How to Save a Life

by Sara Zarr

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Ron comes down our aisle with some go-backs. “Anyway, you look pretty different. So you can see how I wouldn’t have recognized you, right?”

  He nods and presses his lips together.

  “I like Ravi better,” I say. “ ‘R.J.’ sounds like a Texas oil baron.”

  “Okay, call me Ravi. Most people do.” He’s still fiddling with his suit jacket, with his tie, with his sad-looking hankie. “About the other night…”

  “Excuse me,” Ron says, brushing by and disappearing around the corner.

  Ravi clams up again, staring at me like he wants something, expects something.

  “What?” I ask. When he remains silent, I give him the impatient swirling hands of Go on.

  “It was a poor…” He glances toward the ceiling, blows out a breath, then continues. “… execution of my duties. I should have thought before startling you like that.”

  I point to his bruise. “Does it still hurt?”

  “Oh yeah.” He says that with a charming little half smile, and a tone of awe, like he’s impressed. Whatever is left of my indignation deflates.

  “Let’s forget it. Only because I don’t want to deal with the whole nightmare of making a report for HR. And I know closing early was dumb.”

  His body relaxes and he loosens up in his suit, looking slightly less like a person living out some kind of pathetic CIA make-believe game, his black hair cut high and tight and a cell phone clipped to his belt. “Noted.”

  We stare at each other. He’s got that same expectant look. I can’t comprehend him as someone who occupied the life I lived before—before I was all Dylan’s, before my dad’s accident, before I changed. Before I leaped over that jagged place between then and now and didn’t look back. I want to tell Ravi not to take my failure to remember him personally; I don’t remember me, either.

  The lights in the back of the store blink off, the subtle signal to customers to get the hell out and go home. I put my hands in my apron pockets. There’s no reason for our conversation to continue. Thank you and good night. Yet my lips keep moving, and my feet stay put. Like, if I talk to Ravi long enough, maybe I’ll catch some glimpse of myself from back then. “So do you go to UC or DU or what?”

  I watch his face, listen to his voice. Strain to see or hear a memory of Schiff’s computer lab, the view from my keyboard, the sound of whirring CPUs, maybe. Anything.

  “Neither,” Ravi answers. “None. Just working right now. Finally. It took forever to find this job. That’s why I’m a little intense about it, I guess.”

  “A little.”

  “That’s also why I changed my name. After about twenty applications and no interviews, I thought I’d mix things up a little. See if someone named R.J. could get more play than someone named Ravi.” He pulls another business card out of his jacket pocket. “Here. If you need anything at the store or see any suspicious activity or something. There’s been a lot of merchandise disappearing in our region, so I’ll be around a few times a week, at least.” Very professional, very thorough. Like someone twice his age.

  “Okay.” I put the card in my apron pocket just as Annalee comes toward us, smiling.

  “Sorry to kick you out, but we need to get closing under way.”

  “Right.” He gives her a card, too, and repeats what he told me.

  I follow him to the door to let him out and to lock up. Before he leaves, he turns and, sounding nineteen again, says softly, “Look at the tennis team page. In the yearbook.”

  “Tennis team. Okay.”

  After he’s gone, Annalee says, “What was that all about? Are you trying to get my job?”

  “Ha. No, thank you.”

  “Well, whatever. That is one tall, steamy, delicious chai latte.”

  “Really?” I look at the door Ravi’s just walked through. I guess he looks good. Better than he did two years ago, anyway. “I don’t think you can say that without violating some company policy.”

  “All I mean is he’s my type.”

  “He’s a little young for you,” I say. “But go ahead.”

  I count out my register, mopey and disturbed that I still can’t remember Ravi and what that means about what I remember about me, that I closed early Monday, that Dylan and I can’t figure out what to do about us, that I wasn’t nicer to Mandy after school today, that I can’t seem to talk to my mom anymore.

  Or, for that matter, talk to anyone, be nice to anyone except here at work.

  The sad fact about me and work is that I’m my best self when I’m here.

  I can be human to strangers and coworkers, just not to the people who actually care about me.

  Mandy

  There’s a daydream I’ve had ever since I was little. I don’t know where it comes from—maybe I saw something like it in a movie or on TV, or maybe I read it in a book. Except I haven’t read very many books so that’s probably not it. Maybe I thought it up all on my own. In it I live in a log cabin by a small lake, and on the other side of the lake is another log cabin, exactly like mine. A perfect square. A man lives in it, and he carves tiny animals out of wood. For me. A bear, a deer, a raccoon. And puts them in a boat to float them to my side of the lake. I can never think what to send back, because I don’t have anything, but I’m never lonely. Every time I walk out of the cabin door and look across my lake, he’s there on his porch, carving. Water and wildflowers between us, but we’re still together.

  The baby will always have Robin. Jill, too, even though now she acts like she doesn’t care. She will. In a way the baby will have me, also. I’ll be like the man in the cabin across the lake, and for once I can be the one sending things across—letters, money, presents—and the baby won’t have to send anything back. I can give and give and give and never have to take, because I won’t really be the mother. We won’t fight like mothers and daughters do. I won’t be able to hurt her or mess up her life with my bad decisions. For instance if I pick the wrong boyfriend, it won’t affect her, and I won’t be able to make her feel bad about herself; she’ll always be protected by the space between us.

  I’ll only send good things across. Starting with Robin and this house.

  This is Thursday. I got here Monday. I’m already feeling at home. I’ve got my favorite end of the couch, and I have the cable set up to record my shows. More and more I think of my room as my room and not as the guest room. Which I think will be the nursery. There’s a routine: Robin gets up early and works in her downstairs office while Jill gets ready for school. Jill leaves, and I get up and shower and set my hair. Jill and Robin don’t have rollers or even a curling iron, and Jill looked at me funny when I asked. “Curlers?” she said. “What is this, 1988?” All I know is how my mother taught me to do my hair. So I’ve been saving toilet paper rolls and in the meantime using bobby pins.

  After my shower, Robin and I have breakfast together and she tells me her schedule for the day. I’m not sure exactly what she does for a living. She’s told me more than once, only somehow it doesn’t stick. It’s something important, I know that, and she has a lot of meetings with neighborhood boards and city officials and things like that. If she’s not home around lunchtime, she calls me and we chat for a minute and she makes suggestions about what I could eat, and reminds me to take a walk and a nap.

  This morning, while she put our breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, she asked me if I’d thought more about my plans for after. “You don’t think you’ll go back to Omaha?”

  “No.” I can’t do that. Can’t and don’t want to.

  “How about what we talked about in terms of college?”

  “Maybe.” I can’t do that, either, though. At least not until I finish high school, but Robin thinks I have, and I want her to keep thinking that.

  There was a silence then, and I knew exactly what Robin wasn’t saying. She wasn’t saying, You could stay right here in Denver. Be a part of the baby’s life.

  We already talked about that in our e-m
ails before I got here. With open adoption, one of the points is that you could do that. You could be somewhere on the fringes, in the corners, lurking there and being called an aunt or a friend, or sometimes the baby even knows the truth. I told Robin I don’t want that. I don’t think.

  “I just want you to know, Mandy,” Robin said, closing the dishwasher, “that I’ll do whatever I can to help you get settled somewhere. When you decide what you want to do. I don’t want to pressure you, but it would be smart to have a plan worked out fairly soon.”

  “Okay.”

  It’s not that I don’t have a plan. I have Kent’s watch. I guess that’s a safety net more than a plan—one that I think is best to keep to myself.

  I like watching Robin around the house, doing things like making breakfast or sitting at her desk downstairs and looking at her computer. Everything she does, she does with confidence. Like she’s sure of who she is and not waiting for someone else to tell her.

  During my afternoon talk shows, the doorbell rings. It’s an old-fashioned ding-dong. Not like the buzzer at Kent’s apartment, which was so loud it made you jump.

  It takes time to get from the couch to the door, and when I open it, there’s a boy walking away. “Wait.”

  He turns, surprised. “Oh. Hey. You must be… okay, I don’t remember your name, but you’re the one who… with the baby. And everything.”

  “Mandy.”

  “Right. I’m Dylan.” He takes a few steps toward the door. “Is Jill home?”

  “Not yet. Do you want to come in and wait?”

  “Um…” He looks over his shoulder at the street. “She’s not expecting me or anything. I could call and stop by later.”

  “Come in. I don’t mind.” Honestly, I would like the company; waiting for the baby is a little bit boring.

  Dylan is Jill’s boyfriend. I recognize him from the pictures hanging on the door of Jill’s closet. There are some on the inside door, too, which I saw when I looked around in her room yesterday. Like I said, this can be boring, especially between The Young and the Restless and lunch, and Jill’s room gave me something to do. Originally I only wanted more stationery, but I found some other stuff. The pictures of Dylan and some letters from him, too, inside Jill’s desk drawer. Also there was a school yearbook on Jill’s bed. I found her picture, and in it she’s got lighter hair, but what really makes her look different is her big smile. I spent an hour looking at the yearbook. Her school is just like mine; there are cheerleaders and sports teams and a drama club and academic clubs and homecoming. I never had a yearbook, though, because it was eighty dollars.

  A lot of people wrote in Jill’s. Stuff like Stay great and I’m glad I sat by you in fifth and Wasabi Funyuns R.I.P. She has a lot of friends. If I’d had a yearbook, I wonder if anyone would have written in it and what they would have said about me.

  Dylan comes up the walk and inside. He looks like a male Jill. They dress the same—skinny jeans and sneakers and hooded tops, both with dyed dark hair sweeping across their faces, both with eyeliner. Dylan has a ring in his lip to match the one in Jill’s eyebrow. I don’t know why anyone would pierce their face; I don’t even want to do my ears.

  He sits in the leather armchair in the corner.

  “They never sit there,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Jill or Robin. I’ve only been here a few days, but I can tell it’s the most comfortable chair in the room and they never sit in it.”

  “It was Mac’s. Jill’s dad’s.” He runs his hand over the arm. “Don’t worry, I was always allowed. It’s a guy thing.”

  I lower myself onto the couch as gracefully as I can and smooth out my skirt. “What was he like?”

  They never talk about him, just like they never sit in his chair. You can feel him here, though, when they’re home. In the late afternoons, after Robin has come back from wherever she is and before Jill goes to work, it feels like they’re waiting for someone, like a person is about to walk into the room but never does.

  Dylan shrugs. “He was kind of awesomely grumpy. Rough on the outside but a total teddy bear once you got to know him. Smart as hell but didn’t have to show it off. Really great person. Really great.”

  “Did he smoke? I found ashtrays on the bookshelves.”

  “Cigars. Only on the weekends.”

  Dylan is nice-looking, with mostly clear skin and sincere eyes. I try to imagine him with normal hair color and no makeup. When I was in school, I didn’t spend very much time talking to boys, or to anyone, and I’m not sure what to say to Dylan now. I smile. He smiles and slowly nods, drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair.

  “Why don’t you call Jill and find out when she’s coming home?”

  “We’re kind of… we’re in a complicated place right now. With our relationship. I was passing by the house and stopped on impulse. I wanted to meet you, actually.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.” He gets up and walks to the mantel, handling and looking at the knickknacks—a small ceramic pig, a tiny bronze box. Then a picture in a wooden frame, which he brings to me. “This is Mac.”

  I take the picture. I’ve already looked at it but didn’t know who it was. A cousin, I thought, or an uncle. Now I can see the resemblance between this man and the one in the picture in Jill’s desk, only he has longer hair and no beard. “He’s so young.”

  “Nineteen in that picture. Hiking in Peru. When he graduated from high school, he worked a year and then traveled the world for, like, two years? Had all these amazing adventures. Saw everything there was to see, met Jill’s mom on the plane ride home, and the way he always said it was that he never looked back.”

  So it does happen. People meet in unexpected ways in unexpected places, and it can be true and lasting love. It was like that with Christopher. Unexpected and true, anyway. Lasting is something else and I don’t know what, exactly, because I’ve never seen a relationship that did that.

  In my next letter to Alex, I’ll tell him this story of Mac and Robin, and maybe he’ll see that people can meet on a plane or on a train and share a real connection. Never looking back, that’s important, too, when you need to think about the future.

  The door opens; Jill drops her book bag onto the floor. When she sees Dylan, she pulls her earbuds out and lets them dangle around her neck. “What are you doing here?”

  That’s not how I’d greet my boyfriend. Even if the relationship was complicated. “Always look happy to see your man,” my mother says, “even if you aren’t. Make him feel like a king, and he’ll treat you like a queen.”

  Jill strides over to me to take the photo of her father from my hand.

  Dylan and I watch her place it on the mantel, exactly where it was. Then he gets up and goes to her and, to her back, asks, “Do you have time for coffee or something before work?”

  “I’m off tonight.” Her voice is softer than I’ve ever heard it. Small, sad.

  “So… yes?” Dylan says.

  Something’s happening between them. I feel like I should get up and act like I have something to do, but it’s too late now.

  Jill nods, still facing the mantel. She raises one of her hands to wipe at her face, then Dylan takes it. Their fingers intertwine—at first cautiously, it seems. Then Jill’s hand tightens around his, and Dylan turns her body to him and puts his other arm around her and holds her, pressing her hand, still in his, to his chest. It’s so tender and gentle, the way he enfolds her.

  Maybe my mom got treated like a queen by some of her boyfriends, but I never saw any of them hold her like this.

  Jill

  Dylan and I skip coffee. Instead, we go straight to his house and into his room, leaving the blinds open a little so that we can see the snow that’s started to fall. We undress each other. I press my nose to his skin and inhale him, imagine I’m smelling muscle and bone and blood vessels and soul, all of the Dylan I’ve known in this way for two years now, and who’s known me.

  Afterward, we fall
asleep for a while. I wake up first and stare at him—his beautiful face and compact body—running my hand over the slightly olive skin he gets from his Greek mom. My fingers find each rib, careful not to tickle. Feeling for who he is, who we are together, for myself.

  “I love you,” I whisper, so quietly, not even close to his ear.

  A slow smile materializes on his lips, his eyes still closed. “I knew it.”

  “You’re supposed to be asleep!”

  “I knew someday you’d actually say it.” He opens his eyes and rolls over to face me, serious now.

  “I’ve said it a lot.” Of course I love him. I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t. Love was always part of the many, many, many discussions about sex I’ve had with both my mom and my dad. In their efforts to raise me to have neither an over-nor underinflated sense of guilt and weirdness about sex, they may have overdone it in the discussion department. Anyway, I love Dylan. I do. And of course I’ve said it.

  “You have not. You totally have not. E-mail and texting and ‘love ya’ don’t count.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “I say ‘love ya’ to my dude friends.”

  “Because you love them.”

  “Jill. Not the way I love you.”

  I turn the other way and pull his arm around me like a blanket. Despite all the love lectures and even though I just said it to Dylan, sometimes I’m not sure I know what it really means to say “I love you.” These days with Dylan—when we’re together—it’s more friendly and cozy than romantic and exciting, but it still soothes me. Isn’t that more caring about myself, though, than loving him? Shouldn’t love have at least a little to do with the other person, separate from yourself? But how can you see anything or anyone in the world apart from yourself? I mean, everything we experience is subjective, since we have no way of experiencing it other than through our eyes. And I get to thinking that love is just a word we use to describe what boils down to a selfish and temporary state of happiness.