How to Save a Life

by Sara Zarr

  “Mandy got a makeover.” Robin turned down the TV. “Show Jill your new look, Mandy.”

  I hauled myself into a standing position to show her: the navy blue long cardigan that Robin picked out, with rows of purple buttons down the front. It cost more than I’ve ever spent in one trip, let alone on one piece of clothing. Underneath you wear black leggings with a special supportive waistband for the baby. The whole outfit is warm and soft; the material doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever had on. Robin says that’s because it’s natural fibers. My mother always said wash-and-wear materials were best. “If I wanted to spend half my life waiting for my clothes to air dry, I would have stayed on the farm.” But I think this is better.

  “Did you use my flat iron?” Jill asked.

  My hand went to my hair. I’d forgotten we did that. When I saw myself in the mirror with my hair like this, I could barely recognize who I was. My face wasn’t so swallowed up.

  “We borrowed it, yes,” Robin said. “It was my idea.”

  Jill tripped on another bag, catching herself before she fell, but not before she swore. “Mom? Can I talk to you upstairs for a minute?”

  That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

  Robin set the popcorn bowl down on the floor and stood. My mother would never do that. She’d say, “Anything you have to say to me you can say in front of Kent.” Or, “I don’t feel like getting up, Mandy. I’m tired, and I don’t take orders from my daughter.” But Robin, she saw the look on Jill’s face and heard the tone of her voice and followed her right up the stairs, handing me the remote on the way. “Be right back, honey. You can change the channel.”

  I didn’t. I left the volume down, too.

  And now I’m down here, listening, while I start putting some of my new things back into bags. This is the kind of thing I expect to happen whenever it seems like things might turn out all right: Someone will get mad; someone will get mad at me. You never get anything good without paying for it. I walk quietly in my socks to the bottom of the stairs. I hear voices but not what they’re saying. Mostly I hear Jill because she’s the loudest, but muffled. Pretty soon a door slams, and I waddle back to the living room, back to the couch.

  I hear Robin’s footsteps on the stairs; then she’s in the room with me and has that look a person gets when they’ve been fighting with somebody. Tired, disappointed.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have bought me all this stuff. It cost a lot.” I pick up a gray shirt Robin called a charcoal tunic from the cushion next to me and fold it into a perfect square. There are tears pushing up, even though I know not to cry in front of people. It was a good day. Nearly perfect. Now I’m paying for it.

  Robin comes closer and runs her hand over my smooth hair before sitting next to me. “I don’t want you to worry about that. We have plenty of money.” She takes the folded tunic and places it on top of the stack I’ve been making.

  I wish Christopher could see me right this second. The way Robin touched my hair. The way I belong. I take a mental picture and send it to him in my head. A moment in time when I feel loved, to go with the other moment I felt it, the one that he gave me.

  “What is it, then?” I ask. “Why is Jill so mad?”

  “Oh. Jill isn’t mad. Well, she is. Or she thinks she is.” Robin looks at the club chair, Mac’s, the one they never sit in, then at me, and her eyes are full of tears, and she doesn’t even try to make them stop. “Mostly, she isn’t mad. She’s sad.”

  Dear Alex,

  I think by now you must be back home and have gotten my letters. This time I’m enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope. I know sometimes you have the idea to write to someone or call them, but it’s too much trouble to look up an address and a phone number, especially these days when we do everything on the computer. I do have an e-mail address that I don’t use very much. Someone I used to know, his name was Kent, was on the computer all the time, practically addicted to it. I don’t want to miss out on important things because of needing to check something on the computer all the time. Also, I think handwritten letters are more personal. My hand is on this pen writing on this paper, and when you get this paper, you’ll know I touched it, and you’ll touch it, and it’s a connection.

  Well, not to sound so serious. It sure is different being here from living my old life back in Omaha! Did I tell you that I used to be an administrative assistant? It was only about twelve hours a week, for my mother’s boyfriend’s construction company. A little bit of filing and answering the phone and things. When I leave here, I might look for that kind of a job again.

  In my last letter I know I said that my future is a blank. I didn’t want you to think I’m dumb, that I haven’t thought about it at all. I have some money. Or I will have. I would never have left Omaha without a plan, including a plan for if I decide giving up my baby is the wrong thing. Not that I would, but you always need a plan. One of my mother’s boyfriends, not the one with the construction company, liked to say motivational quotes. “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” And things like that.

  So you can use the envelope in here to write to me. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. I bet you have that around somewhere.

  Yours truly,

  Mandy (from the train)

  Jill

  On Wednesday, Dylan wants to eat lunch with some guys from his geometry class who are starting a band—the Substitution Postulates. They’ve asked him to play bass.

  “But you don’t know how to play bass.”

  “So?”

  We’re at my locker, where I’m hunting for a scarf I know I had in here at one point this winter. Dylan’s behind me, his hand on my hip. I lean back into him. “You’d seriously rather watch a bunch of guys chew with their mouths open than hang out with me? We could drive to your house.”

  “Nice try, MacSweeney.” He kisses my neck and moves his hand from my hip to the less sexy shoulder zone.

  I finally find the scarf under piles of books and papers, and shove everything back in to close the door, barely, and turn to Dylan. “I really need to talk, though. Can’t you have band camp some other time?”

  He takes his hand off me and pulls his hood up. “I love it when you belittle my interests.”

  “You don’t play bass! And you won’t believe what Mandy pulled yesterday. My mom—”

  “Jill?” He takes my arms, looks into my eyes. “I’m going to lunch now. You can tell me about it after school.”

  “But—”

  “Remember when we first started going out and you had these things called friends? And sometimes you’d do stuff with them instead of with me, and we both survived it?”

  It does sound vaguely familiar.

  He drops his arms and continues. “You’re back with Laurel and Cinders. Eat with them.”

  I don’t want to eat with Laurel and Cinders. I know they’ll sympathize and agree that the situation with Mandy is total insanity, but in fact I don’t want to sit around and bitch about Mandy. I only brought it up with Dylan because lately I’m not sure what else to talk to him about. It’s either that or my dad. Who’s the person I really want to talk to right now. So I might as well let Dylan go.

  “Okay.” I step back so that he’s free of me. “Have fun.”

  I attempt to do homework in the library during lunch. My mind keeps drifting to my coffee plan with Ravi. Once we made the plan last night, I felt so great. So. Great. Then the second I walked in the door at home and saw Mandy and all the bags all over the floor, I was down again. It’s just all so out of control. Life, I mean. The way it flies off in all these different directions without your permission.

  Still, it’s been so long since I hung out with someone new, the prospect of it is keeping my day going. New things. Instead of doing homework, I open a fresh document on my laptop and try to make a list of every new thing I’ve done since my dad died so that I can prove to my mom, to myself, that I’m not scared. That I have courage. That I’m not pushing away life and ch
ange and whatever else.

  Only I can’t think of anything. I open my calendar page and review the last ten and a half months for signs that I lived a life. Here’s what I find: school stuff that automatically imports to all the students, notes on when to change my oil, and reminders about Mom’s and Dylan’s birthdays. That’s it. And I don’t think I got either of them a present. I see I didn’t bother putting Mandy’s arrival date or due date in; I do that now. I also put my coffee meet-up with Ravi in today’s box.

  I click and scroll into the future.

  Graduation, an oil change, and a tire rotation. No wonder I’m so excited about a stupid coffee plan.

  And, I’m moving after graduation, or so I keep telling people and myself. That’s something. That’s bold and new. I type Move out into a random day in July. See, I’m not scared of change, of life. Under event details, I put See the world. Like Dad. The words are fiction. I have no concrete plans for seeing the world and don’t know how I’d come up with them without his advice, and when I picture myself moving out, it doesn’t feel like a bold adventure. It feels like running away. Because all I can see is the part where I leave, not the part where I arrive.

  But if I don’t leave, and I haven’t applied to any colleges, then I truly won’t have anything to look forward to and may never arrive anywhere.

  I rest my weary head on the fake-wood desk of my study carrel. It smells like hand sanitizer. The school’s gone crazy with that stuff. My dad would say germs are good for you, germs make you stronger, germs help evolution along, and haven’t you noticed it’s the obsessive hand washers who are always getting sick?

  I can hear his voice inside me. I know what he would say not only about germaphobia but also about Dylan being in a band (“Dylan’s a good kid, but joining a band is just asking for a heroin addiction”), my mad self-defense skills against Ravi (“You should have kicked him in the head while he was down…. What is he, anyway, Pakistani?”), Mom’s haircut (“I never liked short hair on women, but your mom looks damn cute”), and the school librarian’s ART CAN’T HURT YOU T-shirt (“I’m all for free speech, but has she ever seen a Steven Seagal movie?”).

  What I don’t know, what I need to know, is what he would say about my future. Travel. Staying with Dylan or not. College. Mandy and this baby and it becoming part of us—part of him, in a way, too. How I’ll do at being a sister. What his face would look like when he saw the ultrasound portrait.

  The only voice I hear inside me about any of that is mine, asking:

  What, Jill? What is it? What do you want?

  I don’t know.

  I’m ten minutes early to Dazbog, which I don’t want Ravi to take as a sign I’m oh so eager to see him. It’s just that Dylan forgot he had an old detention to serve after school, so he had to bail on me—again—and when I got home, Mandy was moping around in one of her new outfits and her ironed hair, stopping at every window to stare out as if waiting for someone to come save her.

  “How was school?” she asked me. Well, she kind of asked the kitchen window while I made a cheese sandwich. She totally sounded like a mom.

  “Fine.” Great. Fantastic.

  Then she limply half-closed the curtain with one hand and rubbed her stomach with the other. Everything she does is like that. Limp. Weak. Noncommittal. “I think I miss it.”

  “Miss what?” I asked, more out of impatience at her being so lethargic than out of caring to know.

  “School.”

  Mandy at school. Now, there’s a picture. “Then you must have forgotten how much it sucks.” I folded my bread over the cheese and took a bite.

  “Maybe if I’d finished, I’d…” She stopped then and turned back to the window.

  “You didn’t finish?” New news to me. I figured my mother knows, and it’s one more thing she didn’t want to tell me in her ongoing and futile efforts to keep me from having a bad impression of Mandy.

  “It wasn’t my choice.”

  Right, I thought. Because you’re so helpless. Yet you’re smart enough to have my PhD-holding mother wrapped around your finger and buying you a new wardrobe.

  I finished my sandwich up in my room while getting ready to meet Ravi. I hadn’t intended to change clothes as if this were anything special, but I saw my purple sweater hanging over my chair and thought, Why not? I feel good in it.

  He comes in, seven minutes early, which is nearly as bad as ten. He’s wearing the suit pants, but instead of a shirt and tie with a jacket, he’s got on a lilac V-neck sweater and a white puffy vest. Very preppy. A ripple of relief passes through me, and I realize I was worried he’d forget or blow it off. Or turn up with Annalee or be late or some other weird thing.

  “Ravi,” I call from my table near the window, where I’m sitting with my au lait.

  “We match,” he says when he gets to me, pointing to my sweater.

  “Not really,” I mumble. “Plum and lilac are—”

  “In the same color family.”

  I let it go. “What do you want?” I ask, looking toward the menu board.

  “You invited me.”

  “No. I mean, what do you want to drink? I’ll buy.”

  “I got it,” he says.

  “No, I’m buying.”

  “I don’t let girls pay for my drinks.”

  “Well, then, you’re stupid. I said I’d get it.” Now I’m standing, pulling his arm downward so he’ll sit. Maybe I pull it a little too hard. He falls into his chair, rubbing his arm. “To thank you for your time,” I add.

  He looks at me like I’m of unsound mind. “You’re… welcome. Americano. Please.”

  I really need to start acting normal around him.

  When I get back to the table with his drink, I’m all business. I figure I’ll start with Mandy, and then maybe we can talk about other stuff once I’ve relaxed a little and have stopped calling him stupid and hurting his arm. “Okay. So. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. And feel free to say—”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  There’s the searching look again, like I know something, when in fact I know nothing.

  “Don’t make me ask because it’s getting embarrassing.”

  The yearbook! “Tennis club. I read it.”

  “And?”

  And I’ve been trying to picture you, trying to remember Schiff’s classroom and where you were, and who I was, and if I was nice, and courageous, and seemed like I had stuff to look forward to. “My memory’s really bad.”

  “Oh.” Ravi nods toward his coffee cup. “But isn’t it kind of funny? Small world and everything? That two years later you’d be elbowing me in the face, which would lead us right here to this very coffee shop.”

  “It is.” God. My mom is so right. I’m scared of everything. Ravi’s offering me a wide-open door into a real conversation, so of course I change the subject before that can happen. “Anyway, feel free to say no and that this isn’t your thing. I’m only asking, and it’s kind of a half-baked idea anyway, and if you don’t want to get into it, that’s okay, and I won’t hold it against you.”

  “So… this isn’t about what I wrote in the yearbook? Or anything like that?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “All right.” He’s shifted gears again, the way he does, back into his work persona.

  “You may want to take notes.”

  From his vest pocket he takes his little flip notebook with a spiral-bound top, the one I knew he’d have on him, and a pen, which he clicks with confidence. “Go.”

  I tell him everything I know about Mandy: Why she’s living with us, where she came from, how my mom found her or she found my mom, and why I’m worried. “It’s not that my mom is stupid or naive or anything. And she really does want a baby. She and my dad used to talk about it… being foster parents or something, since they had room in the house and were still relatively young and healthy and could afford it. They’re the kind of people who think it’s your job to give back to society if you can. You
wouldn’t think my dad was like that, to look at him—or talk to him—but underneath his Red State Tough Guy act, he was a real bleeding heart and—”

  “Wait,” Ravi interrupts, holding his pen in the air.

  “Sorry. I’m getting off track.”

  “No, just—your dad. Was?”

  I realize I’ve failed to mention that my father, a prominent figure in this tale, is dead.

  The first thing I think is I haven’t said it aloud in so long. But as I’m staring at Ravi, who is ever the professional, pen poised to write down whatever I say next, it strikes me: I’ve never said it, period. I’ve never had to. Everyone simply knows. When I told Dylan, I said, “He was in an accident. A bad one.” And Dylan said, “Did he… I mean, he’s alive, right?” And I said, “No.” Then everyone else kind of found out.

  Here’s the opportunity again. For a real conversation, a real connection, something new and something old. Ravi knew me before, which makes it sort of safe and familiar. And also he doesn’t know me, which makes it safer still. If this goes wrong, if it hurts too much, if I’m the way I am and wind up driving him away, no big loss.

  Also, it’s practice. Someday I’ll be somewhere and meet strangers who will become friends, and if I want them to know this thing about me, this very important thing, I’ll have to say it.

  As soon as I begin to shape the words in my mind, I feel myself coming apart. All I can do is keep my eyes on his, and my lips sealed.

  He turns his notepad to a fresh page. Slides it across the small table to me. Then the pen. “I know you don’t remember me,” he says softly. “But, pathetic as this may sound, in my mind we’ve always been friends. I mean, we signed each other’s yearbooks. Friends do that. So pretend we are.”

  I pick up the pen. I could use a friend, even a pretend one.

  I close my eyes and draw in a deep breath.

  In all the conversations I’ve had or avoided having with Dylan and my friends, with my mom, in the dark corners of my own injured heart, I’ve never been this scared.