5

Frank knew that cancer treatment was a process; there was no quick fix. He understood this implicitly, and how could he not, when every day of their lives had to take into account the process they were subject to.

But the thought persisted that he should be able to offer her something else, something in the line of hopefulness that would help her. Again his conversations with Father Tim came to mind, but the specifics that emerged were topical, even theoretical. The only practical thought he could construe was stuff about sin—which really didn’t seem at all helpful here—and yes, hope, but hope in the eternal, in an after-life, in a glorious eternity devoid of loss or pain.

Despite the inherent hope in that, he really didn’t want to raise those issues. Not now.

What returned again and again were thoughts of his first communion—and not the one he had endured in the first grade, although his dress shirt’s itchy collar came vividly to mind.

No, what he meant by his first communion came much later, again during his college days and at Father Tim’s little church, a Sunday morning Mass that Tim hadn’t expected Frank to attend, as Frank never—up until that point—had attended Mass there. And in truth, Frank was somewhat surprised to be there himself.

It was April and unseasonably warm for Pennsylvania, and Frank had awakened early that Sunday with a strong compulsion to go to Mass. He dressed in a hurry and almost ran down the street to the church. For all his rushing, he had nonetheless arrived late, and he sat in the back and watched The Priest do what he presumably did multiple times a week—though Frank had never seen him at it.

When it was time for communion, Frank had thought he’d remain in his seat. He had reasoned there should be something more to this: some hoop to jump through, some meeting with Tim in which he forthrightly affirmed his faith before once again—after so many months—receiving communion. But again, Frank hadn’t been able to help himself: there was an unnameable joy that propelled him, behind the presumably faithful parishioners, toward the front. He was grinning like a fool by the time he reached Tim and held out his hands for the host.

On seeing Frank grin like that, Tim had tried to maintain his solemnity, but Frank could detect the smile working at the corners of his eyes. Later Frank had teased him: Would it have been so wrong, he asked his friend, for Tim to smile back? After all, it wasn’t a private joke the two of them were concealing—at least, no joke they could name. Could the laughter that both of them worked to stifle have somehow misled the congregation?

But Tim had argued that there aren’t words for some things, that it would have been impossible and perhaps inappropriate for him to have held the parishioners captive to the obligatory explanation that here was laughter for the best reasons: Frank was a lost one, found; the two of them were brothers of the best kind; the bread and wine were everything they believed them to be, and therefore likely signified more than either one of them, or anyone, could understand. Frank, his back to the congregation, had smiled broadly as Tim said, with all the earnest seriousness he could muster, “The body of Christ.” And Frank had said, “Amen.”

Frank realized now that he could no longer muster the joy. Neither could he recall how long it had lasted, or if it ever returned to him in subsequent Masses. There had not been, in his memory, a repeat performance.

But he considered the actual first communion. Surely it had been a solemn occasion: that evening with Jesus and his disciples in a borrowed upstairs room. Frank envisioned a low-ceilinged space subtly lit by torches. A dimness matched by dim awareness in the disciples, who were satisfied to have met the teacher’s instructions in securing donkey and room, products of yet another mysterious confluence of prophetic instruction and providence.

There were thirteen of them there, thirteen dusty, sweating travelers. A room full of egos, Frank thought, full of self-interest. They asked Jesus which of them would betray him—and didn’t the question betray them all? Each of them had thought of it. Each of them had been given the opportunity and had at least one justification to follow through.

Jesus, moving among them, washing feet. He broke bread and poured wine. He was surrounded by friends and also profoundly alone, his acts of humility and love misunderstood.

All of them ate the bread; they drank the wine. Judas, the betrayer. Peter, who betrayed him, too. Not one of them comprehending any of it.

R

Friends had offered to sit with her; her mother had offered to come down for this first bout of chemotherapy. But Maddie only wanted Frank.

Now he sat next to her in the infusion room. He had found childcare and had taken the afternoon off work, and he avoided asking her if she was nervous. He also avoided looking for words of comfort or hope which, when attempted in his mind, sounded as hollow platitudes. Instead he said things like, “It’s the big day!” and “Your chemotherapy debut!”

It was going to be merriment and joking, Maddie realized, which was not surprising: she recalled the route he used to take on their way home during the last weeks of each pregnancy, the ones with the huge speed bumps. “Pregnancy bumps,” he called them, his little effort to jostle the baby out of her womb.

Maddie’s cancer diagnosis had opened a new line of interest in Frank, who had lived on Pop-Tarts and Kraft macaroni and cheese in college. Now everything was organic, and the overhaul of pantry and refrigerator were only the front line of his assault on their household goods. Detergents were newly scent-free and environmentally friendly; all soaps and lotions were organic. Who knows what these chemicals do to our bodies, he had said to her and their friends and sometimes even the clerk in the checkout line. How do we know that cancer isn’t connected directly with hormones in milk or some rogue food coloring?

He sat next to her while the liquid dripped into her chest. It hung on a pole above them, a weighty red bag attached to Maddie’s port by its equally red tube. She watched Frank bravely watch the bag. This is good stuff, he said, gesturing to the medication. Just a little Kool-aid, he said.

R

Maddie had been remarkably lucky to find Frank, that much she knew. He was, as she often told him, her own Renaissance man: the writer, tennis player, and opera lover, who last summer built the boys a tree house of his own design. He was both passionate and grounded, and he was her best friend.

When she had told him that her parents would be upset that he was Catholic, he took this in his stride, making no apology or excuse. He wasn’t changing anything but was pleased that Maddie wanted to convert and go to church with him. It makes the most sense for our family, he had said, for any children we might have, that we be of the same mind about church. And her heart had warmed at the thought of a family.

Sometimes it occurred to her that she might have missed him; she very nearly did, turning him down after he asked her out in the library. She had dismissed him as too bookish, maybe, too intellectual: all she wanted to do in that first semester was to blast high school’s memory from her mind. Frank, wearing glasses and distributing microfilm, didn’t seem relevant to that plan—which required, for starters, a whole lot of drinking.

So she had been surprised to see him leaning against the bar at the Landmark, a popular dive at the edge of town. It was her first time there, and everything about it was a study in extremes: the dark, the loud, the grit, the crowd. She was following a friend who was pushing aggressively toward the band at the back, and Maddie had been jostled into Frank by a stream of people coming the other way. She glanced up and recognized him immediately, and then, to her extreme discomfort, remained pressed into his side for some time: the stream was a long one, seemingly endless. She kept her head turned away from him, hoping that he hadn’t identified her.

But he had, and apparently was not made at all uncomfortable by this forced interaction. Of course he wouldn’t pretend he didn’t know her and had also to immediately bring up the source of her discomfort: that she had turned him down for a date. “How’d that test go?” he’d yelled to her over the noise, grinning.

Maddie felt unaccountably offended by his asking, as though he were implicating her in a lie (she had had a test that Monday), but she felt forced to yell back anyway (“Fine!” terse and dismissive), while continuing to face out into the (still streaming) crowd.

For his part, Frank continued talking to her. He yelled to the back of her hair, “I was really disappointed when you said no.”

She couldn’t have fallen in love with him at that point. She was too embarrassed, her mind too much in the way of wanting to keep her distance from him. But she was caught nonetheless on this confession: any other guy might have asked about the test and left it there, or said something snarky, or ignored her altogether.

The least she could do, she thought, was try to impress him. She turned so as to give him her profile and shouted—bragging—that all she really wanted was to get mind-numbingly drunk, failing to realize that this goal might actually be banally familiar, the senseless objective of legions of college students. But Frank was still interested, and he drew her out. Soon the two of them were leaning into the bar side by side, their heads inclined, their voices nonetheless, necessarily, raised. Over a glass of beer (Frank insisted on paying for it) she eventually related the cause of her rebellion: the hide-bound strictures of her church upbringing. Frank was fascinated: he had recently done some soul-searching of his own in terms of religion, had explored a handful of options—both foreign and domestic (he chuckled)—and had settled on the Catholic faith of his childhood.

At about that point Maddie’s friend returned for her, having long since achieved the enticing back of the room. But Maddie was too engrossed in the conversation—or was it Frank?—to leave. Feeling herself something of a legitimate expert, she was giving him her full-on critique of Christianity: all doctrines, disciplines, denominations. Frank mostly listened, but he gave bold answers where he knew more than she did—which was, to her mind, surprisingly often. Maddie’s fondest memory of the evening was Frank’s explanation of the Immaculate Conception, shouted at her over the noise of the band.

She did not get drunk that night, but she found she didn’t mind this as she drove her drunk and stumbling friend back to the dorm. The next morning, she was glad she wasn’t suffering from a hangover, gladder still to remember that she needed to go to the library. And unwittingly blushing when she saw that Frank was in his station at the microfilm desk. She thought she remembered that he worked on Saturday mornings. When he asked her out this time, she said yes.

They would tell the story in the way that all couples do, reliving it in fast-forward motion behind their eyes. Maddie would always punctuate it by repeating, “The Immaculate Conception,” and Frank would always smile, the skin crinkling up around his eyes the way it did even back in college.

It had been different with Vincent. She had been much younger then—not yet sixteen and truly naïve. Justine was the one to tell her. “You’re next,” she had said.

Maddie had no idea what Justine was talking about, despite Vincent’s instant and near-constant presence in her life. She couldn’t remember when she hadn’t known who he was, and since that display at the church altar, he had become a fixed part of the Bethel Hills congregation, enfolding himself into this part of Maddie’s world. But Maddie didn’t take the hints that were his frequent phone calls and sitting next to her at lunch; Justine’s “You’re next,” fell on innocent ears. For all of his attentions and presence, she was confident that he would never choose her for anything beyond a friend, and she attributed his attentions to his conversion and his acquaintance with her through church.

And then she was next, just the way Justine promised. Word was all over school that Vincent Elander had dumped Jennifer Imhoff, that he had ended his partying ways, that he had become a church-goer and a Bible-beater. And Maddie found herself his new girlfriend, not entirely comprehending, sort of lifted and tucked under his arm in the way he would take hold of a football.

She finally realized it when she noticed her picture: he had cut it from the yearbook and stuck it inside the door of his locker. “Hey, that’s me!” she said, leaning in to focus.

“Yep,” he said without looking at her. He was reaching to get a book from the shelf.

“Why do you have my picture in here?” she asked him, incredulous, blushing.

“Why do you think, silly?” he had asked her, and slammed the door so suddenly she had felt the breeze of it on her face. Then he had walked her to class.

R

It was that sort of thing that could change a life. Walking side by side down the hall, stopping at the door of your classroom when he himself isn’t going in. Sitting with you at lunch every day, even inviting his friends to join him, because he’s no longer sitting at his table; he’s sitting at yours.

Or holding hands.

It had such significance when, walking out of church into the late spring sunlight, Vincent had taken her hand and held it. He had continued to walk; the gesture—the taking and holding of her hand—had been sudden and also casual; it depended on an understanding, one they hadn’t discussed, and so Maddie wondered in retrospect how it was he knew that enough of her affections belonged to him that he could also claim some proprietary regard for her hand.

No, she hadn’t wondered that. Not, at least, until much later. That kind of reflection rooted itself in indignation, and it was nothing like indignation she felt on that spring day when he first took her hand in the church parking lot and she tried to act nonchalant, following his lead, his presumption that taking her hand was perfectly natural, even what was expected of him.

Yet for some time it had the continuing power to surprise her. Walking down the hall at school, standing outside the locker room after a football game, Vincent casually took her hand, their fingers loosely touching or even intertwined. A life can be changed when things like that happen, when other people see something like that, and Maddie saw them see—saw the girls she knew but had never spoken to take in at a glance Vincent Elander standing next to Maddie, not even standing closely, not even talking to her necessarily, but their hands just touching, just holding like that. Something so small as this changed everything.

Including Maddie, of course. She would think of herself later—much later—as victimized or preyed upon. But then, at the beginning, she didn’t think of such things. What she knew then was the contour of his hands, the length of his fingers, the calluses of his palms. She came to know the perimeter of her own hand by the perimeter of his; she came to know the comfortable distance between her own fingers as determined by the width of his. And she came to know, too, the power of his hand on her untouchable center, the solidity of her core.

But she didn’t marvel about it at the time; she didn’t wonder at the power of that hand in hers to make her untouchable solid core turn, bend, cave slowly in upon itself so that she felt she was composed of liquid.

R

The vomiting had started at about one o’clock in the morning—no, earlier. It was one or so when Frank heard something in the bathroom and then turned, confused, to discover that Maddie wasn’t in the bed. He found her squatting in front of the toilet bowl, gripping the seat with both arms, her hair falling around her face. Crouching behind her on the floor, Frank tended to her hair, holding it away at the back of her neck.

Already there was nothing left. The toilet was empty of all but its standard water and what looked like saliva. Maddie heaved and heaved again, and afterward spat at the strings of mucous still clinging to her lips. Frank looked about him for a washcloth, then pulled his bath towel from its bar and tucked it toward Maddie’s face. Breathless, she thanked him, and then the heaving began again.

With every pause in the retching, Frank thought this would be the end. The tension in Maddie’s shoulders eased. She sat back on her heels, eyes closed, lungs gasping for air. There was nothing left in her stomach; surely it was over.

And then it started again, and Frank remembered what he was dealing with. This was no virus. This was nothing her body would readily be rid of. Who knew how long it would continue?

“How long have you been in here?” Frank managed to ask. He was afraid of the answer. The nausea’s abatement was long enough to have given him hope: for the first time, Maddie had leaned against him, her back full against his chest.

Her answer came after a long pause: “I have no idea.”

Then Maddie lurched away from him and Frank marveled at her instinct: she may have been here like this for hours; did she think there was anything left in her stomach?

He struggled to his feet, legs cramping from their prolonged crouch. He stumbled toward the cabinet, found an elastic band and clumsily tried to work it into her hair. He could wrap it well enough but couldn’t figure out how to make it stay in tightly, and then Maddie was pulling away from him again. He finally gave it up, leaving some of her hair loosely coiled in the elastic while thick strands still swung toward her face. These he occasionally tried to tuck behind her ears when he wasn’t otherwise stroking her back, but all of it struck him as futile.

Exhaustion interfered with consciousness. Half-awake, eyes open, Frank hallucinated: the towers of San Gimignano were etching themselves unprovoked in varied order across the bathroom wall. He and Maddie had visited the town on their honeymoon, but he hadn’t the energy now to wonder why this should be the vision that accompanied his vigil. Mindless, he stroked Maddie’s back and gazed at the towers against a bright blue morning sky and then washed in red against a sunset orange—always only the towers and not the lower walls of the city. Just that many-pinnacled skyline, the architectural remains of medieval ambition lined solemnly along wall and shower curtain. After that, those towers—their varied heights, their persistently haunted sense of abandonment—were always linked in his mind with cancer.

Finally they dozed: he slumped with his upper back against the bathroom wall, and Maddie spread out over him, her face on the cool linoleum floor. Occasionally, the nausea would force her mouth open and the dry retching would convulse her body, but she no longer sat up to the toilet bowl for this. She lay there crookedly without opening her eyes, a small spot of saliva pooling under her cheek.