How to Save a Life Page 4

  Two older ladies come in together and buy the latest City Read and a fifty-percent-off cat calendar.

  One of them points to the white fluff ball on the cover. “This one looks exactly like our Edgar.”

  “You should hang it where Edgar can see,” I say.

  “Oh, he passed.” She looks down as I slide the calendar into a bag.

  “Christmas Eve,” the other lady says, touching the first lady’s shoulder.

  Maybe they’re sisters. Maybe they’re friends. Maybe they’re life partners. Whichever, there is such real affection there, real tenderness, that the sight of them inflates that balloon a little bit more and presses against my heart so intensely that I put my hand to my chest in an attempt to mash it back down.

  “I’m so sorry.” Don’t let my scary-teenager hair and piercings fool you, I think. I know loss. “Have a nice night.”

  I lock the door behind them and tell Ron, who has to get home to his kid, to take off, I’m closing up.

  “Twenty-five minutes early?” he asks.

  “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  Poor Ron. He’s in his thirties and started here about four months ago; it was the only job he could get after losing his actual career in the recession and winding up the oldest employee here, yet lowest on the totem pole. It’s grown on him, though, and it turns out he’s this incredible visionary when it comes to store displays. Last week he combined our bestselling sci-fi, fantasy, and graphic novels into one beautiful geek heaven.

  He leaves, and as I crank out the closing paperwork at lightning speed, the situation with Mandy reemerges to obsessive consciousness. Did I do enough to try to talk Mom out of it? I think I did. Yet the more I pointed out what a colossal disaster this could become, the more she turned into a brick wall. There was no one but me to attempt to break through. All my grandparents are dead, and so is my dad’s brother, and my Mom is an only child. She has friends, but she sort of shut them out when Dad died. Like I did with my friends. Only with her, it was about suddenly being “busy with work,” whereas I directly told my friends to leave me alone. My exact words might have been “Leave me the hell alone.”

  Mom and I, different as we are, are twin planets orbiting the same universe of grief but never quite making contact. Maybe this baby is a good thing and I’m just not seeing it. Maybe it’ll be a new little sun for us, or at least for Mom. Or maybe it will be a black hole that will suck us in and tear us to bits. Either way, we’re at the point of no return. Hello, event horizon.

  At home earlier, I caught Mandy sniffing the couch. When she realized I was watching her, she said, “Real leather.”

  “Yeah.”

  I mean, it’s nothing sinister, but it’s weird, right?

  And before I left for work, she hinted that since I work at a bookstore, maybe I could borrow some magazines for her to read, the celebrity gossip kind, then I could return them tomorrow.

  “It’s not a library.” I sat on the bottom stair, lacing my boots.

  “I wouldn’t wrinkle the pages.”

  “We do have a library about a mile away,” Mom said. “It’s closed for the holiday, but we can go tomorrow, on our way back from the doctor.”

  Mandy shut up about the magazines after that and started in on Mom with special grocery requests. All stuff we never eat, like kids’ cereal and frozen lasagna and snack mix. I watched Mom’s face as Mandy rattled off her list. Mom just kept smiling. I’m dying to see, when I get home, if Mom is so eager to please Mandy that she violated her deeply held whole-food principles.

  Now I put on my coat and remind myself to stop fixating on Mandy. Ultimately it’s not about her but the baby. The baby and Mom. And I guess I fit somewhere in that scenario, too.

  Outside, in the retail development where Margins is an anchor store, the chill is startling. It’s at least twenty degrees colder than it was at the train station this morning. I lock the doors behind me quickly, wishing I’d brought gloves. There might be a pair in my messenger bag, but it’s too dark and deserted to be standing around digging in my bag like a perfect target, asking to be bludgeoned. Dad signed me up for self-defense when a serial rapist was on the loose in downtown Denver, and not only did he go with me every Saturday for six weeks, he participated in the class by volunteering to be repeatedly kneed in the nuts by a bunch of outraged women. He wore padding, of course, but still.

  The instructor never failed to remind us to be aware of our surroundings. So when a guy approaches from what seems like out of nowhere, my muscles are already tensing.

  “Aren’t you open ten more minutes?”

  I relax a little. It figures that the one night I close early, we have a late customer. His face is in shadow, but he seems young, and he’s tall, dressed in a suit that I can’t imagine is keeping him warm without an overcoat.

  “Usually, yes.” I apologize and suggest he come back tomorrow, hoping he’s in a good mood, because closing early is definitely a serious offense.

  When I start moving away from the door, he stays close. I unrelax. One thing we learned in the self-defense class is to trust your instincts, and my instincts tell me this is creepy. There’s no one else around. I think about my keys in my hand and how I can use the big store key to gouge out an eye if I have to. As cold as it is, sweat prickles under my arms.

  I start walking toward my car, which is also toward him. If he follows, I’ll know something is up. With my keys in hand, I take a few purposeful steps his way.

  He puts out his arm to stop me. “Oh, um, I need to search your bag? I’m R.J. Desai? From Corp—”

  But the second his hand touches my shoulder, my reflexes kick in and I throw an elbow strike to his face, the forces of fear and adrenaline behind it. He drops without a word, stunned.

  Wow. That completely worked. A hundred elbow strikes to a punching bag, my dad standing behind it to hold it still, are apparently engraved in my muscle memory even after a year. The next thing you’re supposed to do is either (A) run like hell or (B) try to do a little more damage while he’s still vulnerable. Since I’m a slow runner and he’s already getting to his feet, I mentally prepare to go for the groin and the eyes.

  But when he’s up, he backs away, holding his face. “Why’d you do that?”

  It could be a diversionary tactic. I stay in my defense position, feet apart and knees slightly bent. We’re both breathing hard. I stare him in the eyes and don’t see a trace of a threat, only pain and bewilderment. Also? He looks a tiny bit familiar. What was he saying before I decked him? “Because you’re stalking me in a dark mall in the middle of the night,” I say.

  “Are you Jill MacSweeney?”

  “Maybe.”

  “R.J. Desai.” He reaches under his suit jacket and pulls a card from the chest pocket of his shirt. “Margins Loss Prevention.”

  I step up and whip the card from his hand.

  R.J. DESAI

  LOSS PREVENTION ASSOCIATE

  MARGINS, INC.

  “How do I know this is you?”

  From his back pocket he pulls out a wallet and produces a driver’s license. I take it and hold it next to the card. It’s him. Ravi Jagadish Desai, nineteen, with a Washington Park address.

  “You could have had this card made at any copy shop. A real Margins employee would not do a dumb-ass thing like show up with no warning and start grabbing at a girl in the middle of the night.”

  “I wasn’t grabbing at you.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Well, you did. With no warning,” I repeat.

  “If we gave a warning, we’d never stop employee theft.” His voice is unsteady. I think I really scared him.

  “Now you’re accusing me of stealing?” I look at the license again. “Wait, do I know you?”

  He takes his driver’s license out of my hand; I hold on to the card. “At least half our property losses last quarter were from employee theft and carelessness.” He takes a deep breath an
d expels it in a puff of white into the cold air. “We went to the same high school.”

  “We did?”

  “We were in computer science together.” He touches his jaw cautiously.

  I study him, trying to conjure up the computer lab and the people in it, including myself—the self I was. “With that student teacher? Ms. Schiff?” I begin to shiver in the cold even as a trickle of perspiration makes its way past my ear.

  “Yeah. My senior year. I think you were a sophomore.” He waits while I keep staring.

  Sophomore year. Eons and eons ago. “If you say so.” I turn to head to my car; he follows.

  “Jill, I think I still need to search your bag.”

  I laugh. The bitter one. “I don’t think you do.” I keep walking. My hands are shaking. Even though I know the moment of crisis is over, my body doesn’t—adrenaline pumping, knees weak, and even tears working up. A purely physical reaction to being scared and mad. Not only at him. Maybe I didn’t do the right thing. I never know anymore what the right thing is, let alone if I’m doing it.

  R.J. jogs a little to catch up with me. “I—hang on. I was just trying to do my job….”

  “Fail,” I say over my shoulder. Because it’s a lot easier to be mad at him than at me. “Is that really what they train you to do? Stalk people? Jump out at them in the dark?”

  “No,” he says, next to me now, indignant. “Procedure is to come into the store. You closed early. You—”

  “Don’t try to blame this on me.” I get to my car and fumble with the keys for way longer than I want, thinking that I wish I hadn’t closed early and I could really get into trouble. When I finally get the door open, I throw my messenger bag onto the passenger seat before getting in.

  “Wait.” R.J. holds the corner of my door, keeping me from closing it. With my adrenaline-fueled superpowers and all the other emotions roaring, I yank it shut and start the engine. I hear his muffled pleas. “Wait! I’m sorry. You’re right.” That gets me to look at him. He’s grimacing, holding one hand with the other and now tapping them both against the window as I back up. “Are you going to report this? I can’t lose my job right now, Jill.”

  He says my name as if he really knows me. Ms. Schiff’s, sophomore year. The year I got together with Dylan after we took driver’s ed together. The year I got my piercing without Mom’s or Dad’s permission and suffered through a two-week grounding thinking it was the worst thing in the world that could happen to me. The year Laurel and I sneaked into an eighteen-and-over club on Colfax and had the best night ever and totally got away with it. The year I had no idea how much of my lucky life I’d lose.

  “Jill?” R.J. asks again. “Seriously, it’s my first week. Please.”

  Realizing I have the power in this situation, I roll down the window just enough so he can hear me clearly. “Tough shit.”

  He stands there, holding his hand and watching me take a speed bump too fast. Then I turn toward the exit and he’s gone.

  Halfway home I pull over on a residential street, too amped to drive. My elbow hurts where it connected with R.J.’s face. Idiot.

  I start crying.

  Not because of fear or anger anymore. Because: When I get home, my dad won’t be there to get outraged on my behalf, to be impressed when I re-enact my elbow strike, to say I told you so about making me take that class, to tell me I did the right thing and the store stays open too late, anyway, for school nights. I won’t get to see him turn red. I won’t get to talk him out of calling the police or Margins headquarters. I won’t get to say, Dad, calm down. I lived. It’s fine.

  I’ll walk in the door and his chair will be empty.

  I beat on the steering wheel a few times, blow my nose on a napkin I find in the glove box, and head home. On the way I stop at a mini-mart and buy Mandy three magazines and a package of cupcakes.

  Why I do this, it’s hard to say, except I know that it’s exactly the kind of thing my dad would have done.

  Later, when I can’t sleep and I’ve tried all the usual tricks—listening to talk radio, counting backward, drinking warm tea—I pull out my sophomore yearbook so that I don’t wind up lying awake thinking about my dad all night.

  I find my class picture and stare and stare and stare, like Jill MacSweeney is someone from my long-ago past. A forgotten pen pal. An old summer-camp friend.

  Here’s something I remember: Laurel and I swapped shirts the morning of picture day. For no reason other than to make fun of the whole idea of school pictures and how everyone at school was trying so hard to look good. I can see us in the girls’ room, laughing and standing in our bras. In my picture I’ve got on her favorite retro English Beat T-shirt. In her picture, she’s wearing my signature green hoodie. It hurts to look at that too long. All I can remember is what I lost, not who I was.

  Desai, Desai. I flip pages until I find him. Ravi—not R.J.—Desai.

  His senior quote is beneath his picture:

  As we journey into the future,

  may we all encounter new adventures,

  and our true selves.

  Thanks Ma and Baba, Miti, Neil, Anand.

  He had glasses back then, big, bushy hair, a round face; he signed his picture. I feel kind of bad not remembering him. He was obviously a different person back then, though. And so was I. The pre-dead-father Jill. Who is as much a stranger to me now as Ravi is.

  Mandy

  Today we have a doctor’s appointment, and it’s the one last thing I have to get through before I can unpack. Robin offered to help me last night. “Don’t you want to have everything in order before you go to bed?” she asked. “You’ll sleep better.” We were in the guest room, my room. Jill had gone to work. Robin made us turkey sandwiches and fruit salad for dinner. I’ve never had a fruit salad like that; it was just cut-up fruit, no Cool Whip or marshmallows or anything.

  I told her no, I’d wait and do it today, after I’d had a chance to think about where to put things. Robin left me alone after that, and I lay awake for hours listening to cars go by. Not that that’s what kept me up; I like that sound, and knowing there are people out there coming and going. Kent’s apartment was on the third floor of a building off I-29. He liked to be close to the casinos. “An apartment community,” my mother called it, reading from the website before we moved in with him. “It has a broad range of amenities.” It was quieter than you’d think, with carpets everywhere and neighbors not really talking to each other. Sometimes I got the feeling that even if I screamed and screamed no one would hear me.

  What kept me up last night was worrying about this appointment and whether afterward Robin is going to let me stay. I have to get it right. The appointment is a reminder of why I’m really here. I’m not here for me. Robin’s not here for me. The guest room isn’t here for me, and it doesn’t matter if Jill likes me, and all this is leading up to a moment when I’m gone. That’s the point. Me being gone. The baby staying here. That’s the part I don’t want to mess up.

  The doctor turns out to be a woman. Her name is Megan Yee, with an office in a hospital, and we’re all sitting at a small, round table in the exam room. She’s young and too pretty to be a doctor, with sleek hair in a ponytail and natural lip gloss on. I thought the doctor would be a man. I hoped. Men like me better than women do, all around. I answer Dr. Yee’s questions the same way I’ve been answering Robin’s all along.

  Amanda Madison Kalinowski.

  Eighteen.

  Thirty-seven weeks.

  A boy.

  The father can’t be located but, as far as I know, is in good, normal health.

  Yes, I’ve been taking my vitamins, going to appointments, and not drinking or smoking.

  Only a percentage of those things are true, but I try to say them all exactly the same way. Making eye contact but not too much eye contact. Breathing normally. Resting my hand on the baby and sometimes looking at the painting of lilies hanging on the wall behind Dr. Yee’s head. When I say “thirty-seven weeks,” she glance
s up from the laptop where she’s entering information, and her eyes flick to my belly, to my face, and to my belly again. Then back to the computer.

  “Have you had a glucose tolerance test?” she asks, typing.

  “Probably.”

  “You’d remember. They give you a drink? Tastes like flavored sugar water?”

  She could smile and be friendlier if she wanted her patients to relax. Every time I answer a question, I feel like it’s the wrong answer. “Maybe not.”

  Robin’s been sitting quietly in the chair next to mine. I’ve avoided looking at her, even though I would like to stare and stare, keep seeing the pieces of her add up. I want to add up for her, too, and don’t want to let her down, even though it’s bound to happen eventually. In all our e-mails since January, I’ve tried to be what she wanted me to be, because all that mattered was getting her to take the baby and getting away. Except she asked me so many questions, more questions about me than I’ve ever been asked by anyone in my whole entire life put together. Little things, like what kind of music do I like, and my favorite subjects at school; and bigger ones, like what is my idea of God and who are my heroes in history and if I could be anything I wanted, what would I be? One time she sent a short e-mail that said only There were magpies out in the snow when I was on a walk this morning. Have you ever seen Monet’s painting The Magpie? It’s one of my favorites.

  I didn’t know how to tell her that I’ve never even been to a museum. Maybe on a field trip once a long time ago, but I didn’t know if that counted.

  Questions like that, and like who my heroes in history are or what I want to be, I didn’t answer, because I don’t have an answer. I didn’t want her to think I’m dumb. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Her e-mails made me nervous sometimes, even though they were also exciting to get and to read. And even though none of this is supposed to be about me, it was hard not to let it be a little bit about me. I never talked to anyone who had so many thoughts about so many different things before. Everything felt like a test, and I must have kept passing because I’m here.