Healing Maddie Brees by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

Author:Rebecca Brewster Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: faith;healing;marriage;family;memory;secrets;Pittsburgh;Pennsylvania;Raleigh;North Carolina;FIC19000;Literary fiction;FIC044000;Contemporary Women's Fiction;FIC042000;Christian fiction;religious fiction;Rebecca Stevenson
Publisher: Light Messages Publishing
Published: 2016-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

16

Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital was in the heart of the city’s downtown. Constructed of steel and concrete, it was nonetheless designed to let in light: from both inside and out, it appeared to be made of plate glass. There was not a room on any exterior wall that did not have one length composed of window. Thus designed and situated on the Monongahela River, the founders’ hope was that the children undergoing treatment should have a view of the world around them, and the hospital’s sickest patients would have rooms with a view of the river and the mountain beyond it.

Seeing beauty like this could only aid in the healing process.

Such was Maddie’s imagination, anyway, of the famous children’s hospital in her city, but she had never actually seen it. Had she known its actual design and setting, she would likely have been disappointed that it wasn’t actually downtown, that it enjoyed only regular views of a rolling, house-dotted landscape, and that these were obtained through standard-sized windows. No river, no mountain, no plate-glass.

This might have required reassessment of her assumptions; but as they were untried, she could carry on with the images that, more and more of late, were readily coming to mind. Most vivid was the oncology ward, home to the sickest of the hospital’s patients. Maddie imagined it as a long room lined with beds against one wall; and opposite the beds, providing the children with their first and last sights of the day, a wall made of windows. The windows were sloped, dropping away from the ceiling at a seventy-degree angle, coming all the way to the floor. Through them the children watched birds, planes, helicopters, traffic moving across the top of Mount Washington, and the city’s famous incline making its way up and down the steep hill.

Maddie’s imagination provided further details: sun streamed into the room through these windows; the beds were covered in sunlight. Each bed was different, bearing gifts sent by friends and worried families: over-large teddy bears, and Mylar helium balloons that glinted in the sunlight. Each bed was occupied by a child in some degree of terrible illness. They were bald. Their eyes were large and haunted or pinched behind swollen cheeks. Some of them had tubes attached to their arms. Some were too weak to sit up.

But hope was there, too. For Maddie imagined Vincent among them, tall and handsome, walking slowly from bed to bed, touching each child on the head or the arm, bending down to speak to them. Tousling heads where hair might once have been. He would talk to them, sit on their beds, make them laugh. And then after sitting with a child for a while, he would just tell her that he was going to pray now, and that this prayer was going to make the child better, that soon after this she would be able to get rid of the tubes forever and grow her hair back and play in the backyard just like she used to.

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