How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (3 page)

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 miracles! Who knows? Maybe I can even perform a miracle that will fix everything. Saints do things like that, every day.

A
FTER 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.

We drove through the streets of beautiful Boston and I tried to memorize all the buildings, like the old State House, so that when I got home I could play them back in my mind.

“They moved,” my mother said suddenly.

“Who?”

“The Palmers. Rose's family. They moved to Cleveland. We got a card at Christmas.”

Then I got really mad because she hadn't even bothered to tell me. “Cleveland?” I said. If it wasn't a state capital, I didn't necessarily know which state something was in.

“Cleveland. Ohio,” she said.

“Capital, Columbus,” I said, satisfied. I wondered how Poppy and Marigold were managing now, and smiled, relieved,
I guess, that someone else in the world might be unhappy like me.

My mother was pulling up in front of the Ritz-Carlton, and letting the valet take our car. This was all feeling like a celebration, but my mother looked really glum. Her jaw was set kind of weird and she kept avoiding eye contact with me. Always a bad sign. Inside, we sat in the beautiful dining room and the waiters in their tuxedos treated us like movie stars. It was the first time I'd ever been there when they didn't bring me a coloring book and crayons, which meant I looked mature and sophisticated. Ballerinas can extend their necks and hold their chins just so for effect. I did this, imagining Madame instructing me: “Reach, Madeline. Reach!”

“What's wrong with your neck?” my mother said.

She really didn't know anything about anything. I wondered how, just a few short months ago, I used to think she was smart. Outside the window was the Boston Common and the Public Gardens, and I looked at them instead of her, stretching my neck. Reaching, reaching.

“Did you twist it or something in class?” she said, and I chose to ignore her.

I ordered Lapsang tea because the name was lyrical (new vocabulary word, number 100), and I filled my plate with all the miniature cakes and things, but my mother, who ordered Earl Grey, the most boring tea ever, just sat there.

When my mouth was full of scone, she said, “Well, Madeline, the thing is…”

Then she stopped talking and I stopped chewing and then she said, “Have you ever heard of the Providence Ballet Company? The ones who do
The Nutcracker
every year in Providence? In a college auditorium?”

I kept chewing, worried.

“Well,” she said, “actually, I spoke to the teacher you would have there, Misty Glenn? And she said that they might be able to use a real theater this year.”

“The teacher I would have?” I said. My scone had turned all dry in my mouth and I considered spitting it out. But you just don't spit out scones at the Ritz-Carlton. It isn't ballerina-like. It isn't even saintlike.

“Oh, Madeline,” she said, and her face crumpled the way it did right before she started to cry. “I just can't do it anymore.”

“Do what?” I said. I glanced around to make sure no one was watching her. But the room was full of a bunch of old ladies in wool suits and gray buns, sipping and staring at nothing at all.

“Ever since your father left, I am having organizational problems,” she said. She made a weird face, trying not to cry.

“Okay,” I said.

“This drive into Boston every Saturday is too much. The traffic, the time, finding someone to watch Cody, Cody crying because he doesn't want me to leave him, the cost of this class over one that's literally right down the street from home—”

My face didn't crumple. I didn't twist it all funny. I just cried. Hard. My mother had already driven my father away, and now she was taking the one thing that mattered the most in the world to me. Maybe God was testing me or something. Aren't saints supposed to be tested? But this was too much. She was telling me how I would be in the advanced class with Misty Glenn. She was telling me that soon they were having auditions for a ballet set to Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
and
I could try out. But all I could do was sit there and cry and hate her even more.

Then, the next week, she gave me more bad news.

“It's going to be the trip of a lifetime,” my mother said. Of course I didn't believe her. She was an expert on exactly nothing. Unless you counted messing up lives.
That
she was excellent at. For starters, I now took ballet lessons with a woman who looked like a cheerleader and chewed gum while she showed us what to do. Also, her cell phone always rang during class and her ring tone was the theme from
The Addams Family
TV show.

I watched my mother lay a bunch of maps and guidebooks on the kitchen table.

“Naples,” she said, opening one of the books to a picture of happy people eating pizza at an outdoor café. “Florence,” she said, opening a different book and pointing to an enormous statue of a naked man. “This,” she said, “is Michelangelo's
David
.”

“Who cares?” I said, and made myself yawn.

“Imagine it,” she said. “Pompeii! Pizza! Italy! I can't say enough about Italy!”

My mother has the plainest face in the world. Her eyes are brown, her hair is brown. All ordinary. She likes to remind me that when I was little I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Last time she said that, I told her, “Oh, really? Well, I also thought Mount Rushmore got that way naturally. So I guess I made a lot of mistakes.” This was called a
zinger
, and Sophie and I practiced them sometimes after school if she had nothing better to do. Zingers are mean. Lately, sometimes I get a strong urge to be mean to my mother.

“What do you think?” she said now in her best upbeat voice.

“I think you should wear lipstick every day,” I said. That was not a zinger. That was sarcasm, which is even harder.

“Thank you for the beauty advice, Madeline,” she said. She didn't sound upbeat anymore. I smiled at her and she smiled back, both of us sarcastic. “Now tell me what you think about our trip to Italy.”

I said, “I don't want to go.”

Outside, it was still winter, a rainy gray winter. The streets of Providence were like an obstacle course of puddles and slush and old snow that had gone dirty and hard.

“Of course you want to go to Italy,” my mother said. “Everybody wants to go to Italy. It's something people want.”

“Well, I want to go to New York City and spend the summer with Daddy.
He
said he'll take me to the ballet.
He
said he'll take me to Queens where there's a painting of a saint that weeps. Real tears,” I added because I could read my mother's mind and knew she was thinking it was a hoax.

Then, to be good and rude, I opened up the book
The Song of Bernadette
about how a peasant girl in France saw the Virgin Mary and got all of these orders from her, like to build a church in a particular place and have sick people come and bathe in water from the spring. Bernadette became a saint. I was keeping a list of what I had in common with other saints, and number one on my list was that I was a peasant, too. It looked like rich people never got to be saints, so that eliminated Sophie.

“Besides,” I said to my mother, “I thought we didn't have any money. I thought we were peasants. How can a bunch of peasants afford to go to Italy?” We had read about peasants in school, too. Peasants tilled the land, we learned. They were poor, but they were good, hardworking people.

“Peasants!” my mother shrieked.

“Peasants helped people,” I told her. “In World War Two. It's nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“What has gotten into you?” she mumbled under her breath.

I knew what she was thinking. She talked about it with Mrs. Harrison all the time.

They were embarrassing, those talks. And she and Mrs. Harrison had them right in front of me, as if I were invisible. “It's those teen years I read about when she was tiny,” my mother said. “They seemed so far away, so unlikely then.” Just yesterday, when Mrs. Harrison came to pick me up for school and I refused to wear the silly, bright yellow slicker and matching boots my mother had bought me as if I were a baby duckling instead of a twelve-year-old—a miracle worker, a soon-to-be saint—she shouted from the porch to Mrs. Harrison, “She still wears flowered underpants but
these
are too babyish.” So now the whole world knows about my underpants. Mrs. Harrison gave my mother a big sympathetic look. Then when I got in her ridiculously humongous SUV she said, “Madeline, why can't you try to help your mother?”

I watched over the top of
The Song of Bernadette
while my mother sat staring at all her stupid books and maps. My father never uses guidebooks. He just goes places. He explores. He has adventures. Even in the days when they were married and supposedly happy, they would argue over traveling techniques, my mother reading from a guidebook and my father ignoring her.

“Trust me on this, Madeline,” she said suddenly, brightly, in a way that made me immediately suspicious. “You are going to love this trip. We'll go to Italy and you can go to churches where there are saints' actual bodies right there.”

“Like who?” I said.

“Saint Agatha,” my mother said.

“Saint Agatha?”

“Only thirteen years old and the emperor made her stand naked in public because she rejected some guy's advances. So she's standing there naked and miraculously her hair starts to grow. And it grows and grows until it covers her nakedness completely.”

I considered this.

“Well,” I said, turning back to my book. “That might be interesting.”

What else might be interesting came to me then, too. If I went to Rome, then I could go talk to the Pope. I didn't want to sound too excited so I said, “I'll think about it.”

“Oh, yes,” my mother said, oh so smug, “there are so many saints in Italy. Catherine of Siena, Saint Claire, Saint Francis, Saint—”

“I get it, okay?” I said. But I was, I admit, tingling with excitement.

Of course, divorce changes a lot of things. For example, all of the stuff I was worried about while I prayed in church the day of the avalanche wound up happening anyway. My dad was okay, but no more ginger scones on the way to school. No more slow dancing in the kitchen. In Humanities class we learned about point of view. This is the way a writer tells a story. A point of view is very specific, and changes the way the character sees the world. Well, from my point of view my mother kept getting worse and worse. It wasn't just the way she cried all the time, or made stupid decisions, or lost things, or even the way she stopped looking pretty. But she started to seem foolish. Her job seemed foolish. Her hair
seemed foolish. The things she said seemed foolish. From my point of view, my mother was foolish.

Once, a few months after my father moved out, I found a list she had made. She was seeing a therapist with the unbelievable name of Doctor Sane. Doctor Sane always had her do things like draw animals to represent her emotions and make memory boxes and other completely idiotic tasks. This one, written in my mother's excellent penmanship instead of on the computer, said at the top:

The good things in my life:

1. The kids, of course.

2. The house. Its wainscoting in every room. Its claw-foot tubs. The butler's bell that still works. The only slightly chipped stained glass window in the front foyer. The maze of crooked stairs and multiple stairways that lead to each floor. The nicotiana that blooms beside the front porch and fills the evening air with its sweet smell. My bookshelf-lined office. The screened-in porch that inexplicably juts from that office, even though it's on the second floor. The house is the kind of house I imagined myself in as a child growing up
in a split ranch in Indiana. Of course, I also imagined a husband but I won't go there.