6

On her good days, Maddie could be impressed by cancer’s power to reshape her life. There were the obvious daily changes to medication and diet, and then there was her hair—or had been her hair—which she decided not to think about.

But cancer was even more assertive than this, reassigning the calendar to something of its own choosing. No longer did Maddie think in terms of months or weeks, the standard weekends, seasons and holidays in their course. Instead, she had to organize her thinking around the three-week periods between her chemotherapy treatments. Listening to a friend discuss holiday plans, Maddie ran the dates through the gauntlet of her treatment schedule. She couldn’t attend this party because her white blood count would be at its lowest at that time; she couldn’t meet friends for lunch because she had to avoid restaurants, crowds, the world in general.

This was routine for cancer care, nothing to complain about. Others had endured these circumstances with prognoses far worse.

She reminded herself that she was receiving the best treatment. Never mind that most of her discomfort was due to that treatment and not from the cancer itself: currently she was taking medications for several chemotherapy side-effects, the results of which made her tired most of the time and ruined the taste of her food.

Endurance was the name of the game. Maddie knew that. Chemotherapy was poison, plain and simple, and it was her task to survive it, to outlive the cancer with as much of herself intact as possible. Her hair and her fingernails seemed almost obligatory sacrifices. Everyone lost at least this much in cancer treatment. So she told herself.

She didn’t do the research; she left that to Frank. For Maddie, survival meant taking care of herself and also of her sons—to the best of her ability—and keeping at bay those thoughts of Vincent’s year in her life, memories useless, vague, and vexing nonetheless.

Lately it wasn’t Vincent she was thinking of but the people he had prayed for: Mr. Pavlik, Mrs. Senchak, little Joey Amoretti on the parsonage lawn. She thought of Susan Sweet and her high, soft voice, thanking Vincent for praying for her there in the church reception hall.

All of them had wanted to be healed, whether they asked for it or not. This much she knew, and that knowledge filled her with an unaccountable defiance. Maddie, too, wanted to be well—although she was willing to wait for it, to endure the treatment and all the time and energy it took from her. She was willing not to ask to be healed.

And she thought of Matthew, Justine’s little brother. She remembered him sitting in the pew between his parents, his legs sticking out straight on the pew bench, the heels of his shoes extending just over the edge. He had lived and died years before any of them knew Vincent. His casket had been very small and was covered in white flowers.

R

Frank kept a watchful eye on the calendar. From diagnosis to right now, cancer had taken seven months of their lives. Only seven months. What was it in the scheme of things? They were spending their lives together. He told himself that this cancer ordeal was manageable. Give it a year. Let it take every bit of a year. And the boys were fine. They were doing fine, and they were so young. By the time Maddie was better, they would scarcely remember it.

But he worried about his wife. The treatment was taking its toll, and he was sure the fatigue frustrated her. Yet he never had a word of complaint from her—as was her way.

In truth, he never had much in the way of any conversation from her these days. He would have liked to hear her thoughts, even if they weren’t pleasant ones. But she was often silent. She seemed absorbed with something outside them all. Sometimes, thinking she was asleep, Frank might quietly enter their room to check on her and find that she was just lying there, staring at the wall. She would barely register his presence.

She had let him help her with her hair when it started falling out. Frank had tried to add levity to the process: he had fetched his electric clippers from under the bathroom sink and announced they’d have a head-shaving party. Maddie had agreed to it, and they had laughed as her hair fell in clusters to the floor. Frank insisted on doing the clean-up while Maddie examined her newly exposed head in the mirror, and he thought they had cleared the danger nicely, that she had accepted her new look with pluck. But when is anything of this magnitude so simple? She had cried into her pillow for a long time that night, immune to his efforts at comfort.

Seven months in. Only seven months, and there was no changing course, there was no remedy, no experimental process that might be the escape hatch Frank sometimes thought of longing for.

The urge to call Father Tim was sudden and also the only thing to do.

“How’s it going?” Tim asked.

“It’s going,” was Frank’s reply.

“Cancer sucks,” Tim said.

Frank brought him up to speed, and Father Tim’s response was reassuring: deeply sympathetic and unsurprised. He had known his share of cancer patients. He had visited them at home, in hospitals, sometimes at their deathbeds. He knew the right questions to ask; he knew the terminology.

He also knew the theology but didn’t utter it. Instead, he said, “You’re living the dream, my friend.”

That was it, of course. The reminder—the kick in the pants, really—that Frank was needing.

And hadn’t he known it, even from the earliest days of Maddie’s diagnosis? This was the dream—this was it, what he and The Priest had talked about all those years ago, when they had moved on from theology and Catholic doctrine and started talking about marriage.

“A good marriage,” Tim had clarified, “is absolutely where it’s at.” And then he had gone on to paint a vision of marriage that was both stunningly beautiful and also somehow familiar: a friendship bound by sacrament, the mysterious union of husband and wife; unparalleled intimacy. Fierce, unbreakable commitment—no matter the circumstances.

Frank had been taken by this vision. He had really been enchanted. Around him, news reports were of divorce rates on the rise; his own parents had split when he was eleven. In a culture of potential societal decay, the thought of a sound, committed, “good” marriage struck him as a form of fantastic rebellion.

And he was buoyed in his thinking by romance—smitten, for example, by the sight of an elderly couple holding hands and walking feebly down the street together. Presuming them to have been married since their twenties, Frank saw in them something to strive for. His casual relationships with former girlfriends suddenly felt silly to him; Francesca’s eschewing marriage seemed the height of immaturity and foolishness.

Over the first months of dating Maddie, Frank recognized in her a woman who would be willing to do the sometimes “hard work,” as Tim had called it, of marriage: she wouldn’t look at frustrations or obstacles as reasons to quit; she would persevere through them. With Maddie, Frank realized, he could “live the dream.”

Now, after this phone conversation with The Priest, Frank felt both chastised and strengthened. “In sickness and in health,” that was how it went, right? Maddie needed him now, more than ever. And here they were, Frank and Maddie, working through the hard times together. Living the dream.

Frank felt it was fine to let his conversation with The Priest rest there. It was enough to have heard that much.

R

When their son was not yet two years old, Maddie and Frank took little Jake to the top of Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh. It was night, past his bedtime, and for that reason alone Maddie hadn’t thought it was the best idea. But they were returning to North Carolina in the morning, and Frank knew that Maddie loved the view of the city at night. They wouldn’t have to stay long; they could stand there for as little or as much time as they wanted to. And didn’t Maddie want to do this, even if it was just for a few minutes?

Maddie had yielded her practicality to Frank’s enthusiasm, to his ardent belief in the value of a great experience. In truth, she wanted it, too. They had both grown up in Pittsburgh, but on the opposite sides of town, and it was an early delight of their relationship to discover that the view from Mt. Washington was—for each of them—their favorite thing about the city. Maddie had assumed that Frank’s would be the stadium, but no, he told her. On their earliest date to the city he had surprised her with a picnic on one of the overlooks.

Of course it was a popular view with everyone: the mountainside disappearing under the feet and the rivers sliding past the city, which shot up from its widening slit of land in peaks and pinnacles. Maddie liked its contradictions: the glass and concrete against the glassy rivers, the whisper of the trees on the mountain against the drifting sounds of traffic. The city, so far below, simultaneously seemed within reach: if she wanted to, she could break one of the towers away between her fingers.

At night the city’s lights were softened in the black rivers. Folded over and through the landscape, the lesser lights of houses and buildings hugged the ground and pressed close to the city, growing up as they got closer in. And around it all and through it, the lights of the cars crawled along the city’s edge, slipped in and out of it, and poured, streaming, over the bridges. It was as if, Maddie once told Frank, everything around it—pavement and parking lot and tired steel mill—was a living thing, sustained by the bright heart at the center.

And so they took little Jake to see it, parking at the edge of the sidewalk and walking him between them to the overlook. It was a warm summer night, and a gentle breeze came up the mountain and gusted at their hair. There had been a baseball game that night; the stadium was still ablaze. The little family stood at the fenced edge and gazed out at the city.

Jake hadn’t lasted long. He began shrieking almost immediately, in such terror that Maddie felt certain he’d been injured somehow. Frank picked him up and held him close while Maddie peered at his extremities, looking for signs of what? She thought maybe a bee sting?

And still Jake screamed, clinging to his father, his legs working as though he would climb higher on his father’s chest.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Maddie was asking, trying to be soothing while also trying to suppress the panic she felt rising within her.

But then she realized Frank was laughing, a low chuckle. “He’s fine, Maddie,” he said. And he made her understand that Jake was simply terrified: he was trying to climb away from the city, to get back to the safety of the car.

Later, this was a moment in their parenting that amused them: the opposed efforts they hoped would help their son. For Maddie, the solution was obvious: get Jake back to the car and buckle him safely in his car seat, then get him to bed.

But Frank was all about helping their son overcome his fear. Walking deliberately with him back to the railing, he held the climbing, screaming Jake in his arms and pointed out to him the beauties of the view: “See the boat? That’s a barge. And look! There’s the stadium where the baseball players work.” All of it in his soothing, confident voice, and all of it effective—were it not for the terror in their little boy’s mind.

Yes, they could laugh about it later. But for Maddie, it now gained some significance. It was indicative, she felt, of the sometimes opposing ways she and her husband approached things. Take healing, for example, take God. Maddie knew that if she breathed a word to Frank about Vincent, her husband would say they should try it, ask for healing, pursue this remote chance.

Maddie understood it differently. She could see what Frank had, perhaps, not bothered to understand that night with little Jake: That the mountainside beneath their feet was lost in the darkness, and then there was the glowing river below them and the even more glowing city, burning like so many coals. Jake hadn’t known what was beneath them; perhaps he feared that, at any moment, the concrete would give way and he and his family would go sliding down, cascading into the river—or worse, into the hot bright center of the city.

Frank had taken Jake’s fears and tried to help him see beauty. And there was beauty, Maddie knew, in faith, in asking to be healed. But she wouldn’t ask, ever.

All too clearly, she understood Jake’s fears that night on the mountain. More and more often of late, she felt that she was standing on the edge of a precipice with a dark and plunging void below her. There was again the sound of sliding stones, faint but clear, like shale worked loose in a mine.

No, Maddie thought. She thought again of Mrs. Senchak. She thought of Mr. Pavlik. She thought of Vincent, and then—wasn’t it simply a matter of practiced self-discipline?—she forced herself not to.