A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy) (15 page)

Or was Emily behind it?

The only thing I knew for sure was that I had way more questions than answers.

“Earth to Miranda,” said Lindsay. I realized she had been standing in front of me for a while. And I had been staring at the same page of my book for about ten minutes or more. I’d been reading the same sentence over and over, but not understanding anything I was reading.

I closed the book and looked up at Lindsay.

“Sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”

“You hungry?” she asked me. She handed me a candy bar she’d gotten from a vending machine somewhere. I took it and we both sat and ate chocolate in silence.

“You think he’s going to be okay?” Lindsay asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you
want
him to be okay?” Under other circumstances, this would be an opening for an argument. But I looked at Lindsay and saw she wasn’t trying to make me mad, she honestly wanted to know. Given my history with Dad, I couldn’t exactly blame her.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. It dawned on me after the words were out of my mouth that they were one hundred percent true. Dad and I may not see eye to eye on everything, but I didn’t want him gone.

 “Good,” she said. And then she plopped down in the chair next to me. She tossed her candy bar wrapper into a nearby trashcan and then slouched against me. I knew she was tired, because in about two minutes she was out cold. Not that I blamed her. We’d both had a stressful day and now it was nearly midnight.  

I still had
A Tale of Two Cities
in my lap, but what I really wanted to do was grab my journal from my backpack. I could see the corner of the leather bound book sticking out near the open zipper of my bag. I hadn’t written in the journal yet today. In fact, I hadn’t written in it for a couple of days—since before Heathcliff dropped the big proposal bomb. Writing about my life in my journal helped me get perspective. When I wrote, things seemed clearer, more in focus. It was one of many reasons I knew I wanted to be a writer.

I was itching to write in it again, but Lindsay’s head on my shoulder prevented me from reaching it. Every time I leaned over, Lindsay slouched a bit. Even trying to drag it out using my foot didn’t work. If I got the journal, Lindsay would fall off me and make a rough landing on the ICU waiting room floor and that was not an option. Not after the day we’d had. Journal writing would have to wait for another day. Besides, I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d write in it. The last few days were just a swirl of confusion and my feelings were all over the place. In forty-eight hours, I’d had my boyfriend propose, someone—possibly his ex—try to kill me and my dad nearly die of a heart attack. Even by Bard standards, that was a pretty crazy few days.

I don’t remember falling asleep. One minute I’d given up trying to reach my journal and the next, I was dreaming. I knew right away it wasn’t going to be a good dream. I was walking up the stairs of some old cottage, following a click-clacking sound, almost like two pencils being tapped together. After I’d climbed the flight of stairs, I found an older woman sitting in a rocking chair, knitting. The clicking sound was the wooden knitting needles, of course, moving quickly together. She was at work on the world’s longest scarf, which was really the only way I could think to describe it. The knitting poured over her lap and wound down into a large pile on the ground. The pile of new knitting was nearly as tall as her chair. I had a feeling if she straightened out the scarf it would stretch across the room and down the stairs. The scarf was decorated with an odd pattern of squiggles. When I took a step closer, I realized they were letters.

“Bon jour, Miranda,” she said. “Je m’appelle Madame Defarge.”  That’s about as much as I understood her say. The rest of her French came out in a tumble of advanced vocabulary far beyond my one semester of French.

Madame Defarge worked her needles furiously together, adding length to her scarf every few minutes. I felt I should know her. She looked familiar.

“What are you knitting?” I asked her, but as I looked at the words in her knitting, I realized they were not just any words – they were names. And then it hit me: I knew where I’d heard her name before. It had been in
A Tale of Two Cities.
She was a blood thirsty French Revolutionary who spent her time knitting the names of people who she thought ought to die.

She said something more in French that I didn’t understand and then she dropped her knitting needles in her lap. She shook out the scarf and held it up so I could see it.

That’s when it dawned on me that those weren’t strangers’ names. I knew them. They belonged to people I knew at Bard:

Hana

Samir

Blade

Heathcliff

Ryan

As I read the names, an uneasy feeling bubbled up in my stomach. They weren’t betrayers of the Revolution! None of them even lived in that time. But she wanted them dead. Or, perhaps, she was telling me they already were.

Madame Defarge gave me another smile, and I felt suddenly very cold. 

“Why are my friends on that list?” I asked her. “Why?”

She just spoke more French that I didn’t understand. It hardly seemed fair that this was my dream and yet I couldn’t understand a word she said. I asked her again, but this time she shouted something loudly and three or four angry men stomped up the staircase. They were carrying knives and old rifles and they had on old-fashioned clothes. One of them grabbed me and pulled me away from Madame Defarge. As he dragged me away, I managed to get one last look at the scarf.

At the very top, on the patch she was just starting to finish, I saw she was working on completing the last “a” of “Miranda.”

My name was on the death scarf, too.

Then, I was pulled out of the room. The last thing I heard was one of the men shouting, “Vive la Revolution!”

I woke up with a start to see Mom’s face hovering above mine. “Miranda?”

I tried to calm down. That’s what I get for reading a classic before bed.

I sat up straight, trying to get my bearings and that’s when I saw I was still sitting in the waiting room of the hospital ICU. Lindsay was gone, but I was there and it was morning, because weak daylight had started to stream in through the blinds covering the windows next to me. My neck felt like I’d slept at a right angle all night and maybe I had. 

 “Your father is awake,” Mom said now. “And he’s asking to talk to you.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, and I stood up and stretched, trying to get the image of those angry men out of my mind. It had just been a dream, I told myself. Just a dream.

“Should I wait for Lindsay before I go in?” I asked Mom as we began to walk away from her.

“She’s in the bathroom, and anyway, your father said he wanted to speak to you first.”

“He did?” I was skeptical. I couldn’t imagine a universe where Dad would want to see me
before
Lindsay.  Mom took me by the arm and led me down the hall to Dad’s room. When we got there, Dad’s doctor was in his room talking to Dad. Dad looked pale, I saw, but not as bad as yesterday. Plus, his eyes were open, which just made him seem way more alive than yesterday when all the alarms in the room were going off at once. I glanced up at his heart monitor and saw the steady
beep, beep
of his heart rate pop up on the screen in steady green lumps. He seemed calm and stable. I wonder how long that would last
after
he saw me.

“So, we’ll take it easy today, and maybe by tomorrow we can move you out of the CICU,” I heard the man in the white doctor’s coat say. He glanced up and saw Mom and me, and turned to include us in the conversation.

“Is this the Miranda I’ve been hearing so much about?” the doctor glanced at Mom and when he got the nod, he extended his hand. He hadn’t been the doctor on call last night, but then I realized it had been late and last night’s doctor was probably an intern or some other doctor in training. This one looked older and more put together. I took his hand and shook it, even though I always still felt weird when adults did that. It was like they were treating me like one of them. I never knew how hard to squeeze an adult’s hand or how long to hold it. It’s not like I got much practice at Bard. None of the faculty there shook hands. I couldn’t blame them. It took a lot of concentration and energy for a ghost to keep up a solid form.

“I’m Dr. Givens, and I have to say that I think you saved your dad’s life,” Dad’s doctor said.

“Me?”

“Well, we weren’t sure he was going to wake up,” Dr. Givens said. “Miranda, I think you brought him back. It was really touch and go there for awhile.” Dr. Givens glanced through the window. “You must be a very special daughter.”

I glanced at Dad briefly, but he didn’t stand up and shout “you lie!” or anything else to deny it. I half expected him to do something like that, but he didn’t say a word. He just lay in his bed still looking a little tired. Maybe he was just too pooped to tell Dr. Givens I was not the favorite daughter. I was a far, far distant second. He gave me a weak smile, instead.

“Well, I’ll leave you all to talk,” Dr. Givens said and then he left the room. Mom left with him, and then there were only the two of us. I noticed he no longer had the tubes in his mouth or all over his face, and Dad motioned me over with a gentle lifting of his hand. I didn’t really want to go closer. It was one thing to talk to Dad when he was in a coma. It was another thing when he was awake and could respond. Of course, he couldn’t really yell and scream at me, I thought. He was still weak from the heart surgery. 

He glanced at me, his eyes a little glazed, but I could tell he was
there
. That was him in that hospital bed. He was back.

“Hey, pumpkin,” he said, his voice a scratchy croak. He smiled at me. “Pumpkin” was a name I hadn’t heard since I was four. Terms of endearment weren’t at the top of the list of things Dad usually said to me.

“Hey,” I answered back, suddenly wondering if he had brain damage. Did he think I was actually four?

“Miranda, sorry you had to leave Bard and your school work,” Dad said and he cleared his throat. Okay, so, he didn’t think I was four. That was good. Also, Dad never apologized. For anything. I wasn’t sure what to make of this turn of events.

“Uh, Dad, you had a heart attack. I think that’s more important than a few research papers.” Besides, somebody had to get Lindsay home, I thought. 

“I have something I really want to tell you,” Dad said.

I braced myself. When Dad had news, it was usually that he was getting married – again.

“I want you to know that since Carmen left me, I’ve been seeing this counselor,” he said.

“Are you two engaged?” I asked, assuming the usual.

“What? No!” Dad started to sound like his usual defensive and grumpy self, but then he pulled it back. “No, I mean, I see why you would think that, given my track record, but when I said ‘seeing’ I meant in a professional capacity.”

“You’re in therapy?” This was even more surprising. Dad never asked for help for anything in his life. Mom tried to get him to go to marriage counseling for years and he never did.

“Yeah, I am,” Dad said.

I thought about this a minute. “So did the shrink give you the heart attack?” Maybe all that regurgitating of his childhood was too much for Dad to take.

“No, Miranda. He didn’t give me the heart attack.” Dad cleared his throat and tried to sit up a little in bed. “But he has helped me to see things a little clearer, and I realize that I made a lot of mistakes with you. You had—and have—every right to be angry at me. I really screwed up a lot of things, pumpkin.”

I glanced down, wondering if Dad remembered anything I’d said to him when he was unconscious. 

“But I realize that life is short, and I might not be here tomorrow,” Dad said. “And when I was in that coma, I saw
you
. I heard
your
voice, and I swear, Miranda. It brought me back.”

“Because you wanted to ground me?” I joked.

Dad gave me a weak smile. “No. I know you think I’ve always been angry with you, but really, I was angry with myself. I punished you when I really wanted to punish myself. I was angry at me, not you. But what I want to do now is make it up to you if you’ll let me.”

“Okay.” It was as if Dad
had
really heard me when he’d been in his coma. Isn’t this what I asked for? A truce?

“You don’t have to be my best friend. I don’t expect you to give me the best Dad of the year award ever, but I just want the chance to get to know you better without all the anger and the judgment. Does that sound good?”

I nodded. It did.

And for the first time in a very long time I wasn’t angry at him. And I realized that all these years, that I hadn’t just been angry at Dad for missing visits or for ignoring me. I’d been angry at him for disapproving of me
being me
. And even though I thought I was too old to care what Dad thought of me, I realized I wasn’t. It mattered to me.

Dad reached up then, opening his hand, and I took it and he squeezed. 

“Uh… Dad?” Lindsay was at the door, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Come here, you,” Dad said and Lindsay threw herself into a hug. Fortunately for Dad, the ICU came equipped with bedrails, or Dad would’ve been flung to the floor. All was right in the world again.

During that week that Lindsay and I spent at home, we visited Dad every day at the hospital. In some ways, I thought the heart attack was the best thing that could’ve happened to our relationship. Not that I’m glad Dad had to have open heart surgery or anything, but I was glad we were on speaking terms again. I was also really happy to discover that the sight of me didn’t make a vein pop out on the side of Dad’s head like it usually did.

Even Lindsay was glad to see us not fighting, and I realized how stressful it had been for her, too, all these years, constantly being asked to take sides when Dad and I fought, continually disappointing either him or me when she didn’t seem loyal enough.

We even laughed, like really laughed, and we were in the
hospital
, and yet, it was all like we were at Disney World or something. And, for the first time, I felt proud of Dad. He was evolving. He was seeing a counselor. He was working on his life. It was all good.