How to Save a Life (26 page)

“Superman?” He runs his hand down his tie. It’s one I haven’t seen before—kind of a rose-and-navy-striped thing. No glasses. This Ravi makes me feel different from the way the jeans-sweater-glasses Ravi does. A little on edge.

“Clark,” I say. “Clark Kent? A.k.a. the Man of Steel?”

“Huh. I was thinking of William Clark. As in Lewis and Clark.” He gazes at me. “The explorers?”

“Yes, I’m familiar, but that’s…” Then I catch something in his eyes, around his mouth. Ravi has made a joke. “You were not thinking of Lewis and Clark.”

“No, I was not.”

“You were thinking of Superman.”

“Totally thinking of Superman,” he says with a conclusive nod.

“Well, I hope you like it, because you’re stuck with it for the duration of this whole Mandy thing. By the way, iced coffee is not coffee. Just so you know.”

He rattles his ice at me. “I’ll file that information away under
J
, for
Jill Is Wrong
.”

We’re flirting. Nothing serious, just the way friends do. I was always good at that, since seventh grade, when I discovered my sense of humor and figured out how to use it. Maybe that’s what Ravi saw that made him write that I seemed smart and funny, that he wished we could have talked more. These days I’m more likely to clear a hallway or hear someone say “ouch” after I make a “joke.” I want to go back to this. This is better; this is energizing and doesn’t leave me feeling like an asshole.

I’m thinking of my comeback when Ravi says, “Hey.” And I know whatever is next is not going to be about Mandy and not going to be flirting. No more joking around.

“Hey what?”

He opens his mouth.

“Don’t ask me how I am,” I blurt. “Please?” I want to keep feeling good. Just because the lights are on doesn’t mean I have to look.

He closes his mouth.

I brush a crumb off our table, something left by a previous customer, and keep brushing well after it’s gone. “Sorry, Ravi,” I say, unable to look at him.

“Let me ask you a different question, then.”

“Okay.”

“You know how I said I’ve always thought of you as a friend, and maybe you could pretend that we are?”

I nod. I’ll never forget that.

“Are you…” He’s squishing his straw wrapper into a tiny ball with long fingers. “I mean, I know it started because you only wanted help with Mandy. But I think it would be good, or what I’m saying that I want to know… sorry.” He leaves the wrapper alone. “Is this pretend?”

I put my hands in my jacket pockets and shake my head. “No.”

“So… if we’re not just pretending, and we really are friends, I can ask you how you are. Right?”

“I guess that is how it works. Technically.”

“I thought so.” He folds his arms over the table. “Jill?”

“Yes, Ravi?” I look at him and make efforts at a smile, trying to find the humor in the moment but only feeling raw as a burn, like if someone brushed against me right now, I’d yell out in pain.

“How are you?”

I close my eyes. Make myself think about it before answering. “I’m okay. I mean, you know. I don’t know. Kind of weird.” I laugh. I shouldn’t be laughing.

“Weird how?”

“Weird like the whole last year has been a mistake. Or a dream. The way I’ve handled it. Like… I’ve messed up my ‘grieving process’ or whatever. And I can’t go back and do it right.”

My eyes, now open, maintain contact with his.

“I don’t think there’s a right way to do it. It’s hard enough that your dad died. Don’t criticize yourself for how you’ve dealt with it.”

I blink. “Okay.”

“You’re doing great,” he says.

“I am?”

“You’re doing your best.”

I really am. As short as it falls, I really, really am. And I love him for saying that.

“Do you want to talk about Mandy?” Ravi pulls out his notebook.

“I guess.” I shift in my seat, get focused. “What did you think? She’s not normal, right?”

“She does seem pretty awkward,” he concedes. “And young. How old did you say she was?”

“Eighteen.”

“She comes off younger.”

“I know. I just figured that was part of being from Corn Country, and being small, and not being all that bright. I’m already feeling bad about last night,” I confess. “The lying about who you are and all that. She really had a good time, you know? She kept talking about it on the way home, how neat the coffee shop was and how nice you were and everything. And when I felt the baby…”
and looked up at you, everything seemed possible again
.

“You don’t have to do this. We can forget the whole thing.”

“But what about the red flags?”

“They could all be explained away.” He puts his pen down, closes his notebook. “I only want to help you. If you want me to try to check Mandy out further, I will. If you don’t want me to, I won’t.”

I toy with the cardboard sleeve on my coffee cup. I don’t even know anymore what I want, if I started this to protect my mom or because I didn’t have anywhere else to put my anger, or if it was all an excuse to bring Ravi closer, and if that was it, why can’t I just admit it?

“Are you going to the store tonight?” I ask. There’s frustration in my voice, which surprises us both.

“I’m on duty, but I have some follow-up to do at a couple of the other stores. I’ll probably stop by, though.”

“To see Annalee.” It comes out of its own free will, is what it feels like. It’s not what I mean to say. It’s not where I mean to go.

“To work,” he says, flipping some pages in his notebook, something for him to look at. “To thwart evil.”

“And see Annalee.”
God. Shut up, Jill. If you don’t want to be this person, then stop. Fucking. Being her
. “Isn’t she kind of old for you?”

Ravi flinches. “She’s seven years older.”

Why isn’t he saying it doesn’t matter, because they’re not dating? Why isn’t he flirty again and making a comment on the two-year age gap between
us
? That’s what I want him to say, I realize. That’s where I want the conversation to go.

“Old. You’re only nineteen.” I try for a smile, try to make it playful.

He pauses, and I can tell he’s straining with all his might to read my tone and get it right. It’s awkward. It’s painful. We turned a bad corner; I want to take it all back. “We both like
Doctor Who
,” he says. Which I’m sure he thought would be a safe answer.

What he’s about to find out is that no one is safe with me when I’m this mad at myself. “I mean, that’s fine if your whole ambition is to work at Margins the rest of your life, dating the staff and living with your parents. Great goals.”

We stare at each other, both stunned. Ravi looks injured, and I’ve hurt myself, too. After this great moment of trust and connection and letting us be friends, I had to go and do what I do.

“So, um,” he says, quiet and self-conscious, the way I imagine he was back in Schiff’s, “take some time to think, and tell me what you want to do.” Louder, more confident, he adds, “About Mandy, I mean. You’ll figure it out, Jill. You’re a smart girl.” He stands, pointing to my cup. “All finished?”

“Yep.”

He takes it with the rest of our trash. “See you.” And he’s gone.

Yeah. I’m so smart.

Mandy

I’m standing outside Jill’s bedroom door with a cup of coffee. The coffee is for her. Robin showed me how to make it the way she likes: with a lot of half-and-half and a little bit of brown sugar. “She also likes it when I throw some cinnamon into the grinder with the beans, but we’re out.” Robin pulled her robe around her body and said, “Remind me again why you’re taking coffee to Jill? Don’t let her boss you around.”

“I’m not. But it’s Saturday morning, and she hasn’t been down yet. Maybe she’d like coffee in bed. I have to go upstairs anyway.”

The truth is that one of the three times I got up to pee in the night, I heard a sound coming from Jill’s room. A gasping. At first I thought she had Dylan in there with her, but when I stopped to listen as hard as I could, I knew what it was. Crying. The kind of crying that takes over your whole body and makes your head hurt and your ribs sore. You think you might throw up. You try to bury your face into blankets or pillows to keep from being heard, but when you do that you can’t breathe, you start to choke. So you pull away and gulp in air, then try to hide your face again, quickly. That’s the sound I heard.

It made my own lungs empty out for a second, hearing her. My body remembered what it was to cry like that. I went back to bed and pictured myself in my room in Council Bluffs, six months ago, gulping air and clenching layers of blankets in my fists. No one in the world should have to feel like that. Not even Jill.

It’s been one week since we went out together and she felt the baby. She’s almost ignored me since. It’s like it never happened. I’ve tried not to feel hurt. It’s hard.

“Jill?” I ask, tapping lightly on her door.

“Go away, Mandy.”

“I have coffee.”

There’s no reply.

“For you,” I add. “Your mom showed me how.”

After a few seconds the door opens a crack, and Jill’s forearm snakes out. I pull the mug just out of her reach. She opens the door wider and looks out. “Are you going to let me drink it or what?” Her eyes are puffy. There’s a pimple near the corner of her mouth. She’s wearing regular clothes, like she slept in them all night.

“Can I come in?”

“Mandy,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut. I can tell she’s trying not to blow up at me. I want to say the right thing that’s going to make her see me as somebody who sincerely feels bad for her. Because that’s what I am.

“I heard you crying last night.”

She opens her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Me neither. I thought this would help.” I extend the mug. “That’s all.”

She takes it. “Why do you want to come in?”

Because I’m lonely
, I think. Why does anyone ever want to be with another person? “I thought maybe you’re lonely,” I say.

Jill touches her mouth. Her eyes shift away. “Not really. But okay.” She pushes the door all the way open and gets back in bed. I look at the futon chair. Without someone to help me, I don’t think I can sit in it, let alone get up.

“Here,” Jill says, reaching to flip back a corner of the blanket at the bottom of the bed. “Sit against the wall. Put your feet under.”

I do what she says and watch her sip her coffee. “How is it?”

“Pretty good.”

“We’re out of cinnamon.”

She watches me over the rim of the mug.

“I mean,
you’re
out,” I say. My feet feel under the blanket for the warmest spot, and I accidentally brush against her foot. “Sorry,” I say, jerking mine back.

“Don’t worry about it.” Jill draws herself up to sit cross-legged. “So what are you up to today?”

“Same as always.” I smile. “Nothing.”

“What would you be doing today if you were back in Omaha or Iowa or wherever?”

“Same.”

“I mean, like, if you weren’t pregnant. Say you were back home and this”—she waves her hand toward my belly—“had never happened. What was your life like before? I mean, did you have a job or were you living at home or what?”

Jill’s never asked me this many questions, been this interested in my life. Probably it’s because she doesn’t want to talk about herself or why she’s sad. Maybe if I talk about me, she’ll talk about her.

“I lived at home with my mother and her boyfriend. Sometimes I worked for his company, helping him with billing or entering stuff on the computer.” Kent liked it when I came to his office and sat behind the front desk. Contracting customers liked to see a pretty girl, he said. Half the time he forgot to pay me. But he would take me out to lunch. If we ran into anyone he knew, he’d always say, “This is Mandy.” He never explained that my mother was his girlfriend.

“What about for fun? I mean, going out with friends and stuff?”

I finger the edge of the comforter. “My two best friends, DebAnn and Lucia, sometimes we’d all go out.” I imagine going to a movie with them, sitting in the theater with DebAnn’s coat taking up an extra seat and Lucia with her earbuds in, staring straight ahead. DebAnn and I did spend a Saturday together, once, when I gave her twenty dollars to take pictures of me with her digital camera so I’d have something to send Robin. “Do you have friends?” I ask Jill. I only want to change the subject away from me.

Jill laughs. “God, Mandy.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like—I just never see anyone here. And all those people signed your yearbook.”

“When did you see my yearbook?”

I pat the blanket where it rests on my belly. “I think maybe your mom showed me?”

“The answer about friends is: not really. There’s Dylan, and the people at work. I used to have a couple of good friends and a lot of what you’d call friendly acquaintances. The friendly acquaintances disappeared when my life got tragic, and the good ones sort of got tired of being treated crappily.” She looks at her mug. “So it’s not just you I’m an ass to. I’m sure that makes you feel tons better.”

“It does.” Maybe not tons. But some.

“We’ve patched things up, I guess, but… I don’t even know if any of us like each other anymore.”