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.
Then one morning right after breakfast, my parents sat Cody and me down in the living room, a room we hardly ever sat in, and my mother wouldn’t look at us. Instead, she kept staring at the pattern on the floor, her eyes tracing its edges. Dad looked right at us, though, and started to say things like someone on a television movie. “Sometimes people fall out of love,” he said. And, “No one is to blame here.” And, “I will always be your father and love you.” I kept trying to get Mom to look at me. But she wouldn’t.
Cody started to panic, “Do you mean you’re getting divorced?”
I laughed. “Of course they’re not getting divorced,” I told him. Just the night before, we had made homemade pizza together and then we played Pictionary and then we all danced the chicken dance. Does that sound like a family about to get divorced?
I heard Dad say, “Yes. We are getting divorced.”
Next thing I knew, he was telling us that we could visit him every other weekend in New York, and Cody shouted, “You’re moving to New York?”
“He’s not moving to New York, you dope,” I said. It was like my brain couldn’t process the information. I was hearing words, but they didn’t seem to have any meaning.
Then Dad said, “I’m sorry. I really am.” He looked sorry when he said that, but still, he kissed us both on the tops of our heads and walked out of the house into a new life.
All the while, Mom sat there staring at the floor. She never explained anything. She never tried to stop him from going. As soon as the door shut behind him, she ran to the window and watched him drive away. She was crying like crazy, and Cody was crying like crazy, and I said, “Do something, Mom! Do something!”
She finally turned and looked at me. In that one moment, she seemed to get a lot older. She looked at me and she said absolutely nothing. I think that’s when I started to hate her.
“This is your fault,” I said.
So how did I, Madeline Vandermeer, fairly normal girl from a fairly normal family, decide to become a saint? Well, when I saved my father’s life, I somehow managed to ruin everything else. Now my life was all upside down, and frankly, I needed something to happen. If I performed just one more miracle, I believed I could fix everything and become a saint. The whole world would hear about me and the amazing things I’d done. I even wrote to the Pope at the Vatican in Rome, Italy, and asked him how to proceed. He probably understands about a hundred languages, even hard ones like Japanese, and remote ones like Swahili, and ancient ones that aren’t even languages anymore. Certainly he can read English, an easy one, a popular one, the language of a future saint.
I told my mom that I wanted to be a saint and she said, “Madeline, we aren’t even Catholic.”
“That,” I told her, “is a technicality.”
The night I told my mother that I wanted to be a saint, she was making one of her disgusting dinners. She has a column for Family magazine and she writes recipes and stupid essays, every month. Why are they so stupid? Because we are not a family. We are three people—her and me and Cody—all living under the same leaky roof. A family likes one another. A family turns off all of the lights and stands in front of the big window and gazes down at the Statue of Liberty, each one of them holding their own breath at how magnificent she is, the way we do in my dad’s New York City loft, with his new wife, Ava, and their baby.
“No, Madeline,” Mom said, “it is not a technicality. It is a requirement.” She didn’t even look at me. She just kept stirring and measuring. These are the kinds of things she does that drive me crazy.
I peered into the pot. Whatever was inside was far too green for me. I don’t even like when they put parsley on my plate in restaurants.
“Did you know that some saints lived on nothing but air?” I asked Mom.
“That,” she said, “is ridiculous.”
To indicate that this conversation was over, she turned on her Cuisinart, which sounded like a helicopter landing in our kitchen.
“If you want to do something useful,” I shouted, “why don’t you invent a silent Cuisinart so that American families can converse while they cook?”
“What, Madeline?” Mom shouted back, pointing at her ears. “I can’t hear you!”