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

by Ann Hood

  “Yeah, well,” Antoinetta said, groping for something. Maybe she had called to apologize. She hadn’t said one word in the car, just sat with her arms folded and stared out the window, ignoring me.

  “So what’s up?” I said. I was the one who should be angry. Antoinetta was the only person in the world who knew about my miracle and she’d acted like it was nothing, a waste of a miracle, really.

  “I’ve been thinking. You know, about what you told me.”

  I glanced around the corner at my mother, who was adding chopped tomatoes to the pan.

  “About my miracle?” I said, watching my mother, who was clearly eavesdropping on me, stirring the tomatoes.

  “Yes,” Antoinetta said. “All of a sudden it hit me. I was doing my homework and I thought, Madeline saved her father’s life. It hit me just like that. And here’s what I think. I think you should perform another miracle.”

  For an instant I was afraid that Antoinetta was going to ask me to bring back her mother. But Antoinetta was already saying, “I mean, you could be a saint, Madeline. You have to start being good, living a good life. You have to open yourself to the possibility of more miracles.”

  Antoinetta began to list all the things that could happen if I indeed became a saint. There was stigmata, where I would spontaneously bleed in the very spots where Jesus had been nailed to the cross.

  “I don’t want that one,” I said, suddenly afraid of sainthood.

  “There’s the scent of roses, where you just emit the smell of roses for no earthly reason.”

  “You mean everywhere I went I would smell of roses?” I asked, imagining it. People’s heads would turn. They would close their eyes and inhale deeply whenever I walked by. That one sounded better.

  “There’s bilocation,” Antoinetta said. Now she sounded excited. “Like Padre Pio.”

  “Bilocation,” I repeated. My mother’s eyes flickered over to me, then quickly back down. “That’s the one I want.”

  With bilocation, I could be in two places at once. I could be here with my mother and simultaneously be in New York City, living an important life with my father and Ava Pomme. On Friday nights, while Cody and I ate our mother’s disgusting experimental dinners, I could bilocate and be at the Odeon, the coolest restaurant ever, in New York with my father, eating roast chicken and the best French fries in the world. They called them frites. And they were better than Wright’s Chicken Farm.

  I rolled the word bilocation around in my mouth.

  Antoinetta was talking about other saintly virtues. Mom was draining the pasta in a colander in the sink, saying, “Time to eat, Madeline. Tell your friend you can call her later.” Cody was walking into the kitchen, dragging a blanket I had not seen for years, the old worn-out baby blanket he used to carry with him everywhere until our mother hid it from him. “Not that again, Cody,” Mom was saying. Antoinetta kept talking, her voice growing more and more excited with each possibility.

  But I had just one thought and kept repeating it in my mind: Saint Madeline of Providence. That thought rendered me speechless.

  “All right,” my mother was saying. “You can keep it in the house but I am not lugging that ratty thing everywhere we go. Cody? Do you hear me?”

  The steam from the pasta rose, enveloping my mother’s face so that she grew momentarily blurry. “Madeline? Now?”

  “Visions,” Antoinetta was saying. “Prophecy.”

  It felt like every single person was focused on me, Madeline, and I smiled happily, beatifically, thinking, Saint Madeline of Providence.

  Chapter Eight

  ITALIA

  A week before we left for Italy, I waited next to the phone for the junior company of the Boston Ballet to call. Finally the phone rang and I saw the caller ID: Boston Ballet Company. I got in! They would only call if we were accepted, they had said.

  “This is Madeline Vandermeer,” I said when I answered, “and I am honored to accept this. Honored. Honored.”

  The woman on the other end was laughing by the second honored. But then I started to cry and she said, “Congratulations, Madeline.”

  Even though my parents were still divorced and my mother was still ordinary and all of the other terrible things in my life, I felt happy. Ecstatic, even. I thought about the patron saint of air travel, and how he used to levitate and float. That is how I felt that day.

  And then, before I knew it, my mother and Cody and I were on an Alitalia 747 heading to Italy and I really was levitated, high above the Earth and everything I knew. Despite myself, I was excited, and I squeezed my mother’s hand and even let her lift my hand to her lips and kiss me. Things were starting to change. I could feel it. By the time we settled into our hotel room, I was certain. Change was in the air.

  For one, Italy changed Cody. It was as if he belonged there more than anyone else, as if Providence had been a temporary place for him to stay while he waited to come here. I noticed it and I was jealous, even though envy didn’t become saints. I struggled with jet lag, waking at one or two every morning, unable to fall back asleep while Cody slept soundly through the night. When he woke up, he had energy, ready for everything and anything. He happily picked up the phone and ordered room service: caffè latte for our mother, blood-orange juice for all three of us, a tray of these crusty cream-filled pastries called sfogliatelle.

  When the waiter arrived with the cart that bumped noisily across the floor, Cody was already showered and wrapped in one of the hotel bathrobes. But I could hardly pull myself out of bed after so many hours awake in the middle of the night, staring out the window, past the balcony, to the street beyond, where lovers rode their Vespas up and down, the girls holding on tight as the boys drove fast along the bay. Naples was noisy all the time, even at night. I was miserable, bleary-eyed, cotton-headed, homesick, even.

  “How do you know that blood-orange juice isn’t made from real blood?” I asked Cody. “Like monster blood?” I added.

  This was the type of question that would have sent him into a fit of tears at home.

  But here, in Italy, in Naples, it delighted him.

  “Blah,” he said, sticking out his tongue in the glass and lapping up some juice, “I’ve come to suck your blood.”

  He loved the food that Mom made us try. She always scribbled in her little notebook, sniffing things, asking our opinion, drawing little pictures. The stuffed and fried rice balls called arancini, and calamari, which was squid, and rolled meat stuffed with breadcrumbs and nuts and cheese called brasciola, he liked it all, while I stuck to pizza. Here, it was so wet I couldn’t even lift it, even though that’s what they expected you to do.

  In between eating we took tours. We went up the funicular to Vamero and my mother let me choose a cameo, a small pin with a saintly face carved in ivory. “She looks like you,” Mom said, and even though it wasn’t true, I felt special and maybe even pretty. We spent a hot afternoon in the Archeological Museum, room after room of ancient treasures. Many of them had been plucked from Pompeii, put there for safekeeping from vandals and tourists eager for a souvenir ruin. Even though I grew fascinated by all the broken things there, the pottery shards and cracked columns and bits of people’s lives, I got tired. Exhausted. Keeping my eyes open was almost impossible. Cody, on the other hand, chatted with the guards and made Mom read him descriptions of pottery and busts and sculptures of gods.

  Italy also changed my mother. She transformed into someone new before my eyes, a worldly woman who could speak a few phrases in Italian, order in restaurants, negotiate prices with shopkeepers and cab drivers. She walked with great confidence. She even looked beautiful to me again. She and Cody walked ahead of me, pointing and laughing and taking pictures, while I dragged behind them.

  “I am so unhappy,” I would call to them. “I am so tired.”

  “Come on, slowpoke,” they would call back.

  How could a future saint be so tired in Italy?

  Our next stop was Pompeii.

  It was clogged with
tourists, mostly German. Tour guides carried different colored umbrellas so their groups wouldn’t follow the wrong leader. There weren’t any English guides, so our mother bought a small book at the kiosks in front and we walked through the ruins together, Mom looking things up in the book as we went.

  “The bakery,” she said, reading from the guidebook, and there we saw the ovens, the two-thousand-year-old loaves of bread encased in volcanic ash, the bricks they used to heat them.

  We found the Temple of Jupiter, the mayor’s house, the amphitheater. The streets had deep ruts from the wheels of the chariots.

  “Look,” Mom said, pointing. “A one-way street.”

  All the ruts on the one-way street were on one side; the street that intersected it had them on the other side. It was incredible to see.

  We ate the picnic our mother had packed on a grassy area near a small theater. Salami, cheese, olives, bread, and limonata, the lemon soda I like so much. Limonata, such a funny name. I suddenly started to feel less tired, less overwhelmed.

  “Tomorrow can we go to some churches?” I asked my mother.

  “All day. Every church in Naples,” she said.

  Always, behind us or looming ahead, no matter which way we turned, stood Mount Vesuvius. Its top was not pointed like other mountains; instead it was heart-shaped.

  “That top,” Mom explained, “blew right off.”

  I was amazed. Life had been ruined and then recovered in this place.

  “Exhilarating, isn’t it?” Mom said. “It’s hard for you to understand what it’s like when you feel like your life has been destroyed. I know this place might seem sad to some people, but to me it feels hopeful.”

  “Hopeful?” I said. “You ruined all of our lives and now all of a sudden a volcano makes you feel hopeful?”

  I couldn’t believe I had said it. I didn’t know where it came from.

  Immediately, I felt bad. The way my mother’s face collapsed, the way I could tell she was fighting back tears. Right when we were actually getting along.

  “Is that what you think?” she asked finally. “That I ruined everything?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  “That is what you think,” she said, as if she had just realized that all my scorn for her was actually based on something.

  I waited for her to prove otherwise. But of course she couldn’t. Everything I knew to be true was true. My mother just sat there, staring.

  Later, when she went to the trash can to throw out the remains of our lunch, Cody said, “How could you choose Ava over Mommy?”

  “No one’s choosing,” I said. “We have them both.”

  “Well, lucky us,” Cody said.

  He ran to our mother and took her hand. I walked a few feet behind them, not because I was so tired anymore, but on purpose.

  Saints had to suffer. I knew that and I knew I was really suffering. I was sick of being torn like this, of always having to take sides, even if it was only in my heart. I didn’t know how to love each of my parents the same. More than anything, I wished I could go back and somehow make a different miracle. Of course I wanted my father saved. But maybe if there had been no avalanche at all, things would have stayed the way they were.

  I had managed two miracles. If I could find another one, I could change things and be noticed. I lay in bed in the hotel in Naples, listening to the motorcycles whizzing past, the sounds of people having fun. Sometimes I even wished, in a very secret place, that my parents would get back together. I knew it was ridiculous. Why would Dad come back to his old boring life in Providence? And what would happen to Ava and Zoe if my father left them? And even if he did, with them in his life, it wouldn’t be the same as before. I knew better than to waste my prayers, the way Antoinetta did. Her dead mother wasn’t coming back. And how was her father ever going to meet a new woman if he never even got out of the car?

  No. I needed to pray for the right thing.

  I got up and stood by the curtain that opened out to the balcony. Beyond it was the Bay of Naples, the island of Capri, Vesuvius. Tonight the moon was a crescent one, my favorite. Most people liked full moons. They even wrote songs about them. But I liked this tiny sliver moon, the moon that was hardly there. I let myself pretend that when I turned around, my mother wouldn’t be alone in the other bed. Instead, my father would be there beside her.

  I remembered what it used to be like to crawl into their bed early in the morning. I would have to squeeze to get between them because they slept so close. Like spoons, my father used to say. How could two people who slept like spoons, year after year, not even live together anymore? I felt hot tears spill out of my eyes and run down my cheeks. I swallowed hard, in gulps. That was one way I knew to stop tears. And even though I was wasting prayers on the impossible, I prayed:

  “Dear God, please bring our father back to us. Please let him be here, like spoons, with my mother.”

  It was ridiculous and useless and impossible, but wasn’t that what a miracle was, making the extraordinary, the impossible, happen?

  I turned around.

  The hotel bed, a queen-sized one with lots of pillows and a fluffy comforter, looked as vast as the ocean with my mother there, drifting in it alone. I went over to it and climbed in beside her, turning so my front was pressed against her back, shaping myself into my mother’s form. Without waking up, she felt me there instinctively and snuggled close. Then I closed my eyes, and filled with disappointment and confusion and faithlessness, slept.

  We saw so many churches the next day that their names blurred. There was the big one where San Gennaro’s blood liquefied every September; the one with the beautiful chipped tiles everywhere, leading out of the neglected garden; the modern-looking one where people went to get healed. And then there was the one in the old section of the city, across the crooked cobblestone street where the nativity figures were made.

  Mom decided we should buy an elaborate nativity scene, with a big straw-covered manger and all the carved figures. She spent forever choosing the right Joseph and Mary, the perfect-sized archangels and wise men. Cody picked out funny figures to add: a winemaker, a butcher, a pizza man, a clown. The shop smelled bad, like cats, so after I picked out a fat baby Jesus, I stood in the doorway to get fresh air. But I watched Mom carefully. Ever since what happened in Pompeii, she looked different to me. Maybe because I knew I had hurt her in some deep, horrible way. I tried thinking mean thoughts, like The truth hurts and things like that, but it didn’t make me feel better. Mom was hurt and I didn’t know how to make it better.

  The man who ran the shop flirted with her. He was younger than her, and he had a big blue birthmark on his cheek that I stared at. He caught me looking, and his fingers caressed the spot tenderly, as if to erase my gaze. I wondered how it would feel to live with something like that. And then I thought about divorce and how, in a strange way, it was like having something big, blue, and ugly. Divorce made you feel different than most people with real families. It made you uncomfortable.

  “Can we take a taxi back?” Cody asked when we left. “I want to get back to the hotel and unwrap all the people we bought and play with them.”

  “I want to go in that church,” I said, pointing at a gorgeous, old building.

  I knew nothing about it. But I noticed it while I was standing in the doorway of the shop and even though we had been to enough churches already, I felt pulled toward this one.

  “No!” Cody said. “I am so tired of churches!”

  My mother looked at me tenderly. “I think we can stand one more, can’t we, buddy?”

  I ran across the piazza, feeling as if the church might hold some secrets. Inside, it was small and dark and empty.

  My mother paid some euros for a guidebook and she and Cody walked around, trying to find what was described in it. Every church had some piece of famous art, a relic from a saint, an interesting apse or altar piece or ceiling.

  But I went straight to the front, to the altar, and kn
elt. My whole body filled with the faint smell of incense and candle wax. I wanted another miracle. I wanted to be Saint Madeline of Providence. I prayed so hard that I didn’t realize someone had come to kneel beside me.

  It was a nun. A young, beautiful nun like Maria in The Sound of Music, and she had on a hat that looked like a paper airplane.

  “Americana?” the nun said, not even bothering to whisper. When she spoke, I smelled roses, and I remembered that was one of the saintly qualities like bilocation that Antoinetta had told me about.

  I nodded. I didn’t like how everyone immediately recognized me as an American. Everywhere we went people knew.

  “You pray hard, no?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I glanced around to be sure I could see my mother and Cody. They were staring into someone’s tomb.

  “You sad?”

  I shrugged.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I do know.”

  “Ah,” the nun said.

  The nun began to pray, moving her lips silently.

  I leaned in close to her to smell her rose smell. “I made a miracle,” I whispered.

  “Yes? That’s very good,” the nun said, unimpressed.

  “If I make another one I’ll become a saint. Saint Madeline of Providence.”

  “Ah.” The nun shook her head. “No. First, to be a saint, you must be morte. Dead. Then you must wait a long time until someone remembers how good you were. Then they get together and talk about you and if you have a good miracle, maybe they beatify you. Then, after that, if you make another miracle, you be saint. Basta.” The nun slapped her hands together like she was wiping something off them.

  “But I saved my father’s life,” I said. I whispered the story to the nun, about the snow and the man’s voice and the church. About the avalanche that changed our lives.

  “Avalanche?” the nun said. “I don’t know this word.”

  “It’s when snow comes at you so fast that it ruins anything in its path. You don’t know what hit you,” I explained.