How to Save a Life (14 page)

Varsity tennis. Ravi’s on the team, with his big hair and glasses and the rounder face. But what he wanted me to see is squeezed into the lower corner of the page in ballpoint pen and neat printing:

Jill—

It was nice sitting near you in Schiff’s. You seem really smart and funny. Of course that’s only my guess from a distance. Maybe you’re stupid and dull! Ha-ha! Not possible. Too bad we didn’t get a chance to talk much. Okay, at all. But I hope we’ll run into each other sometime. I bet we will.

Ravi J. Desai

(the quiet guy who just loaned you a pen so you could sign Amy Diaz’s yearbook)

Mandy

It’s hard to sleep. I don’t know if that’s because of being in a new place and a different bed or because of being so pregnant. Robin says I should sleep on my left side. She told me why, but I forget. I try that and wind up on my back and then worry it’s not going to be good for the baby, so I turn onto my side again, but I’m not used to it. Before, I always slept on my stomach with my hands tucked under me, like I did when I was a little girl.

Every morning that I’ve woken up here and opened my eyes to see the branches of the tree by my window and feel the soft edge of the blanket, I’ve stopped to say
thank you
. I don’t know who to. The ceiling, the sky, the world that I’m a part of now, luck. It’s lucky that I saw Robin’s post when I did, and lucky that she wrote back when I wrote to her, even though I had so many rules. How does it work, I wonder—that kind of luck that would bring two people together at the right moment? Three people. Four if you count Jill.

It’s the same kind of luck that made me see Christopher at the fair and made him see me.

Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, I’d never had it before then. Always it’s been the other kind of luck—when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I don’t want the baby to have that kind. I want her to be born into this kind.

I get up and dressed, checking the bottom drawer, under my bras and things that don’t fit me anymore, to make sure Kent’s watch is still there. Every morning and every night, I check. Even though I don’t think I have to worry about Robin and Jill snooping that way, it makes me feel better to be sure. I should start moving the watch around, too, to different places, just in case. It used to be that when Kent was in a good mood, he’d talk to me about his gambling strategy. That if you’re smart, you hedge your bets. If you bet on something crazy, you always make sure there’s also a sure thing, or as close to a sure thing as you can get, in case the crazy bet doesn’t go like you hoped. The watch is my sure thing.

Downstairs, Robin’s in the kitchen, tuning in a music station on the radio instead of the news she listens to on weekday mornings. Jill is still asleep, or at least still in her room. Sun reflects off the snowfall from last night and lights up the kitchen and living room, showing off how warm and clean the house is. It’s like a house in the kind of catalog that’s full of down comforters and cotton pajamas.

Robin seems happier now than she has the last two days. When she sees me standing in the kitchen doorway, she smiles and waves me in with the whisk in her hand. “I’m making crepes. Do you like crepes?”

I’ve never had a crepe. I’m not positive what it is, exactly, even though I’ve seen it on menus before. “Yes.”

There’s a glass of orange juice already on the table for me next to all my vitamins, and a blue-and-white checkered napkin folded up. The big wooden table, every time I see it, looks like a picture from a magazine. Not because of the table but how Robin does it, like with the checkered napkin this morning, or the fruit bowl that always has real fruit in it, or sometimes a sweater hanging over one of the chairs. It just makes you feel good. She knows how to make a home even out of a table. Not everyone can do that.

“Is every Saturday like this?” I ask.

She cracks an egg against the rim of the mixing bowl. Even an egg and a bowl in her hands looks like home. “What do you mean?”

When someone lives a certain kind of life all the time, it’s hard to describe to them what it looks and feels like to someone who lives a certain other kind of life. On Saturdays in Council Bluffs, Kent and my mother were usually in a bad mood from drinking too much Friday night or staying out too late or losing money gambling. A lot of times I would be trying to forget that Kent had visited my room after my mother was asleep. And there could be a lot of cleaning to do before they came out wanting coffee or aspirin. Sometimes it didn’t smell very good; they were always trying to quit smoking and only lasting a few days here and there.

My mother usually had a long list of things she had to do that she could only do on Saturdays because of her job, which she was angry to have in the first place because Kent had promised her she wouldn’t have to work anymore, that he would take care of things. But he didn’t, so on Saturdays my mother did errands like any working housewife, even though they weren’t married. Grocery store, bank, nails, and hair. Kent sometimes did nice things, like bring me doughnuts or give me fifty dollars to go shopping if he’d had a good night at the casinos. Usually not.

At Robin’s table I drink my juice and say finally, “I don’t know.”

She beats the eggs, adds flour and milk, not measuring anything. “Is Jill up?” She holds the whisk in front of her face and studies the way the batter drips.

“No.”

“Let’s get her up. These are best hot and fresh.”

When she doesn’t move from the counter, I realize she means I should get Jill up. Jill, who said I’m just an incubator. “I think she’ll like it better if you go.”

Robin laughs, slicing ham into thin strips. “Oh, don’t let Jill scare you. She’s exactly like her father—all bark and no bite. Knock on the door nice and hard and say ‘crepes.’ She’ll come out.”

Upstairs I stand outside Jill’s door and listen. Maybe she’s already up and about to come out and I won’t have to do anything. After a minute of nothing but silence, I knock on the door twice. “Crepes!” Then I turn and go down the stairs as fast as I can in my condition.

When I get to the bottom, the baby moves. Not like a kick. More like a roll.

All of a sudden I see her. I see her at five years old, coming down these stairs sideways, one step at a time, holding on to the railing with both small hands. She’s wearing pink pajamas, the kind with feet built in, and she has Christopher’s dark hair and my light eyes. She calls out Robin’s name—she calls her “Robin.”

But reality is she’ll call her “Mommy.” I didn’t think about that before.

Where will I be in five years? How far away from here, and from her?

These are questions I maybe should have thought about harder a few months ago.

All through breakfast Jill reads a comic book. Trying to make conversation to show her I’m not mad about what she said to me, and showing Robin I’m not scared, I say, “I used to like
Sailor Moon
. That was the only comic I read.”

Jill gives me a look of disdain. She and I haven’t been in the same room since she yelled at me on Thursday night. “This isn’t freaking poser-ass magical-schoolgirl
anime
. It’s a graphic novel. It won awards.”

“Jill,” Robin says, but she’s not really upset. She’s reading, too, one of her magazines.

“What’s that about?” I ask Robin.

“Hmm?” She looks up. “Alternative transportation models going forward into a post-oil age.”

“Oh.”

It’s good that my daughter will be with smart people. My mother says it’s better to be pretty than smart, but I don’t know. Lately I’ve been trying, in my head, to put things in the opposite order of what my mother says. Being nice would come first. Then smart. Pretty is last. Or, why can’t you be all of them? If you’re pretty, does that mean you can’t also be smart and nice? I think Robin is all three. Jill is two out of three. Maybe she’s nice, too, just not to me. I don’t care. I only care that she’s nice to my daughter, her sister. So I need to make sure not to say or do anything else that will make her mad.

When I go to the fridge for milk, I say, “Can I get anything for anyone while I’m up?”

Robin says no thanks. Jill doesn’t acknowledge that I talked. I guess she needs more time.

Dear Alex,

I know you probably only just got my last letter and haven’t had time to write back. Or maybe you haven’t even gotten that yet because you could still be traveling. You could be on a train right now.

Well, I am settling in here. The family I’m giving the baby to is very nice. It’s a mother and daughter. There is no father. And I know that’s not perfect, but this family acts like a family with a father. By that I mean there’s a ghost of a father still here. He died not that long ago, and you can tell they’ll never forget him, never ever stop missing him. Not like my family, which I bet has already forgotten about me.

I do wish they would talk about him more, but it seems like it makes them sad.

For a second today I had the thought that I would like to keep the baby. Robin, the lady who is adopting, sat down with me this week to talk about emotions and psychology and all of that, and she’s constantly telling me it’s normal to have mixed feelings right now. I’ve never really had any, though, until today. They were short. Anyway, it’s an open adoption and I can visit the baby if that’s how we decide to do it. It’s not set up legally that way, but we trust each other.

Sometimes I see the future and it’s like I’m a blank. I mean I know what I’ll look like, that I’ll exist. But I don’t know who I’ll be or who will be with me. At least I know who I’m not and who won’t be with me. I won’t be my mother, or with someone like her boyfriend. That is a guarantee.

Do you know who you’ll be in the future? And who you’ll be with?

Yours,

Mandy (from the train)

It’s only a first draft. When Robin and I were e-mailing back at the beginning of the year, I got used to writing my letters out in my school notebook first, then typing them, then checking them against books, then retyping them. The mail doesn’t go out again until Monday, so I have plenty of time to change it. I fold the paper and put it inside one of the magazines Jill brought me on my first day here, which I’ve already looked at but like to look at again. Magazines—and TV, too—help me think about who I might want to be.