How to Save a Life (39 page)
Read How to Save a Life Online
Authors: Sara Zarr
There’s a flurry of activity down the hall—we look up. Mom rushes into the waiting room, looking like crap but gigantically happy. She presses her hands to her mouth and nods. The doctor follows behind her and extends her hand to me. “Congratulations on the birth of your niece.”
I stand and shake the doctor’s hand. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Dylan stands, too. “Niece?”
I hug my mom, and hug her and hug her and hug her.
“We’ll explain it later,” Mom says to Dylan over my shoulder.
The doctor puts her hand on my back. “Wouldn’t you like to see her?”
In sixty to ninety days, that will be my legal name. Then we’ll get an amended birth certificate for Lola, and she’ll be a MacSweeney, too. Jill will be my sister. And Robin will be my mother.
And I’ll sit at this table each morning at breakfast and each evening for dinner and wake up to the cheerful orange walls, without secrets or worrying that I might mess up or thinking about when I have to leave.
Really it was Jill’s idea.
She remembered something from three years ago. Robin and Mac volunteered to help do something with foster kids. I don’t remember what. But when they did it, they learned about how some foster parents really wanted to adopt their foster children but couldn’t, because the biological parents wouldn’t give up rights or other complications. But then when the children turned eighteen and could make their own choices, the foster parents adopted them.
If it was possible to adopt adults, could Robin adopt
me
? Instead of the baby? Jill asked.
Jill
asked. That day after I thought I wanted to leave.
When Robin finally wasn’t throwing up anymore, we went down to her computer and looked online. She called her friends in the government.
“We could do this, Mandy,” she said, getting more excited with every phone call and piece of information.
And I said, “But you wanted a baby. Not a nineteen-year-old.”
I didn’t believe it could be that easy. Nothing in my life is that easy. Nothing ever has a solution that makes everyone happy. You don’t get anything without giving up something. And I knew Robin would be giving up something, and I wanted to make sure she was thinking of that and not just being scared to lose the baby completely.
She rolled herself in her office chair around to where I was sitting in another chair, across the desk. “Here’s what Mac’s death taught me about life, Mandy: Be prepared for detours. We had a whole plan. For our marriage, for Jill, for retirement and old age and burial.”
“Death changes things,” I said. “It happens and you can’t stop it. You don’t have a choice. This is different.”
“Life changes things, too.”
And then, like Lola had heard us and couldn’t wait three more weeks to change our lives with hers, my water broke. Robin started the paperwork for adopting me as soon as I was home from the hospital.
And that’s how I belong to her and she belongs to me and we all belong to each other and I’m home.
He’s there already, at our table at Dazbog, wearing old, ratty jeans and a sloppy sweater and glasses, looking devastatingly gorgeous. I can admit it to myself now without all the anxiety: Ravi Desai is one of the best-looking guys I have ever known.
Even though he’s dressed so casually, I wish I’d tried harder to look nice. But I didn’t want to seem like I was trying. Yes, we are still in that complicated phase.
“Hi,” I say, and sit down.
“I got you an au lait.” He slides the mug toward me. “That’s what you like, correct?”
“Correct.”
Mandy’s dossier is on the table between us. “Why did you want me to bring you this?” he asks, tapping it. “I assumed case closed.”
I slide it toward me and flip through it, running my finger over Ravi’s handwritten notes, his printouts about adoption scams. “Hey, look.” I hold out my phone to show him the latest picture of Lola, who I’m falling for fast.
Ravi takes it. “Wow.”
“You should see her in person. She’s totally serious. Furrowed brow, stern looks. Like we’re all in trouble with her. Considering she has none of my dad’s genes, she’s an awful lot like him.”
I close Mandy’s file and push it back toward him. “I was thinking you could help us find the baby’s father. Mandy doesn’t know his last name. He lives on a reservation in South Dakota. She thinks. She knows the general vicinity.”
He puts his palms on the table. “At this point… I should probably confess: I don’t actually know how to find people. I mean, I have your basic Internet search skills, but that’s about it.”
“But when I asked about Mandy, you made it sound like—”
“Yeah. Because I wanted to impress you.”
“It worked.”
“I know.”
I laugh, and we spend a good number of seconds grinning like the fools we are.
“Did you ever think,” I say, “the night I elbowed you in the face, that we’d wind up here?”
“I hoped.”
“You did not! Did you?”
“If you’re asking when terror turned to lust, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment.”
“Lust? Is that all this is?” I’m playing, helping to keep things as light as he’s trying to. We both know that there’s a lot going on right now for me, too much to get as serious as we sometimes feel.
“Isn’t that always what it is, at first?”
“No. At first it’s friendship.” I sip my au lait and say, as if I’m indifferent, “I’m moving away, you know. Or traveling. After graduation.”
“So you’ve repeatedly claimed.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You’re an aunt now. And a sister. Family ties.”
While I still sometimes struggle to feel connected to Lola, who is alien in her baby-ness, it’s easier and easier to think of Mandy as my sister. We bicker like siblings. I’m bossy, like Ravi’s brothers. We’re different. But we experience the same life now, together.
“Do you think, maybe, you’d like to come over for dinner next week?” I ask.
“As Clark?”
“No. As you.” I hold up my au lait in a toast. “And I’ll be me.”
The view from the train back to Omaha is different from the trip to Denver. The time of day is different, the light is different, and since then spring has come and summer is coming. Wildflowers are up, trees are leafing.
Jill, in the seat next to me, yanks out one earbud. “How long did you say? Nine hours?”
I nod. Jill groans. “I know taking the train is all meaningful for you, but I still think we should have driven. I’m going to get some coffee. Want anything?”
“Something sweet.”
“Of course.” Then she leans over Lola in my arms and talks in the voice she always uses with Lola, low and silly and with her lips pursed, trying to make Lola smile. “How ’bout you? Tea, coffee? Raspberry scone? No? All you ever want is milk. So predictable.”
Then she looks at me again and frowns, reaching to fix my hair. “You should keep it off your face. The whole point of this haircut is to show off your eyes.”
“Okay.”
After Lola was born and I could walk around again, I told Jill I wanted shorter hair, and she took me to the place where she goes. The man who cut my hair had a shaved head and three nose rings. I got scared and told him, “Don’t make me look like Jill.”
Jill put her hands out, pretend strangling me, and they laughed. I don’t know why that was so funny. The haircut turned out good, though. I’m still me, only more free-feeling.
“Mom?” Jill asks Robin, across the aisle from us. “Want anything?”
“I’d love some tea, honey, thank you.”
They’ve been getting along better. We usually all eat breakfast together now. Since Jill’s done with school, she’s not always rushing, and she’ll come down and eat at the table and not stand in the middle of the kitchen like she has somewhere else she wants to be. Sometimes if she’s up late, she’ll even sit with me in my room when I’m nursing in the middle of the night. One night I told her she didn’t have to do that, she could go to bed.
“Remember when you told me liking some people takes time?” she whispered.
I nodded.
“I’m starting early with Lola.”
Mandy thinks that once she sees the fairgrounds, which she knows how to get to, she’ll figure out how to find the reservation. It all sounds a little overly optimistic to me, but my ideas about optimism might be changing. Mandy’s been wearing the necklace Christopher gave her, and sometimes Lola reaches up and grasps it in her fingers, and Mandy is convinced this is a sign of something.
It was a summer one-night stand. Mandy says it was love. She says love is love whether it happens in five minutes or five years. Usually I just try not to laugh. But once in a while, I decide that I don’t always have to be right.
As we drive in the rental car out of Omaha and into the country, where it’s just acres and acres of green, I put my hand out the window. Life is always moving forward, forward, forward. Relentless. If someone offered me a time machine right now and I could go back to before my dad died, I would, of course, if only to see if I could save him. But then I’d want to come right back here, to face the next unknown moment and the next and the next.
Lola becomes her most quiet, serious self. Mandy says she can sense Christopher getting closer, closer. “I can feel his energy,” she says.
My dad would laugh. He’d call it all mystical bullshit. He’d say, “Take your dream catcher and sell it somewhere else, sister.”
But he was a romantic. Tenderhearted and sentimental.
Secretly he’d believe.
And so secretly, secretly, as the cornfields fly by, I believe, too.
With grateful thanks to the following folks for research help: in Denver—Susan Bettger and Scott Kingry for hospitality, happy hour, rowdy stories, chauffeuring, and three memorable trips to Casa Bonita. Steve Inman for additional insights, tales, and bar service. In and about Omaha—Mark Peach, Jaafar Talha of Happy Cab, the Bookworm, the staff at the Magnolia Hotel Omaha, Sarah Sproul, Lois, Kaylie and the guy who drove me to the train station so that I wouldn’t have to haul my bags through the snow like Mandy, and the man next to me on the plane who answered all my questions about corn. Also—Mitali Perkins, Sherman Alexie, Melissa Marr, Dr. Bernadette Kiraly, and that person on Twitter who named the bookstore that employs Jill.