How to Save a Life

by Sara Zarr

  Any normal person would look away and make up something about needing to excuse herself. Mandy, being Mandy, stands like a deer in the headlights and takes it all in as if she’s watching one of her shows.

  I want to tell her go away and leave us alone. But you can’t listen to Otis for an hour straight and then yell at someone. And you definitely can’t do it when your mother is starting to cry, too, and coming at you with open arms.

  Ravi calls after dinner. I’m in my room, trying my best to concentrate on homework. Though I’ve been ignoring texts from Dylan all night, I lunge for the phone when I see it’s Ravi. Hey, hi, where are you, when can we talk again? And it scares me, because then I think, No. You’re going to lash out. Maybe not now, but you will, because you always do, and then he’ll hate you.

  Bravely, I answer. “This is Jill.”

  “Jill. Ravi.”

  We’re both doing this big act: professionals, coworkers.

  “Hello.”

  “How are you feeling?” And I fear he means feelings feeling, about which I’m far too exhausted to talk. Then he clarifies: “I was by the store a little while ago, and Annalee said you were sick.”

  “Oh yeah. Not too bad. Kind of stuffed up.” From hours of weeping.

  “Sounds like it. So you probably don’t want to meet up to go over some of the results of my research into your situation.” He talks as if our phones might be tapped, in his Grown-Up Ravi voice, the one that makes him sound like a distant, uninterested uncle. It’s comforting, in a way, to know that just because we had a moment yesterday doesn’t mean every conversation has to turn into an emotional root canal. Maybe I won’t ruin this after all.

  “You already have results?” I ask.

  “Well, nothing specific. We could talk about it right now, or if you have video chat….”

  He’s pretending he only wants to go over “results” of my “situation”; I’m pretending to believe him. When what it feels like is that we want to see each other.

  But I hate video chat. It’s so hard to get the laptop screen at a flattering angle, and the colors are weird; I don’t need Ravi seeing me all beige and busted.

  “No, we can meet. This may shock you, but… I’m not actually sick.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t rat on me to Annalee.”

  It’s awkward saying her name, and Ravi replies, “I wouldn’t,” a bit too quickly.

  We make plans to meet at Dazbog, and I put myself back together so that when I go downstairs to tell Mom I’m headed out, she can see that I’m fine, absolutely fine, and no one need worry about me, despite the fact that only hours earlier I was in a sorrowful heap on the floor.

  Mom is unconvinced. “Where are you going?” She and Mandy are at the kitchen table, the laptop open and a notepad nearby.

  “Meeting a friend for coffee.”

  “Why don’t you stay in? It’s been a long day already, and the snow is really coming down.” Understatement, re the long day. “You can help us decide which birthing class to take.”

  “Fun. But no.”

  “You could do the class with us,” Mandy says. She’s smiling, wearing one of her new outfits, happy as a clam. “In case something happens and Robin can’t be there.”

  “I’ll be there,” Mom insists. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t be there, too, Jill.”

  Even in a world in which I accept that Mandy’s baby will be in our lives forever, I cannot conjure up an image of me in a hospital room with her and my mother, shouting out breathing instructions and fetching ice chips or doing whatever else needs doing in a baby-having scenario. I try to be polite. “Thank you so much. Don’t plan on it.”

  Yet I have a twinge of jealousy, seeing them there, cozy, looking at birthing websites like they’re planning a wedding or something. It’s your choice, Jill. As Mom said, she’s been trying to include me from the beginning, but I wouldn’t have it. Instead, I’m about to go discuss Mandy as if she’s a criminal. Except, okay, that’s not really why I’m going out on a cold night to see Ravi.

  Mom gets up to give me a kiss. “All right. Don’t be late. One hour, then home to bed, okay? Since you’re not working, you might as well get some sleep.”

  I worried that when I saw him, I’d get nervous, freak out about yesterday, start crying again, or want to turn around and run. But when I walk in and spot him already at a table, what I feel is relief. Nearly joy. I want to blurt out, Thank you for being my friend, which would be so awkward and crazy and not me. When I get to the table, there’s a weird second where he stands and it’s like, should we hug? Then we don’t, and sit down. Ravi is suitless again, in jeans and a sweater with a moth hole near the collar, so real, normal, nineteen. Tonight he’s even wearing his glasses, like he has on in his senior yearbook portrait.

  I watch him as he opens what he calls the “Mandy dossier” and flips through it with elegant hands. Let’s not talk about Mandy, I want to say. Let’s talk about tennis club and Otis Redding and movies and books. Let’s walk in the snow, sink up to our knees in it, get cold and come back for hot coffee. That’s the kind of stuff you do with new friends you want to know better. I’m remembering how this works. How life doesn’t have to be only anxiety about what’s gone wrong or could go wrong, and complaints about the world around you. How a person you’re excited about can remind you there’s stuff going on beyond routine oil changes and homework. Stuff that matters. Stuff to look forward to.

  So I say, “Whatcha got?”

  “Based on what you’ve told me, I’ve identified a number of red flags.”

  Red flags. The opposite of stuff to look forward to. “Like what kinds of red flags?”

  “This is a start based on generalities. Every red flag could be explained away, potentially. We’re looking at a set of circumstances. Simply… laying out information.”

  “Right.”

  Ravi sips his Americano and glances up from the dossier to catch my eye. “Like I said, all of this could be nothing.”

  “Okay. Just tell me.”

  “You said that Mandy lied about her due date?” he asks.

  “The baby is due later than she originally told my mom. But my mom thinks that’s just because Mandy had a bad doctor.”

  Ravi taps his pen against the folder. “You also said it all happened fast, back at the beginning of the year. Like, instant match.”

  “Yeah. Mandy saw my mom’s post on some weirdly unofficial adoption board and e-mailed her, basically saying, ‘Hey, you’re perfect, you can have my baby.’ That’s weird, right? For such a big decision?”

  He makes an “mmm” noise and a noncommittal shoulder move.

  “You don’t think that’s totally nuts?”

  Ravi runs his hand over his notes. His fingers are long and graceful, gentle-looking, trustworthy. “Haven’t you ever had a gut feeling about something? Like your mom did about Mandy? Something you categorically know, whether or not it makes rational sense?”

  No, I think. Normally my mother is the one who does things by impulse and gut feeling. Normally I’m in total control of my actions and emotions. “Not really,” I say, even though I might be starting to understand it.

  His cell phone beeps, and I nearly jump out of my skin. He checks it, oblivious to my reaction, and texts something before putting it back in his jacket pocket. “So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that both Mandy and your mom experienced this gut knowledge, this sense of destiny about the baby.”

  “Okay. But what about money? When my dad died, my mom got a pretty big insurance settlement. Could Mandy have found out about that?”

  “Possibly. Does she ask for money?”

  “I don’t know. I have this feeling there’s a lot my mom doesn’t tell me. And my mom is so…” I almost say “dumb,” but my mom is not dumb. That’s not it. Trusting is what she is. And somehow I’ve come to see trusting as dumb. “I mean, I’m sure all the doctor’s visits cost a fortune, and my mom is paying out of pocket
for Mandy’s baby stuff. And the other day she gave her AmEx to Mandy and left her alone at the mall for like three hours. We had a big fight about it.”

  I don’t even know if I was mad about that. I think I kind of wished it could have been me shopping with my mom.

  Ravi takes notes. “And what happened? Did Mandy use it for something she wasn’t supposed to?”

  “No. I mean, maybe? She got a bunch of clothes, but my mom made it sound like it was all her idea, not Mandy’s. Like she had to practically force Mandy to get even that much. But who knows? I doubt my mom even checked her statement afterward.”

  “See if you can find that out.” He looks at his watch and closes the dossier. “Of course, what’s most problematic is what you told me about Mandy not wanting any lawyers or social workers or agencies involved. That right there is your biggest flag.”

  Is he getting ready to leave already? “And biggest potential disaster.”

  “No legal recourse for your mom if Mandy decides to take off.”

  “I know. That’s my nightmare.”

  His phone beeps again. Somehow I know it’s Annalee. He ignores it this time. “Do you think I could meet Mandy? Talk to her? Subtly, I mean. Without her knowing I’m trying to find stuff out.”

  “Oh. You could, I don’t know, come over to my house for dinner or something?” In the far, far reaches of my memory, I must have, at some point, known how to invite friends over.

  He gets up, gathers his stuff. “Better if I can meet her in a more neutral environment, kind of incidentally.”

  “Yeah.” I point to his cup. “You didn’t finish.”

  Ravi looks down at me with that half-smile. He nudges my shoulder with his elbow. “Next time we’ll stay longer.”

  Something inside me opens further. Another door. A window. I can almost hear the creaking hinges. I blink back tears. “Without your suit you could almost be a normal nineteen-year-old.”

  “I am a normal nineteen-year-old.”

  “So you claim.”

  He laughs, a lilting laugh. “See you later, Jill.”

  “Bye, Ravi.”

  I watch him head outside; snow floats and swirls in the lamplight as he dashes to his car. For long minutes after he pulls away I stare at the spot where his car was parked, probing and poking at this feeling, at once familiar and foreign. Expectant, hopeful. After I’ve successfully slashed and burned a huge swath of acreage around me, just in case anyone tried to come near, Ravi has forged across, and I let him. How did he do it? I wonder. How did I?

  Mandy

  When Jill gets home after school on Friday, the first thing I hear after the door closing is her calling my name. Usually I’m right there in the living room. Today I feel sad, the kind of sad that makes me want to be alone. To hide. Until now I haven’t spent much time in this room, my room, other than when I’m sleeping. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s classic and comfortable, like the rest of the house. The walls are painted light orange—the color of summer sunsets on postcards—with cream trim and the same dark hardwood floor Robin has through most of the house. There’s a rug made of different blocks of color and everything on the bed is bright white. I’ve never slept on a bed this comfortable. The first night, I tried to get under this thick cover, and Robin said no, it’s a featherbed; you sleep on top of it, not under it.

  Cheerful. The whole room is cheerful.

  What I feel is that I don’t belong in it. When I’m here, it feels too much like home, and I don’t mean like home felt back in Council Bluffs, at Kent’s. I mean home home. An idea of home you carry with you your whole life, only you don’t know it until you’re there. I know I can’t stay, and that’s why I don’t like to spend too much time in here, feeling home the way I’m learning it’s supposed to be felt. Every day I feel it more, and every day the sadness of knowing that it will end gets worse and today it’s the worst so far.

  “Mandy?” Jill is outside my door now. Usually when she says my name, it’s with a combination of question mark and exclamation point and is followed by a complaint or request. Like: “Mandy! Can you not use my blow-dryer without asking?” “Mandy! Did you put the peanut butter back in the fridge? It goes in the fridge, you know. It’s not the kind filled with all that sugar and trans-fat crap.”

  She really is attached to her peanut butter.

  This time she’s saying my name in an almost friendly way, with a gentle kind of question mark.

  It takes me a while to get to the door; by the time I open it, I half expect her to have given up. She’s still there, as close to smiling at me as I’ve ever seen. “Hi.”

  “Hey. Are you doing anything right now?”

  Maybe she’s going to ask me for a favor or tell me I did something wrong and I need to fix it. “Kind of.”

  She looks past me into the room. “Really? What?”

  “I’m supposed to rest.”

  There’s a long pause. Jill puts her hands into her sweatshirt pockets and nods slowly, then takes a deep breath. “I’m off work tonight. It’s Friday. Mom is at a meeting and Dylan has stupid band practice, which is a joke, since he doesn’t play an instrument or sing, but anyway I figured you must be going slightly crazy around here and might want to get out for some coffee.”

  It feels like a trick. Why would she suddenly want to spend time with me? “I’m not supposed to drink coffee.”

  “You can get decaf. Or herb tea, or a steamer.”

  “What’s a steamer?”

  “It’s—Mandy, okay.” She starts to laugh, shaking her head like she can’t believe I asked that, and takes her hands from her pockets to hold them up and make air quotes. “ ‘Going out to coffee’ doesn’t necessarily literally involve drinking a hot caffeinated beverage. It’s just something to do. You can have water. You can have a soda. You can get a brownie or a bagel or a muffin or a sandwich or a pretzel or a piece of cake. Whatever.”

  Maybe Robin talked to her and told her she has to be nice to me. “You don’t have to,” I say. “I know you don’t really want me here. It’s not for that much longer. You don’t have to be nice.”

  A certain expression lands on her face. One I’ve never seen before other than maybe a little bit yesterday when we got home and found her crying, but she had on sunglasses then so it was hard to tell. The expression is not hard, not trying to show that she doesn’t care or is separate from me and Robin. I think what I’m seeing is the real Jill.

  “My mom doesn’t even know about this,” she says, and I believe her. Then her expression changes back to the usual. “It’s totally my idea. I mean, you’ve been here almost three weeks, and you and me barely know each other. Come on.”

  I wouldn’t mind going out to be distracted from sadness awhile. “Can I go dressed like this? Is it nice enough?” I have on my new black maternity leggings and a sort of half dress, half sweater.

  “This is Denver,” Jill says. “You can wear your good Wranglers to the opera.”

  “I didn’t do my hair or makeup.”

  “You look gorgeous.”

  I touch my hair. My mother would never leave the house like this. “Are you just saying that?”

  Jill puts her one hand on each of my shoulders and stares me in the face. It’s a little scary. “You’re beautiful, okay? I promise.”

  At the coffee shop, Jill orders herself a latte and a caramel steamer for me, after she explains what it is, and also buys us a big piece of chocolate cake to share. “I won’t tell my mom about all the sugar,” she says. “Anyway, it’s Friday. Fridays don’t count.”

  We sit at a table near the big front window.

  “I like people-watching,” Jill says.

  “Me too.”

  A light snow is falling, but it isn’t too cold. You can begin to imagine that spring will be here soon. The snow is pretty, the way the small flakes float down and seem to disappear moments before they would land. There’s music playing, a kind of music I’ve never heard that’s not too jazzy or too rock
. It’s quiet; it feels good.

  “This is a nice neighborhood,” I say. We’re in a part of town I haven’t seen before. I guess most of Denver is made of parts I haven’t seen before. I wonder what else is in this city that I could discover. Could I fit in here, be a part of it? If I came to a place like this without Jill, I wonder if I could feel like I belonged.

  “It’s all right. A lot of overeducated white people and hipster coffee shops.”

  “Like where you live.”

  “No, where we live it’s more—okay, yeah. There are more wire-rim glasses per square acre here, though.”

  She seems nervous. I worry she regrets bringing me out. What are we supposed to talk about?

  “Did it hurt?” I ask. “The eyebrow ring?”

  “A little. That stuff always hurts.”

  “Why do you do it, then?”

  “Because…” She touches the ring with her index finger, resting her hand against the side of her face, and turns her head to look out the window. The way the streetlight hits her face you can see how pretty she is, and how pretty she’d be without the hair dye and dark eyeliner. She turns back. “You know what? I’m going to get a tattoo. That will really hurt.”

  “My mother always said only whores and soldiers have tattoos.”

  Jill jerks her head back and coughs out a laugh. “Thanks.”

  “I’m only saying what my mother says. I don’t think that.”

  “What is she, like, eighty?”

  “No. She has strong opinions.”

  Jill takes a big forkful of cake. “With opinions like that, I don’t think I’d listen to anything that comes out of your mother’s mouth.”

  The baby kicks, and kicks hard, like she’s angry. So hard I bend over and touch my stomach and gasp. Jill swallows her cake and asks, “Are you okay?”

  “I think so. I—” The baby kicks again.