How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) Read Free Page A

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 uslined 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?
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œMr. 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 felland 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