long, blackened segments, marked out by regular treatments and the days and weeks of recovery between them. And far off, unknown and impossible to guess, the day when she would be recovered and utterly well.

Then Frank and the boys came in. Maddie wiped her tears away on a corner of the bed sheet and Garrett climbed up next to her, entreated by his father to remain on her right side. He had brought his stuffed kitten, a grey and ragged thing that he held by its tail while he sucked his thumb. He lay there beside her for a long time, content to lean against her shoulder, and she stroked his hair and studied the scab on his round knee, an injury he’d happened upon last week in the driveway. It was only a shallow abrasion, but Garrett had a very low pain threshold, and he had cried for a long time.