How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else)

by Ann Hood

  Even though I had just turned eleven, I wanted to curl up right on her lap and stay there for a while. Before the divorce, my mother had that effect on me.

  Instead, I asked her, “What’s hospice?”

  She looked up, all worried. “It’s where people go when they’re dying, when there’s no hope for them at all. Who’s in hospice?”

  “It’s a place?” I asked, disappointed, thinking that Mr. Greer maybe didn’t die in the kitchen after all. Then where was my source of power? And how would I ever find it again?

  “Yes. Well, yes and no,” she explained. “Hospice workers sometimes go to the person’s house and help take care of them until they die. Like Boppa.”

  Boppa was my father’s father, a heart surgeon, a smart man who nonetheless died last year of the same disease a famous baseball player named Lou Gehrig died from. After Boppa got that disease, my father made us all watch that movie so we’d understand better. Then Boppa died, and that’s how we got money to buy this house.

  My mother was going on and on about Boppa and the nurses that stayed with him around the clock and how that way everybody got to be right with him when he died.

  Lucky everybody, I thought, shivering. I had never seen a dead person and I didn’t want to.

  “And he got to die at home,” my mother continued, “right where he wanted.”

  Lucky Boppa, I thought, already bored with hospice. Maybe I wouldn’t add hospice to my New Vocabulary list after all.

  My mother sighed and looked dreamy. I wondered if she was thinking of her own father who had also died, but without hospice. He just lay down for a nap one Saturday afternoon and died.

  She stood then and scooped sleeping Cody up in her arms. “Want to join us?” she asked.

  Every time our father was away on an assignment, Cody always slept with our mother. I used to, too, the three of us lined up in my parents’ big bed, with the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and Secret deodorant in the air. But Cody took up too much room with his flailing arms, his need to always have the cool side of his pillow up, and his screams in the middle of the night from stupid nightmares.

  I almost said yes. But shouldn’t an eleven-year-old not want to sleep with her mother and her little brother?

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll stay up really late and watch television.”

  She smiled and kissed me good night. “Not too late,” she said.

  After they went upstairs, I tried to find something on television that I wasn’t allowed to watch, but there was nothing good on and I fell asleep with the TV right back on the Weather Channel. At some point, I got up and climbed into my own bed and thought about Marie Taglioni and hospice and the snow in Idaho until the next thing I knew I was startled awake by a man’s voice saying my name as clear as anything: “Madeline. Madeline.”

  I sat up.

  I waited.

  “Mr. Greer?” I said, because who else could it be?

  The clock by my bedside seemed to tick extra loud. It was three o’clock.

  I waited, but the man didn’t speak again. My heart was pounding against my ribs. I was terrified. I was exhilarated. I got out of bed, my knees all trembly. The floor was cold but I didn’t even stop to put on my father’s rag socks, the ones I wore as slippers. Instead, I went straight over to the window, uncertain what drew me there. When I parted the lace curtains—left behind by the Greers—and looked out, all I saw was a blanket of snow. Snow so thick I could not make out anything, not the street or Sophie’s house next door. Even the light from the streetlamps was dim, a distant creepy glow.

  I waited by the window until I got too sleepy to stand there any longer. Then I went back to bed, puzzled. My heart was still beating faster than usual, but my curiosity took over. What did Mr. Greer want to show me? I wondered. But then I fell right back asleep, easy as anything, and dreamed of snow falling on a mountainside in huge flakes, flakes the size and shape of Idaho, like crooked triangles. They fell and covered everything in their path—trees and SnoCats and skiers.

  Skiiers! My father! Something wasn’t right, I thought with a start and pulled myself right out of that dream until I was wide awake.

  It was morning. On our block the sun was shining brightly. Ice had formed around the tree branches, and the street outside my bedroom window glistened like a fairy-tale forest. It was kind of like rock candy had taken over everything. The snow in the street looked like a beautiful white blanket, without even one footprint in it. I remembered how Sophie had bragged about the snow wherever she had gone skiing at Thanksgiving. “We were the very first people to touch that snow, Madeline,” she’d said. Now I knew what she meant. I dressed as fast as I could and went downstairs. In the kitchen, Cody and my mother were making waffles, oblivious to the danger my father was in, lost in a warm cocoon of oranges and vanilla and maple syrup. I grabbed my cherry-red jacket from the brass hooks in the foyer and slipped outside without even stopping to say good morning.

  The streets were sheets of ice, shiny and smooth, treacherous. I had to take baby steps the whole way and still I slipped every few feet. There was nothing to grab on to; ice covered everything. Finally, I reached Saint Sebastian’s, the Catholic Church. Inside, there was a big crucifix with a suffering Jesus hanging from it and statues of saints in long robes, all with gold circles above their heads like someone’s fancy china. I practically gasped. That’s how beautiful it was in there.

  I went straight up to the altar. The air smelled like wet wool and melting wax, a serious smell that I liked. I knelt down on the padded kneeler, clasped my hands, bent my head, and even though I thought you were probably supposed to whisper in church, I spoke in my natural speaking voice to be sure God heard me. “God, save my father from that avalanche.” I just kept saying it, over and over. “God, save my father from that avalanche. God, save my father from that avalanche.”

  I was surprised how the whole time I was there, not one person came in. It was just me and God and Jesus on the cross and all of those saints. I said my prayer about a million times. That’s what it was. A prayer. I couldn’t imagine our life without my father. I mean, we were a family of four. And even though sometimes Cody drove me crazy, most of the time I liked the way we looked together, all of us. Maybe we didn’t take ski vacations to fancy places and maybe our house needed a lot of work, but we were a great family. I didn’t want to be just three. I didn’t want my father to die and leave the rest of us alone. So I prayed. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed, pushing away the thoughts of what my life would be like without my father in it. Without him driving me to school and stopping at Seven Stars Bakery for hot chocolate and ginger scones. Without him teaching me new words or facts or songs. Without him taking my mother by the waist and spinning her around our kitchen floor while some old song played on the stereo.

  I could tell by the way the light slanted differently through the stained glass windows that I had knelt and prayed for a long time. My throat felt raw, my voice was raspy, and I was burning hot. Outside, the ice had melted into fast rivulets of water that raced down the streets and sidewalks like it had somewhere to go. Still, it took me even longer to get home. My legs felt heavy and my head pounded. Maybe I was dying, I thought. Maybe I had suffered from hallucinations the night before. Maybe I had lost my mind.

  But when I walked in the door, I knew immediately that everything had happened just as I had thought. There was panic in the air.

  My mother emerged, red-eyed, from the kitchen, clutching Cody by the hand. Behind her, I saw Gran, my father’s mother; and Aunt Birdie the cardiologist; and Aunt Becky the pediatrician; and other faces behind them, familiar and frightened.

  “Madeline!” my mother said, and she started to cry. “Where in the world have you been?”

  “Is Daddy dead?” I asked, my voice hoarse and sore.

  “Why would you say that?” my mother asked. She was twisting a crumpled tissue in her hand. “Did you hear it on television last night after I went to bed?
”

  “Is he?” I said, and it came out all raspy.

  Gran stepped forward, tall and erect, her silvery blond hair slightly droopier than usual.

  “He’s alive,” she said. “We just got word that he’s one of the people who made it.”

  I nodded.

  “But how did you even know?” Mom asked, moving toward me. “How could you know?”

  “Was it an avalanche?” I managed to whisper before I slumped to the floor in a sweaty, feverish heap.

  From somewhere above me I heard my mother’s voice, surprised, saying, “Yes.”

  I closed my eyes, smiling. I had done it. I had performed my second miracle, a huge miracle, a miraculous miracle.

  “My God,” someone said, “she’s burning up!”

  I felt myself being lifted and carried away, up, up, up. The next time I opened my eyes, it was night and still. My father was saved. And I was on my way to becoming a bona fide saint.

  I didn’t need to be a saint. I was already pretty busy. For one thing, there’s my ballet, which is really important. I have blisters on my feet and a callus on my toe that is really gross. Also, I can do the most perfect arabesque. This requires great balance and fortitude. For another thing, I was working very hard on improving my vocabulary. I did all of the Word Power challenges in my grandparents’ Reader’s Digests. They kept them in the bathroom, and when the conversation got really boring I would go and sit in there and improve my vocabulary. They would always ask my mother if I had some kind of digestive issues. “Have you had Madeline’s digestive tract checked recently?” they’d ask. And later, in the car on the way home, Mom would ask me, “What is it you do in there, Madeline?” But I couldn’t answer her because I was reciting new words in my head: turbulence, noun, disturbance of the atmosphere……jettison, verb, to cast off……

  Also, after my father came home, I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. But, it seemed like something had changed. He looked gloomy and restless. Plus, he had to be in New York City all the time because his heli-skiing article was suddenly an article about surviving an avalanche and people were really really interested in it, and in him. After so many years of fluctuating incomes, his seemed to be only going up. But he acted miserable instead of happy.

  Then one morning right after breakfast, my parents sat Cody and me down in the living room, a room we hardly ever sat in, and my mother wouldn’t look at us. Instead, she kept staring at the pattern on the floor, her eyes tracing its edges. Dad looked right at us, though, and started to say things like someone on a television movie. “Sometimes people fall out of love,” he said. And, “No one is to blame here.” And, “I will always be your father and love you.” I kept trying to get Mom to look at me. But she wouldn’t.

  Cody started to panic, “Do you mean you’re getting divorced?”

  I laughed. “Of course they’re not getting divorced,” I told him. Just the night before, we had made homemade pizza together and then we played Pictionary and then we all danced the chicken dance. Does that sound like a family about to get divorced?

  I heard Dad say, “Yes. We are getting divorced.”

  Next thing I knew, he was telling us that we could visit him every other weekend in New York, and Cody shouted, “You’re moving to New York?”

  “He’s not moving to New York, you dope,” I said. It was like my brain couldn’t process the information. I was hearing words, but they didn’t seem to have any meaning.

  Then Dad said, “I’m sorry. I really am.” He looked sorry when he said that, but still, he kissed us both on the tops of our heads and walked out of the house into a new life.

  All the while, Mom sat there staring at the floor. She never explained anything. She never tried to stop him from going. As soon as the door shut behind him, she ran to the window and watched him drive away. She was crying like crazy, and Cody was crying like crazy, and I said, “Do something, Mom! Do something!”

  She finally turned and looked at me. In that one moment, she seemed to get a lot older. She looked at me and she said absolutely nothing. I think that’s when I started to hate her.

  “This is your fault,” I said.

  So how did I, Madeline Vandermeer, fairly normal girl from a fairly normal family, decide to become a saint? Well, when I saved my father’s life, I somehow managed to ruin everything else. Now my life was all upside down, and frankly, I needed something to happen. If I performed just one more miracle, I believed I could fix everything and become a saint. The whole world would hear about me and the amazing things I’d done. I even wrote to the Pope at the Vatican in Rome, Italy, and asked him how to proceed. He probably understands about a hundred languages, even hard ones like Japanese, and remote ones like Swahili, and ancient ones that aren’t even languages anymore. Certainly he can read English, an easy one, a popular one, the language of a future saint.

  I told my mom that I wanted to be a saint and she said, “Madeline, we aren’t even Catholic.”

  “That,” I told her, “is a technicality.”

  The night I told my mother that I wanted to be a saint, she was making one of her disgusting dinners. She has a column for Family magazine and she writes recipes and stupid essays, every month. Why are they so stupid? Because we are not a family. We are three people—her and me and Cody—all living under the same leaky roof. A family likes one another. A family turns off all of the lights and stands in front of the big window and gazes down at the Statue of Liberty, each one of them holding their own breath at how magnificent she is, the way we do in my dad’s New York City loft, with his new wife, Ava, and their baby.

  “No, Madeline,” Mom said, “it is not a technicality. It is a requirement.” She didn’t even look at me. She just kept stirring and measuring. These are the kinds of things she does that drive me crazy.

  I peered into the pot. Whatever was inside was far too green for me. I don’t even like when they put parsley on my plate in restaurants.

  “Did you know that some saints lived on nothing but air?” I asked Mom.

  “That,” she said, “is ridiculous.”

  To indicate that this conversation was over, she turned on her Cuisinart, which sounded like a helicopter landing in our kitchen.

  “If you want to do something useful,” I shouted, “why don’t you invent a silent Cuisinart so that American families can converse while they cook?”

  “What, Madeline?” Mom shouted back, pointing at her ears. “I can’t hear you!”

  And that, in a nutshell, was my problem. No one could hear me, except, I guess, God. But when I was an official saint, everyone would listen to what I had to say. My name would be in newspapers. I would be on television. A sculptor would come to our house and make a statue of me wearing long flowing robes and a gentle expression, maybe with a baby lamb or kitten at my feet. Biographers would write my life story for the history books. People would hang out on Lloyd Avenue in front of our house, waiting for a glimpse of me. I wouldn’t have to go to school anymore, though I wasn’t sure of all the rules and benefits of sainthood. The Pope would have to fill me in.

  One thing I thought was that when I was a saint, I would probably have to forgive my mother for letting my father leave us. Saints are nice like that. Besides, before he left, I thought she was great. She did things like put faces on my hamburger buns. She would take those green olives with the red insides that come in a bottle and cut them in half and use those for the eyes, and a small round of sweet pickle for the nose and then a big red ketchup smile. Also, we used to cut shapes out of pieces of American cheese with cookie cutters so that my sandwiches always were one piece of white bread topped with a star, or a heart, or a moon.

  When I remember things like this, I feel all weird. But then I look at my mother with her plain hair and her plain face and sad eyes and I get angry at her all over again. She let my dad leave us. Still, I keep trying for a third miracle. If I live as long as Mother Teresa did, I could perform something like a thousand miracle
s! Who knows? Maybe I can even perform a miracle that will fix everything. Saints do things like that, every day.

  Chapter Two

  THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME

  AFTER MY PARENTS GOT DIVORCED and the very thing I worried about—life without my father—had happened, I missed our old life in Boston even more than before. So every Saturday after ballet class, I begged my mother to drive past our old apartment in Back Bay. Sometimes she would even do it. But usually she would sigh and say, “It’s time to move on, Madeline.” I had three best friends when we lived in Boston. They all had flower names: Poppy, Marigold, and Rose. This was just a coincidence. I really missed them. We used to take museum classes together every Saturday morning and meet in the playground near Poppy’s apartment in the South End on beautiful afternoons. Then I moved and they just stayed their own happy bouquet.

  Of course we pinky-swore that we would always always stay in touch and that they would come to Providence some weekend and I would visit them after ballet class sometimes but somehow, even though we were only an hour apart, none of those things really happened. Once, my mother arranged for me to call them. Poppy’s mother gathered all three of them at their apartment and put them on speakerphone but no one talked. Not even me. Another time, we met Marigold and her mother for lunch after ballet, but my mother cried and talked about her divorce and Marigold and I stared at each other. She had on lip gloss. And Uggs.

  This particular Saturday my mother was especially cranky but I asked, anyway. “Can we drive past our old apartment? Please, please, please?”

  “I thought we’d go for tea at the Ritz-Carlton,” she said.

  Tea at the Ritz-Carlton was expensive. Something seemed very suspicious. “Okay,” I said, knowing it wasn’t okay. Then I thought of something. “Is Rose going to be there?” Rose had her tenth birthday party there, a real tea party, and we got all dressed up in pretty dresses and even got manicures.

  “Rose?” my mother said, as if she had already forgotten who Rose even was. “Oh,” she said. “No.” Then she added all special-like, “Just us.” But that made me feel bad because that’s how I thought of our family without my father in it: just us.