How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (5 page)

Another bad habit of my mother's was to tell and retell the same old story to anyone who would listen. Mrs. Harrison had probably heard it all a million times by now, how the winter before the divorce my father went to Idaho on an
assignment about helicopter skiing. They had just bought the house, and the article would earn them enough money to pay for the renovations. The avalanche happened and everyone except Dad and a dentist from Chicago was killed. My father turned his article into a bestselling book called
Avalanche: Skiing Toward Disaster
, moved to New York City, married Ava Pomme, and had a new baby.

For a while, we couldn't even turn on the television without seeing Dad and Ava. He told his harrowing tale on the
Today
show and
Oprah
, and Ava stood teary-eyed and lovingly beside him. “As if she had been the one waiting for the calls from the Sun Valley Hospital to see if he was all right,” my mother said in the same old story. “As if she was the one who waited for him at Logan Airport when he returned, the one who stayed up with him at night, waiting for him to talk about what he had lived through.” Oprah had turned her moist eyes on Ava and said, right on national television, “This must be so hard for you to hear,” and Ava Pomme, the Tart Lady, had nodded, had dabbed at her eyes with a linen handkerchief, had put her hand over his—“Possessively!” my mother added dramatically, pathetically, endlessly—while we all sat, miserable and abandoned, in our unrenovated house.

The thing is, while we watched him on television last year, we were all miserable for separate reasons. I liked seeing my father on famous television shows with a glamorous woman and I felt miserable that instead of waiting in the Green Room with movie stars I was sitting with a mother who screamed and threw shoes and Legos at the TV set. I asked Dad if I could go with him when he taped one of these shows, but he said my mother needed me more.

By the time the trip of a lifetime negotiations began, Zoe was born and a whole year had gone by. Even though he wasn't on TV so much anymore, his cell phone was always ringing and he was always e-mailing editors from his BlackBerry. He was famous. He was in demand. And even though I missed him like crazy, from my point of view, my father was anything but foolish.

I almost forgot I was listening in on their phone conversation. Then I heard my father saying, “First of all, Madeline doesn't even want to go.”

“You mean second of all,” Mom said.

“What?”

“First of all was I hadn't asked your permission,” she said. “Second of all, Madeline doesn't want to go. And I
can save you third of all because Cody doesn't want to go, either.”

“So you go and the kids will spend the summer here with us.”

I held my breath. It was only three in the afternoon, but already the sky was dark, threatening still more of the cold rain that had marked most of January. In New York City, gray skies looked romantic. Here, they only looked dull.

“You know,” Mom said, “I started to build a playhouse for the kids last fall. I thought I could finish it, but it was harder than I expected. I had to keep redoing it.”

“Alice,” Dad said, and I could hear the dread in his voice. My mother could very quickly deteriorate into an ex-wife from soap operas, all tears and accusations. “Don't.”

“What I am trying to say is, I make plans and I work on them until I get them right.”

“Okay,” he said carefully.

“And I'm planning this trip and we're all going. All three of us. You can see them before and you can see them after. But for one month this summer those kids are mine.”

Silence. Silence for so long that I had to check to make
sure we were all still connected. We were. New York City in summer, I knew, was hot and humid and the subway smelled like pee. But I didn't care. When you are part of a family, things like that don't really matter. Just when I started imagining it, how I could forget about my mother and Cody and disappear into my father's family, into New York City, my father spoke. His voice cutting into my daydream startled me so much, I almost screamed.

“This is an ongoing dialogue,” he said. “The trip, the details, all of it.”

“We leave June twentieth,” my mother said, and let the date sit there between them, stretching across Connecticut right into my father's loft in Tribeca. She waited, then said in a dewy voice, a voice I'd come to hate because it was supposed to make everybody pity her, “I guess that date doesn't mean a thing to you anymore.”

June twentieth would have been their fifteenth wedding anniversary.
I
still remembered that date, so I knew he had to remember it, too, the way my mother would get all dressed up fancy and spray on too much Chanel Number 5. She'd wear lipstick, too, and mascara. Ava Pomme wore
those things all the time, but my mother never did. Except on their anniversary. She'd let me take a pair of new stockings out of the funny silver plastic egg they came in and unroll them for her. We'd wait by the door for my father to come in and act like he'd forgotten. “Oh,” he'd say, “is dinner formal tonight?” Until finally he'd produce a dozen long-stem roses and they would kiss all romantic like two people in love.

My throat started to get funny. It's weird when your parents aren't in love anymore. It doesn't make sense. “It's complicated,” both of them say whenever I ask them about this. For my whole life, until the divorce, almost nothing was complicated. Now everything was.

“Does it mean anything, Scott?” Mom asked, her voice all soft.

Some teeny part of me thought that maybe that question would change everything. Of course Dad remembered that he was the guy in that wedding picture with Mom, the one with the goofy grin on his face and the slightly crooked bow tie. He was the one who wrote their wedding vows and had them printed all fancy and framed. He was the one who hung those vows in their bedroom, right above their bed.

I wanted to yell into the phone, “Of course you remember, Dad!”

But instead, I turned off the speakerphone. I didn't want to hear his answer. In some ways, even though I hated to admit it, my mother and I were actually a lot alike.

“
W
hen people die,” Cody said, “they disappear.”

Our mother concentrated on her own reflection in the mirror, putting on a color of lipstick called Walnut Stain. It sounded like something you used on a piece of furniture getting refinished. She'd dragged us to Nordstrom earlier, where we had to watch her wander around in the makeup department like a zombie. She did fine at the local supermarket. But put her in a place where they sold something other than food and she couldn't handle it.

“But when they faint,” Cody continued, “they only half disappear.”

“Not exactly,” she said.

She put her finger in her mouth, puckered her lips, then pulled her finger out of the tight
O
of her mouth. This is how you kept lipstick from getting on your teeth, she had explained to me after the woman at Nordstrom had explained it to her. I filed that away for future use.

As if he hadn't heard her, Cody said, “But what happens when a person gets divorced? They're not exactly disappeared, but you can't exactly see them, either.”

“Don't stand on the tub,” she said, frowning.

“When a person gets divorced,” Cody said, “do they get like sort of frozen?”

Our mother turned around and lifted him off the edge of the tub, where he stood gripping the shower curtain, an old plastic thing covered with black-and-white images of movie stars from the 1940s. Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. Our father had picked it out. We used to watch
Classic Theater
every Friday night on Channel 36. This was before Cody was born. The three of us used to scrunch together on our old sofa, the one the color of eggplants, and share a bowl of popcorn that Dad had made on the stove, not in the microwave, with freshly grated parmesan cheese on top. He could name any movie and who starred in
it without even thinking very hard. On the other hand, our mother always got Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio mixed up. Never mind
old
movie stars.

“Tomorrow we're getting a new shower curtain,” she mumbled, more to herself than to Cody, who now stood before her, gazing up into her face.

“No!” he said, horrified. “I love this one! It has all these people's faces on it. This lady and this guy,” he added, jabbing at Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Poor Cody! By the time he was old enough to watch old black-and-white movies with us, there was no more us.

She kneeled down in front of Cody.

“I'm divorced and I haven't disappeared, have I?” she said softly.

He frowned, trying unsuccessfully to wrap a piece of her hair around his finger. He used to fall asleep that way, curling a strand of her hair around his finger and tugging on it gently. But after the divorce Mom had cut her hair shorter and shorter, first in a chin-length bob, then having the back as short as a boy's but with the front still long enough to tuck behind her ears, and now all of it
in short layers. I hated it. She didn't even look like herself anymore.

“You haven't disappeared but like right now you're going away,” Cody said.

“Not away,” she corrected. “Just out. For a few hours.”

“With a man who isn't Daddy because Daddy is in New York, frozen.”

“That's so stupid,” I said, breaking my own ten-minute-old decision to not talk to either of these people. “Do you really think that Daddy just sits around while we're here? He has a life, you know.”

Even as I said it, I was wondering if my father and Ava and Baby Zoe were scrunched together on their couch watching old movies and eating popcorn made on top of the stove and sprinkled with parmesan cheese.

“He's busy with his assignments,” I said, because I had to say something or else I might start to cry. I didn't like thinking about Dad doing all those family things without me. “He's flying around the world and writing about important things that really matter to the planet—and humanity.”

I glanced at my mother. Surely even she knew that column of hers was stupid, a waste of time to write and to read. Surely she knew that my father did something worthwhile with his lengthy articles about rain forest destruction and the commercialization of the environment. On my bedroom wall, nestled between a shrine to Saint Teresa and another to Mary Magdalene, my own patron saint, I hung the cover of the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
with his article about the death of Yellowstone from over-tourism, framed and even autographed. The father of a saint should be doing good for the world.

“Oh, yeah?” Cody said, close to tears. “Well, I think what he writes about is stupid and I wish he had disappeared in that dumb avalanche. I really do.”

“Oh, honey, I know you're mad at him but you don't wish that. You love Daddy,” Mom said.

“No, I don't!” Cody yelled, and he ran from the bathroom and up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door loud.

“I hope you're happy now, Madeline,” my mother said, following Cody.

“Have a nice date,” I said, in a fake sweet voice.

Her date was a man who made expensive drinking glasses.
A glass sculptor, he called himself. His name was Jamie and he had silver hair that was way too long, hanging almost to his collarbone in dramatic waves. It was their third date. To me, his glasses looked warped, the way the windows on our house looked. They were rimmed in vivid colors and sat on different colored stems. On their first date, he had brought my mother two champagne glasses; one was deep orange and ruby, the other emerald green and cerulean. That's what
he
called the colors. To me, they seemed like ordinary colors.

“The idea of it! Melting glass!” my mother had gushed, grinning all stupid while I thought about how ugly those glasses were. “Once,” she had babbled, “my ex-husband and I visited the Big Island of Hawaii and hiked through Volcano National Park to watch hot lava flow out of the volcano and into the ocean below. Of course, I realize now that one of the things fundamentally wrong with our marriage was that Scott enjoys such things: trekking in Nepal, rock climbing in the West, scuba diving, while I don't like any of it.”

Even though it was true, I couldn't believe she was spilling all of this personal stuff before they'd even left the house. Although my mother could ski, she avoided expert trails and stuck to bunny slopes. She did not like to swim to points
too distant from the shore or venture any place too high above the ground. Like Cody, she was afraid of most things. I had thought for sure this guy wouldn't stick around. But now they were going on their third date. Maybe he was even going to be my mother's boyfriend.

When Mom returned to the bathroom, I was practicing putting on mascara. Every time the wand came near my eyes, I blinked them shut or poked myself so that now I had eyes like a raccoon with black mascara circles around them. “Who could kiss a guy with long stupid hair like that?” I asked

“Do you have a comment about every single thing?” Mom said. She was doing something weird with her hair, plopping globs of wax on it and making it stick up all over her head. She looked like someone who had been electrocuted. Ava used rosemary mint shampoo that came in a bottle shaped like waves, not the cheapo drugstore kind. Ava did not look electrocuted.

“What are you doing?” I asked my mother, disgusted.

“I am trying to have a life!” she shrieked.

With her hair like that and her eyes bulging the way they did when she got mad, she looked crazy. So crazy that I laughed.

And as soon as I laughed, she started to cry.

“This is dysfunctional,” I said. “I will be in therapy for the rest of my life!” Carolyn MacNamara from school went to therapy every Wednesday. She had dark circles under her eyes, pointy bones, and divorced parents.

I decided to stay in my room all night and write another letter to the Pope about my sainthood. Certainly someone who would put up with all of this all the time—a mother who wanted her hair to stand up like she'd been electrocuted, who laughed and cried without any reason, who shouted at her daughter—certainly all of these things would help my cause.

I was writing the letter when my father called. Of course, I listened in.

“It's fine, Alice,” he was saying. “Take them to Italy.”

“What?” Mom said.

“That's right,” Dad said, “because I worked on getting an assignment in Rome and the
Times
just gave me the okay. This way I'll be there, too, and I can see my kids.”

“Fine!” Mom said. “If you have to one-up me every single time—”

“Don't get paranoid,” Dad said.

I hung up quick. They were about to have a big fight and I didn't want to hear. Besides, I was happy. Dad was going to be in Rome this summer. Italy was looking better and better.

One of the things my mother hated most about the divorce was putting us on that train to New York City once a month. She hated the way I always dressed in black for the trip to New York, how I pretended I actually lived in Manhattan and was on my way home instead of
away
from home. She hated the way that Cody always pressed his face to the window, distorting his features so that he appeared like something floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Until that phone rang five or six hours later, she was all nerves and jumpiness. I knew all this because she always told me, every single time.

But this time we were all boarding the train together. Cody and I were off to visit our father and Mom was on her way to a meeting and dinner with her editor, Jessica. She wore black, too: the pants she called Katherine Hepburn pants and a cashmere sweater, the one thing she'd splurged on for
herself with her cookbook royalties. Her college roommate Melissa had told her that a girl needed something cashmere, the bigger the better. “Melissa knows these things,” my mother told me. “That's dumb advice,” I said, just to be contrary.

She had on her Walnut Stain lipstick and she'd waxed her hair again. I decided to sit alone.

“You can sit alone only if I can see you,” my mother said.

So I took the seat in front of my mother and Cody.

“Isn't this fun?” I heard her ask Cody. He was going to practice writing his numbers. He always made his 3s and 6s backward, but very neat.

“It is, Mommy,” he said. “I'm so glad you came with us. When you don't come, Madeline won't even talk to me. She just listens to her iPod and eats all the snacks.”

I rolled my eyes, even though they couldn't see me. For one thing, I only had an old Shuffle to listen to. Everyone on the planet had iPods that played videos but I had this ancient thing. Also, I had no cell phone. Saints shouldn't be so materialistic, I guess, but Bernadette didn't have to keep up with technology.

“This time
we'll
eat all the snacks,” my mother said, like that would bother me.

“Go ahead,” I said, sticking my face against the crack between the seats. “I hate those stupid rice cakes you always pack and I hate that bread with the cream cheese.”

“Good,” my mother said, leaning toward the crack. I could smell her coffee breath. “You can go to the diner car and get whatever it is you do like.”

“I want an Am on Rye,” I said. When she didn't laugh, I said, “Get it?
Am
instead of ham because we're on Amtrak. And Rye because we go through Rye, New York.”

“The pun,” she said, “is the lowest form of humor.”

She opened her book then. It was a mystery, set in England, her favorite thing to read. She always liked trying to solve the murder, and the foreign setting, which somehow made everything even more ominous and seemingly impossible to solve. She always used to tell me the plots of these novels and together we would try to figure out who the bad guy was. But lately, I'd lost interest.

“Want to know the setup?” she asked.

Even though a little part of me wanted to say yes, I leaned back in my seat and said, “No, thanks.”

“It's a good one,” she said.

I looked out the window at all the trees whizzing by. “I'm not in the mood,” I said finally.

Her seat seemed to sigh as she settled herself into it for the four-hour ride to New York City and Dad.

At Penn Station, we made our way through a confusing stairway to the arrivals board where our father always met us. On the train, our mother had gone into the bathroom right before we arrived and put on some more lipstick and a big spray of Chanel Number 5. “For Jessica,” she'd said. “I need to look professional.”

After twenty minutes beneath the clattering arrivals board with no sign of my father, she asked me, “Is he always late like this?” When she asked things like that I always felt like she was keeping notes somewhere of every single thing he did or didn't do.

Cody said, “He's always standing right here when we come up the escalator. He always has flowers for Madeline and a new Brio train for me.”

“What?” she said.

A few years ago, when she had wanted to get Cody a train
set for Christmas, our father had called it an extravagance and refused.

“So you have a train set at Daddy's?” she asked.

“Yeah. And it's got a drawbridge and two tunnels and about fifteen hundred trains,” Cody said. “Where is Daddy, anyway?”

I was just about to strangle Cody when I saw the most beautiful sight: Ava Pomme. She was walking toward us, her hair shiny and her clothes perfect.

I waved like mad. “There's Ava!”

Our mother spun around to look.

“Why'd he send her?” Cody mumbled.

Ava and our mother had never actually met. This was the first time I'd seen them side by side like this. Ava was a good five inches taller, with long rich brown hair falling over the collar of an oversize, below-the-knee camel cashmere coat, the sight of which made me embarrassed by my mother, standing there in her meager Old Navy pea coat. Ava wore black cigarette pants and boots with heels that my mother couldn't walk on to save her life. She wore stupid shoes that she bought in Chinatown—fat black things with a strap across the instep. My mother looked short and dumpy. As
Ava got closer, she reached out her hand, her legs so long and thin that all I could think of were deer running through meadows. My mother was more like a chipmunk.