That night Antoinetta called me at home. She had never called me before. Her father didn’t like her to talk on the telephone.
So when my mother came into the family room where I was looking up Saint Teresa in the encyclopedia—Saint Teresa of Lisieux; b. 1873, d. 1897—and said, “It’s Antoinetta,” I was surprised.
I went into the kitchen to pick up the phone before she could answer.
“Hi,” Antoinetta said. Her voice sounded all worried.
My mother came in, making all sorts of noise, and started to cook garlic in some olive oil on the stove.
“Hold on,” I said. “It’s very noisy in here.”
I stretched the phone cord as far as I could so that I could stand around the corner in one of the kitchen’s pantries. This one still smelled of the Greer’s old dog’s pee. No matter what we did, in warm weather the smell came back. When I passed my mother, the cord bumping into the edge of the stove, I gave her a dirty look.
“It is so hard to have privacy around here,” I told Antoinetta loudly.
“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
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