How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else)
Ann Hood
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.