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

by Ann Hood

  “Ah. I know it, yes. Avalanche.” She touched my hand. “So now you try for a doubleheader, ha?” She laughed and it was like she was showering me with rose petals. “I like American baseball.”

  “I think if I pray hard enough I can make something happen. I’m just not sure what. Like last night, I was thinking that maybe my parents could get back together. But that’s impossible.”

  “They divorce after the avalanche?” the nun said.

  “Yes,” I said, like something bad was caught in my throat.

  “They funny things,” the nun said. “Miracles. I no explain how your father survive avalanche or how you knew what you knew. This stays a mystery, eh? But I think miracles come from inside.” The nun tapped her chest, hard enough for the wooden rosary beads she wore to quiver. “Then you feel like Saint Madeline of Providence, even if you not official saint. Basta,” she said, slapping her hands together again. “Ciao, Santa Magdalena,” the nun whispered.

  I didn’t want her to leave. For one thing, she definitely knew more than Antoinetta, who had left out some major milestones on the road to sainthood. For another, I felt like she could look right into my heart.

  Cody started calling to me, “Come on! Come on!”

  “My brother,” I said, turning to explain to my nun. But she wasn’t there. I looked around. She wasn’t anywhere. “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello!” Cody whispered back, waving his arms like he was parking an airplane.

  When I still didn’t budge, he came running to get me.

  “Come on, already,” he said. He tugged on my arm.

  “Did you see that nun I was talking to?” I asked him.

  “All I saw was some dead saint’s ear. These relic things are gross.” I knew my mother had just taught him that word and I smiled.

  He tugged and he yanked, but I couldn’t move. It was like I was taking root, right there.

  I inhaled. “Do you smell anything?” I asked him as the faint scent of roses filled my nose.

  “Yeah,” Cody said. “I smell church.”

  Finally, all I smelled was church, too: incense and wax and stale air. My feet moved again, and I let Cody take me out of there.

  After Naples and Capri we went to the Amalfi Coast and spent two nights in Ravello and four nights in Positano. The town, with its pastel-colored houses, hung from a cliff as if it might tumble at any moment. One of my vocabulary words rose up when I saw it: precarious.

  “I hope we don’t fall into the ocean,” I told Cody when we first checked in, hoping to scare him. Now that my offical sainthood was further away than I’d thought, I could be bad again.

  “That’s silly,” Cody giggled, disappointing me.

  “Just as well that you guys are going to Rome,” Mom said, trying to cheer herself up. “Tuscany is just vineyards and beautiful landscapes. Boring for you guys. You’ll get to see the Colosseum and the Forum and the Trevi Fountain. And be sure to throw a coin in because that means you’ll go back to Rome.”

  My heart swelled. I felt it getting bigger and bigger. My father was in Italy. We were all in Italy. I let myself imagine the four of us doing Italian things—twirling spaghetti and being a family.

  “Is Daddy alone?” Cody said, narrowing his eyes. “Or with you-know-who?”

  Mom pulled Cody onto her lap and buried her nose in his hair. “With you-know-who,” she said.

  I was getting used to switching parents. It no longer felt like stones in my chest. Now it felt like small dips, like the funny lurching feeling you get right before your roller coaster car takes a hill. Of course my father would be here with Ava Pomme and Zoe. They were a family. And I would be a part of that—for a while, anyway.

  “I don’t want to go to Rome,” Cody said, and it was the first time since we got to Italy that he sounded like his whining old self. “I want to see beautiful scenery.”

  “Then look right over there,” Mom said, pointing off in the distance.

  I looked, too. It was impossible not to look. The beautiful sea glistening in the sunlight. The pastel houses. The tiled rooftops.

  “I’m hungry,” Mom said. “I think it’s time for the beach and some lunch and some shopping. What do you say?”

  My mother really was beautiful in Italy. The sunlight made her look soft and young. She’d bought a coral and turquoise necklace and she wore it every day. Against her tanned skin it seemed like an exotic and magical thing.

  Our hotel was at the end of a steep road. When we left it to go to the beach, we had to navigate crowded streets as small as alleys, too small for cars to pass. Our mother bought pottery, mugs, and platters painted with brightly colored animals. I got a bathing suit and a pair of sandals.

  Every afternoon we ate lunch at Bocca de Bucca on the beach, then we took our tatami mats and laid them on the pebbly sand. I collected sea glass. Some pieces were pottery shards, others were glass worn dull by the ocean.

  While we sat on the beach, Mom told us again how lucky we were to go to Rome instead of on to Tuscany with her. But no matter how hard she tried, I could tell she was heartbroken.

  On our last day in Positano, when we left the beach and went back to the hotel, a letter was waiting for me. I had left the addresses in Naples and Positano with Antoinetta, hoping she would find the time between Catholic day camp and babysitting her cousins to write me. I’d sent her dozens of postcards, of every church and the Blue Grotto and the piazza in Ravello. Of course I had sent postcards to everyone I could think of—Mai Mai Fan, who was in the Berkshires at some kind of genius camp; Sophie, who was on her grandparents’ own island somewhere; even Bianca Plotz at her stupid summer camp in Maine.

  Now, when the man behind the desk handed my mother the huge key with the long red tassel, he said, “And a letter for Signorina.”

  “Me?” I said, so happy I thought I might fly up the long marble stairs.

  I didn’t open it until after we got in the room and a waiter had delivered two limonatas and one Campari and soda. The three of us sat out on the balcony overlooking the houses clinging to the cliff above them, and the blue bay sparkling below.

  “It’s from Antoinetta,” I announced.

  “How nice,” Mom said sadly, sounding like she missed us already.

  The letter was written on old lady stationery, perfumed and flowery.

  “Dear Madeline,” I read out loud. “Thank you for the beautiful postcards of San Gennaro’s and all of the other churches, too. Did you see San Gennaro’s blood liquefy? You didn’t happen to mention that. I am having a nice summer. I have watched some of those old black-and-white movies you told me about and I’m sorry to say I thought they were all really boring. Sorry.”

  I stopped reading long enough to roll my eyes, then I continued. “I wanted to tell you that my miracle came true, too.” That made me stop reading out loud. I got up and walked into the room and continued to read:

  “One day when my father and I went to the cemetery to put flowers on my mother’s grave, we met a woman putting flowers on her husband’s grave, one row away. We all said hello, to be polite. But my father and this woman, Connie Pietro, started to talk. Her husband died of an aneurysm which is really terrible because one minute you’re fine and then you get a headache and boom! You’re dead. At least we had time to prepare. Not Connie. And she’s not very old either. Maybe thirty-five?

  “Anyway, that was just three weeks ago, right when you left, and you’re not going to believe it but they are getting married in September! Do you know what she said to me yesterday when we all went to Wright’s Chicken Farm to celebrate? She said, ‘Antoinetta, I hope after we get married you’ll be able to call me Mom.’ Saint Teresa heard my prayers, Madeline. I have to go and make her an offering of thanks. Maybe I’ll wait until you get back home.

  “Love from your friend,

  “Antoinetta Calabro.

  “P.S. I hope this news won’t be a disappointment to your mother?”

  “What happened?” my mother called t
o me. I walked back onto the balcony.

  “Her father’s getting married,” I said, still not quite believing it myself.

  “Who would want to marry that funny little man?” my mother said.

  “They met in the cemetery,” I explained.

  “Creepy,” Cody said. “What are they, vampires?”

  “It’s a miracle,” I said, folding up the letter and putting it back in the envelope.

  Chapter Nine

  WHAT I KNEW

  As soon as Cody and I got to Rome, I knew one thing right away: Ava Pomme wanted her family to be in Rome, not my family. In New York, we were always just passing through. But this time was different. We had big duffel bags, bulging backpacks, digital cameras. We settled in and it made Ava very unhappy. It was in the nervous way she moved around the hot, stuffy apartment, her hands fluttering oddly, her face pinched. The way she said to our father, “Why don’t you take your kids to the park?” And, “Could you talk to your daughter about cleaning up after herself?” New lines had been drawn, I thought. And then I realized that maybe they weren’t so new. Maybe I just never noticed before. Even Baby Zoe was crankier than usual, fussing all night in the stark, unfamiliar room where her crib, unlike the one she slept in back in New York, had no happy dangling creatures, no tiny Brahms lullaby playing. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Zoe began to scream, a loud, shrill scream that woke everyone.

  Ava said it had to do with learning to walk, which Zoe had done on their first day in Rome. She had stood, teetered, then, zombie-like, made her way across the floor. Day after day she’d picked up speed, and was now climbing onto chairs and beds, always seeming about to fall off at any moment. She scurried up the stairs, glancing behind her at the adults who chased after her. She stopped taking her regular morning naps and instead cried from exhaustion, falling every few steps but unwilling to stop.

  On our second day in Rome, Ava hired Carmela, the old lady who lived on the first floor, to take Cody and Zoe to the Borghese Gardens. The moment they left, Ava locked herself in the bathroom and took a really long shower. She emerged from the bathroom, her hair wet, wearing a fluffy white bathrobe that made her look fat. Even though she smiled at me, her eyes had a bruised look about them and the corners of her mouth were pulled in tight. She didn’t look very pretty lately. I thought of my mother in Positano, her coral necklace, the flowered scarf she bought that made her look like an old movie star. She had stopped using that weird hair stuff, too, and her hair had grown a tiny bit and she stuck it behind her ears, which was so much better than the electrocution look.

  Thinking of Mom made me sad. All of a sudden I felt all the sadness I should have felt when my father first moved out and Mom used to cry all the time, over the least little thing. I had a terrible memory just then, one I had tried to forget: Once, just a couple of weeks after he left, Mom decided to bake a cake. It wasn’t anybody’s birthday or anything; she just wanted to bake a cake. Baking relaxed her, she always said. But she kept messing up. She couldn’t remember whether she put in the baking powder or not. We were out of vanilla so she used almond extract instead. I sat in the kitchen watching her getting more and more upset at how she couldn’t even bake a simple cake. It was one of the things she was good at and now she couldn’t even do that. And every mistake she made started her crying again. When she took the eggs out of the fridge, she tripped over nothing at all, and dropped the whole dozen on the floor. She plopped down, right there in the middle of the kitchen, trying to pick up the long strands of yolk, the pool of goo slowly expanding, refusing to be caught. She cried, harder and harder, as she worked at those broken eggs. Now I wished I had tried to help, had done something. I thought about the way my mother felt during a hug, as if her whole body might just melt into mine. It sent a cozy warmth right through me.

  Ava was making her coffee in the press pot, thick stuff that left black grounds in the bottom of the cup.

  “Did you know that I’m the one who saved Dad?” I asked carefully.

  “Saved him?” Ava said, without looking up.

  She was too busy concentrating on getting the coffee right. Yesterday the whole thing had exploded in an eruption of boiling water and coffee grounds, spraying the floor and walls and Ava’s white robe. I could still see some faded brown stains at the hem.

  “Saved him how?” Ava said.

  “In the avalanche,” I told her. I don’t know what made me tell my miracle to Ava Pomme. But she put down the coffeepot and gave her full attention to me.

  “That avalanche?” she said. “But you were at home. You were a little girl.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” I said, irritated. “I was ten.” I added under my breath, “I wasn’t little.”

  “I just mean I don’t see how—”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  Ava hesitated. She wasn’t always sure what the right thing to do with kids was. That was one of the things that made her so appealing usually. She didn’t know you weren’t supposed to let kids stay up late or give them cappuccino, or a million other things. But all of a sudden, it seemed stupid for her to be so clueless about kids. For one thing, she had her own kid. For another, she was a grown-up.

  Ava began to heat some milk for the coffee.

  “Do you believe in miracles?” I asked her, studying Ava’s back, her slim waist under the belted robe, the shape of her rear end. When I first met her, Ava was already pregnant with Zoe, a tall skinny woman with a ridiculously big belly.

  “No,” Ava said. She put her hands on her hips and stared into the pot of milk.

  “How do you explain things like Saint Bernadette?”

  “I saw the movie,” Ava said, “but I can’t really remember.”

  “Lourdes,” I said, disgusted. Even my mother knew about these things.

  “Right,” Ava said. “All those sad people go there to drink the water—”

  “Bathe in it.”

  “Okay. Bathe in it. Then they go home and die, anyway.”

  That picture of Antoinetta’s mother flitted across my brain.

  “Well,” I said, uncertainly, “God has to agree that the person should be saved.”

  Ava laughed. “That hardly seems fair, does it?” She poured some milk into her cup, then added the coffee. When she sipped it she grimaced. “It’s so hard to find good decaf coffee here.”

  “The thing is,” I continued, “I asked God to spare my father. From that avalanche. And he did.”

  Ava studied my face harder than she ever had before. “You mean,” she said finally, “you got the news of the avalanche and began to pray? And then the next thing you heard he was saved?” I could tell that she was thinking hard, carefully choosing her words. “Because, you know, by the time you heard about the avalanche he had been saved. We just didn’t know that. The news didn’t have reports of survivors yet, only news that there had been an avalanche. So you were praying but really, he was all right.”

  I wanted to explain better, about the voice and everything, but I couldn’t. Ava’s words had taken hold of something inside of me and squeezed it hard. She had said “we didn’t know.” But my father hadn’t even known Ava yet. My family was the “we” then and Ava Pomme was not part of our family. All of that came after. After the avalanche, after he got back home. Then the arguments began and the word divorce floated around our house like a bad spirit. But now, I wasn’t sure.

  “Madeline?” Ava was saying. “Do you see what I mean?”

  “I think so,” I said softly, trying to put everything in the right order. If my father already knew Ava, maybe even knew her back when I had danced in The Nutcracker, then I had saved him only to have him leave all of us and go to Ava Pomme. The Ouija board’s warning came back to me: Beware M. Antoinetta had told me it was a sin to consult Ouija boards, tarot cards, or phone-in psychics. I didn’t want to sin, but that Ouija board had sent me a warning. Maybe it was a warning about Ava Pomme.

  “Now if you had prayed before the avalanche and then he
lived, that would be different,” Ava was saying, “but why would you do that?”

  “But that’s just it!” I blurted, forgetting for a moment what I was considering. “I didn’t know about the avalanche. I got a message or something. A premonition, maybe, that Daddy was in trouble. And I ran to the church and I prayed and I prayed and when I got back, he was saved.”

  Ava stood, walked over to the sink, and emptied her coffee into it. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” she said.

  “Ava?” I said, taking a step closer to my stepmother. Funny, I hardly ever thought of Ava as that: stepmother. The word conjured toothless witches, people with bad intentions.

  Ava sighed, bored with this conversation, or with me. It wouldn’t be the first time. She often got impatient, like when I told a joke too many times or didn’t understand something and asked for an explanation. For a mother, she sure didn’t have any patience. With a sharp pang, I remembered how long my real mother spent teaching me to tie my shoes, to write my name. M is for mountain, she had taught me, and it looks like a mountain.

  I was thinking all these mixed-up things and staring at Ava Pomme. Something flickered in her eyes, then went out. Just a brief shadow, but I saw it. Right then, I realized that if I was right, if I had figured this out, then so had my mother, probably a long time ago, back when it all first happened. And for two whole years my mother had let me hate her rather than telling me the truth and letting me hate my father. My mother had faith in us, and faith protected us from the truth. Somehow we would come back to her eventually.

  The largeness of my mother’s love made me breathless. I thought of that list she had made. The first thing she’d been grateful for was us: The kids, of course. Ava Pomme would never put me on a list of things to be grateful for, I was certain.

  “Ava?” I said again.

  “Hmmm?” Ava said, distracted, and trying once again to make a pot of coffee. I got the clear impression that a good cup of coffee was a lot more important than I was.