We were the same that way. Are. Were. He was, I am. When he was here, I knew who I was. If I forgot, he’d remind me. In theory, I should be the same person now I was then. He died, not me. So I’m trying to be that person, still, even though he hasn’t been here for ten months now.
But let me tell you: it’s epically, stupidly, monumentally hard.
Hard to deal with people who are only trying to be nice, comforting. Hard to not hate all my friends who still have their dads. Hard to smile and say “thank you” to all the random strangers I deal with in a day who don’t know any better than to act as if the world is a good place.
The hardest thing of all is loving my mom without him to show me how. Loving, maybe, isn’t the best way to put it. Obviously, I love my mom. Understanding, appreciating, showing kindness and compassion and basic friendliness towards – which, you know, are the things that express love, because otherwise it’s just a word, right? – those are the challenges.
Especially understhitanding. Especially when she’s making lunatic decisions, like the one that’s led us here to the train station at seven o’clock on a Monday morning. Instead of celebrating Presidents’ Day the way it’s meant to be celebrated – with sleep – we’re waiting for the human time bomb that’s about to wreck our lives. Wreck it more, I mean. That’s my opinion, and it’s no big secret. Mom knows how I feel about this; she just doesn’t seem to care.
It’s a grief thing. Anyone from the outside looking in can analyse what’s going on and see it, except she claims this isn’t about that, not directly. Eventually I had to stop arguing with her; my rants only make her more stubborn about seeing this through. Not that I’m unfamiliar with stubbornness, and not that I’ve done such a fantastic job handling my own grief. But at least I’ve tried to limit the stupid shit I’ve done so that I’m the only one who gets hurt.
This? This affects three lives. Soon to be four.
“Sun,” Mom says now, stretching to see out the high, narrow panes of the station windows. There’s a glimpse of winter sky growing blue. When we got here, we found out that because of security rules, we couldn’t actually wait out on the platform, which somewhat shattered Mom’s romantic vision of how this whole thing would go down. Threat level Orange tends to do that.
I know I shouldn’t say this – I know it as surely as I know the earth is round and beets are evil – and yet here it comes: “It’s not too late to change your mind.”
Mom, still staring up at the windows, lets her bag slide off her shoulder and dangle from her elbow. “Thanks, Jill. That’s tremendously helpful.”
If I had any sense, the edge in her voice would shut me up. Alas. “You’re not obligated, like, legally. You didn’t sign any papers.”
“I’m aware.”
“You could put her up for a night in a hotel, then pay her way back home tomorrow. You could say, sorry, you made a mistake and didn’t realize it until you actually saw her and it hit you.”
Mom hoists her bag back up and walks closer to the doors under the TO TRAINS sign. Once there, she strokes her left jawline, where I know there’s a small mole, almost the same colour as the rest of her skin, so you don’t really notice it, but it’s raised enough to feel. When she’s nervous, agitated, pissed off, or deep in thought, she runs her fingers over it non-stop.
I sink my hands into the pockets of my pea coat, trying to warm them up and also feeling for my phone. Don’t check it, I think. Don’t check for a message from Dylan because there won’t be one.
Mom looks so lonely over there. No Dad beside her to rest his hand on her shoulder, the way he would. I could do that. How hard can it be? I move closer. Tentatively lift my arm. She turns to me and says, “You’re the sister, Jill.”
My arm drops.
The sister. It’s so hard to get there mentally. Yes, when I was a kid, I desperately wanted a baby brother or sister, but at seventeen it’s a different scenario.
Mom looks at her cell phone and fluffs her cropped hair. It’s a new look for her, one I’m not used to yet. “Why don’t you go ask if there’s a delay.”
I leave her there to her mole and her thoughts.
The station, with its soarinlayg ceilings and old marble floor, is echoey with pieces of conversations and suitcases being rolled and the thwonking of a child’s feet running up and down the seat of one of the high-backed wooden benches. “No, no, Jaden, we don’t run indoors,” the mother says. Thwonk thwonk thwonk. “What did I just say, Jaden? Do you want to have a time-out?” Pause. Thwonk thwonk thwonk thwonk. I can see the top of Jaden’s head bobbing along as his mother counts down to time-out. “One…two…” Thwonk. “Three.” Thwonk thwonk. “Okay, but remember you made the choice.”
Jaden screams.
This is what we have to look forward to.
Why my mother would want to put herself through all this again is a mystery to me, no matter how she’s tried to explain it. When she announced over tuna casserole six weeks ago that she was going to participate in an open adoption, I laughed.
She frowned, fiddled with her napkin. “It’s not funny, Jill.”
“This is just an idea, right? Something I could potentially talk you out of?”
“No.” Her hand went to her left jaw.
If I didn’t know my mom so well, I wouldn’t have believed her. But this was completely consistent, so something she would do. She’s never been one to solicit opinions before making major decisions. It drove Dad crazy. She’d go trade in her perfectly fine car for a brand-new one, or book a non-refundable vacation on a total whim. Then there was the time she decided she wanted to paint every room in the house a different colour and started one Saturday while Dad and I were at the self-defence class he made me take. We came home and the living room had gone from white to Alpine Lake Azure. Surprise! I didn’t really care, but Dad was so aggravated.
This, though, I cared about, and when I realized she was serious, I said, “It’s insane.”
“War is insane. The fact that there’s still no cure for AIDS is insane. This is not insane.”
“You’re old, Mom!”
“Thanks, honey. Early fifties is not old.”
“When the kid is my age, you’ll be—”
“Seventy. I can do the math, Jill.”
“Seventy is old.”
Everything was in its normal place: the old wooden farm table in front of me, the iron pot rack over the stove, the cigar box full of stamps at the end of the counter near the phone. Our quiet street outside. Yet this conversation? Not normal. She remained so perfectly calm through it all that I had to say several times, “You do realize you’re talking about adopting a baby?” to make sure we were living in the same reality.
“Yes.”
“A baby baby.”
“Jill. Yes.”
We went on like that for a while, and I got angrier and angrier, though I couldn’t say exactly why.
“I’m not asking you to do anything, Jill,” she said. “You’re leaving after graduation. You know Dad and I talked about doing something like this for years.”
Yes. And they really got into their volunteer work with foster kids a few years ago. “That’s different.” What I wanted to say was that with Dad gone, it didn&rsq And theyuo;t seem so much that she was carrying out their plans as trying to replace him. With a baby. Which just seemed like a really, really bad idea, for so many reasons. But I couldn’t say that. Sometimes even I know when to shut up.
As I got up from the table and took our bowls to the sink, something I didn’t want to feel pushed up from underneath the anger. Anger I can deal with. Anger is easy for me. It can actually be kind of energizing to fume and feel superior and think about all the ways you’re right and other people are wrong. But the truth is I felt like I was going to cry. The feeling pushing up, the one I avoid at all costs because I don’t know what to do with it, was hurt. That she’d decided this huge, life-changing thing without consulting me.
My mom is not a stupid perso
n and not a selfish person. Things she does that might seem that way on the surface come from a really good place in her heart. One year she boycotted Christmas because she was fed up with consumerism. A cool idea from a good place, yet it also kind of sucked because, you know, no tree, no presents, not even a stocking. And one time she decided we’d eat only one meal a day for a month and send our grocery money to Sudan, where a lot of people eat only one meal a day all the time. Again, chronic hunger wasn’t so terrific for helping me get homework done, and I’m pretty sure my dad was sneaking lunch on the job, but you have to love that heart.
And I know that’s the heart that led her to make this decision. Adding someone to a family, though? Is major. Life-changing. Permanent. When someone’s been subtracted from a family, you can’t just balance it out with a new acquisition. In the months after Dad died, a couple of people told us we should get a dog. A dog!
How is this all that different?
I rinsed the dishes and beat down the hurt with more anger. “I can’t believe you’re doing this, Mom. It’s just so impossible.”
Grim, resigned, she got up and headed to me with the casserole dish. She spooned leftovers into a plastic container. Snapped on the lid. Put it in the fridge. Handed me the casserole dish to rinse. “I want to give a good home to someone who might not otherwise have one,” she finally said. “Why see that as impossible? Seeing good things as impossible is exactly what’s wrong with our world.”
What could I say to that?
She put on the kettle. I watched her middle-aged body move, her back half-covered by silvery hair Dad would never let her colour, and I could almost see his hand smoothing it down as he bent to give her an after-dinner kiss before taking down the cups and saucers – pottery from their tenth anniversary trip to Brazil.
“Mom…” I stopped short, not sure what to say. I knew how much she missed Dad. I missed him, too. And I knew how different our missing him was, and that made it even harder. Couldn’t it be just us for a while, missing him together, in our separate ways? Couldn’t she at least wait until after graduation? Let us get used to each other, the people we are without Dad. “Mom,” I tried again, but she probably thought I was going to keep berating her and said, “No, Jill, I’ve made up my mind. It feels right. A death, and now a life.”
The next day, she chopped off her beautiful hair.
To find out what happens next, read:
by Sara Zarr
“An achingly poignant read.”
Daily Mail
OUT NOW
www.usborne.com/howtosavealife
ISBN: 9781409546757
EPUB: 9781409554875 KINDLE: 9781409545882
Acknowledgements
A host of people helped see me through the writing of this book by being present in various important ways:
Mike Martin, thank you for that talk on the couch in Winston-Salem, and for showing me beauty and possibility when I most needed to be
lieve. You know the ways in which this story is yours. Thank you, Sarah Martin, for your support.
Ann Cannon, thank you from the absolute depths of my heart for your understanding and wisdom.
Thank you Matt Kirby, Stephanie Perkins, Mark Pett, Liz Zarr, the Glen Workshop community, my church family, Bob, and everyone who took the time to offer advice and hospitality, send notes of encouragement, say prayers, and offer company during a difficult year.
E. Lockhart, Adele Griffin, Robby Auld, Susan Houg, and Tom Conroy each gave particular help with the story and I am grateful.
Becky Walker, Stephanie King, and the entire team at Usborne have been so good to me. Thank you!
Julie Scheina at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, you are amazing. Thank you for holding the lantern high.
Michael Bourret, you are truly one of the best gifts in my life. Let’s keep doing this.
And thank you to my readers, young and less young, for letting me continue to have this life.
About the Author
Sara Zarr was raised in San Francisco, California and now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband. How to Save a Life, Sara’s first novel to be published in the UK, received wide critical acclaim and was selected as a Book of the Year for 2012 by The Independent.
To tune into Sara’s podcasts and keep up-to-date with her blog, log on at www.sarazarr.com.
Sara Zarr, The Lucy Variations
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