How to Save a Life

by Sara Zarr

  Robin draws her cardigan around her body, takes several deep breaths. “Mandy. You told me you couldn’t find the father. That you tried. If it’s someone else, someone you could find, don’t you see that changes everything?”

  “I know.” I’m not trying to make her madder, but that’s what I’m doing, and I understand it. I don’t blame her. I haven’t told the whole truth about something important. Something I should have told her right at the beginning. But I didn’t want her to see me that way, see that part of who I am, the part that feels ugly and ruined.

  “I mean, do you think this other man would want the baby?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay,” she says slowly. “Well, we could have a paternity test done. Of course, we’d have to get a sample, and it might take… anyway, we can get it all cleared up somehow. It might take some time, and meanwhile you can stay here. The point is there’s a solution.”

  “No.”

  “Mandy, you say no to everything!” She scoots away from me, still against the tub but just out of arm’s reach, like she wants to get away. “You have to start saying yes to something. Anything. Say yes. Tell me what you want.”

  It’s easier to say what I don’t want than what I want, since I’m not sure what I want. “One of the people… the one I sort of tried to find, if we could find him, I wouldn’t want him to think it could be anyone’s but his. The other person. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near her.”

  “Yes, Mandy,” she says, still frustrated, not really listening. “I’m sure it’s complicated. It won’t be easy. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  I look at her beautiful profile. Profile because she won’t look at me right now. Trust, Mandy. If there’s anyone in the world you can trust, any place in the world you’re safe, it’s here in this bathroom, with Robin.

  “One of them,” I say, “is my mother’s boyfriend. Was.”

  This stops her frustrated momentum. She’s waiting for me to say more.

  “We…” This hurts my throat. “He…”

  I know what the word is. I say it in my head all the time. And I argue with it, and feel wrong, and feel right, and wonder what it means and doesn’t mean, about him, about me.

  “He…” I need to say it. “He abused me. Sex.”

  I could never say that to my mother because she wouldn’t believe me. She’d find a way to make it my fault.

  “All the time, he abused me,” I continue.

  My mother would say, All the time? Amanda, maybe once you can call it that, but if you let it happen again, it’s something else.

  “So you can see if it’s his, I don’t want him to know.”

  Robin finally looks at me. Looks and looks and looks, eyes searching mine. Am I telling the truth, she’s wondering. I meet her eyes. Yes. She scoots back over toward me, sour-smelling and sweaty, and puts her hand on my leg. “Mandy.”

  “I’m sorry if you don’t want a baby that was made like that.”

  “I don’t care how it was made,” she says softly.

  “I do.” And this is where I start crying. Even though all those baby books tell you how emotional you get and you’ll probably cry all the time for nothing, this is the first time since leaving Council Bluffs that it happens for real. Maybe it’s wrong that I said it, but I do care. I don’t want this to be a baby from fear and sadness. I want this to be a baby from cornfields and Ferris wheels and stars.

  Robin puts her other arm around me, and it’s awkward here on the bathroom floor, me so big but her trying to envelop me anyway. “Of course you do. Of course you do.” She presses my head to her shoulder and lets me cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her after a long time.

  She doesn’t let go. “Either way, this little girl is innocent, and I’m going to love her with all of my heart.” Her whisper is fierce. “I have no doubts.”

  When I’m not crying so hard anymore, I say, “How can you know?”

  She takes my head gently in her hands and pulls me back a little so she can look me in the eye. “Because I already know, Mandy.” She taps one finger very softly against my cheek. “This little girl is innocent, too.”

  Jill

  Because I’ve vowed to myself not to cut again for the rest of my high school life, and also because I’m avoiding Dylan with a zeal that puts my past avoidance behaviors to shame, I use lunchtime to ship the watch. I send it insured, for Saturday delivery. Of course I put Mandy’s note in, too, and even though I said I wouldn’t read it, I do. Let’s face it: Mandy’s judgment is the tiniest bit questionable. I just want to make sure she didn’t say anything that’s going to cause more problems. So, sitting in my car outside the shipping store, this is what I read:

  Here is the watch.

  I turned nineteen yesterday. Maybe you remembered my birthday. Sometimes you do.

  What nineteen means is I’ve reached the age of majority. I bet you didn’t even know that I know what that is. It means I can do whatever I want, be whoever I want.

  So even if you cared enough to ever find me, you have no say over my life.

  I belong to myself.

  Amanda

  PS: Everything you think about me is wrong.

  I have to say, the letter sends a tingle up the back of my neck and to my scalp. I read it a few times. That Mandy. She might not be the smartest person ever to walk the earth, but she has a kind of power about her you have to admire. I hope her mother really is a horrible-enough person to care about the stupid watch more than her own daughter and will leave her alone for good.

  And that’s it. The watch is out of our lives.

  On the drive back to school, I remember what flashed in my mind last night when I told my Mom what Dylan said about Mandy needing a mother. At least, I remember part of it; I need to ask my mom the rest, and I want to do it right now, but her cell goes straight to voice mail and the house phone goes to the machine.

  Between school and work, I go home and find both Mom and Mandy fast asleep in their rooms. There’s a pizza box in the fridge with two slices left—I can’t believe my mom let Mandy have pepperoni, and it’s not even the soy kind. I guess everything is okay. Maybe Mom really did forget the details of last night. Maybe they talked it out. I’m dying to wake up Mandy and ask a million questions, and I even creep close to the bed in case she’s resting and not really sleeping, but she’s out like a light. She’s got the prettiest face, truly. I almost reach out and touch it. Instead I leave the tracking slip for the watch tucked in her Bible and look in on Mom. Same deal: dead to the world. Too bad.

  I shake her awake. “Mom.”

  “Mmmph.”

  “Open your eyes.”

  “Jill. Not now.”

  I pry open the lid of her right eye with my fingers. “I’ll make it quick. I have to go to work.”

  She bats my hand away and sits up, clutching her pillow to her chest. “Speak, child.”

  “Remember when you and Dad volunteered as educational surrogates? For those teen foster kids?”

  What I remember: Dad coming home from the first training, brushing snow off his coat and saying, “Hey Jilly, I found out tonight that adults can adopt other adults. So when you’re eighteen and sick of us, you can farm yourself out and get a fresh set of parents.” I said, “Awesome. Best news I’ve had all year.” Then we went to the kitchen and ate brownies.

  Now I have Mom’s full attention. “Go on….”

  On the way to work, I have time to ponder the Ravi situation. I’ve been sending him very brief text updates throughout the day, but nothing serious.

  It wasn’t a surprise, what happened in the cave. What it means, though, I have no clue.

  Dylan tried to talk to me this morning right before first period.

  “I’m still too mad at you,” I told him.

  “I know. I’d be pissed at me, too. So… after school.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be ready today, Dylan. Probably not this week. Angry Jill isn’t good at co
mmunication.” The look on his face broke my heart. We both knew. I touched his arm. “Please. Don’t give me more opportunities to say stuff I’ll regret.”

  “Call me when you’re done being mad,” he said, and fortunately the bell rang to drown out his last couple of words, which were tear-choked and full of a final kind of sadness.

  Now I text Ravi to see if he’s coming into the store tonight, and he says he’s not sure, how is Annalee’s mood?

  Not good is my reply, and I stick my phone in my apron pocket before Annalee catches me. She’s been terse with me since I got here, all snippy about me taking a night off. “We got slammed,” she says. Tonight we get an hour-long rush of customers during the post-dinner hours, everyone wandering around after their mall meals or movies, looking to rack up a few more credit card charges.

  It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open and stay upright at the register. During a lull Annalee says, “You’re not asking people about the frequent-buyers club.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you’re not smiling.”

  “I’m really tired. Sorry.” I smile hugely at her, gritting my teeth. “I still got the magic, see?”

  That’s the kind of thing that would have made her laugh a week ago. She turns away. “You know, Jill, there was a secret shopper here a couple of weeks ago. You did not get a good report.”

  “For real?” I always get great marks from the secret shoppers. I’m helpful, friendly, and always try for an add-on sale.

  “You told her that Jake Lamonte doesn’t write his own books.”

  Damn. So one of our regulars went to the dark side. Usually I can smell a secret shopper from a mile away. “Well, he doesn’t. It’s not really a secret.”

  “That’s not the point. You made a negative comment about one of our products.”

  “It wasn’t negative,” I argue. “It was neutral.”

  She lunges over the counter and grabs a paperback from one of the front dumps and waves it in my face. “Jill, if you go to a restaurant, do you want the waiter to tell you that your chicken parmigiana comes from a chicken parmigiana factory instead of the tender loving care of the restaurant kitchen?”

  I laugh. “It’s not like we’re writing the books in the back room….”

  “Let people form their own opinions about the products. If they want to find out about Jake Lamonte’s ‘writing process,’ they can go online. If you want to be all conversational about how books are made, and pretend you read the New York Times, maybe you should go work for one of those dirty little bookstores with a mangy cat in the window and no café or Internet.”

  She’s totally picking on me. We’ve both been making snotty comments about Jake Lamonte all year. She slaps the paperback down on the counter and tears the plastic wrapping off a roll of dimes.

  A few more customers line up, and we play nice. I get one person to sign up for the frequent-buyers club, and sell one mini Bhagavad Gita from the spinning rack at my register. When those customers are gone, Annalee turns to me. Her face is red. Her eyes are shiny. “I know we only went out twice, but I really liked him, Jill.”

  Oh no. “Who?”

  “As if you have to ask.” She slams her register drawer shut and swooshes past me, walking back out into the store.

  I slip my phone out of my pocket to see Ravi’s reply to my last text: She knows.

  I write back, Um, yeah.

  Despite my exhaustion, despite my headache, despite the fact I just want to close my eyes, I follow Annalee. “Am I really in trouble about the secret shopper?”

  “No,” she says curtly. “It’s your first negative report.” She picks up a cookbook that a customer has left with the fiction and walks away.

  My phone rings. It’s my mom’s ringtone—Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” which Dylan set as a joke about a week ago—super loud and super embarrassing.

  Annalee turns around, her eyes fierce. “Do not answer that. You’re not on break.”

  “It’s my mom. She never calls me at work unless it’s an emergency.”

  “If you answer that, Jill…”

  “ ‘You came and you gave without takin’,’ ” my apron pocket sings. I don’t want to lose my job but considering what happened last night, I reach for the phone. “We’ve got this pregnant girl staying with us.”

  “Don’t, Jill!”

  I turn away from Annalee, answer.

  “Mom?”

  “Meet me at St. Vincent’s,” she says. “Mandy went into labor.”

  Mandy

  It hurts.

  A lot.

  I know that Robin is in the room with me, that she’s next to me, with me, but I can’t hear her or see her or feel her anymore. It’s like I pictured it, only now I’m sure that she’ll still be here after my daughter finally comes out. Soon, I hope.

  At first the pain only came in waves, and we even laughed a little bit on the way to the hospital. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you have that pizza,” Robin said.

  Mostly I was scared. “Is it bad to be this early? We didn’t take our birthing class yet.”

  “It’s not ideal, but you’re within the safe zone. It will be fine.”

  “Is Dr. Yee going to be there?” As much as I don’t like Dr. Yee, I wanted to know what was going to happen and what I could expect, and I wouldn’t mind a familiar face.

  “I had her paged, so I hope so. But since it’s early, there’s no guarantee.”

  My seat was tilted back at a slight angle. I could see the streetlights and phone wires and tops of buildings. “How does it feel?” I asked Robin. “How did it feel when you had Jill?”

  “It feels… well, it hurts, Mandy. I won’t lie. It’s going to hurt,” she said, flying through a yellow light. “But it’s something completely indescribable, too. And it’s yours, it’s totally yours. It’s strange that way—an experience women have all over the world every minute, but at the same time something so yours. Not anything that anyone else can ever understand or take away from you. And it’s so worth it.”

  If this had happened two days ago and Robin had said that, I would have thought, That’s what women always say, but the women who say that are mothers, and they’re talking to women who are also going to be mothers. What about for people like me? Is it still worthwhile? But now everything is different. We decided what to do. The idea of it being worthwhile for me is more real than ever. Still, after I waited for another wave of pain to pass, I asked her, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m very sure.”

  We got there fast; getting admitted took longer. Robin yelled at the nurses a lot. I had to tune her out, go away in my mind, because she was causing me stress. Finally we got into a room and as Robin helped me get out of my clothes she said, “You’re going to be a good mother, Mandy. I promise you.”

  Jill

  The hospital feels so empty at this time of night. And it’s sad. Mandy’s family should be here. I mean, not her biological family, because they suck, but there should be people to join in the waiting and excitement. The person I want to invite is Ravi. I want to see him, have his company. But he’s not really anyone that important to Mandy, and I think about how she asked if she could still be Dylan’s friend. It meant a lot to her—that was clear.

  I call him, even though it’s past eleven now. It’s Friday; he’ll be up.

  “You’re already done being mad at me?” he asks.

  “Mandy’s in labor. Can you come?”

  “Oh shit. Yeah, wow.”

  I tell him how to find us, and then ask, “Can you stop on the way and get her some trashy magazines?”

  “Done.”

  Absolutely crushed with fatigue and a headache, I wind up dozing off in the waiting room. When I wake up, Mom is there with me, her feet up on the coffee table. Her eyes are closed, but I know she’s not asleep.

  “Anything happen yet?” I ask her.

  “Not really,” she says without opening her eyes. “She’s been having a hard time. She’
s trying to take a little rest, but it’s rough going.”

  I move to the chair next to her and rest my head on her shoulder. “Is it anything to be worried about?”

  She puts her arm around me. “No. Birth is never easy. That’s all there is to it. The body is sending you all these signals that it’s time for new life to happen, but it also resists. It wants to quit. Fighting it hurts. Not fighting it hurts. Helping it hurts. There’s no way around it.”

  I slip my hand into hers. I’ve always loved her hands. Strong, capable. “I can imagine.”

  Mandy

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but I’ve had time to think about everything. Every moment at the fair with Christopher, all the meals Robin has cooked me in the last month, and the ones I liked best. The crepes were good. The little clothes that Dylan bought for the baby. The music at the restaurant last night and how happy I was to see Jill walk into the train station.

  I try to think of being on a long, slow-rocking train ride. The land flicking past. That I’m moving, moving, moving forward into my new life and new family, away from the old one. My hand goes to my neck, and I feel the blue-beaded necklace Christopher gave me. I put it on after Robin and I finally left the bathroom this morning, before we went downstairs to work on—

  “Push!”

  I don’t know who’s yelling it. Maybe Dr. Yee, maybe Robin, maybe someone else, I don’t know. All I know is that whenever something is yelled at me, I do it, even though I think I might die.

  Don’t die, Mandy. You finally have life.

  But it’s hard. It hurts, like Robin said it would, and it goes on a long time and hardly any rest in between now.

  Someone puts ice in my mouth. Someone squeezes my hand. Someone gives me a shot of something. And I can’t help it: along with everything else, I think about my mother.

  Nineteen years ago this was her, in a hospital in Fort Dodge, Iowa. She was young. Not as young as I am, but still young, and my father, the married man—well, I guess he wasn’t there. And I know her mother wasn’t there, because she told me. So it’s the same for us, and for a few seconds I’m able to understand how hard it was for her, and for those few seconds I wish good things for her. For her to find what she’s looking for. For her to know love like I have. And I don’t mean with Christopher.