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

  That was how peasants went to Italy, I suppose.

  “I don’t want to go,” Cody said. “I want to stay home with you and watch television this summer. I want first grade to be done for me and you to stay in bed all day and watch—”

  “Italy!” our mother said with so much enthusiasm that she swerved the car into the next lane. “We’re all going to Italy and we’ll see museums and the Colosseum. We’ll see everything.”

  She glanced back again. Cody had slumped down so far I wondered if she could see him at all.

  “You can pick the things you want to see and we’ll go see them,” she said weakly.

  “Uh-huh,” said Cody.

  “Great,” she said. “Isn’t this great?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Clearly,” I said, closing my Spanish book firmly, “we are both sooooo thrilled.”

  We turned into the school parking lot, where kids were pulling out of minivans and station wagons. They all seemed so much happier than us, practically skipping through puddles in their bright rain boots, flashes of red and yellow and green, backpacks swaying as they moved. I looked down at my own stupid shoes, imagining my bright yellow rain boots left behind in the front hallway. When had bright rain boots become cool? And how did my mom know? Why did these things always pass me by?

  “Here we are,” our mother said, turning off the car.

  “Uh-huh,” Cody said.

  She sat there for an instant, then she said, “You know, you two, I wish I could twitch my nose and make your lives better—put Cody in the top reading group, beatify Madeline, give you both a full-time father, one who wouldn’t leave.”

  She was about to cry; I knew that. This was the very type of thing she said before she started to cry. So I chose not to correct her and tell her that saints got canonized, not beatified.

  I saw the smiling face of Miles’s mother, Julia, hooded in a bright green rain slicker. Then she tapped on the window and my mother sniffled and took deep, relaxing breaths, which is what she did to pull herself together. The window on the driver’s side no longer went down (or if it went down it did not go back up); so my mother opened my window instead. Everything about Julia was bigger than life: hair, face, fingernails. She was like a Godzilla, and by that I mean the original Godzilla, not the terrible remake. “Remakes stink!” my father always said.

  Julia leaned her big head in and grinned at Cody. “Hey!” she said in her Southern drawl. “You’re coming home with me today, you little goober.”

  I winced, right in her face. Julia called all children “goober,” which she claimed meant “peanut.” “Trust me,” Julia would say, “I’m from Georgia and I know my peanuts.” But it reminded me of something in your nose. Privately, Cody and I called Julia “booger,” which always sent Cody into a fit of giggles.

  Beside us loomed Julia’s car, also big, and brand-new, with airbags waiting to get Cody.

  Julia opened the back door and I jumped out. She was already adjusting Cody’s backpack, tightening the straps even though he liked them so loose that the pack bounced against him. Miles and his older sister Suki were waiting patiently at the front door of school, frozen in place like kids in a J. Crew catalogue. I stood next to my mother and watched as Cody let himself be led away by Julia. His backpack was my old one from kindergarten, purple with hot pink trim. He wore my old rain slicker, too, a yellow one with a hood made like a duck’s face, the bill an orange visor, two eyes peering above it. The combination made him look small and vulnerable, like a kid that anything could happen to. Mom must have been thinking the same thing because she called out to him.

  “Cody!” she called. “You’ll be in the back. Don’t worry.”

  Julia and Cody turned. “What’s that?”

  “The airbags,” Mom shouted, “are only in the front!”

  Julia looked at her, confused, but Cody nodded.

  “Have a good day!” our mother shouted to him.

  “You, too!” he said, his voice tiny and high.

  I thought maybe Mom should have walked him inside, but she was already upset so I didn’t point that out to her.

  Cody’s voice drifted across the parking lot to us.

  “What?” Mom shouted.

  “I said,” he screamed, “in a plane crash do the kids die, too? Or just the grown-ups?”

  “The plane won’t crash, Cody!” Mom called to him. “It’s going to be great! You’ll see!” But Cody didn’t wait for her to answer. He just kept walking fast with his head down.

  Señor Valdez, my Spanish teacher, stopped to stare at us from under his umbrella. I pretended not to notice. Finally, right before I died from embarrassment, he started walking again. I jumped out of the car, fast.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, hurrying away from my mother, “we’re all just fine.”

  One of my favorite things to do was listen in on my parents’ telephone conversations. Even before they got divorced I liked doing it. Back then it was stuff like “Can you pick up Madeline at ballet?” or “Can you call Alexis to babysit?” Stuff that made me feel like warm toast inside. Family stuff. We don’t have a family now. It’s more like an unraveled sweater, pieces of it everywhere, the whole thing coming apart. The whole thing ugly. More irony: My mother worked for Family magazine. Ha!

  I used to pick up the phone and listen and not even care if they knew. “Hang up, Madeline,” Mom might say. Or Dad would say, “What are we going to do about Mad? Send her to spy school?” in a really deep fake voice and then I would laugh. And then we would all three laugh. But once they got divorced I had to be more careful because chances were they would be fighting when I picked up the phone. If my mother was downstairs on the kitchen phone, I had to slip into her office and switch the phone on to speaker. They never knew I was sitting there listening.

  After the trip of a lifetime got announced, they had a lot of long-distance arguments.

  “I think it would have been good, appropriate even, if you had asked me before deciding to take my kids halfway around the world,” my father said.

  “Really?” my mother said. “Well, I think it would have been good, appropriate even, if you’d asked before you decided to leave our family.”

  My mother spent that first year crying and angry. Angry that he’d left her, angrier that he’d married someone else. That tart, she used to say. That was my mother’s idea of a joke; he had married a woman who made tarts for a living, the woman gourmet magazines called The Tart Lady, Ava Pomme. My mother did not even believe that her real name was Ava Pomme, that someone who would grow up to make tarts for a living would be named the equivalent of apple, and that her most famous tart was in fact her apple tart. “It’s all a little too convenient, isn’t it?” my mother wondered out loud all too often.

  “Actually,” my father continued, “I don’t think you can even take them without my permission.”

  “Scott,” she said, “don’t be foolish. The magazine is paying for me to take the kids and eat our way through Italy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  My mother had this idea about my father’s new life, that it was filled with champagne and perfectly flaky crust, with a country house and a loft in the city, with cocktail parties and black-tie events. For the most part, she was right. What made her feel even worse was that in just one year, my father and Ava were married with a baby of their own, a little girl named Zoe. They were a family. They were a family and we weren’t. We were three people who lived unhappily in a run-down house in Providence. I wanted to be a part of my father’s real family more than anything, except being a saint. If I wasted my time making lists, number one, I would be a saint, number two I would live in New York City in my father’s real family, and number three, I would be in a full-time ballet school.

  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.

  Chapter Three

  AVA POMME, THE TART LADY

  “When 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.