How to Save a Life

by Sara Zarr

  Which is a lot to ask of myself, I know, considering how I’ve exhibited no skill in this area. So if I can’t do all that, I can at least give him a Mandy update.

  I tried to get her to give the watch over last night so I could take care of it today, but she said she wanted to write a letter to her mother and she needed some time to think. “Well, think fast,” I said. “Your mom doesn’t seem like the patient type.” Then Mandy said, “She doesn’t?” I laughed, thinking she was being ironic, but then I remembered that Mandy and irony go together like mustard and chocolate, so I said, “No, she really doesn’t.”

  Over the last couple of days, I’ve tried to imagine what conversations between my dad and Mandy would be like, the looks he and I would give each other about some of her crazy ideas. I think at first he’d be like, “What the hell?” and then almost as instantly that would turn into affection and acceptance. Maybe I could get there, eventually. Hearing her mom on the phone has already caused some new gear in me to kick in. The one that wants to call that woman back and say, “Hey, bitch, stay away from my family.”

  I swore to Mandy I’d keep the watch situation a secret from Mom. Mandy doesn’t want my mom to think she’s a thief, a bad person, trouble. I tried to tell Mandy that Mom would understand, but she begged me to promise, and I did. I understand the desperate need to not disappoint people.

  And I’m planning a birthday party for Mandy. I told Dylan at school today that it’s this week and that I want to do something, a surprise.

  “Kind of short notice,” he said. We’ve gotten friendlier compared to the polite and careful way we were last week, but still not very boyfriendly/girlfriendly.

  “I know,” I said. “But it has to be the day of her birthday. Otherwise it’s lame. Also, we can make it a baby shower, too, sort of. A birthday-slash-baby-shower. Short notice is good; we won’t have time to get nervous and act suspicious.”

  I didn’t tell him about the watch. He’d have an opinion, and his opinion would be that I should tell Mom.

  For the party to happen, I need to ask Annalee for Thursday off, something I’d planned to do tonight, but the circumstances aren’t ideal for that.

  She swishes her way back up to the front with a coffee in one hand, comes behind the counter, and slaps a magazine down. She flips through the pages violently. Crack. Crack. Crack. “It’s dead,” she says, as if she owes me an explanation. “I’ll do register two if we get a line.”

  Just then my phone rings from my apron pocket. It’s the theme from Mission: Impossible, which I assigned to Ravi’s number when I first saved it on my phone. I pretend not to hear it and start dusting the display of gift books behind the counter.

  “Go ahead and answer,” Annalee says. “I don’t care.”

  Oh, I think you’d care if you knew who it was.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Answer it, Jill.”

  This is no night to test her. I obey. “Hello?”

  “Hey. It’s me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Me, Ravi.”

  “Yes.” I move away from Annalee, scared she’ll hear Ravi’s voice. I’m stuck giving him a semicold “What’s up?”

  He pauses. “Are you at work?”

  “Yes.” I glance at Annalee, who is still looking at her magazine but clearly also listening to me.

  “Can we talk later?” Ravi asks.

  My heart rises. Then falls again at the idea it could be a bad Can we talk? and not a good Can we talk?

  Still, I say yes, and no matter what, yes feels like an improvement.

  When I pull up to my house after work, I call him from my car, heart pounding. Maybe I’m about to get my ass handed to me. But maybe not. Scared as I am, the possibility of never knowing if he and I could really be the kind of friends I think we might be is scarier. For the first time in a long time, possibility conquers fear.

  He answers with a hi. Then asks if I got his messages.

  I blow breath out. “It depends what you mean by ‘got.’ ”

  “Got.”

  “I deleted them without listening.”

  “Oh. That’s…” He sounds relieved. “Why?”

  I lean to rest my forehead on the steering wheel, which is freezing cold. Trust friendship, I think. Trust the next moment even though it’s unknown. “I was scared. I thought… I’m sorry for what I said at the coffee shop. I don’t know why I said those things.”

  I can’t move while I wait for his reply. I think I’m getting frostbite on my forehead.

  “You don’t?” He pauses. I don’t say anything, waiting to be raked over the coals. When he continues, his voice sounds a little shaky. “I kind of walked out on you before we were really done talking. I’m sorry for that.”

  Whoa. I sit up. “No, you were right. You should have walked out.”

  “Okay, yeah, probably.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then we have this whole conversation. For nearly an hour. We start off in familiar territory: Mandy. I tell him all about the watch, and he asks me why I think I can handle this information better than my mom can, why I’d keep it from her. Miraculously, I don’t get defensive.

  “I promised Mandy. She cares so much what my mom thinks and, I don’t know, I feel for her. It was smart of her to take the watch, actually, in a way. It makes me see her in a new light. A smarter one.”

  “You’ve gone from suspicion to sympathy pretty fast.”

  It’s felt slow to me, in a way, but maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve got some of my dad’s heart in me after all. “I guess I’m tired of expecting the worst all the time. We’ll return the watch, and everything will be fine, on track.”

  Then we drift off into more personal things: memories of my dad, Ravi’s trip to India when he was fifteen, my plans or non-plans for college.

  “Wow, I assumed you were going,” Ravi says.

  “I’m going to go, I think. After a year or two off.”

  “English major?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Creative writing?”

  “Really? No.”

  “I just thought because you work in a bookstore and everything.”

  “So do you,” I say.

  “Good point. Um, social work.”

  “Ha!” Who is this Jill person who would major in social work? What does Ravi see in me that I don’t? I ease the seat of my car back and put my feet up. “New topic: In your yearbook, you thanked all these people.”

  “My family. My mom and dad and brothers and sister.”

  “What’s it like having siblings?”

  “Mitali, she’s closest to me in age, and she treats me like a friend. My brothers are bossy and really different from me. It’s always been like that.”

  I turn onto my right side so I can see my house, the front-porch light on, the light in Mandy’s room off. “But what’s it like?”

  “I guess I’ve never thought about it too much. They’re just always there. Like friends you’ll never lose, even if you fight.”

  “And even if you’re different? Like you and your brothers?”

  Ravi starts to answer, then stops. “Are you worried about that? With the adoption and everything?”

  He’s good. “Perhaps a tiny bit of worry crossed my mind.”

  “Don’t. I’ll tell you what it’s about: shared experience. That’s what makes a sibling a sibling. Going through stuff together, good and bad.”

  We talk more about that and, around midnight, plan to meet for coffee tomorrow afternoon because… I don’t know why. No good reason except it feels like our conversation isn’t done. He has to be at one of the regional stores at three, so I’ll be ducking out of school early to meet up with him at Dazbog.

  On Wednesday morning, Dylan’s waiting for me at my locker with a huge grin on his face. I’m feeling pretty good myself. “What?” I ask.

  “I have the perfect idea for Mandy’s birthday-shower thingy,” he says.

  “Yeah? Hit me.”

&nb
sp; “Two words,” he says. “Casa. Bonita.”

  I slap my hand on my locker door. “Yes! You’re a genius. She’ll love it.” Casa Bonita is this awesomely tacky Mexican restaurant on the fringes of Denver, with cliff divers and fake caves and enchiladas made with canned cheese. If Mandy likes Pancake Universe, she’ll be crazy for Casa Bonita. Just the thought of her there, probably saying something like, “This is the most delicious Mexican food I’ve had in my life,” adds to my cheer. I give Dylan a kiss on the cheek. “Best idea ever.”

  “Wait—who should we invite? We need to tell people today if this thing is tomorrow.”

  “Probably just us. Me and you, my mom.” I don’t know if Cinders and Laurel could get through it without letting on to Mandy the kinds of things I’d been saying about her before I started to come around. “Maybe this guy I know from work that Mandy and I ran into the other night.”

  “Who?”

  “You could invite the band if you want,” I say quickly, wondering why the hell I had to mention Ravi. Well, I know why. Because I want to invite Ravi, but I can’t invite Ravi, because Dylan knows Ravi is the person I was going to ask for help with spying on Mandy. And also, PS, Mandy thinks his name is Clark. “Oh, Clark.” I wave my hand like he is nobody. A speck of dust. “He worked at Margins for like five seconds last year. Mandy seemed to really like him. It might perk her up.”

  I feel completely transparent, but Dylan is blinded by his happiness about me finally being nice to Mandy. “You’re like, a whole different person,” he says.

  I can hope.

  Mandy

  Just because you have a watch worth eight thousand dollars doesn’t mean you’re going to get eight thousand dollars for it, I found out. Robin went to meetings half the day, and while she was gone, I called jewelers and pawnshops and even a couple of antique stores. All of them said they had to see it before they could say how much they’d give me. The only person who gave me a number said twenty-five hundred. Something about street value. “It’s not enough,” I said, but there are probably people who have started new lives with less.

  I have to decide soon. Jill asks me every night if I’m done with the letter to my mother. And I tell her not to worry, that my mother sounds bad but doesn’t follow through with things. Except mostly she does, especially things that are for protecting herself.

  All through last night I thought about the baby. Having her. Going through the pain, and the being afraid, and then handing the baby to someone else, someone else who will be her mother. It’s like that lady I met at the mall, the one with the nanny, said: Once I go through all that to have the baby, I’m not going to want to give her up. When she said that, I was so sure she was wrong, and so sure about what I was doing. Now I don’t know what happened.

  Robin finally talked to me this morning at breakfast. Again she said maybe we should get a social worker after all, or even hire a private mediator, and write something down, formally. Sign an agreement. “Just so there aren’t problems later,” she said.

  “No. I told you from the beginning.”

  “But, Mandy,” she pleaded, “everything would be the same. The agreement could say anything you want.”

  I got up and rinsed my breakfast plate and put it in the dishwasher, my head so full of things I wanted to say to Robin, to explain to her. The story about how my father paid my mother so he’d never have to see me. About going to find him, and how he’d moved without telling anyone. The way I used to dream about my father, who he might be and how he would someday come back for me. I don’t know why my mother couldn’t let me go on thinking that for the whole first five years of my life, why she had to tell me what really happened, drag me everywhere looking for him instead of doing it in private.

  I don’t want my daughter to ever hear a story or see a piece of paper or know that one exists on which I signed her away. I don’t want her to ever think that I didn’t want her. No matter what, I don’t want to leave any evidence she could find later that she might think proves to her the worst things she thinks about herself on a bad day. Not when she’s ten, not when she’s fifteen, not when she’s forty. Maybe I’ll be there to explain it to her, but I can’t know that sure enough right now to plan on it. I want it to feel like fate, the way she ended up with Robin. I want to be in her life like a good dream, like someone who might not always be there but who never really left. Her world should feel full of possibilities and open doors, not full of things that are closed and final.

  Robin wouldn’t understand this, because she’s never been abandoned. Mac dying isn’t the same thing.

  “I don’t want to sign anything,” I told Robin this morning.

  She folded her napkin and unfolded it and folded it again. “Okay.” It came out like she was trying hard to be patient. “But we still need to talk. Not just about what’s going to happen when you give birth but about everything after. Your plans for your life, how often you’d like to see the baby, what you want me to tell her about you as she grows up…. Mandy, there’s so much to talk about!” For the first time she was getting mad at me, and maybe ready to cry, too. “I only want to talk. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “It’s confusing to know what the best thing is,” I said. Talking sometimes makes me more confused. Like when Kent used to talk to me late at night about how what we were doing wasn’t wrong, because I wasn’t a child and I wasn’t related to him, and I liked it. “Right?” he’d ask. He’d ask it over and over until I answered back, “Right.” And I don’t want to be talked into something again just to make the other person feel better.

  Robin twisted the napkin in her hand. “It is confusing, I know. I thought we could make this up as we went along. But I see that wasn’t necessarily helpful for either of us.”

  I wish we could go back to those e-mails, each of us at computers, knowing exactly what we wanted and how we wanted to do it, and being so sure of each other. “I’m going to lie down,” I told Robin.

  She stood up. “Mandy, no. Let’s keep talking.”

  “My back hurts.”

  “I’ll come up with you. Or I’ll set you up on the couch.”

  “I want to be alone.”

  I tried to puzzle it out while I rested. To remind myself why I thought this was the perfect plan in the first place, giving up the baby without really giving it up. Being in charge, making my own rules and all my own choices. It’s not that I suddenly think I could do a better job than Robin; I know I couldn’t. But the emotions of it. I didn’t expect to feel this way, like I want to run. This is too hard, maybe impossible. And then there is the piece about who the father of this baby is. If I knew that for certain, maybe I would understand what to do.

  If this isn’t Christopher’s, I think I might hate it. I don’t want to drag around a helpless child, letting her feel all my anger, the way my mother did with me.

  If I could wait and make my decisions after I know, get away for a little bit and then come back, depending, Robin would forgive me. I think. She forgives Jill everything. She could give me that one thing, a small amount of time and space.

  Except I don’t want to leave. The part of me that is just Mandy—no baby, no Christopher, no Kent—wants to stay here forever.

  Jill

  Cinders and Laurel think it’s hilarious to punch me in the arm every chance they get. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and though I’m half Irish, I completely forgot about the holiday and am not wearing a stitch of green. There’s something about the energy of their thumps that can’t wholly be explained by my failure to adhere to a meaningless tradition. They’re punishing me for the last year. Fine. I deserve it, and I’m in a good-enough mood to take it. But by lunchtime there’s a bruise growing on my upper left arm, so I sit with Dylan and the guys from the “band” to avoid further abuse.

  “Did you call work about getting off tomorrow night?” he asks me.

  “Not yet.” I haven’t called work, I haven’t told Mom about Casa Bonita, and I haven’t figured out h
ow to get Mandy there and keep it a surprise, or whether I should invite “Clark.”

  One of the guys—Bo, I think—says to Dylan, “She coming to practice?”

  “No, ‘she’ isn’t,” I say. “Neither is ‘he.’ ”

  “Dude,” Bo says, “are you in the Potato Rebellion or aren’t you?”

  “I thought we dropped the ‘Potato,’ ” says another guy, whose name I can never remember. Kyle, Kenny, Chris, Kevin…? “We’re just the Rebellion, right?”

  Bo shakes his head. “We found out there’s already a band called that. Anyway, the ‘Potato’ part is what makes us indie.”

  I rap my knuckles on the tabletop. “Sorry to interrupt but the point is Dylan will not be at practice tomorrow. He has a birthday–baby shower to go to.”

  All male heads turn to Dylan, who laughs and raises his hands. “No. No. Not like that. It’s not a baby shower for us.”

  “Good,” Bo says. “Because you can’t go out on tour with a baby strapped to your back.”

  Tour? Restraint prevails; I withhold all out-loud sarcastic comments about the future of the Potato Rebellion as a touring band. Instead, I scoop up my stuff and tell Dylan I have to be somewhere after school; I’ll call him later.

  Ravi’s got his suit on, and even though Suit Ravi still makes me slightly nervous, he looks really nice in it. Suit or not, this is the same person I spent an hour with on the phone last night without insulting, demeaning, or dismissing him, and without him shoving my bad behavior in my face. Again, he’s there first, and again he stands, and again I think we should hug hello. Again I don’t. And that’s starting to mean something. If he were a friend, definitely a friend friend, I would. Instead I carry my coffee over to the napkin-stirrer-creamer-everything area and shake cinnamon into the cup. When I come back, he’s sitting again.