How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr Page B

comes up the walk and inside. He looks like a male Jill. They dress the same—skinny jeans and sneakers and hooded tops, both with dyed dark hair sweeping across their faces, both with eyeliner. Dylan has a ring in his lip to match the one in Jill’s eyebrow. I don’t know why anyone would pierce their face; I don’t even want to do my ears.
    He sits in the leather armchair in the corner.
    “They never sit there,” I say.
    “What?”
    “Jill or Robin. I’ve only been here a few days, but I can tell it’s the most comfortable chair in the room and they never sit in it.”
    “It was Mac’s. Jill’s dad’s.” He runs his hand over the arm. “Don’t worry, I was always allowed. It’s a guy thing.”
    I lower myself onto the couch as gracefully as I can and smooth out my skirt. “What was he like?”
    They never talk about him, just like they never sit in his chair. You can feel him here, though, when they’re home. In the late afternoons, after Robin has come back from wherever she is and before Jill goes to work, it feels like they’re waiting for someone, like a person is about to walk into the room but never does.
    Dylan shrugs. “He was kind of awesomely grumpy. Rough on the outside but a total teddy bear once you got to know him. Smart as hell but didn’t have to show it off. Really great person. Really great.”
    “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,