How to Save a Life (12 page)

None of the normal things happen today. Today she sets her shoulder bag down in the entryway and barely looks at me on the couch. “Hi, Mandy” is all she says before walking heavily up the stairs.

More than an hour later, she still hasn’t come down. I’m hungry. I could make myself a sandwich, but usually she cooks something. I start upstairs. If I phrase it like,
I was thinking I could cook dinner tonight
, she’ll probably realize what time it is and say,
Oh no, honey. I’m coming down now
.

Her door is cracked only a tiny bit, and her room is dark. Through the crack I can see her legs on the bed and hear her crying. Not like the big sobbing you do when something tragic and unexpected happens. It’s the quiet kind of crying that can go for hours, when over and over again you try to stop, try to tell yourself it’s going to be okay, but another part of yourself can’t stop thinking about the thing that’s breaking your heart.

Last time I went into someone’s room while they were crying, I was told to get out. This time I go back downstairs and put a pot of water on to boil for the organic whole-wheat macaroni-and-cheese mix Robin buys. She needs comfort food, I can tell. But she’s still not down when Jill comes home and finds me in the kitchen, done eating, rinsing my bowl and putting it in the dishwasher.

“Hey,” she says, looking at the pot on the stove. “Where’s my mom?”

Jill never asks how I am. She didn’t even say good-bye when she left earlier with Dylan, who at least said, “It was nice to meet you.”

“Upstairs.”

She picks up some macaroni out of the pot with her fingers and puts it into her mouth. She has no sense of hygiene. I could remind her I’m very susceptible to infection right now, but instead I say, “Maybe you should go up and see her.”

I wonder if either of them knows about the time they spend crying in their separate rooms.

Jill wipes her fingers on her black jeans, leaving a faint orange smear. “Why?” Then she closes her eyes for two or three seconds, and her face goes from her usual annoyed expression to one that is so sad. “Shit.” The first time she says it is tired. The second time, her eyes now open, is mad. “Shit!” She slams the lid onto the pot.

“What’s wrong?”

And the way she stares at me, defiant, it’s like she doesn’t want to say. She folds her arms in front of her, clutching each elbow with the opposite hand. “Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years they would have been married, today. Thirty-three years if you count when they met and the years they lived together. Can you imagine seeing someone basically every day for thirty-three years and then one of those days…” She shakes her head and pinches her mouth together.

There’s so much anger in her eyes. I want to remind her that only a few hours ago Dylan was holding her like she was the most special thing in the world. Maybe that would make her feel better. I step back toward the dishwasher and close the door. The chances of me saying the right thing are not good. Still, I have to try, because I can’t pretend she didn’t just tell me about something important and awful.

“At least they had those thirty-three years.” It’s the wrong thing; Jill’s eyes go hard. “A lot of people never find real love,” I say to explain what I mean. “Or they find it, and it gets away before they experience any happiness.” I only want her to understand how lucky she and Robin are to have ever had Mac. Lucky that she had a father like that as long as she did.

She takes two quick steps toward me. Her face is inches from mine; I can smell the cheese sauce on her breath. “You don’t get to talk about this.”

My mother says that when another girl steps up to you, just smile and let her have the last word. My mother says it’s usually jealousy or her wanting something you have. But I can’t think of one thing I have that Jill, who has everything, could want. And I can’t smile when we’re talking about a tragedy.

“I only meant—”

“What did I just say?”

I put my hands on my belly.

“You,” she continues, “aren’t family.” She lets go of her elbows. Her hands shake. “To me you’re just an incubator for the one thing that might possibly make my mom happy.”

She turns, her boots squeaking on the tile. As she leaves the kitchen, I think about what I could say. Those aren’t last words I want her to have.
I’m sorry
, I could say. Or,
Why are you so mad at me when I didn’t do anything?
It doesn’t matter. She’s already up the stairs.

It was July.

The cornfields outside of town had come up green and tall like always, oceans of them. You would drive into the farmlands and think that the whole earth was made of these fields. I rode in the back of Kent’s pickup because my mother liked to be alone with him in the cab. I didn’t mind. The warm, moist air flowed over and around me as I watched the road unfurl behind us.

We’d left the city to go to the Riverbrook County Fair. Kent had an idea to maybe buy a horse. I don’t know why, and I don’t know where in Council Bluffs you’d put a horse, but Kent had a lot of ideas he didn’t think through. My mother said not to contradict your man. “Men are fragile,” she said. “They need a cheerleader, not a negative Nelly.”

When we got to the fair, Kent and my mother looked at the brochure and went off to the livestock show. Kent gave me twenty dollars and said to meet them back at the truck by sundown. They didn’t want me to come with them. I mean, they didn’t say that in so many words, but it was obvious, so I went in the opposite direction.

I saw him on the midway. I was looking for a booth where I could get roasted corn and lemonade, and I saw him.

He walked slow, wearing sandals, his shirt off and tucked into the back of the waistband of his jeans, a string of blue beads around his neck. It was his profile I saw because he was with his friends and had his face turned toward one of them, laughing. A big laugh, the kind that makes everyone look to see what’s so funny, and when I looked to see what was so funny he was tucking his shoulder-length hair behind one ear. I stopped walking right in front of them and stared.

One of his friends saw me staring and asked, “What’s the matter? You never saw Indians before?”

I didn’t answer, because I was still looking at him, waiting to see what he’d do next, waiting for him to look at me. When he did, his smile got bigger at first, then it went down, and his expression grew serious. He felt it, too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That’s the way I remember it.

He spoke first. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

The friend who’d first caught me staring looked at him and then at me and watched us watching each other and said, “Always it’s the white girls.”

“Shut up, Freddy.”

One of his other friends elbowed Freddy. “Come on.” And to the boy I still stared at said, “See you later, Christopher, yeah? Or maybe never again?”

“You wanna walk around?” Christopher asked me, but we were already moving forward together, leaving his friends behind.

All day we walked and talked. I never talked so much to anyone. I told him about my father and about how it was for me at school but even with that I liked the school year better than summer because I could be out of the apartment. Everything I said to him was real. My real thoughts, my real feelings. He listened. He listened so well that I almost told him about Kent, but I didn’t want to ruin our day.

He bought me a sno-cone. He tried to win me something at the booth where you throw darts at balloons, but couldn’t. When we were walking away, a man in a baseball cap who’d been watching him said, “The balloons are underinflated and the darts are dull. You shoulda just thrown as hard as you could. Accuracy don’t matter.”

If someone had said something like that to Kent, he would have gotten embarrassed, then mad, and told the guy to mind his business and maybe a fight would start. Christopher only laughed and said, “Next time,” then held my hand and we kept walking.

On the Ferris wheel he put his arm around me, and I rested my head there between his shoulder and his chest, the way I’d always imagined I would in a situation like that. We watched people go by beneath us, and every time our car neared the top the world would get quiet, the music and crowds fading. When we got off the Ferris wheel, he said that there should be a Tunnel of Love. “At the state fair they have one,” he said, “but I never had anyone to ride through it with. Now I do and there isn’t one.”

We went through the haunted house instead, and in front of a dangling glow-in-the-dark skeleton he kissed me.

Outside the fair gates we made a path through the cornfield until we found a clearing. He spread his shirt on the ground and lay back, and I lay next to him. It wasn’t like with Kent, just the night before and always, fast and anxious and him reminding me not to make any noise so my mother wouldn’t hear. When Christopher touched me, it was like none of that had ever happened.

He took off my sundress and kissed me up and down and moved on top of me, so careful and slow, and I felt everything my mother says you’re supposed to feel, what I never felt before. After, Christopher took off his necklace and put it on me.

“Where do you live?” he asked, running his hand over the swell of my hip, smooth brown skin on white skin.

“Omaha.” If you live in Council Bluffs, you should always say “Omaha” when people ask where you live, my mother says.

“That’s a hundred miles. I don’t have a car.”

“Do you have a horse?” I could picture him on a wild pony with no saddle, his hair streaming behind him as he rode into the city and swept me up to sit in front of him and gallop me away.

He laughed his big laugh. “No. I don’t live in a tepee, either.”

“I didn’t think that.”

We were on our backs, watching the tops of the corn shiver in the wind.

“You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Those eyes.” He rolled over onto his elbow. “Stay here. We can live in the corn.”

I smiled. “Okay.” And he laughed a smaller laugh.

In the time since we first lay down, the sky had gone from blue to pink to purple. “I have to go.” I sat up and pulled my dress over my head.

He kissed my hand. My arm. My shoulder.

“Don’t forget me,” I said.

He told me the name of the town where he lived, the reservation. “Just ask for Christopher B. Everyone knows me.” He walked me almost to the parking lot, and then I told him he should go find his friends. I didn’t want Kent or my mother to see us. “Don’t forget me, either,” he said, and our hands separated, then our fingertips very last.

I went running toward the truck, gravel getting between my feet and my sandals. The necklace bounced against my collarbone. Kent stood outside the truck cab, impatient and getting ready to yell at me. I didn’t care.

I know it all sounds like a fantasy. But that’s how it was, and those are the things we said. It’s true. It’s mostly true.

And Jill should understand that, even if she can’t imagine it, there was at least that one day when I mattered.

Jill

Dylan and I sit in his car in the school parking lot as snow piles up on the windshield, gradually reducing the area of visibility until all we can see are the very tops of the heads of all the people going to class.
Trudging
to class, I should say, like prisoners of war off to the work camp to haul rocks with their frozen fingers, under the beady yet watchful eyes of corrupt guards.

Generally, I don’t have a problem with school. I mean, you get through it, and it’s what you’ve been doing nearly your whole life, and there are people who make you laugh and all of that. And of course I’m not anti-learning. I like learning. Education is pretty much the number one value around the MacSweeney home, only Dad didn’t think it had to come from school, necessarily. For him it came from living in the world, trying new things, paying attention. And school can be such torture sometimes, seriously, when you just don’t want to be there and everyone is in your face with all their usual bullshit, not picking up on a single of your
please go away now
cues.