by Sara Zarr
My dad died, I write. Almost a year ago. Car accident. My hand is shaking; my eyes sting and fill. I add Not his fault before pushing the notebook and pen back across the table, wiping a hand across my cheeks.
As he reads, my impulse is to reach out, grab the notebook, run outside, dump it in the trash, bury it in the snow, throw it under the wheels of a passing car—something, something, so I can go back fifteen seconds when this part of me was still shut away and private. Then I look at Ravi’s face again, and the normally white white whites of his eyes are pink. This causes major disruption to my ability to control the flow of my own tears. I see myself when I look at him right now: He’s reflecting my sadness, my broken heart, back to me.
He takes the pen, writes, and slides it over. You’d think it’s something epic from the way it levels my heart. It isn’t.
I’m really sorry, Jill.
Four little words.
I put one hand over the notebook to cover it. I put the other over my mouth, saying through my fingers, “Be right back.”
In the bathroom I shake with tears. I’m still holding the notebook somehow. It’s not only Ravi’s words. It was his eyes, how in them I could see him seriously feeling my pain, close to crying, himself. That touches me like nothing else has and I don’t know why. It’s not like Dylan didn’t cry. But he knew my dad; he’d lost something, too. It’s been like that with everyone—my mom, my friends, friends of our family. Ravi is sad for no other reason than he knows I’m sad. Sad for me. For me. Me, who’s the kind of person who can’t remember an obviously nice guy who thought of me as a friend. It’s completely sincere, what he wrote. And it’s not lame. At all.
I tear off the sheet we’ve written on and put in my pocket. I scrub my face with rough paper towels until it’s the same shade of red all over, not just around my eyes.
When I make it back out and sit down, Ravi asks, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I hand him the notebook, our page gone.
Say “thank you,” Jill. Say “thank you.”
“Thank you.”
And he’s perfect. He doesn’t say Are you sure you’re okay? or I really am sorry, I meant it or Do you want me to tell Annalee you need the night off? or anything. He hears the tone of my voice and makes himself all business again, pen to paper, ready for action. “What do you need?”
I need a friend. A new friend, who hasn’t already been damaged by me beyond repair. One little blow to the face; we can get past that.
“I want to find out everything I can about Mandy.”
Mandy
I’m waiting for my toast. The bread Robin likes me to eat is dry and hard; if I don’t butter it when it’s hot, right out of the toaster, it turns into cardboard. So I have to stand here with my plate and the butter and knife ready. Honestly, I don’t think white bread is going to hurt the baby, but I do it for Robin. We have another doctor’s appointment tomorrow—two weeks since the last one—and I want it to be better this time, I want to do good and not get any strange looks from Dr. Yee.
I feel like I’d do almost anything for Robin.
But my feelings are always confused. Sometimes I think maybe I’m going to give up my baby and maybe I’m not. Other times I’m very sure. One thing I know is I needed the watch in my pocket and the space to think without my mother’s voice in my ear and her face in my face, telling me over and over the same things about how no man will ever want me if I have a baby or if he knows I gave birth, even if I give up the baby. After all, look at her, she said. It took her forever to find someone like Kent because no man like him in his right mind wants to take care of another man’s child. There are plenty of other women out there, women without kids.
“That’s why I have to do the things I do, Amanda. That’s why I have to do all the things I do, and go along with married men and some of the crazies we’ve had, because this rent is not going to pay itself. I make myself special. I keep myself up. I’m different from these women who only want to go to have careers and take care of themselves and be with men who will be their ‘partners.’ ”
She didn’t need a “partner,” she said. “If I wanted a partner, I’d be in a three-legged race.” She needed a man. And so did I, and how was I going to get one dragging around a baby? Especially an Indian baby.
I said, “But you work. It’s not like you don’t have to work.”
She said, “Thanks for the newsflash.”
She said I don’t know anything about how the real world works. She said what she makes at her job is not even a third, not even a fourth, of what she needs to keep up her lifestyle, and if I thought we could take care of ourselves without Kent, I was welcome to try it. Did I want to be on welfare? Did I want to live in public housing? Did I want to be like all the other cows shopping at the dented-can grocery store and getting my STDs treated at the free clinic?
She said, “Because that’s the track your train is on, Mandy. Without Kent, that’s the picture.”
At first the e-mail I sent to Robin on New Year’s was mostly so I could get away from my mother’s talking long enough to breathe. I didn’t really think that much about the giving-away-the-baby part, how doing that would take away the evidence of the only true and beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me. If that’s what this baby turns out to be. Or it could also be evidence of something else, someone else, and I don’t want to think about that.
Now that I’m here, it’s different. I’m changing. It’s just like when I felt my body changing in the first few months of pregnancy, only this time what’s changing is something even deeper in me. Robin is special. This house is special. I’m more sure all the time. Even Jill, who hates me, has something she doesn’t even know she has, and I can tell she’ll make a mark in the world. And that’s probably because of Robin, who could raise another daughter who’d make a mark. Who would matter. Even if the only person she mattered to was Robin, it would be more than I had. The funny thing is, being here also makes me think maybe, maybe I could do it. Maybe I could be a mother.
The doorbell rings at the same time my toast pops up. I ignore the bell and butter my bread and put a layer of the no-sugar jam I’m getting used to, and sit at the kitchen table to eat it.
“Hello?” a voice calls. A male voice from inside the house, and at first I freeze, scared, until the voice repeats “Hello?” and I recognize it as Dylan’s.
“In the kitchen.”
“Oh, hey, Mandy.” He stands in the doorway, his hands in his coat pockets. “I let myself in. They keep a key in the mailbox…. You probably know that. Hope you don’t mind. I didn’t think anyone was home.”
“It’s okay. Jill’s at work.”
“Yeah, I know. I left my history book over here the other day, and this is the night I promised myself I’d catch up on all my homework. So… I’ll just”—he takes one hand out of his pocket, pointing up—“run upstairs and get it?”
“Okay.” He’s not wearing any eyeliner today, but a few of his fingernails are painted dark purple.
He pauses at the bottom of the stairs. I can see half his body through the doorway. “Need anything while I’m up there? I’m sure stairs are no fun for you at this point.”
“No, thank you.”
“Hey,” he says, leaning backward while gripping the rail. “You look nice. I like your hair that way.”
“Thank you.” I smile. He really is so much nicer than Jill. How they get along, I don’t know. “Would you like some toast?”
“Um, sure.”
While he’s upstairs I put two slices in for him and check my reflection on the toaster. Him saying that he likes my hair, that I look nice, those are the first compliments I’ve had from a man—or someone close to being a man—in months. And aside from Christopher, boys my age don’t usually notice me. Not in a good way. They might say something about my body or what they’d like to do with it, but that’s more of an insult than a compliment, if you think about it.
“Got it,” Dylan says, c
oming down the stairs with the book. He stays just on the other side of the kitchen doorway, as if he’s afraid to step all the way in.
“Sit down. Your toast is almost done.”
He comes in and takes off his coat, putting it on the back of one of the chairs before sitting. I get down a plate for him and, when the toast is up, put butter and jam the way I like and pour him a glass of milk.
“Thanks, Mom,” he says, grinning, as I put it all on the table.
Mom. “I like doing things for people.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound like… here, you sit down, too.” He uses his foot to pull one of the chairs out. “How’s everything going? In there?” He points to my belly. “It’s the coolest thing. A whole new human being right inside you. You must feel like God or something.”
He’s sweet. Sincere. Like the last time it was only the two of us talking, I feel comfortable. The way it would feel with a brother, I guess, or a friend. “No,” I say. “I don’t think about it like that. It’s normal. Women get pregnant every day.”
“Good point.” He’s finished his first piece of toast in three bites.
“Do you want any more?”
“No, thanks. This is perfect.”
I get up to tie the wire twist tie around the bag so the bread doesn’t dry out more than it already is. “Everything tastes better when someone else fixes it for you.”
“True.” He brushes crumbs off his shirt. “So… is Jill being nicer to you?”
The bread, the milk, the jam all go back into the refrigerator. I have to answer carefully. “Robin says she’s that way because she misses Mac.”
Dylan lets out a big breath, tilts his neck to stare at the ceiling. “God, yeah. So much.” He tilts his head forward again. “Don’t take it personally. She treated me like crap for a while there, too.”
“She did? But you’re her boyfriend.”
“Right?” Now he’s relaxed in his chair, curling his hands up and putting them in his jeans pockets. “I don’t know how it feels to lose a parent. I try not to judge. I try to just be there for her, but she doesn’t always want me there, and I don’t know when she does and when she doesn’t, so it gets… whatever. Anyway.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to lose a parent, either. Unless you count never having a father in the first place.”
He’s silent, and I feel him watching me while I sponge down the counter where the jam knife left a sticky spot.
“My mother got pregnant with me from a married man,” I say, “and she told him, and he gave her a lot of money to go away and never come back.”
The money ran out. One time she went back to him to ask for more. She took me with her. I was four or five, and I remember it, or I think I do. Maybe I only remember it from her telling me about it so many times. We walked from the bus stop to his house, and my mother told me, “It’s a mansion, Amanda. You’ll see. And when he gets a look at you, it’ll be yours, too. Ours.”
Dylan’s voice calls me back. “Wow.”
Only at this mansion, which was really just a big house, the man who answered the door had never heard of the man who was my father.
“From the minute I… developed,” I tell Dylan, embarrassed, “she always told me how not to have a baby and how it’s the worst thing that can happen and how I had my whole life in front of me and not to ruin it with a baby. The way she ruined hers.” Maybe my father had moved two owners ago, the man at the door said. “With me.”
Dylan makes a noise, air rushing from lungs. “Your mom said that to you? Like, to your face?”
I rinse the sponge, squeeze out the excess water, set it by the faucet to dry. When I turn around to answer him, “Yes, she said that to my face and not just once,” he’s leaning on his elbows resting his face on his fists, watching me. Looking like he can’t believe anyone on the face of the earth would say a thing like that to her own daughter. No one has ever looked at me like that before, not like pity but like they’re truly sorry you’ve been hurt.
Now I know what people mean when they say they have a lump in their throat.
“I should probably lie down now. Robin wants me to be sure to get all the rest I need.”
He gets up. “Okay. Thanks for the toast.”
“Don’t forget your history book.”
“Right,” he says, picking it up. He puts on his coat, and I walk him to the door. He pulls a green ski cap on and looks at me, and there’s a feeling between us. Not like the kind of feeling I had with Christopher. Not romantic. Not sparks. It’s more like the kind of feeling I have with Robin.
He holds his arms open. “Hug?”
I stare. What if Jill walked in right now? Or Robin? Would I get kicked out? He doesn’t wait for me to say yes. He leans in and puts his arms around me. It’s not long and, because of my stomach, it’s not that close. When he’s done, I want to say something, but I’m not sure what.
“She gave up a lot” is what comes out. “My mother.”
“Still,” he says, with a shake of his head. “I mean, she got a lot, too.”
I can’t think what my mother got that would make what she gave up worth it. When I look at him, wondering, I realize he means me.
Jill
Tenderness. When Dad and I used to tell each other to try a little tenderness, we meant calm down, be soft, stop having to be right, give a person the benefit of the doubt for a change. We never talked about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of it. How it leaves you the other kind of tender—raw, bruised. In certain cases it might leave you bewildered and stumbling, a person who’s been crouched in the dark, afraid someone will turn on the lights and find you, and then it happens and in some ways it’s not so scary after all and in others, well, holy shit.
Last night, after seeing Ravi, I got through my shift by shutting down, because I couldn’t keep feeling what I was feeling and also do my job. Thank God that Mandy and my mom were in their rooms when I got home. I slugged some NyQuil and slept in my clothes. It’s hard to get up and go to school and be me, be Jill MacSweeney, in the same way I was yesterday. I feel exposed, like Ravi has found some unlocked door inside me and now anything can get in.
So I compensate. And maybe I go overboard. In need of extra armor, I do the major smoky eye. The black jeans, the black boots, the black hoodie—hood up. Leather cuff. All my rings. Hair ironed and waxed to a perfect edge. When Dylan comes by to pick me up, I get in his car and hold my backpack on my lap.
“Wow,” he says. “That look is rock.”
Indestructible.
“Yep.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yep.”
“You sure about that?”
I check myself in the side mirror. Sunglasses: on. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
On the way he tells me some story about Mandy and her terrible mother and toast. I know I should be paying attention. Only my brain is occupied getting everything that Ravi loosed back on lockdown.
“… and what’s she going to do after the baby is born?” Dylan is asking as we turn into the school lot.
Oh, that. Mandy. Whatever, who cares. “I don’t know.”
“Isn’t the point of an open adoption that she’ll have contact with the kid and stuff?”
“I guess.”
He pulls into his spot. “So you’ve lost interest.”
“No,” I say, impatient.
“Two days ago you were planning to call a PI on her ass, Jill.” He turns off the ignition; we get out. “Don’t tell me you actually listened to me and talked to your mom about it.”
“Ha.” I tighten the strings around my hood, adjust my sunglasses, and survey the parking lot. I feel like I could get in a fight right now. I feel like I could slash a tire. “I’m tired of thinking about it is all.”
Dylan doesn’t notice that I’m bent on destruction and in no way interested in Mandy at the moment. “After talking to her yesterday… man. I feel sorry for her,” he says. “Seriously. She
may be giving up the baby so it has a mother, but she kind of needs one herself.”
I kick a chunk of ice off the wheel well of Dylan’s car with my boot, and then kick it again so it skids across the lot and breaks up. “One what?”
“A mother. She’s the one who needs a mother.”
I call in sick to work, from school. I never do that unless I’m actually sick, which is rare. Annalee asks me if I want tomorrow night off, also, because Polly is looking for more hours this week to pay for a car repair. Fine. When Dylan drops me off at home, I lie to him, too, and tell him I’m sick and getting straight into bed and he should leave and not kiss me good-bye or anything because he might catch it. It, my phantom illness.
Mom has left me a note on the kitchen counter—she and Mandy are at the doctor’s.
Dad’s CD collection is organized strictly by the first name of the artist. Nothing fancy. It’s easy to find Otis, right between Neil Young and Paul McCartney. I haven’t fired up the components since way before Dad died. He refused to get on board with music downloads and digital storage; rebuilding his collection from vinyl to CD was as far as he was willing to go. He’d never rip anything to his computer or listen on an MP3 player—albums were meant to be heard whole, he said, not chopped up and portioned out like hors d’oeuvres. Albums are meals. For him it was all about the component system and the giant speakers on either side of the fireplace. Between which I now lay, on the floor, the remote in my hand.
The horns start in, then the little strum of an electric guitar.
That’s all it takes; I’m gone. Otis and a box of tissues and me.
Weary me.
Unsurprisingly, considering I’ve got the volume as high as it will go without distorting, I don’t hear Mom and Mandy get home. They find me listening to “Try a Little Tenderness” for the twenty-first time, surrounded by wadded-up tissues, still in my sunglasses and with my hood up. I don’t love my mom seeing me like this, but it’s definitely the last thing I want to be doing in front of Mandy. I scramble up, turn off the CD player, amass my snot rags, and toss them into the fireplace.
