How to Save a Life (32 page)

If this were only about me wanting Robin to think of me a certain way, Jill would be right. But the part I can’t tell her is that I might need the money. I can’t tell Robin I want to keep the baby and then expect her to write me a check. Even I’m not that stupid about how the world works. The watch is all I have. That, and the baby. But without the watch I don’t have the baby, because without money I can’t do anything, and I won’t go back to Council Bluffs, no matter what. No matter what.

“No,” I told Jill. And I felt bad lying to her, but I said, “We’ll mail it by Friday. I promise.”

Last night we had dinner early; Robin had to go to a meeting, again, afterward. “A few more days of this,” Robin said, “then it’s all over. As soon as I present the feasibility study, my part is done and we can focus on… everything else.” Meaning me, the baby, the decisions we haven’t made, the conversations we haven’t had. Since dinner was early, Jill ate with us instead of running right off to work. She looked a little bit like she’d been crying—by now I’ve seen her cry enough to know her different faces—but she sounded and acted happy.

“Still soup?” she asked. We’ve been eating this soup since Sunday.

“Unless you’d like to whip up a rack of lamb,” Robin said, putting out bowls.

“It’s good,” Jill said. “Just eternal.” She looked at me, then, and made a face. Like we’re friends, or sisters.
No secrets, no worries
might be true, but also having a secret together has made us closer.

She took the newspaper from the top of the recycling bin in the corner of the kitchen. “I think that’s yesterday’s,” Robin said, putting out spoons, napkins.

“That’s what I want. I’m testing the wisdom of the universe.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, this argument I got into with someone from work who totally believes in astrology. I want to see if yesterday’s horoscope came true.” She flipped through the pages and read aloud: “ ‘You’re not as clever as you think you are, Aries.’ That one’s for the baby.” She leaned over and said to my stomach, “Not as clever as you think! We’re onto you! Okay, now me. Capricorn. ‘Don’t let what you think you know…’ ” Jill kept reading silently.

“Go on,” Robin said, laughing. “That sounds like you, all right.”

“This is obviously b.s.”

“Oh!” Robin turned to me, suddenly, from the stove. “Do you realize your due date is right around Mac’s birthday? April second. Wouldn’t it be something if she was born on his birthday?” She sounded far away. “Wouldn’t it, Jill?”

“It would.” Then Jill got up and decided she needed to go straight to work after all, leaving the newspaper in a pile at her place at the table. On her way out, she said, “Mom, try to stay up, I want to talk to you about something when I get home,” and I don’t mean to be paranoid, but it sounded like the thing she wanted to talk about was me. Otherwise why would she say it like that? “Something” instead of “work” or “school” or normal things. Maybe she’d figured out from her laptop what I’d been looking at about the value of the watch and where I could get money for it. I’d cleared all my history, but she could know something I don’t know about computers.

The truth is that earlier yesterday I was a little calmer. More sure about staying here and following through with all my plans. Confident that Robin and I would work it out, and everything would be all right somehow. But when Jill said that, I knew she was going to tell on me for taking something that wasn’t mine, trying to get away with something. That I might be a thief. That I might wind up stealing from them.

Then this morning they both acted normal and I thought,
No, Jill didn’t tell. Maybe I’ll stay.
It’s so hard to know what to do, and I go back and forth like that, all day, every day, since Monday after Dr. Yee. I look at Jill and Robin and think,
Yes, I can trust them; this is a good situation.
Then I see Robin at her computer and think maybe she’s not doing work for her meeting, maybe she’s e-mailing lawyers.

I picture it all:

Me at the hospital. Giving birth. It hurting and taking a long time. Robin will be there helping, but it’s only because she wants this so bad, this life in me, someone to give her love to who is new and isn’t ruined like I am. And the baby will come out, and Robin will hold her, and she and Dr. Yee will whisper and take my daughter away.

And disappear.

Then it’s me. Alone.

The nurse will say, “Mrs. MacSweeney packed your bag for you, and here it is. So you don’t have to go back to the house for it.”

It will be like at the train station in Omaha when the taxi driver left me and I walked through the snow and the dark, only this time I won’t even have my baby, or anywhere to go.

That is how it’s going to happen, I just know. That’s how my life has been. That’s how it will be, unless I do something different.

So all of that means this is my last day here.

At breakfast this morning I took in every detail to remember in a week, in a year, in twenty years: how Jill looks before she puts on her eyeliner, the way she stands in the middle of the kitchen eating her peanut butter toast instead of sitting at the table, because she’s always in a hurry. The sound of Robin’s feet on the stairs and how they’re different from Jill’s—lighter and more cheerful.

Robin had to rush out, too.

“This is the last day,” she said to me, touching my head, like she does sometimes. I closed my eyes and felt each fingertip. “After tonight I’m done. If they need anything else from me, they’ll have to get it by phone. Okay? I promise.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll talk about everything tomorrow.” I gave her my most convincing smile and reached up from where I was in the kitchen chair and put my arms around her neck. Powder, coffee.

Remember this
, I think.

Jill

All day Thursday I can’t shake a peculiar feeling. Mrs. Espinoza has the window cracked, and there’s a spring breeze that’s almost warm, smelling at once carbon-y and grassy, old snow and new plants, growth, life. Everything’s off somehow, unsettled. It feels almost like: the future has already happened. Graduation is over, Dylan has gone off to college, Mandy’s had the baby, and I can see my mom holding her, gazing at her. The only thing I can’t clearly see about the future is what
I’m
doing in it. I sort of picture myself in Denver. Which is all wrong.

Spring fever. Senioritis, maybe. Confusion about Ravi, certainly.

Meanwhile I have to plan a surprise party, call Annalee about work, and get that damn watch back to Iowa no later than tomorrow. And PS, I also have be at school and perform my trained-monkey-high-schooler duties: showing up on time, paying attention or pretending to, and somehow not checking out before it’s all over. Just because I’m not going straight to college doesn’t mean I want crappy grades for my last semester of high school.

But, something’s got to go, and I’m afraid it will be government and chem, a.k.a. the latter half of my day of learning.

In English while we’re supposed to be writing, I make a checklist, try to break it down to one thing at a time. Dylan, who sits two seats ahead and one row over from me, casts a look back every now and then, and I can tell that
he
can tell that whatever I’m writing in my notebook, it ain’t an essay about William Faulkner.

Call Annalee.

Call Mom.

Buy presents.

Figure out how to get Mandy to C.B. without telling her what’s going on.

Invite Ravi to C.B.

I tap my pen on the Ravi sentence.
Tappity-tap.
I cross it out. I write it again. I tap. Dylan looks back at me, and Mrs. Espinoza also gives me the eye.

I want Ravi to be there. For Mandy. She likes him, and it will even out the boy-girl thing and make her feel good. Don’t tell me that even at eight months pregnant, you don’t want to enjoy a little social interaction with a boy. Also, I don’t want him to be there. The situation is full of all kinds of potential awkwardness. But… man. I just want to
see
him. Like, I can’t go a whole day without seeing him. It’s bad.

When the bell rings, I tell Dylan to meet me in the school lot at lunchtime—we have to go shopping. “That’s okay for me,” he says. “I don’t have any unexcused absences yet this semester. But you’re kind of on your last leg with that, right?”

“Oh no, now I won’t get into Yale.”

He starts to say something, then shuts it down. I take off to the bathroom to make my phone calls. Annalee answers her cell. The sound of her voice in real time instead of her voice mail makes me wince. After a bunch of excuses and a lot of hard-core negotiation that results in me being scheduled for the next five Friday nights, I get off work.

Mom doesn’t answer her phone at first but calls me back while I’m leaving her a message. “What, honey? Everything okay?”

She’s in a big rush, that’s clear, maybe even in a meeting. Her in a rush and me sitting in a bathroom stall do not add up to the right time to tell her about Mandy’s surprise party, which, with everything else that went on yesterday, slipped my mind. But I tell her, and she says, “Tonight?”

“Yeah, tonight. It’s her birthday.”

“It is? How did I not know that? A party, Jill, that’s… thoughtful. But I have a neighborhood meeting tonight to present the feasibility study. The one I’ve been working on for the last six months? I may have mentioned it
once or twice
.”

Crap. “Oh yeah.”

“And by the way, explain to me why you want to go
Casa Bonita
anyway?”

Mom doesn’t appreciate the awesome badness of Casa Bonita. “I think Mandy will love it. So I’m sorry I forgot to tell you, okay? And don’t tell her—it’s a surprise.”

“Fine, fine. Have fun. Take pictures. I want to see this.”

The passing period is well over, and I’m alone in the bathroom. If I’m going to invite Ravi, it’s now or never. I scroll through my phone in order to simply reread one of his text messages and accidentally brush the touch screen where it says
CALL RAVI DESAI
. The universe has made my decision for me.

“Hey, Jill.” He sounds subdued.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“I wanted to see if… I mean, I wanted to tell you thanks for yesterday.”

He’s quiet.

“That was good for me,” I say. “To go there.”

“Good.”

I wait for him to say more. I stare at the bathroom door, freshly scrubbed of graffiti. “Also, we—I’m throwing this little surprise birthday–baby shower thing for Mandy tonight. I thought maybe you could come. As Clark.”

“A baby shower? Isn’t that a girl thing?”

“More her birthday, but the presents will be baby stuff. At Casa Bonita.”

He pauses. “Who all is going to be there?”

Someone comes into the bathroom. Through the space around the stall door, I can see whoever it is looking at herself in the mirror. “Me. Mandy. Dylan. Maybe some other people.”

“I don’t know.”

“You can bring a date,” I say in a rush, with too much enthusiasm. “You can bring Annalee!” Digging my fist into my thigh keeps me from punching myself at how absurd it is to say that. As if I don’t know Annalee can’t take off work tonight because I’m going to. As if I don’t know she’s mad at him or they’re broken up or whatever.

“Not likely.”

The person in the bathroom is waiting for me to leave, I can tell. “Really, I just thought Mandy would enjoy it.”

“I guess I don’t see the point, Jill.”

No, no
, I think. We were doing good. We were talking openly. We were figuring it out.

On the other hand, he’s right. It’s a bad idea, and there is no point except my selfish desire to see him again, which isn’t fair to him and not fair to Dylan and not fair to me, really, since I’m so mixed up anyway. Which makes me angry at myself. Usually when I’m angry at myself, I take it out on people who mean something to me. This time I try to be different.

“Ravi, it would mean a lot to me if you were there, but I totally understand if you can’t or don’t want to. Casa Bonita. Six thirty.”

After a few seconds, he says, “Let me think about it.”

“Okay.”