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

  How I Saved My Father’s Life

  (AND RUINED EVERYTHING ELSE)

  ANN HOOD

  For Sam

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One Avalanche

  Chapter Two The Trip of A Lifetime

  Chapter Three Ava Pomme, the Tart Lady

  Chapter Four Dead Mothers

  Chapter Five All the Mistakes

  Chapter Six Betrayals

  Chapter Seven Saint Madeline of Providence

  Chapter Eight Italia

  Chapter Nine What I Knew

  Chapter Ten Home

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  AVALANCHE

  MY NAME IS MADELINE VANDERMEER and this is the story about the year that I wanted to become a saint. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not a religious fanatic or anything. I’m not even a religious person. My family never goes to church, or says prayers before bed. But things happened in my life that led me to believe I could be a saint. Maybe even should be a saint. I actually performed two miracles. Before this, I was a normal kid in a normal family. At least, we were sort of normal. When I was little, we lived in Boston in a neighborhood called Back Bay. Our brownstone was connected to a bunch of others, all lined up in a pretty row. We were the third house from the left—my mother, Alice; my father, Scott; me; and later my baby brother, Cody.

  Both of my parents are writers, and when we lived in Boston, even though we were happy and did happy things like play Uno and make banana splits and take walks in the Public Gardens together, we were also always broke. Writers’ incomes fluctuate very much, my parents always used to say. When I was ten, their incomes fluctuated way down and we left Boston and moved one hour south to Providence, Rhode Island. Providence is the capital of Rhode Island, but it hardly looks like a city at all. There are only five tall buildings, and one of them is a hotel, not even a real skyscraper. Boston has beautiful tall buildings made out of glass that shine in the sunlight, and it has traffic and crowds on the streets. To me, these are the things that make a city.

  But in Providence, people live in houses with yards and sometimes you can walk down the street and pass maybe an old lady walking her dog or a couple of Brown University students rushing to class. In Boston, I wasn’t allowed to roam around. But in Providence, as long as I let my mother know I’m leaving, I can walk down to Thayer Street and get a falafel at East Side Pockets or just look in the store windows or go and sit on the Brown green and pretend I am in college.

  Not too long after we moved, my father got an assignment to write about heli-skiing in Idaho. This is when adventurous people let a helicopter drop them off on some remote mountain and then they ski down it. My father is adventurous. He is handsome and charming and smart. Back then, I used to think my mother was pretty great, too. She would rub my back if I couldn’t fall asleep and sometimes we would play Beauty Parlor and paint each other’s toenails in our favorite color, Melon of Troy. “Puns are the lowest form of humor,” my mother always said when she pulled out that bottle of nail polish. We loved that silly name, Melon of Troy.

  My two miracles both happened over a year ago, when I turned eleven. That winter was the last time my mother made me a birthday cake shaped like a snowman—covered in gooey white frosting, sprinkled coconut, black gumdrop eyes, and a black licorice mouth. It was the last time it snowed on my birthday, too—December 19. That season I was in a special performance of the Boston Ballet’s The Nutcracker. I didn’t have the role I wanted exactly, but some kids didn’t get any part at all so I was happy to have made it. Plus I got to wear the glitteriest costume ever. My father said I glittered all the way across the auditorium.

  The week before my birthday, on December 12, the date of Miracle Number One, I made a glass of water slide across the kitchen table and smash onto the floor all by itself. I did it just by staring. I stared and stared at it, imagining it skating across the smooth surface, actually seeing in my mind the way it would teeter at the edge before crashing down, sending a spray of water across the floor. I stared at that glass, and pictured it falling, until it finally did. A miracle. And since I made one miracle happen, I had to try for more. So I attempted to make a drawer slam shut on its own, a light go dim or even flicker a little, the bathtub faucet turn itself on and then off. Things like that. But nothing worked.

  I almost gave up. At night, I prayed into the darkness: “Please give me special powers. Please, please, please.” I don’t know any official prayers, just a Cherokee chant and things like that, which I threw in for good measure. What had I done exactly right in that moment? Was there something special about the kitchen? Or was it the time of day? I thought about that glass sliding across the kitchen table, the way it glissaded as if it took ballet from Madame Natasha at the Ballet School, too. The Ballet School was in Boston and every Saturday my mother drove me to my class there, even though it was an hour away. Not only did kids from the Ballet School get to try out for The Nutcracker, we also had the best chance of getting into the Boston Ballet’s junior company. So even after we moved to Providence I got to take my class there with Madame.

  I decided that to perform more miracles maybe I needed to be in the kitchen, so I moved all of my efforts downstairs, and waited until the afternoon light sent rays of amber and violet at just the right slant through the stained glass window above the stairs. Then I sat and stared. At the sink with its white and silver old-fashioned knobs that said hot and cold; at the only drawer that didn’t stick in our new house (new to us, that is; it’s actually really an old, old house); at the bare bulb that hung over the kitchen table, the one that first had a long string hanging from it and then, because it still wasn’t long enough for me or Cody to reach, also had a coat hanger covered in the fuzzy pink sash of my mother’s old bathrobe.

  According to my mother, someday we would get enough money to fix the house up and make it beautiful, like the other houses in our neighborhood. Those other houses had polished wood floors instead of scuffed-up ones like ours and lights that were covered up and walls painted clean white or rich deep colors like dark red or Christmas green. This house was an embarrassment. Right in the next yard, there was a fancy, elaborate play set, with colorful tunnels that led to curly slides and a small rope bridge and lots of swings and a Tarzan rope that swung across a goldfish pond.

  The girl who owned that play set was named Sophie and she was beautiful, with straight blond hair always held off her face with a different headband: checks or stripes or solid colors topped with a small bow. I didn’t have very many friends in Providence, and the ones I did have felt like friends of convenience. Like the daughters of women my mother was friends with, or other new kids, or Mai Mai Fan from school who was so busy being a chess champion that she was willing to be anybody’s friend because she could never actually do anything like go for pizza or watch DVDs. The only reason why Sophie was my friend was because she lived next door and sometimes got so bored she actually invited me over. And even though I didn’t like her too much, I went. Sometimes, we even had fun together. But not usually. Whenever I told my mother I was going over to Sophie’s she would say, “But I thought you didn’t like Sophie,” and I would just shrug. Our relationship was complicated.

  Sophie was beautiful. I am not beautiful. My mother said I would grow into my looks, the way she also says I will grow into my too-big winter coat and the sweatshirt that I have to roll up the sleeves of whenever I need to use my hands. Madame said I am unusual-looking. “This is good for the ballet,” Mad
ame said. Which I guess means not good for all the other parts of my life. My hair is coarse like straw and the same color. If I push it behind my ears, they stick out like the ones you screw on Mr. Potato Head. My nose has nostrils like a horse’s, long and narrow. They flare whenever I get angry, which is pretty often lately. My lips are long and narrow, too. My mother has those lips. The nostrils come from my father’s side; all of his sisters have them.

  What I do have are beautiful, perfect ballerina feet: high arched. I can jump better than anyone at the Ballet School. My feet, lovely and shaped like the arched bridge on the Brio train set that Cody wanted for Christmas, are my best asset. An asset that no one can see. So I go barefoot whenever I can so people can see them and admire them. I can stand very erect and lift one leg so that it reaches my face, and flex my beautiful toes, in case someone hadn’t noticed.

  That winter, whenever I wasn’t experimenting with my powers, I stood outside in my leg warmers and that too-big—“It’ll last for years and then Cody will wear it, too!”—cherry-red down jacket, my fuzzy hot-pink earmuffs, the purple and black and green mittens my father brought me from Ecuador, one blue snow boot, and one bare perfect foot that I brought carefully up to my face and then flexed, over and over. My breath came out in small puffs and my nose ran. But I didn’t care. Some things I did for God. Other things I did for art. I wondered if the library had some kind of list of saints and what they had suffered for, beside the obvious stuff like world peace and justice for the poor. Maybe I would become the first saint who was a ballerina.

  “That’s totally weird,” Sophie said from her yard.

  She was peering through a hole in the fence that separated the two properties. It was my parents’ responsibility to fix that hole, but they had no intention of doing that when they needed new plumbing and rewiring, not to mention having the floors sanded and polished, the walls painted, and insulation installed.

  I didn’t answer. For one thing, I hated her something fierce, standing there with her headband and private school uniform. For another, the flexing kept my foot from going numb and I needed to concentrate.

  “It’s like five degrees out here and you’re barefoot,” Sophie said. As if I didn’t know I was barefoot.

  “Really, Sophie? I’m barefoot? Thanks for that information. Why don’t you go and brush your hair a hundred times or something?” I said, watching my breath come out in little clouds, like smoke.

  “My mother still can’t believe someone bought this dump,” Sophie said.

  I squinted toward her, trying to maintain my concentration.

  “It has character,” I said. It’s one thing for me to say our house was a dump, but when Sophie said it I wanted to kill her.

  “They couldn’t sell it, you know. They lived there for like forty years and never lifted a finger. The man, Mr. Greer, died inside.” Then she added in a whisper, “Of cancer.”

  Now I searched the hole until I found a piece of Sophie’s face—one eye and her nose. Nothing was worse than Sophie having important information that I didn’t have, especially about my very own house. “In the kitchen?” I asked her. Of course I was trying to sound disinterested, but really the possibilities thrilled me. Maybe the kitchen was the source of power in the house. Maybe every miracle I performed would originate from there. Maybe a ghost was helping me with my miracles!

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “He had hospice.”

  I frowned and memorized the word to look up later. Even though my parents were writers, whenever I asked them what a word meant they said, “Look it up.” I always said, “But how am I going to do that when I don’t even know how to spell it?” “Trial and error,” my father would say. One of my parents’ prized possessions was their Oxford English Dictionary, which stood in the middle of our living room like another member of the family on its own library stand.

  “You,” Sophie said, snapping me out of my thoughts, “are, like, crazy.”

  “And you say like too much,” I said. “My parents charge me a dime every time I use like inappropriately. Your parents should do the same. They would be rich by now.”

  “They’re already rich,” Sophie said so matter-of-factly, I wanted to kill her all over again.

  “Good for them,” I said. I suppose Sophie had drawers full of Fruity Punch Lip Smackers. Closets full, even.

  “Are you li—” Sophie stopped herself and I smirked, right in her direction. “Are you a ballerina or something?”

  “I was in the Boston Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker,” I kind of lied. I mean, my performance was with the official company. Did Sophie have to know that it was just one special performance and not the official show? After all, she had so much to brag about and sometimes she made me feel terrible. Surely a little white lie didn’t matter?

  “But I saw that!” Sophie said while I searched my conscience. “Why wouldn’t you tell me if you were in it? I’m sure you weren’t in it.”

  “I was, too!” I shouted. “I didn’t tell you because we haven’t hung out in a long time,” I said hoping she might feel badly about that.

  That was the truth, and it was probably why I felt mad at her. Her family went skiing over Thanksgiving break, somewhere fancy with perfect snow. When we moved here three months ago, she actually came over with a stupid T-shirt for me that said: Watch out where them Huskies go, Don’t you eat that yellow snow.

  Sophie considered my white lie. “Were you Clara?” she said finally.

  “I was a Spanish dancer,” I said, which was true, and when she looked smug I said, “Next year I’ll be Clara,” with more certainty than I really felt. “I have perfect ballerina feet.”

  Sophie pressed her face against the hole for a better look.

  “Like Marie Taglioni,” I added.

  No way did Sophie know who that was. It was my mother who introduced me to Marie Taglioni. For my eighth birthday she gave me a book called Great Ballerinas and we both fell in love with Marie Taglioni above all of the others. Born, 1804; died, 1884; created a delicate new style marked by floating leaps and balanced poses, such as the arabesque. I was already taking ballet classes then, but we were little and just ran around for half an hour while the teacher yelled, “Be a tree!” and we’d all strike a pose like weeping willows or giant oaks. Sometimes we would lie on the floor and bend ourselves into shapes like the alphabet. But after my mother gave me that book and we read about Marie Taglioni, all I wanted was to do floating leaps and arabesques, just like her.

  “Madeline,” my mother called from the porch, “it’s time!”

  “I have to go,” I said, relieved. “My father’s going to Idaho and we’re all taking him to the airport.”

  Taking Dad to the airport meant lunch at Durkin’s Park first. My father and I always got the Yankee pot roast. I hopped across the patches of snow in the yard so my foot would stay dry.

  “I don’t think you were in The Nutcracker,” Sophie said. “I still have my program. I’m going to look.”

  “Be my guest,” I said to Sophie.

  Hospice, I said to myself. After we got back from Boston, I would add it to my New Vocabulary list and then I would call Mai Mai Fan and tell her that my list finally had 100 words. By the time we got in our decrepit Volvo to drive to Logan Airport, I had practically wiped Sophie from my mind.

  Every night while my father was away in Idaho, my mother and Cody and I watched the Weather Channel. Snow always hung right over Idaho. It was funny that my father had gone to a place called Sun Valley in a state that clearly never got any sun.

  The night that I saved my father’s life, Cody fell asleep right in front of the TV while we waited for the Idaho weather. I sat on the couch, trying to drink from a straw while I was lying down so that if I ever became paralyzed or got a terminal disease, I would still be able to drink coffee milk, my favorite thing in the world, and one of the only good things available here in Providence but nowhere else in the country, maybe even the entire univer
se. My mother was reading a book and taking notes for an article about healthy eating.

  She looked up at me and said, “Why are you wearing that ridiculous Husky T-shirt?”

  I grinned, loving her so much for that.

  “Let’s put it in the giveaway bin,” she said. The giveaway bin was where clothes that didn’t even fit Cody ended up.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to the television, “there’s Idaho.”

  “More snow,” Cody said.

  I tried to imagine my father riding in a helicopter and getting dropped off on some mountain, having to find his way back. He was, I knew, resourceful. After all, he had climbed all the way to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. He had eaten a roasted guinea pig in Quito, which is the capital of Ecuador. He had ridden on a raft down the Amazon River while guerrillas shot at him. But still, finding your way off a mountain in the snow in Idaho sounded really scary.

  “What if Daddy doesn’t find his way off that mountain?” I asked my mother.

  “He will,” she said without looking up.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s with a guide, for one thing.”

  I sighed and watched the weather report for the Cape and islands. Rain. Cody thought that was a special place, the Capon Islands, even though our father had shown him on a map and everything: Cape Cod and the islands, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

  “Have I ever been to Nantucket?” I asked my mother.

  “When you were a baby.”

  That made me smile. I loved to think of myself as a baby, a bald pink thing that was carried from place to place, Nantucket and Mexico and London and Barbados, in some kind of conscious state; I remembered none of it. In pictures, I look so cute in my jean jacket and OshKosh overalls, with ridiculous droopy hats.

  “I wish I could remember,” I said.

  “All you need to know,” she told me, “is that you were the most fabulous, most adored, most wonderful baby ever.” She smiled at me.