And that, in a nutshell, was my problem. No one could hear me, except, I guess, God. But when I was an official saint, everyone would listen to what I had to say. My name would be in newspapers. I would be on television. A sculptor would come to our house and make a statue of me wearing long flowing robes and a gentle expression, maybe with a baby lamb or kitten at my feet. Biographers would write my life story for the history books. People would hang out on Lloyd Avenue in front of our house, waiting for a glimpse of me. I wouldn’t have to go to school anymore, though I wasn’t sure of all the rules and benefits of sainthood. The Pope would have to fill me in.
One thing I thought was that when I was a saint, I would probably have to forgive my mother for letting my father leave us. Saints are nice like that. Besides, before he left, I thought she was great. She did things like put faces on my hamburger buns. She would take those green olives with the red insides that come in a bottle and cut them in half and use those for the eyes, and a small round of sweet pickle for the nose and then a big red ketchup smile. Also, we used to cut shapes out of pieces of American cheese with cookie cutters so that my sandwiches always were one piece of white bread topped with a star, or a heart, or a moon.
When I remember things like this, I feel all weird. But then I look at my mother with her plain hair and her plain face and sad eyes and I get angry at her all over again. She let my dad leave us. Still, I keep trying for a third miracle. If I live as long as Mother Teresa did, I could perform something like a thousand miracles! Who knows? Maybe I can even perform a miracle that will fix everything. Saints do things like that, every day.
Chapter Two
THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME
AFTER MY PARENTS GOT DIVORCED and the very thing I worried about—life without my father—had happened, I missed our old life in Boston even more than before. So every Saturday after ballet class, I begged my mother to drive past our old apartment in Back Bay. Sometimes she would even do it. But usually she would sigh and say, “It’s time to move on, Madeline.” I had three best friends when we lived in Boston. They all had flower names: Poppy, Marigold, and Rose. This was just a coincidence. I really missed them. We used to take museum classes together every Saturday morning and meet in the playground near Poppy’s apartment in the South End on beautiful afternoons. Then I moved and they just stayed their own happy bouquet.
Of course we pinky-swore that we would always always stay in touch and that they would come to Providence some weekend and I would visit them after ballet class sometimes but somehow, even though we were only an hour apart, none of those things really happened. Once, my mother arranged for me to call them. Poppy’s mother gathered all three of them at their apartment and put them on speakerphone but no one talked. Not even me. Another time, we met Marigold and her mother for lunch after ballet, but my mother cried and talked about her divorce and Marigold and I stared at each other. She had on lip gloss. And Uggs.
This particular Saturday my mother was especially cranky but I asked, anyway. “Can we drive past our old apartment? Please, please, please?”
“I thought we’d go for tea at the Ritz-Carlton,” she said.
Tea at the Ritz-Carlton was expensive. Something seemed very suspicious. “Okay,” I said, knowing it wasn’t okay. Then I thought of something. “Is Rose going to be there?” Rose had her tenth birthday party there, a real tea party, and we got all dressed up in pretty dresses and even got manicures.
“Rose?” my mother said, as if she had already forgotten who Rose even was. “Oh,” she said. “No.” Then she added all special-like, “Just us.” But that made me feel bad because that’s how I thought of our family without my father in it: just us.
We drove through the streets of beautiful Boston and I tried to memorize all the buildings, like the old State House, so that when I got home I could play them back in my mind.
“They moved,” my mother said suddenly.
“Who?”
“The Palmers. Rose’s family. They moved to Cleveland. We got a card at Christmas.”
Then I got really mad because she hadn’t even bothered to tell me. “Cleveland?” I said. If it wasn’t a state capital, I didn’t necessarily know which state something was in.
“Cleveland. Ohio,” she said.
“Capital, Columbus,” I said, satisfied. I wondered how Poppy and Marigold were managing now, and smiled, relieved, I guess, that someone else in the world might be unhappy like me.
My mother was pulling up in front of the Ritz-Carlton, and letting the valet take our car. This was all feeling like a celebration, but my mother looked really glum. Her jaw was set kind of weird and she kept avoiding eye contact with me. Always a bad sign. Inside, we sat in the beautiful dining room and the waiters in their tuxedos treated us like movie stars. It was the first time I’d ever been there when they didn’t bring me a coloring book and crayons, which meant I looked mature and sophisticated. Ballerinas can extend their necks and hold their chins just so for effect. I did this, imagining Madame instructing me: “Reach, Madeline. Reach!”
“What’s wrong with your neck?” my mother said.