How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (2 page)

“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 universe. 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.

Even though I had just turned eleven, I wanted to curl up right on her lap and stay there for a while. Before the divorce, my mother had that effect on me.

Instead, I asked her, “What's hospice?”

She looked up, all worried. “It's where people go when they're dying, when there's no hope for them at all. Who's in hospice?”

“It's a place?” I asked, disappointed, thinking that Mr. Greer maybe didn't die in the kitchen after all. Then where was my source of power? And how would I ever find it again?

“Yes. Well, yes and no,” she explained. “Hospice workers sometimes go to the person's house and help take care of them until they die. Like Boppa.”

Boppa was my father's father, a heart surgeon, a smart man who nonetheless died last year of the same disease a famous baseball player named Lou Gehrig died from. After Boppa got
that disease, my father made us all watch that movie so we'd understand better. Then Boppa died, and that's how we got money to buy this house.

My mother was going on and on about Boppa and the nurses that stayed with him around the clock and how that way everybody got to be right with him when he died.

Lucky everybody, I thought, shivering. I had never seen a dead person and I didn't want to.

“And he got to die at home,” my mother continued, “right where he wanted.”

Lucky Boppa, I thought, already bored with hospice. Maybe I wouldn't add hospice to my New Vocabulary list after all.

My mother sighed and looked dreamy. I wondered if she was thinking of her own father who had also died, but without hospice. He just lay down for a nap one Saturday afternoon and died.

She stood then and scooped sleeping Cody up in her arms. “Want to join us?” she asked.

Every time our father was away on an assignment, Cody always slept with our mother. I used to, too, the three of us
lined up in my parents' big bed, with the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and Secret deodorant in the air. But Cody took up too much room with his flailing arms, his need to always have the cool side of his pillow up, and his screams in the middle of the night from stupid nightmares.

I almost said yes. But shouldn't an eleven-year-old
not
want to sleep with her mother and her little brother?

“No, thanks,” I said. “I think I'll stay up really late and watch television.”

She smiled and kissed me good night. “Not too late,” she said.

After they went upstairs, I tried to find something on television that I wasn't allowed to watch, but there was nothing good on and I fell asleep with the TV right back on the Weather Channel. At some point, I got up and climbed into my own bed and thought about Marie Taglioni and hospice and the snow in Idaho until the next thing I knew I was startled awake by a man's voice saying my name as clear as anything: “Madeline. Madeline.”

I sat up.

I waited.

“Mr. Greer?” I said, because who else could it be?

The clock by my bedside seemed to tick extra loud. It was three o'clock.

I waited, but the man didn't speak again. My heart was pounding against my ribs. I was terrified. I was exhilarated. I got out of bed, my knees all trembly. The floor was cold but I didn't even stop to put on my father's rag socks, the ones I wore as slippers. Instead, I went straight over to the window, uncertain what drew me there. When I parted the lace curtains—left behind by the Greers—and looked out, all I saw was a blanket of snow. Snow so thick I could not make out anything, not the street or Sophie's house next door. Even the light from the streetlamps was dim, a distant creepy glow.

I waited by the window until I got too sleepy to stand there any longer. Then I went back to bed, puzzled. My heart was still beating faster than usual, but my curiosity took over.
What did Mr. Greer want to show me?
I wondered. But then I fell right back asleep, easy as anything, and dreamed of snow falling on a mountainside in huge flakes, flakes the size and shape of Idaho, like crooked triangles. They fell
and covered everything in their path—trees and SnoCats and skiers.

Skiiers! My father! Something wasn't right
, I thought with a start and pulled myself right out of that dream until I was wide awake.

It was morning. On our block the sun was shining brightly. Ice had formed around the tree branches, and the street outside my bedroom window glistened like a fairy-tale forest. It was kind of like rock candy had taken over everything. The snow in the street looked like a beautiful white blanket, without even one footprint in it. I remembered how Sophie had bragged about the snow wherever she had gone skiing at Thanksgiving. “We were the very first people to touch that snow, Madeline,” she'd said. Now I knew what she meant. I dressed as fast as I could and went downstairs. In the kitchen, Cody and my mother were making waffles, oblivious to the danger my father was in, lost in a warm cocoon of oranges and vanilla and maple syrup. I grabbed my cherry-red jacket from the brass hooks in the foyer and slipped outside without even stopping to say good morning.

The streets were sheets of ice, shiny and smooth,
treacherous. I had to take baby steps the whole way and still I slipped every few feet. There was nothing to grab on to; ice covered everything. Finally, I reached Saint Sebastian's, the Catholic Church. Inside, there was a big crucifix with a suffering Jesus hanging from it and statues of saints in long robes, all with gold circles above their heads like someone's fancy china. I practically gasped. That's how beautiful it was in there.

I went straight up to the altar. The air smelled like wet wool and melting wax, a serious smell that I liked. I knelt down on the padded kneeler, clasped my hands, bent my head, and even though I thought you were probably supposed to whisper in church, I spoke in my natural speaking voice to be sure God heard me. “God, save my father from that avalanche.” I just kept saying it, over and over. “God, save my father from that avalanche. God, save my father from that avalanche.”

I was surprised how the whole time I was there, not one person came in. It was just me and God and Jesus on the cross and all of those saints. I said my prayer about a million times. That's what it was. A prayer. I couldn't imagine our
life without my father. I mean, we were a family of four. And even though sometimes Cody drove me crazy, most of the time I liked the way we looked together, all of us. Maybe we didn't take ski vacations to fancy places and maybe our house needed a lot of work, but we were a great family. I didn't want to be just three. I didn't want my father to die and leave the rest of us alone. So I prayed. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed, pushing away the thoughts of what my life would be like without my father in it. Without him driving me to school and stopping at Seven Stars Bakery for hot chocolate and ginger scones. Without him teaching me new words or facts or songs. Without him taking my mother by the waist and spinning her around our kitchen floor while some old song played on the stereo.

I could tell by the way the light slanted differently through the stained glass windows that I had knelt and prayed for a long time. My throat felt raw, my voice was raspy, and I was burning hot. Outside, the ice had melted into fast rivulets of water that raced down the streets and sidewalks like it had somewhere to go. Still, it took me even longer to get home. My legs felt heavy and my head pounded. Maybe I was dying, I thought. Maybe I had
suffered from hallucinations the night before. Maybe I had lost my mind.

But when I walked in the door, I knew immediately that everything had happened just as I had thought. There was panic in the air.

My mother emerged, red-eyed, from the kitchen, clutching Cody by the hand. Behind her, I saw Gran, my father's mother; and Aunt Birdie the cardiologist; and Aunt Becky the pediatrician; and other faces behind them, familiar and frightened.

“Madeline!” my mother said, and she started to cry. “Where in the world have you been?”

“Is Daddy dead?” I asked, my voice hoarse and sore.

“Why would you say that?” my mother asked. She was twisting a crumpled tissue in her hand. “Did you hear it on television last night after I went to bed?”

“Is he?” I said, and it came out all raspy.

Gran stepped forward, tall and erect, her silvery blond hair slightly droopier than usual.

“He's alive,” she said. “We just got word that he's one of the people who made it.”

I nodded.

“But how did you even know?” Mom asked, moving toward me. “How could you know?”

“Was it an avalanche?” I managed to whisper before I slumped to the floor in a sweaty, feverish heap.

From somewhere above me I heard my mother's voice, surprised, saying, “Yes.”

I closed my eyes, smiling. I had done it. I had performed my second miracle, a huge miracle, a miraculous miracle.

“My God,” someone said, “she's burning up!”

I felt myself being lifted and carried away, up, up, up. The next time I opened my eyes, it was night and still. My father was saved. And I was on my way to becoming a bona fide saint.

I didn't need to be a saint. I was already pretty busy. For one thing, there's my ballet, which is really important. I have blisters on my feet and a callus on my toe that is really gross. Also, I can do the most perfect arabesque. This requires great balance and fortitude. For another thing, I was working very hard on improving my vocabulary. I did all of the Word Power challenges in my grandparents'
Reader's Digest
s.
They kept them in the bathroom, and when the conversation got really boring I would go and sit in there and improve my vocabulary. They would always ask my mother if I had some kind of digestive issues. “Have you had Madeline's digestive tract checked recently?” they'd ask. And later, in the car on the way home, Mom would ask me, “What is it you do in there, Madeline?” But I couldn't answer her because I was reciting new words in my head:
turbulence, noun, disturbance of the atmosphere……jettison, verb, to cast off……

Also, after my father came home, I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. But, it seemed like something had changed. He looked gloomy and restless. Plus, he had to be in New York City all the time because his heli-skiing article was suddenly an article about surviving an avalanche and people were really really interested in it, and in him. After so many years of fluctuating incomes, his seemed to be only going up. But he acted miserable instead of happy.