4

More and more, Frank found himself thinking of shooting hoops with The Priest behind the Catholic church in their little college town. He listened for the ring of the basketball as it pounded the dirt in the alley. He heard the clang and rattle as the ball hit the hoop and the sagging metal net beneath it. He and Tim had shot hoops together for hours at a time, starting in those dark months of his freshman year. They had been out there in the snow; in February, the ball cracked the ice in the alley’s ruts. In the spring, they had played even in the rain, both of them drenched to the skin, firing the ball at the hoop as they fired questions at one another: so often The Priest returned Frank’s questions with questions, forcing Frank to think.

He had first come upon The Priest because of the rain, driven to the church in a sudden downpour. His roommate had warned him to take an umbrella, but Frank hadn’t cared and his roommate hadn’t been surprised: by that time, he had grown accustomed to Frank’s solitary, nightly rambles, his skulking around on the small town’s streets “like a dejected Heathcliff.” Frank’s roommate was a lit major, and Frank had rather liked the allusion. He felt it lent gravitas to his grief, the greatest loss he had known at that point in his life: Francesca’s sudden transfer to another school and her consequent departure from his life. It wasn’t until he sought refuge from the downpour and stood dripping on the carpet of the Catholic church that he was aware he might also bear some guilt, might even owe a confession or two. Since arriving at the little Protestant college in August, he hadn’t acted at all like the good Catholic he’d been raised to be.

But happily for Frank the open church building appeared to be empty, and Frank thought he would wait out the rain in solitude. Until, that is, Father Tim startled him, appearing suddenly from out of a dark hallway. He didn’t seem at all surprised to find Frank standing there, and Frank couldn’t remain startled for long: Tim was decidedly warm and welcoming, young and tall and rosy-cheeked, and his pale hair, thinning, seemed to stand up an inch or two over the top of his head. He seemed to harbor no suspicion that Frank was in want of confessing anything, but immediately invited the dripping Frank into his study for tea and then (when the rain stopped) out into the alley to play basketball in the mud. Frank keenly remembered that first walk out to the hoop with The Priest, how cold the November air felt on his still-wet clothes, and how Frank asked himself what in the world he was doing. It was after midnight, and he had spent the last hour or so discussing with Tim all things not Francesca—which felt strange, as she had occupied his waking thoughts and much of his dreams since September.

But he didn’t want to talk about her with The Priest. He needed no conversation with a man of the cloth to inform him that with Francesca he’d been feeding his lust, that sex outside of marriage was strictly against the rules. He didn’t want to hear the inevitable: that he had sinned, that his pain was his own fault, that his recent fornication-with-abandon was meaningless, was wrong, was an act of the body against the soul, and he needed to repent.

Frank rather believed, while first crossing the parking lot to the solitary hoop, that he must get through this strange encounter without raising Francesca’s spectre at all.

But then, despite these reservations, Frank began to talk about her. There was something about Tim that invited confidences. He was, in the first place, disarmingly young and unassuming, friendly and even jovial, for lack of a better term. And then there was the fact that, at that time and for a few months prior, Francesca had very nearly become Frank’s identity: her approval, her opinion, her affection, her body—these were all that Frank had appetite for. By the time he and Tim reached the basketball hoop, Frank had exhausted his capacity on any subject that wasn’t Francesca.

That was how it began: the many-times-weekly dialogues with The Priest, when Frank pitched his newborn grief against existential beliefs as old as centuries, grappling with what he’d been taught, confronting it as if for the first time.

Perhaps what made Frank go back for more was the fact that The Priest met almost none of his expectations. Tim didn’t dismiss outright his relationship with Francesca. He didn’t tell him that he was making too much of this lost love, that fornication had brought him his just desserts. Where Frank anticipated—even felt he deserved—remarks about sin, confession, repentance, Tim instead had helped him explore what it was he loved—or imagined he loved—about her. And what was it about her body, about their bodies, about the union of them that Frank loved and missed?

It was The Priest, not Frank, who suggested that maybe it wasn’t that sex was wrong, but that sex in the wrong way was wrong. Perhaps one wasn’t intended to have sex with someone who might arbitrarily disappear, that the loss Frank was suffering was perhaps more real—not less—than he realized. That their physical union perhaps mattered far more—not less—than Frank had earlier conceived.

It was those conversations under the basketball hoop—not his first communion, not years of Catholic religion classes, not his confirmation—that made Frank a Catholic. He and Tim banged the ball into the dirt; they passed it back and forth to one another until their hands were seamed with dirt or numb with cold. Under a sky so often leaden in that little nook of western Pennsylvania, Frank thrust his sadness and anger toward the hoop, toward Tim, toward God. They talked about theology, sex, women, about what it meant to be a spiritual being within a limited, corporal frame. The Incarnation, pounded out on the dirt. The unlikely miracle of the Eucharist.

And could it be that sex with Francesca was somehow connected to the Eucharist? Frank was shocked, when Tim raised it, at the possibility. Could one link something so earthy and—for lack of a better term (they both laughed at it)—hot, with the death of Christ? It was Tim who made Frank see the terrible physicality of the crucifixion, the blood and sweat, the torn flesh. No, not at all the same in terms of passion, but passion nonetheless. All of it so physical, Tim said. The body matters, he said. It signifies.

So what could it mean that communion might be more than symbolic, standing in weighty contrast to the clear belief of the Protestants? Frank and Tim hashed out the possibilities: Transignification; Consubstantiation; or the actual daily, hourly renewal of the crucifixion, made real in Holy Mass all around the world? Frank pondered the possibilities as he palmed the ball. The transformation of wine and bread into actual blood and body, nourishing body and soul. The incarnation took on new and near-frightening implications, all of it punctuated by the ball hitting the ground and the rim, and Tim’s open laughter, and the worn-out sweatpants he always wore, the ones Frank laughed at because, based on the wrestling logo riding up the leg and Tim’s own admission, The Priest had worn them even in high school. Sweat beaded and then dripped down their faces, ringed their armpits, drenched their chests, backs, stomachs, leaked into their drawers. And the talk was of “Christ with us,” a thought horrifying and wretched (how to bear the scrutiny?) but also—miraculous in its simultaneity and in Frank’s inexplicable hunger for it—infinitely comforting.

Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was—the day or even the month—when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see.

Now, in the days surrounding Maddie’s surgeries, Frank found himself wishing he could remember more of the hope he had found in those days. He longed to shed some light into the gloom of Maddie’s sadness. And certainly he tried, but words seemed empty. The second surgery was plainly profound loss, and he knew from his long ago grief—so trivial now—that there was no way around it. She would have to be sad—and angry, and in denial, and all the other things—until she wasn’t anymore.

So the night before that surgery, he just told her that he loved her. What else was there to say? They fell asleep together with his arm over her shoulder and his hand at her waist, a shelter insufficient but earnest.

R

When Maddie knew he was sleeping, she lifted Frank’s arm and laid it along his own side, then lay still for another moment to be sure he wouldn’t stir.

She didn’t turn on the bathroom light until the door was closed, and then she stared at herself in the mirror, studying the way her shirt lay over her body. She studied her profile, too, then lifted her shirt over her head and let it fall to the floor.

Her breasts weren’t large, but they were shaped well enough, given the breast-feeding. They were flat at the top now; their fullness resided underneath. Maddie cupped them in her palms and studied her reflection, trying to summon the thoughts she had saved for this night: thoughts of nursing her babies, for example, of wearing her first bra when she was twelve, other memories, too—sexual ones. First times.

Since knowing she would have a mastectomy, Maddie had tucked away these aspects of her loss in her mind, hoarding them as if in a box or journal, to be drawn out and reflected on when she was alone. Now she could think of none of it. She was just there with her body, staring at her own reflection, all of it the same as always.

She pulled her shirt back over her head. Disbelief, she realized. That’s what this was. It was shock and disbelief. That one breast would be gone by this time tomorrow was as believable as her own death, or Frank’s, or any other terrible unreality that she had never known.

R

In October the day finally arrived when the humidity was gone. Standing in the backyard on a Saturday morning, coffee cup in hand, Frank felt the clear air in his lungs. For the first time since May, the damp blanket that was the summer air had been rolled up and heaved into some celestial attic. Never mind that it was October, that this delightful shift would have—and had—taken place up north a month ago. Frank was a southerner now, or trying to be one. The summertime heat and its vicissitudes were integral to a southern life. He couldn’t hold Raleigh’s weather against her.

He inhaled deeply, taking in the crisp air and the expanse of the newborn weekend. Things were better now. Maddie was doing well—well enough, anyway: almost completely healed. The second surgery had been brutal—as one would expect with an amputation. This, of course, was a word he would never use with Maddie. It was a mastectomy, a lateral mastectomy—but Frank felt that official euphemism was not effective. In his more objective moments, he wondered at the nomenclature. Perhaps it wasn’t called an amputation because reconstruction, in this case, could be effected—more so, anyway, than in the amputation of a limb. Maddie’s reconstructed breast would be prosthetic, but it wouldn’t look artificial in the way, say, of a peg-leg.

Before the surgery, he had pondered whether she someday might allow him to give the reconstructed breast a nickname, something to privately amuse them both. But now this seemed like something he might have done in another lifetime, to a couple who did not as yet live under the weight of diagnosis. He couldn’t imagine anything about this surgery or its after-effects taking on humorous proportions. Not ever.

It had actually been horrible to watch her come out of the anesthesia: violently sick to her stomach, her face deathly pale. The pain and how she fought against it. The drains dangling at her side, filling with red liquid—not blood entirely, the doctors said, but yes, blood and other fluids. Frank had emptied the drains himself, working to be cheerfully untroubled by the task, by the tubing’s disappearance into Maddie’s side. This was a small duty—this and the others: getting her meds, helping her bathe, all and anything it would take to help her.

If she decided to undergo reconstruction, they would have to go through this yet again. If that’s what she wanted, Frank knew, he was more than willing. And if she didn’t want it? He didn’t care. He told her often that she was beautiful, and he meant it.

Now she was nearly healed, which meant they would be moving on to the next phase of treatment. Chemotherapy didn’t sound good, but to Frank—and to Maddie, too, he thought—it meant progress, moving forward, getting on with this phase and thereby, eventually, getting past it. The waiting had been tiresome despite its necessity. They were both ready to move on.

And yet. He hadn’t been able to help himself: he had spent more than enough time researching this next phase that they were supposedly ready for. The potential side effects to chemotherapy were legion and ranged from bad to horrible. Meanwhile, doctors couldn’t tell them which ones Maddie would be likely to face; one couldn’t predict how an individual would react. He had read the good news: stories of women whose treatments had been a relative breeze. No side effects to speak of, carrying on with work and life in an almost normal way. And he had read the horror stories. They were mostly horror stories on the Internet.

Standing there in the yard, Frank considered mowing the lawn and pruning the bushes between them and the neighbors. Through the open window at his back drifted the sounds of running water as Maddie cleaned up after pancakes and the mania of Saturday morning cartoons. Who knew what they were headed for? Already they were moving forward, driving toward God-knew-what and there was no turning around, no escape hatch into the bright and open air. In sickness and in health. His wife had breast cancer.

Maddie would scold him if she knew, but Frank thought of it often: a story of the Superhero, her old boyfriend, Vincent. He had been playing football and an opponent had been injured—his neck, his back, something awful. Vincent had prayed for him right there on the field, and the kid had gotten up and walked off unassisted to the sidelines. Completely fine. A miracle on the gridiron.

But Maddie would protest—and had, so many times—that this, like all the other stories, was a misunderstanding. “He couldn’t really heal people,” he heard her saying. “It just didn’t happen.”

R

The thing to do was not to think about it. Mind over matter, that was Maddie’s philosophy. Let the incision heal; let her body recover. Move on with her treatment and kill the cancer. There was no need to shed tears over what was already done.

She need only look at her boys, at her boys and Frank, or even, while they were all gone to school and work during the day, to look at the little pieces of their lives: Garrett’s stuffed kitten, lying lopsided by his pillow; Frank’s array of favorite pens on his desk; Jake and Eli’s Lego empire waiting for their return. All of it spurred a keen tenderness within her. Whereas she used to see these and other things as merely part of the household, now it was all hung with profound and ineluctable meaning. Everything pointed to the demand of her recovery—which meant looking forward, not back.

Still, mind over matter wasn’t effective in all arenas. Once upon a time Maddie had worked to push thoughts of Vincent from her mind, and she had largely been successful. But lately the memories sabotaged her. They volunteered themselves, each a small eruption triggering another that—chronologically or causally—was completely unrelated to the one before it.

Kneeling next to her on the pavement, the sky pale around his bent head. He had taken off his baseball hat and his hair was pressed in a ring. His profile, his silence, his deliberate attention to her leg and the center of the pain where the car had hit her. He hadn’t even known her name.

Her photo, cut unevenly from the yearbook page and stuck inside his locker door. It was a terrible picture. She didn’t think until much later of him leafing through the book to find her picture, wielding the scissors, finding tape—or maybe chewing gum—to hold it in place.

Standing after dark in the pouring rain, allowing his own body to be the means by which a drunk and homeless man righted himself, even reaching down to take hold of his shoulders and helping the man to his feet.

His patient progress through the oncology ward of the children’s hospital and the way the sunlight streamed through the room, falling on and between the beds of the little sick children, their eyes over-wide and dark.

His head bent over Mr. Pavlik, his hands on Mr. Pavlik’s swollen head. His hand on Mrs. Senchak’s head, her body curled and shrunken on the hospital bed, her breath grating like a shovel over pavement.

How much of it was certain? It had happened so long ago. The scenes were isolated but clear—and who was to say which ones were true memories and which imagined, things she envisioned then and now envisioned again, as clear and acute as memory? And which of them was accurate? Was that the way it happened? He said it, and in this way?

At home, recovering from the surgeries, Maddie had these quiet hours to regain her strength. Yet the memories plagued her; she was almost angry: she had left this wretched territory behind her long ago. Cancer was more than enough, thank you. Must she spend its treatment combing through this layered sediment again?

She considered talking it all out with Frank. Yes, she had other friends she could talk to, but she found her husband was the best candidate for helping her assess the sometimes swarming contents of her mind. He had certainly heard this stuff before, or much of it, anyway, and maybe that prior knowledge would be insightful. But that was reason enough, too, not to mention it to him. Why drag him through the old narrative when they had so much else to deal with?

At the very least, she could set the record straight in her mind, the simple and exonerating order of events. For none of it could be claimed to be her fault, could it? Vincent—of his own mysterious accord—had visited her church in the spring of her sophomore (his junior) year. His loud repentance at the altar had engendered natural curiosity in Maddie, and it was this that led to her innocently observing him over the ensuing week at school.

She had wondered what to expect from a boy like that, wild party-er that he famously was, after his bone-chilling display at the altar. What happened, exactly, in that interaction with God?

It was because she had been watching for him at school that she had been hit by the car. She had been staring at Vincent Elander—but this time they locked eyes, and she had been unable to look away. So she hadn’t seen or even heard the car coming, the one that should have, for all of its speed and impact, broken her leg.

That Vincent knelt to pray over Maddie as she awaited the ambulance was his choice. She hadn’t asked him to do that. Had she known what would follow after it, she would have done everything in her power to send him away. Not that it would have worked. And then this memory: “You shouldn’t worry about what other people think.” His first words to her, just a few days after her accident. And she might never have believed it was Vincent Elander who had said it if he hadn’t turned his head and looked at her as he was going inside, if he hadn’t looked right at her with those deep blue eyes and smirked before disappearing behind the door.

That was when Maddie seized on the idea of Vincent’s having healed her.

A miraculous healing was not the sort of thing that one could recount easily to Justine who, like Maddie, had been raised in the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness. Justine had some time ago come to the conclusion that the people of their church were too readily inclined to look for miracles, so Maddie knew she would have to keep her mouth shut on that score. But Maddie wasn’t one to remain silent, and so she said something different. She said, “Vincent Elander says I shouldn’t worry about what other people think.”

“When did you talk with Vincent Elander?” Justine asked. Immediately Maddie wished that she had talked to Vincent, and could see again, as she had imagined it so many times already, the way the conversation might have opened up in the hallway before class, could imagine leaning against the wall with, perhaps, one knee bent, the sole of her shoe pressed against the wall, and Vincent standing perpendicular to her, his shoulder pressed against that same wall, looking down at her, talking to her, listening. If she had only come down the hall sooner, maybe that’s how it would have gone.

But honesty was one of Maddie’s strengths. “I didn’t talk to Vincent,” she said. “He talked to me.”

Justine had no patience for this cryptic response. She wanted immediate and full disclosure, and so Maddie immediately disclosed it.

“Well,” Justine said, and Maddie noticed how she moved effortlessly past any surprise, “he’s right. You shouldn’t worry about it, Maddie. You just have to let it go.” To which Maddie responded that she knew this was true, but she did not say aloud how difficult she found it: to reject or be unconcerned with other people’s responses.

“Did he say anything else?” Justine asked. Maddie said that he hadn’t, and then went on to say that the bell had rung, creating and leaving open the possibility that, had the bell failed to ring, the conversation during which she would have leaned against the wall enjoying Vincent’s perpendicular attention might have taken place. She did not mention that he hadn’t paused, hadn’t stopped, but had spoken as he was walking and then had walked away from her.

“I wonder what he thinks of the whole thing,” Justine said.

“I thought that you shouldn’t care what other people think,” Maddie said.

“Ha, ha,” said Justine in that way she had of sounding as if she thought something were funny while showing you that it wasn’t really funny at all. “I mean,” she went on to say, “that you should ask his opinion as to what went on that day. Why did he come over to you in the first place? Why didn’t he stay with the team? And why did he touch your leg like that? How did he know? You should ask him,” she said.

Maddie was certain that she couldn’t ask him and never would. In the first place, she couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which she could put such a question: Does one walk up to a person like Vincent in the hallway or the cafeteria and just start asking questions? Or does one first have to say, “Can I ask you something?” and then proceed to ask while all the friends, girlfriends, and general entourage stand by to overhear? She said as much to Justine.

“I think you should ask him anyway,” she said, without offering suggestions as to how. Maddie was easily influenced by Justine. She was easily influenced by lots of people; it couldn’t be helped. She was only fifteen, after all, and most of the people she knew were nice enough. But Justine especially, despite her gruffness, was someone who could be trusted. She had a level head; Maddie’s parents had said this before, and Maddie had observed it to be true.

Still, Vincent Elander would be difficult to talk to. There remained the whole question as to when and how to approach him. And there remained, too, (although this she did not say) the way that Vincent Elander looked in his baseball uniform, and the way that he had met her gaze from under the brim of his baseball hat. And there was the way, too, that she had heard him cry out from the altar at the front of the church only a few weeks before that. All of this informed her intimidation. All of it made Vincent Elander, of all people, particularly difficult to approach.

Now Maddie shifted her weight, making to stand up from the sofa where she had been resting yet again, and felt only the slightest twinge at the incision site. Swinging her legs gently to the floor, she sat, hands on knees, and contemplated getting to her feet.

Frank would laugh with her at this narration, at what had been adolescent insecurity laced with puppy love. Naming it with Frank would put it in its place.

Except that she wasn’t sure they would agree on it. The insecurity, yes; the infatuation, sure. But what of the healing? From their long dormant conversations about those miracles, Maddie guessed that Frank still might wish to talk with Vincent if he could.

Frank simply had more faith than Maddie had. She knew this. Or, at the very least, he was more open to possibility. And now, of all times, was not the time to get him thinking that way. Neither one of them needed to be hoping for miracles now.

Hoping for miracles had only gotten Maddie into trouble. If she had been at all to blame, then it was here, when she was talking with Justine and newly convinced that Vincent had healed her. Maddie had believed that she had been part of a miracle, but she had believed lots of things. Once when they were ten, she and Kelly Cox, minds teeming with Nancy Drew novels, tried to discover mysteries to solve in their Pittsburgh suburb. The girls were committed to the notion that Michael Pulaski, the thirty-something across the street who sold used cars and still lived with his parents, was a cat burglar. Which, of course, he wasn’t.

It takes no psychologist to demonstrate that the emotions of teenage girls are powerful things. From an adult’s perspective, Maddie could see this clearly. It was enough to be driven by hormones, to be amazed by Vincent’s demonstrated remorse, to be hit by a car. Any teenage girl in this situation could conjure the notion of miraculous healings, especially at the hands of a boy like Vincent.

Now she liked to imagine that she had asked him, that she had put to him the question Justine had encouraged her to ask—and other questions, too. Why did you touch me, Vincent? Why didn’t you just stay with your friends? Why didn’t you leave me alone? She liked to think that the very next day found her striding up to him in the hallway before their language classes, calling him by name so that he turned to face her, and questioning him without preamble as to why he had knelt next to her in the parking lot, and what exactly he was doing when he’d groped for her injury.

She liked to imagine this, but only much later, and when she did imagine it the dialogue went no further. She was never able to put the right words in his mouth, never able to envision his stunned expression, his frank surprise. Her fantasy ended satisfactorily only in leaving him wordless, while she turned her back on him and strode away again down the hall.