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

by Ann Hood

  “Sure,” I whispered.

  I had never known anyone whose mother was actually dead. At my old school, there was a girl whose mother had died a long time ago but she had a stepmother and didn’t seem very tragic. But Antoinetta was different, I could tell. We walked through the living room—more plastic-covered furniture and another saint statue—I didn’t recognize this one but I could see it had been broken and glued back together. There were thin lines all over it, like veins.

  In her bedroom, Antoinetta handed me a picture from her bureau. The woman had curly hair like Antoinetta’s, and full lips with red lipstick. She was sexy and pretty and full of life. I shivered.

  “Wow,” I said, still whispering.

  Antoinetta took back the picture, but instead of putting it down she studied it, too. “She was sick forever. Practically my whole life she was sick. I don’t remember her doing very much. My sister does.”

  She put the picture down and added, “She’s older.”

  “I’m going to Italy,” I said.

  “To San Giovanni Rotundo?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. My mother’s planning the trip.” Immediately, I felt bad for saying that. How thoughtless to mention an alive mother to Antoinetta. “She’s divorced,” I said, hoping that made up for the other remark.

  Antoinetta was frowning. “Aren’t you Catholic?”

  “Sort of. I mean, I am but she’s not.”

  “The Pope doesn’t let people get divorced,” Antoinetta said, still frowning. “It’s a sin.”

  “She’s Unitarian,” I said.

  “What’s that? Protestant?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I was afraid if I said the wrong thing Antoinetta wouldn’t be my friend. “It’s kind of its own thing.”

  “So who’s sick?”

  “Huh?”

  “You go to San Giovanni Rotundo for a miracle. Don’t you know?”

  I shook my head.

  Antoinetta sighed, frustrated. “Padre Pio was this priest who could heal people. In Italy. Like if your mother or somebody was sick right here he could come to her bedside even though he was saying a mass in Italy at the very same time. He could be in two places at once. If you go there, there’s a whole chapel with the crutches and braces and things from people he healed. And letters from people. I don’t know why he couldn’t heal my mother.”

  “Did you meet him?”

  Antoinetta laughed. “He’s dead, silly. You pray for him to intercede on your behalf. You know, ask God for the favor. My grandmother said that God wanted my mother with him. So he refused Padre Pio’s request.”

  I considered this possibility.

  Then Antoinetta spoke in a low voice. “They called us up and told us to come to the hospital. It was only four o’clock in the morning and my father took us in our pajamas and we got there in time to hear the priest give her the Sacrament of the Sick and then just sat there waiting for the miracle to happen, you know? That whole time she would only take a breath every minute or so. I was holding my breath until she took her next one. And then, she just didn’t take another one. It was 5:03. I looked at the clock. Everybody started screaming and my father cursed the Virgin Mary and Padre Pio and the doctors. Because we’d gone all that way. For a miracle, you know?”

  I nodded, remembering my own miracle, how I saved my father from the avalanche. This wasn’t the time to tell Antoinetta. But I would. Antoinetta was the one person who could understand.

  “My mother’s patron saint was Saint Clare. She was named for her. When we got home from the hospital, my father picked up my mother’s statue of Saint Clare, the one the bishop blessed, and he threw it against the wall. My uncle Joe glued it back together.”

  “Saint Clare,” I said. “She’s the patron saint of television.”

  Antoinetta smiled at me. “Want to play saints? You pick one to be and I’ll pick one and we’ll pretend we’re dying?”

  My heart soared. “Yes,” I said.

  Chapter Five

  ALL THE MISTAKES

  Thanks to my father’s divine intervention, I auditioned for the junior company of the Boston Ballet. If I got picked, I would take the bus into Boston twice a week for class, starting in September. My feet hurt from my toe shoes and my neck hurt from stretching so much. In other words, I felt great. Each of us waited in a big room, and they called our names one by one. When it was my turn, I stood all alone up on the stage and official people with notepads out in the audience asked me to do this or that. Jeté! Arabesque! Jumps in first position! In fifth! Switch! Switch! I had a good audition. I knew it. When I walked off the stage, one of the women shouted, “Thanks, Madeline! You’ll be hearing from us!” in a way that made me think: I got it!

  But when I went out to the waiting room where all the mothers were sitting, I acted very cool. I saw them trying to read my face, but I wanted to seem mysterious. I mean, would Marie Taglioni rush out after an audition and start bragging and gushing? No. She would have good posture. She would nod. She would leave.

  “Well?” my mother whispered as I gathered up my things. When I didn’t answer, she said, “Madeline? I’m dying here.” That made me smile.

  I almost took her hand while we rushed down the long corridor and then the stairs that led us outside. But I didn’t want to be seen, a future ballerina with the junior company of the Boston Ballet, holding hands with my mother. So I just made a face that said: I think I got it! And in that instant, when her eyes lit up with something like pride, I almost loved her with the same intensity I used to before the divorce.

  Once we got outside, though, and the car cost a zillion dollars to park in the garage and the traffic was thick and cars cut us off and honked their horns, I went back to being annoyed with her. I knew better than to distract her, even about this, when she was driving in Boston traffic.

  So I put in my new favorite tape. Nuns singing Renaissance music.

  “Do we have to listen to this now?” my mother said. She gripped the steering wheel hard enough that her knuckles got white and bony. “Can’t we listen to whoever kids are really listening to these days?”

  “I like nuns,” I said. I wanted her to get us out of the traffic and concentrate on my audition even more, so I just listened to the nuns and thought about when we all lived in Boston and were happy. I thought about my Montessori School and how there were no grades and kids were put together by what they knew and what they liked. I was in the Ocean group. We read stories about the sea and kept a tank of saltwater tropical fish and learned about underwater life. Where were they now, the Ocean group? I wondered. I tried to remember their faces, the kid with the freckles, the kid from Germany, the boy who said he wanted to marry me. And my three friends with the beautiful flower names.

  I sighed, homesick for our old life, the way we would cook spaghetti together and my father would make one of his super-duper salads and play opera and we would all sing together real loud. Sometimes I had dreams where I was in that apartment and someone was singing “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Carmen but it wasn’t my mother singing and it wasn’t my father; in fact, I couldn’t find either of them and I couldn’t find my way, either. I hated that dream.

  “At last,” my mother said, relaxing. “Okay. Tell me about it. Every detail.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about the audition anymore. Instead, I was thinking about the Calabros and how they’d invited me over for Easter breakfast. Bring your mother, they’d said.

  “Want to go somewhere with me?” I said, surprising myself because the last thing I wanted was to share the Calabros with my mother. But thinking about our old life had made me forget for a minute how much I didn’t like her anymore.

  “It depends,” she said.

  “Can’t you just say yes? I mean it’s a thing I want you to do and right away you have to have all these conditions.”

  “All right. I’ll do it. But can’t I even ask what it is?”

  I was already sorry I’d invited her. I tried
to think of a lie, to make up something like the school carnival or something. But that might be a sin. It was so hard to be Catholic.

  “This is a mistake,” I said. Our life seemed to be gathering mistakes at a surprising speed.

  “Come on,” my mother said.

  “I have this new friend,” I said reluctantly. I saw it already, a new mistake coming. “Antoinetta.”

  “Antoinetta?”

  “Antoinetta,” I said, clenching my teeth. “And her family invited us for Easter breakfast.”

  “All of us?”

  I frowned. “Not your boyfriend. Us. Our family.”

  “I was thinking of Cody,” my mother said gently.

  I thought of all the kids that roamed around the Calabro house every Sunday, the little ones eating meatballs and the fat babies and then the middle ones, girls who chewed gum and braided one another’s hair and put on temporary tattoos.

  “Cody can come,” I said.

  “Should I call her mother and ask her what I can bring?”

  “Her mother’s dead,” I said proudly.

  “Well, isn’t that sad,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, but thinking about the Calabros, I didn’t feel sad at all. Instead, I felt part of something I hadn’t felt part of for a long time: a family.

  Right away I saw it had been a mistake to bring my mother. For one thing, she wore a suit, the kind of thing she wore to meetings with editors. For another, she had brought asparagus with toasted sesame oil. I looked at her standing there in her business clothes, holding the pottery dish with the scrawny asparagus in it, and I wanted to disappear. Better yet, I wanted her to disappear.

  But Mama Angie, Antoinetta’s grandmother, came over and took the dish. She smelled it, then said to my mother, “You’re Dutch, right?”

  “No. No. I’m just American, I guess.”

  “Indians?”

  “I’m nothing,” my mother said, laughing.

  “Huh,” Mama Angie said, and she put the asparagus in the refrigerator.

  I brought my mother and Cody into the kitchen and introduced them to all the aunts and uncles, and to Antoinetta’s father, and to Antoinetta herself. She was wearing a yellow ruffly dress. Antoinetta dressed pretty badly, but I didn’t care. She went to Catholic school and wore a blue plaid jumper or a skirt with a white blouse, a navy cardigan, and either navy kneesocks or tights every day. She didn’t have to think about clothes. She could use her brain cells to think about religion, about saints and things.

  Cody was with the little kids. Mama Angie had made him a little loaf of sweetbread, like she did for her own grandchildren, in the shape of a cross. Smack in the middle was a boiled egg. One of the aunts—Carla? Fanny? I still couldn’t keep them straight—was showing my mother the special Easter breakfast foods: the homemade cheese and the frittata, which was like an omelette, and the pastera, which was a rice pie.

  “This is so interesting,” my mother was saying. “Did you know I have a cooking column? And my project now is ethnic food.”

  “Yeah? Who do you write that for? Good Housekeeping?”

  “No—”

  “Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  “No. It’s a magazine called Family.”

  “I never heard of it,” the aunt said, and went back to layering a lasagna.

  Mostly, during breakfast, I was miserable. My mother kept embarrassing me. It was like she was incapable of doing or saying anything right these days. Who cared about her stupid column? Worst of all, she didn’t even realize how she was coming across.

  Now she was asking Aunt Mary how they made the pastera. “We don’t tell strangers our recipes,” Aunt Mary said coldly. I couldn’t believe what was happening.

  Then she went over to Antoinetta’s father and asked him stupid questions about being a barber, and when he answered them she gushed, “How interesting!”

  She even tried to explain Unitarianism to two of the uncles.

  “You got the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You understanding what I am saying?” Uncle Al said.

  “Well, yes,” my mother said. “But—”

  “There is no but,” he said. “That’s what you got.”

  Then, Mama Angie, all four foot ten of her, climbed onto the kitchen table. She took a bottle of holy water from her apron pocket and sprayed it over all our heads, saying something in Italian.

  Still on the table, she called to me, “You staying for lunch? We got lasagna.”

  I felt so proud, being singled out like that by Mama Angie, but my mother had to open her big mouth. “We couldn’t possibly eat one more thing. But thank you.”

  Antoinetta pulled me into the hallway while my mother went around shaking everyone’s hand like she had just gotten a new magazine assignment.

  “I had the most incredible idea,” Antoinetta said. “Wouldn’t it be great if my father fell in love with your mother?”

  I almost laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with my father?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that what would he ever see in my mother?”

  Antoinetta looked at me, shocked. “But she’s so beautiful,” she said.

  I watched my mother coming toward us, holding Cody’s hand in one hand and the dish with the asparagus in the other. No one had even tried it.

  “She is?” I said, seeing nothing but a person who messed up everything she touched.

  In the car on the way home Mom said, “How do you know this girl?”

  “Church,” I said.

  “What church?”

  I shrugged.

  Then Cody, who had eaten his entire miniature loaf of bread, pizza, two slices of pastera, canned pineapple, and ham, said he was carsick.

  “It was a mistake to let you eat so much strange food,” my mother, the expert on ethnic cuisine, said, swerving into the breakdown lane.

  She took Cody out of the car and stood way over near the scrub that grew by the road. I watched them, Cody’s face with its greenish cast, my mother in her silly business suit.

  She saw me looking and waved like an idiot.

  “We’re okay!” she shouted.

  “No, we’re not,” I said to myself.

  Chapter Six

  BETRAYALS

  Even though my house and my mother and my little brother were the biggest embarrassments in my life, I invited Antoinetta to sleep over on a Saturday night. I had to.

  For one thing, my mother didn’t like that I was always at Antoinetta’s house. “Don’t girls take turns hosting each other?” she said, which made her sound like Martha Stewart. For another thing, even though I went to her house every Sunday after church, her father didn’t allow sleepovers there. “Strangers in our house at night make him uncomfortable,” Antoinetta explained, which insulted me. After all, I wasn’t exactly a stranger. When I said that to Antoinetta she got all defensive. “He’s suspicious of things like that,” she said. “That’s all.” So if I was going to get Antoinetta to myself for a whole night it had to be in my awful house with my awful family. That definitely went on my merit list for sainthood.

  It took weeks to convince her father that this was a good idea. He asked her questions like: “What will you eat over there?” and “What do these people want from you?” After the asparagus incident I could understand the food question. But I was beginning to think that maybe Antoinetta’s father was paranoid, which meant he believed everybody was after him—that was a bonus vocabulary word and I got it right.

  By the time he gave her permission, I was deep into rehearsals for that ballet set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. This was for Misty Glenn. And I got the lead in “Spring,” even with my so-called chicken arms. It required great concentration and practice. Also, I had just started dancing in toe shoes and my feet killed me. When I took off my toe shoes my big toes were all bloody. I liked to come home and soak my feet. I even let my mother wrap my toes in soft gauze, which made me feel good. She was so gen
tle and nice when she did it, and all the while I thought of the pain I was enduring and how good that was for my pending sainthood, too.

  So even though it was the most inconvenient time in the world for me to have someone sleep over, since that someone was Antoinetta, I got all excited. At rehearsal, the choreographer, a man named Randy, told me I was not concentrating hard enough. I missed my cue twice and I did a sloppy arabesque. My jumps, he said, gave him indigestion. Randy spoke with a mysterious accent, and Demi Demilakis, who got the lead in “Winter,” said that she’d heard he was from Transylvania. This sounded both scary and exciting to me.

  Before I could leave, Randy stopped me at the door. “It is Spring,” he said, frowning. “You must think light! Think airy! You must think!”

  I stood there, clutching my ballet bag, my toes aching like crazy. I concentrated on my costume, all sparkling green and glittery in its plastic wrap, in my other hand. I wished I could explain everything to him. I wondered where Transylvania was, and decided it must be in Russia. Then I wondered if there were any Russian saints. The only thing I knew about Russia was from seeing half of Doctor Zhivago, which was probably the most boring movie ever made. My mother cried through the whole thing and made terrible soup called borscht for dinner afterward. Borscht is beets, which are the worst vegetables, worse even than cauliflower.

  “Madeline?” Randy said. He rapped my head with his knuckles, hard. “What is going on in there?”

  I shrugged, thinking that maybe all Russians were saints—all the snow, all those beets. They endured an awful lot. I wondered if I had a crush on Randy, with his sunken eyes and Gumby body and his weird accent.

  “Is Transylvania in Russia?” I asked him.

  “I have no idea,” he said, clearly disgusted with me.

  When my mother and I got home, Antoinetta and her father were already there, an hour early, sitting in their car.

  “Is that them?” my mother said, sounding distressed. “Already?”

  Limping, I followed her to their car.

  “Hello,” she said in her fakest voice. “Would you like to come in?”