How to Save a Life (5 page)

“What?” I ask, turning to her. She’s got her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. Slouching and frowning.

“On your bed. How many? Mom says some pregnant people like to sleep with one between their knees.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what? One for your knees and one for your head? Or more?”

How many pillows do they have? “Either way.”

She sighs. “Can you just give me a number?”

“Three.”

“Great.”

Jill clomps back up. I lean into the soft, real leather of the sofa and close my eyes, wondering what my mother would say if she could see me now.

Jill

The excitement of watching Mandy take over our lives has to be temporarily abandoned so that I can come to work. Work is good. I urgently need distraction from the situation, which until this morning was all dread and imagination. Like the SAT or a dentist’s appointment. For weeks and weeks you imagine how horrible and impossible it’s going to be, and then you’re doing it and it’s hard to tell in the moment: Is this as horrible and impossible as I thought it would be? Worse? Not so bad? I don’t know.

I’ve tried convincing myself it has nothing to do with me. It’s Mom’s right to do this. Yet I can’t help thinking,
Am I not enough?
Mom and I have had our issues. I know she didn’t want me having a serious boyfriend in high school. I know she would have preferred me to have friends with better GPAs. I know she wants me to go to college, and I’m not, at least not right away. She knows I know all these things, though we never talk about them. You’re familiar with the elephant in the living room? We’ve got a whole herd. The biggest one is this: Dad was the parent I was closer to.

And I think, for my sake, Mom feels guilty about being the one who lived.

It has occurred to me that she sees the baby as a do-over. A chance to correct my failings and to finally have a child that’s all hers.

These are not pleasant thoughts. Work gives me a little bit of a break from it all.

Margins is a bookstore—part of a big national chain, which Mom isn’t super thrilled about, given that she’s on the Buy Local board and had me marching around Washington Park with a sign reading
SAVE MOM ’N’ POP!
when I was eight. But my parents wanted me to have a job, and Margins was hiring. At least it’s books, Mom said, something we can believe in and not deep-fried sandwiches or mortgage banking. Plus, Dad quickly realized I could put the employee discount to good use keeping him up to his neck in World War II memoirs and quantum physics theory and crime novels. And, to our collective surprise, it turned out that for a person who doesn’t like people, I’m pretty good at this customer service stuff.

It’s a slow night. We’ve got a Presidents’ Day special going on—twenty-five percent off any title at all related to a president. The problem is, Corporate didn’t define “at all related” or “president,” and right now there’s an old guy trying to get a discount on
Happy Birthday, Ms. President
. The cover photo is of a hot woman in skimpy lingerie holding a briefcase. I look at the back for a description while the customer rests his knobbly hands on the counter.

“So, this is actually about the president of a company,” I say.

“Still a president.”

“Yeah, but. Of an underwear company.”

He corrects me. “Fine lingerie.”

My manager, Annalee, is on break, meaning this case is mine to judge. The guy looks like someone’s nice grandpa. Maybe this book is his only hope for some jollies. In the end I give him the discount; Margins isn’t going to miss its $1.99 that much. Normally I’m tough about these situations—questionable returns, expired coupons, complicated lies about lost receipts. But it will make me feel good to help this man get the most out of his allotment of happiness—which I’ve learned over the past year is limited for all of us—and I want to feel good.

“Happy Presidents’ Day.” I slip his receipt into the bag.

“You, too, sweetie.”

Aw.

What I need is to talk to Dylan about Mandy. About how it felt to take her stuff up to the guest room. About her flowered dress and eerie eyes. About how I’m torn between wanting to keep an eagle eye on her to protect Mom and wanting to say,
Fine, you didn’t ask my opinion, and now it’s your problem
. About how I’ve felt for months now that some universal force has been slowly inflating a balloon inside me to see just how much I can take before I pop.

Not much more.

After making sure there are no approaching customers, I pull my phone out of my apron and start a text to Dylan.

Store basically empty if you want to come hang out. I’ll buy you a snickerdoodle
.

By the time I thumb type
snickerdoodle
, Annalee is walking in, and I shove the phone back into my apron pocket without hitting Send.

“It’s getting cold out there. Still dead?” She looks around the store while unwinding her striped scarf.

“One customer since you left.”

She pulls her brunette braid over her shoulder and fingers the end. Annalee, who I think is like twenty-seven or something, probably won’t ever be a legend in the bookselling business, as she doesn’t know that much about actual books, but she’s a great manager: completely reliable, never gets sick, is never short at the end of the day, never messes up the schedule, never loses her cool with employees or customers, and rarely takes a day off. So it surprises me when she says, “I’m thinking of leaving early. I can count out register two and have Ron close up the coffee counter. Can you handle the rest?”

“Of course.” I’ve been working here nearly two years. I could run the place if I had to. That’s another thing that makes Annalee a good manager, if not an expert on literature—she’s taught me how to do everything she does. “In case something happens to me,” she said once, matter-of-factly. “Like we’re robbed and I get shot.” The only thing I don’t know is how to get into the safe; I’ll just throw all the cash and paperwork into the drop for her to deal with in the morning.

“Doing anything fun?” I ask. “Or not feeling well?”

One corner of her mouth turns upward. “Don’t laugh.”

“I won’t.” Though, it must be said that I would love to laugh. I would love to hear something funny right now—truly funny so I can laugh something other than the bitter “Life Is Unbelievably Shitty” laugh that’s become my standard.

“There’s a
Doctor Who
marathon on tonight, and I forgot to set my DVR. I don’t want to miss it.”

Now that’s funny. I laugh.

“Jill!”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have promised.”

“It’s the
original
,” she says, defensive.

“Enjoy.” Later, when she’s gone, I straighten up the display tables and endcaps, turn out the lights in the back way earlier than usual, and stay at the counter chatting with Ron, keeping my eyes on the doors in the hope Dylan will walk through. Then I remember I never sent the text.

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.