How to Save a Life (11 page)

“Did he smoke? I found ashtrays on the bookshelves.”

“Cigars. Only on the weekends.”

Dylan is nice-looking, with mostly clear skin and sincere eyes. I try to imagine him with normal hair color and no makeup. When I was in school, I didn’t spend very much time talking to boys, or to anyone, and I’m not sure what to say to Dylan now. I smile. He smiles and slowly nods, drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair.

“Why don’t you call Jill and find out when she’s coming home?”

“We’re kind of… we’re in a complicated place right now. With our relationship. I was passing by the house and stopped on impulse. I wanted to meet you, actually.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” He gets up and walks to the mantel, handling and looking at the knickknacks—a small ceramic pig, a tiny bronze box. Then a picture in a wooden frame, which he brings to me. “This is Mac.”

I take the picture. I’ve already looked at it but didn’t know who it was. A cousin, I thought, or an uncle. Now I can see the resemblance between this man and the one in the picture in Jill’s desk, only he has longer hair and no beard. “He’s so young.”

“Nineteen in that picture. Hiking in Peru. When he graduated from high school, he worked a year and then traveled the world for, like, two years? Had all these amazing adventures. Saw everything there was to see, met Jill’s mom on the plane ride home, and the way he always said it was that he never looked back.”

So it does happen. People meet in unexpected ways in unexpected places, and it can be true and lasting love. It was like that with Christopher. Unexpected and true, anyway. Lasting is something else and I don’t know what, exactly, because I’ve never seen a relationship that did that.

In my next letter to Alex, I’ll tell him this story of Mac and Robin, and maybe he’ll see that people can meet on a plane or on a train and share a real connection. Never looking back, that’s important, too, when you need to think about the future.

The door opens; Jill drops her book bag onto the floor. When she sees Dylan, she pulls her earbuds out and lets them dangle around her neck. “What are you doing here?”

That’s not how I’d greet my boyfriend. Even if the relationship was complicated. “Always look happy to see your man,” my mother says, “even if you aren’t. Make him feel like a king, and he’ll treat you like a queen.”

Jill strides over to me to take the photo of her father from my hand.

Dylan and I watch her place it on the mantel, exactly where it was. Then he gets up and goes to her and, to her back, asks, “Do you have time for coffee or something before work?”

“I’m off tonight.” Her voice is softer than I’ve ever heard it. Small, sad.

“So… yes?” Dylan says.

Something’s happening between them. I feel like I should get up and act like I have something to do, but it’s too late now.

Jill nods, still facing the mantel. She raises one of her hands to wipe at her face, then Dylan takes it. Their fingers intertwine—at first cautiously, it seems. Then Jill’s hand tightens around his, and Dylan turns her body to him and puts his other arm around her and holds her, pressing her hand, still in his, to his chest. It’s so tender and gentle, the way he enfolds her.

Maybe my mom got treated like a queen by some of her boyfriends, but I never saw any of them hold her like this.

Jill

Dylan and I skip coffee. Instead, we go straight to his house and into his room, leaving the blinds open a little so that we can see the snow that’s started to fall. We undress each other. I press my nose to his skin and inhale him, imagine I’m smelling muscle and bone and blood vessels and soul, all of the Dylan I’ve known in this way for two years now, and who’s known me.

Afterward, we fall asleep for a while. I wake up first and stare at him—his beautiful face and compact body—running my hand over the slightly olive skin he gets from his Greek mom. My fingers find each rib, careful not to tickle. Feeling for who he is, who we are together, for myself.

“I love you,” I whisper, so quietly, not even close to his ear.

A slow smile materializes on his lips, his eyes still closed. “I knew it.”

“You’re supposed to be asleep!”

“I knew someday you’d actually say it.” He opens his eyes and rolls over to face me, serious now.

“I’ve said it a lot.” Of course I love him. I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t. Love was always part of the many, many, many discussions about sex I’ve had with both my mom and my dad. In their efforts to raise me to have neither an over-nor underinflated sense of guilt and weirdness about sex, they
may
have overdone it in the discussion department. Anyway, I love Dylan. I do. And of course I’ve said it.

“You have not. You totally have not. E-mail and texting and ‘love ya’ don’t count.”

“Yes, they do.”

“I say ‘love ya’ to my dude friends.”

“Because you love them.”

“Jill. Not the way I love you.”

I turn the other way and pull his arm around me like a blanket. Despite all the love lectures and even though I just said it to Dylan, sometimes I’m not sure I know what it really means to say “I love you.” These days with Dylan—when we’re together—it’s more friendly and cozy than romantic and exciting, but it still soothes me. Isn’t that more caring about myself, though, than loving him? Shouldn’t love have at least a little to do with the other person, separate from yourself? But how can you see anything or anyone in the world apart from yourself? I mean, everything we experience is subjective, since we have no way of experiencing it other than through our eyes. And I get to thinking that love is just a word we use to describe what boils down to a selfish and temporary state of happiness.

I’m not trying to be a cynic. I seriously wonder about this. Because after my dad died, I thought a lot about what a pathetic job I’d done of loving him, and I couldn’t figure out why I was so bad at it or what made it so hard. Then I thought maybe I didn’t
really
love him until he was gone. And that has made me wonder whether love is impossible until it’s too late.

Except I know love is possible, because I know my dad loved me and loved my mom. What I don’t understand is how he learned to do that so well and what I’m going to do now that he’s not here to show me. Maybe I can’t do it. Maybe I don’t have whatever it is it takes.

“You okay?” Dylan asks.

“Yeah.”

“What are you thinking about?”

I stay quiet a moment longer. This is my chance to say what I’m feeling and thinking and missing about my dad, a conversation Dylan’s been trying to get me to have for almost a year. Not that we haven’t talked about it some—when we’re talking at all—if you count me saying “yes” and “no” and “I don’t know” and “Can we please talk about something else?” Dylan doesn’t.

“Mandy,” I answer. She’s so easy to fall back on, even though I keep telling myself that I’m going to give her a chance or at least learn to tolerate her for two more months.

“Oh.” He scoots away from me a little. “She seems okay.”

“Aside from the lies and the fact that she ate all my peanut butter. What were you guys talking about? When you were looking at that picture?”

“I was telling her how your parents met.”

I tuck my hands under Dylan’s back to warm them up. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about him like that. I mean with her.”

He sighs, then asks, “What lies?”

“The baby is a girl.”

“Ah.”

“And due in seven weeks, not three.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah.”

“Goes to show doctors aren’t always right, I guess.” He stretches across me to look at the time on his phone. “We should get dressed.”

I get up and collect my clothes from the floor. There’s no point in going on and on about Mandy and ruining what’s been an otherwise nice afternoon. Being with Dylan like this feels so natural. I never think about the fact that I’m naked—how my flab might look, or about the stray hairs on my thighs that I missed when shaving. It’s like we’re an old married couple.

I catch myself in the mirror on his door and say, “Hey. Where might a girl put a tattoo that she didn’t want her mother to ever, ever, ever see for as long as she lived?”

Zipping his jeans, Dylan comes over to stand behind me. He touches my pelvic bone. “Here?”

“Too sexy. The tattoo… it would be something to remember my dad by. So I don’t want it in a tarty place.”

He traces his fingers on my back. “You’re going to honor your dad with something he hated?”

True, Dad did always warn me against getting a tattoo. He’d gotten one when he was eighteen, right before his trip around the world, as a kind of send-off for himself. He claimed to wish he hadn’t. I thought it was cool, though. And the permanence of it is the point. You can’t un-take a trip around the world. Your father can’t un-die.

“It’s not like he’s ever going to know.”

Dylan looks at me in the mirror. “You don’t think he’s up there watching?”

I used to. But right now, I’ve never felt a sense of gone as absolutely as I feel it for him. I shake my head.

“You could put it where your bra would hide it. On your back. But then
you
wouldn’t be able to see it, either.”

I like that idea. Unless I wind up in the hospital or something, my mom’s not going to see it. And I don’t want to go around looking at it every second, constantly being reminded. It will be enough to know it’s there, as much a part of me as a mole, or a scar.

“I’m going to do it.”

Dylan doesn’t seem too sure. “Maybe you should think about it for a while. Like a year.”

“You love tattoos on girls.”

“True. Tattoos are rock. But that’s what I’m saying. Indestructible. Be sure.”

“There’s laser removal.” I step away from the mirror and finish dressing.

“I’ve heard that hurts like a mofo. And doesn’t always work, and leaves a mark, too.”

He’s right. That’s why my dad didn’t remove his. Also because he was cheap, and busy, and his tattoo—the planet Earth as seen from space, on his shoulder—was kind of big. I don’t know. Maybe I won’t get a tattoo.

“I don’t think doctors would be
that
wrong about the due date,” I say.

“What?”

“Mandy. She could be innocently clueless, or she could be trying to take advantage. I don’t trust her is all I’m saying.” I sit on the edge of the bed to lace my boots. “My dad wouldn’t have liked her. And that’s why I don’t want you talking to her about him.”

Dylan watches me for a few seconds, then sits on the bed next to me, quiet.

I finish with my boots. “Pick me up for school tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

I get up. He doesn’t move. “What?” I say.

He gives me the saddest look. It’s almost too much, but I stay strong, holding his eyes with mine. “Say it, Dylan.”

“I know he wasn’t my dad or anything? But I miss him, too.”

Mandy

Normally when Robin gets home after being out, she comes straight to me, wherever I am in the house, and asks me how I’m feeling. She asks how the baby is doing and what I ate and if I got any exercise and whether I read any of the books she got for me about taking care of yourself and the emotional things about giving birth. Sometimes we sit at the big wooden table in the kitchen and have a snack together, like organic muffins that don’t have much flavor or cheese that Robin’s careful to make sure I’m allowed to eat.

I like how she talks to me. We have conversations. My mother never had conversations with me. My mother told me things, and I told her things back. Like she would say, “Mandy, don’t stay in the bath so long. It’s a waste of water. Your grandmother used to say only floozies spend that much time in the bath.” Or I would say, “I need you to sign this paper so I can take driver’s ed.” No, what was the point, and did I think I was going to have my own car while I was in high school? Did I think she was going to let me use hers? Like that. Not really conversations.

Robin talks to me about how she’s going to change her schedule when the baby comes, and asks if I think the baby should go to preschool to get socialized or if it’s better to have a full-time stay-at-home mother? “It depends on the mother” is what I said when she asked. She laughed, and that’s another thing I like about Robin. She thinks I’m funny, but it’s not like she’s laughing at me.