How to Save a Life (29 page)

After dinner I go to my room and use Jill’s computer to look on the Internet. Watches like Kent’s are selling for about eight thousand dollars. It’s not a fortune, I know that, but it’s more than I’ve ever had at once, and it would be enough to get started. To get a small life started. I wouldn’t have to live in a neighborhood like this or have a car like Robin’s, or even have a car at all. Just a little apartment. A crib. Diapers. A few toys and things, and then for eight thousand dollars’ worth of time I could think about what to do when it runs out.

I look up different towns—places that wouldn’t be too far to get to from here, since I don’t have much time to get settled, but far enough away that no one would find me. Every few minutes the computer screen blurs so bad that I have to use a tissue to clear my eyes and blow my nose. This isn’t what I wanted or planned and there’s a part of me asking,
What are you doing, Mandy?
Another part answers back that I only ever wanted to do this if I could make all the decisions. There’s not one single important thing in my life that I ever got to choose. Christopher, and this, which is part of that. Maybe. And I chose this for my reasons. I thought Robin understood. She promised we would do this my way; she promised it all along.

It’s right here in my e-mail, in the account I set up just for talking to Robin, the one I always used from the library. I’ve saved everything including her post on the Love Grows website that first made me write to her:

DO YOU HAVE A HEART THAT NEEDS A HOME? I HAVE A HOME IN NEED OF A HEART.

Hello. I’ve never done anything like this before. Where should I start…

I’m a fifty-two-year-old professional woman living in a major urban area of the Intermountain West. I am successful in my business, own my home in a good neighborhood and good school district outright, and have more than sufficient retirement savings.

That all sounds so formal. I should cut to the chase instead of dropping this bomb at the end of it all: My husband of nearly twenty-five years died suddenly this past April.

And she said even though she was still grieving, she felt hopeful about the future.

I will never marry again, but I’m not ready to call it quits on love. He and I talked for years about adopting a baby but foolishly never got the ball rolling, which is why I’m here at this site.

She wrote about her daughter, who was graduating and moving out soon, but didn’t say Jill’s name. She said love is something you do, and if no one is there to receive it, it’s incomplete. She said it’s like an electric current with nowhere to plug in. No one soaks up love like a child, she said.

As you will find out, your children are your heart. Let me give your heart a home, if that’s what you’re looking for.

I remember reading this on December twenty-eighth at the library, where I’d started to look up information on adoption. In most of the posts I found, women and couples were practically begging, desperate, with long stories about how many years they’d tried to have a baby on their own until they finally gave up and decided to adopt, or God told them to adopt. There were a lot of religious people. There were a lot of people trying to make themselves sound perfect. A lot of people posted pictures of themselves, and every time I saw a picture of one of these men, one of these potential fathers, I worried: What if he turned out to be a Kent kind of a person? I know most men aren’t, but some are.

A lot of the sites were run by agencies, and all the communication happened through a between person. Love Grows was different. Just people who posted vague things in public, and then everything specific happened in e-mail. I saw the post on the twenty-eighth and thought about it for a few days, and then on New Year’s Eve, while Kent and my mother were out, I got onto Kent’s computer to write to Robin. Normally I’d wait until I could get to the library computer, but I didn’t want someone else to get her before I did. So I wrote to her and then deleted all my history so Kent couldn’t see. The next time I checked at the library, Robin had written back, and we made our promises. I believed in her. Until today, when she and Dr. Yee were talking about me being “allowed” to do things like hold the baby, and when Robin said maybe we should use a social worker.

I can’t believe she did that.

She should know that children aren’t sponges only for love.

They soak up whatever they’ve been given.

My whole life has been one big broken promise.

I don’t know why I thought this could be any different.

Jill

By Tuesday night at work, I’ve not only
not
listened to Ravi’s messages, I’ve deleted them. His text only said, “Did you get my messages?” Whatever I told myself about it being no big loss if I messed up with him was clearly a shameless lie; otherwise I wouldn’t be so scared to know what he thinks of me.

Annalee is in a pissy mood, closing the register drawer harder than necessary, snapping at Ron the one time he’s not at the customer service booth when someone wants help, and striding through the store with her long skirt making angry
I’m too busy to help you
swishy noises that I can hear from six aisles away. When I finally catch her in a standing-still moment, compulsively neatening a stack of remainders, I ask, “Is Ravi… R.J…. going to be around tonight?”

“How should I know?” She swishes away from the remainders over to an adjacent endcap, where she continues her needless arranging. “He doesn’t work
here
. He works for the
region
. He could be at any of the stores, or none of them.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not his boss.”

“Okay.”

“If you need him to come here for some reason, talk to Corporate.”

“Okay, but…” I catch Ron’s eye from the customer service booth, and he gives his head a tight little shake and clears his throat, which I take as a warning to back off. “All right,” I tell Annalee. “Thanks.”

She mumbles something else, which I don’t ask her to repeat, and stalks off toward the café. It doesn’t take a genius to gather that something has gone down between her and Ravi.

I’d counted on him coming in tonight; seeing his face when he sees mine will tell me more than any voice mail ever could. I want to apologize. I want to tell him it’s not like I
want
to be suspicious of every good thing and push it away before it can hurt. I want to trust the world again. Trust friendship.

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 friendli
er
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.