The Moon Around Sarah (7 page)

All that Sarah could think of to do was to go back to the pier again. She saw that a few fishermen had returned now that the rain had stopped. There were flocks of wheeling, shrieking seagulls, and two pelicans winged slowly past, flying low over the blue ocean. The breeze was light; there were only a very few intermittent raindrops, but still she was very cold in her light butterfly-and-roses dress.

The young man with the pictures had not come back. She knew he had gone to try to find Mother, but what if Mother were sick? Edward and Aunt Trish had dropped them off at the pier, surely they would come back some time to pick her up?

It was more than a little confusing. They said they would come back, but Daddy had the car now. Eric had come back with a bloody face. Edward was walking with him through the rain. Where were they going? It was the rain, she decided. It confused everyone and they had become lost, as she had.

Walking out on the pier, she came across a crippled bird. Not even a bird yet, really. It was bald all over, no larger than a mouse. It was trying to fly, but it was so small and hadn’t even real feathers yet – only a few black whiskers.

She crouched and scooped it up in her hands. Where had it fallen from? One wing, if it could be called that, was broken. A tiny yellow beak opened and closed soundlessly crying. Its eyes were bright and terrified and it flapped around crazily, uselessly in her hands for a minute and then was still.

It was dead. Sarah knew that. She knew what dead meant. It happened to babies too small and weak to live.

Because they had told her that when Baby had died.

That was when Sarah still had trouble walking because her insides hurt. When Baby had wanted her so-sore nipples and she had been taken into the parlor to sit near the fireplace in her bloody robe.

Then Mother and Aunt Trish had gone up the stairs toward the room where Baby cried in her cradle. Mother carried an old silk curtain, one of those which had hung in the parlor when Grandfather had still been alive, and Aunt Trish had carried a pillow; they moved, grim shadows, up the firelit staircase.

After a while, Baby stopped crying. Then it was time to take Baby into the basement.

Baby had been too small, they said. Not strong enough for life. And it was true, of course, although Sarah
remembered
crying for a week afterward. Baby’s little arms were not right. Only that one soft and so-tiny hand reaching for her breast had any real fingers.

Baby was so small. No larger than the bird in her hands, it seemed.

Aunt Trish had screamed, ‘God, I never thought I could do such a thing!’ and she had thrown the pillow into the fireplace where it burned, smelling of fetid decay.

Mother had gone away for a little while then, and when she came home she was sick again. Some man with a big truck had brought her back to the house, but he didn’t come in. He just drove away with his radio loud, and Mother had stumbled upstairs and Edward had helped her move Baby’s cradle out to the shed.

In the middle of that blue, moonless night, Sarah had gone out naked and taken the cradle out of the shed, moving it down to the basement where she dug Baby up and placed her in her bed. She had put her little pink blanket over her and sung her favorite little baby-song until dawn, when they had come down and found her there.

They had taken the cradle away and then smashed it and burned it in the fireplace. But no one could take Baby away, and so she still slept there, quiet and being very good, but just too tiny for the world.

‘Are you OK, girl?’

A big fisherman with a gray beard and concerned eyes was standing over her, watching. ‘You OK?’

Sarah stood and the bird dropped from her hands. The man kicked it off the pier with a big boot and went away.

Sarah walked on.

Raymond Tucker had given it up. Wherever his two asshole sons had gone, he wasn’t going to find them. The blond kid, whoever he was, was nowhere to be seen.

That meant there was nothing for it but to go see Ellen, as strongly as he disliked the idea. Edward couldn’t know where his mother was. The papers had to be signed so that each of them could be free of the dark tentacles of the old house, the past that haunted them, each in his own way. Yeah, pick Ellen up, drive her back to Dennison’s office. In dead silence. Make her sit in the back seat by herself and just keep her mouth shut all the way – unless she did know where Sarah had got to…. His little girl wandering around
alone.… Raymond’s fury began to slowly build again. He fought it down, knowing that it limited his ability to
function
reasonably. Just now he had felt like buying a bottle of whisky and getting half-smashed to get him through the day more calmly. Yet the booze didn’t always work that way on him either. One too many drinks and his temper came back with unpredictable variants.

No, the thing to do was to get his check from Dennison, find a motel room, lock himself in and get staggering drunk. Maybe bring some young whore in to listen to his sad laments. Raymond smiled in self-deprecation. He supposed he had not been a good father, a good husband. It was
self-delusional
to pretend otherwise. But deep down he believed he had tried his best with the tools he had. Maybe it had been just too difficult for him, trying to be everything to everyone in the family. He set his goals lower for today. Get Ellen back to the lawyer’s office, sign the papers. Get a check cut. Find Sarah.

He had to stop and yell out to a half-deaf old man to find the right route to the hospital. It had been a long time since he had been back in town. And since he’d been to the hospital? Jesus, not since Sarah was born. Twenty-one years ago! His entire life was flickering past so rapidly. Like pages in a long, boring novel he simply rifled through. How short now seemed the years they had constructed and destroyed. He could think of so few things he was proud to have done, so many he regretted. Screw it. It was done. There was no changing it now.

He swung onto the coast road as the old man had
directed and buzzed along with the soft-riding Buick beneath him.

Ellen knew that something was wrong, but only gradually did she realize what it was. She was undressed for one thing. It was not her own bed with its thick crimson comforter where she lay. The lights around her were
brilliantly
white; loudspeakers blared and people murmured in low voice.

She was in a hospital again. God! What had happened this time?

It was hardly her first time in a hospital, waking up not knowing where she was, sometimes not knowing
who
she was. It had all started … she tried to shut out the memories, banging a steel door of censorship closed in her mind. It did no good at all. The memories were as clear as yesterday. She remembered the first time, the well-meaning doctor asking her why she drank so much, beyond insensibility, as if it were a suicidal plunge, so deeply crazy were her blackouts. Doctors could be so funny in their way. They searched for organic solutions everywhere. Ellen closed her eyes to the lights. Her forehead hurt, but she didn’t reach up to finger it. She turned inward in a waking dream.

Funny. It was all so funny – they really expected her to talk about it. Cleanse the psyche. Walk away cured, a totally healthy woman.

Well, it couldn’t be talked about.

Did they really expect her to talk about the night when Trish with her pillow, and she with her silk winding sheet,
had gone up the stairs and her sister had smothered the deformed baby, slipped back past a still-bloody Sarah into the basement, and buried the little
thing
…?

‘Mrs Tucker?’

The nurse was Filipina, heavy-set with very white teeth and tiny bosom. Ellen’s eyes flickered open.

‘Yes?’

‘Your husband is here to take you home. Doctor Schoendienst is giving him instructions on how to care for your wound.’

‘Wound?’ Now Ellen did touch her forehead drowsily, feeling the bandage there.

‘We had to take quite a few stitches,’ the nurse said, ‘the anesthetic will probably leave you feeling a little drowsy and confused for a while. By tomorrow I’m sure you will be feeling better, but you did crack your head pretty good. Anyway, your husband has arrived. He will take you home and take care of you.’

The nurse smiled meaninglessly and left, picking up a tray on her way out. Ellen felt like laughing out loud.

Fine!
Raymond was here. He would take care of her. Yes … Raymond was so good at taking care of things!

She began to laugh but it hurt her lungs and brought a rush of pain to her head. Irony can be so amusing … and so painful. She closed her eyes again and the pain slowly subsided to be replaced by a dull throb. Sure enough, not ten minutes later she heard Raymond’s rumbling voice as he spoke to a doctor in the corridor.

In another few minutes, he marched into the room
carrying her release papers and two brown plastic bottles of pills.

‘Get up, get dressed,’ he said in his same old rough manner. ‘You’ve bitched up enough of the day.’

Ellen rode beside Raymond in silence as he guided the car northbound along the narrow coast highway. Mist rose from the surface of the road and the long sea sparkled and danced as if it were warming and reawakening.

‘Here,’ he said without looking at her. He tossed her the pill bottles from the hospital, ‘One’s for the pain, the others are supposed to keep you from coming down too hard off the booze.’

One of the bottles rolled onto the floorboard, and she bent to pick it up. Without glancing at the labels, she put them away in her purse. Raymond continued to drive quickly but not recklessly. He turned on the radio, changed the station three times rapidly and snapped it off again.

‘OK,’ he asked in a barely-controlled voice, ‘where in hell is Sarah?’

‘Sarah…?’ Ellen’s expression grew grave. Where
was
Sarah? She fingered her forehead with its crosshatch of raw new stitches.

‘I knew it,’ Raymond said, flashing an evil glance her way. He banged his hand heavily against the steering wheel, ‘You don’t know where she is, do you?’

‘She was … I suppose Edward must have picked her up,’ Ellen said helplessly. Now her head was beginning to ache heavily. She fumbled in the purse for the pill bottles, but dropped them back without opening them.

Where
had she left Sarah?
Her thoughts were very confused behind the stabbing pain. The blow to her head on top of the liquor she had consumed had reduced her thought patterns to loose conjecture. She and Sarah had walked along the pier … she thought a man had given her a few drinks of bourbon from a pint bottle he had in his tackle-box. The next thing she remembered clearly was dancing with a cowboy with a bad front tooth. Then throwing up … and then nothing until she had come to in the hospital.

‘I’m not sure,’ Ellen said lamely.

‘You know what, Ellen,’ Raymond Tucker said, ‘
you’re
the one who ought to be committed, not Sarah.’

‘And if I were, who would there be to take care of her? Not you!’ Ellen said with sudden passion.

‘It’s only been Trish who’s been taking care of things, don’t you think I know that much?’ He swung the heavy car through a sharp hairpin curve. ‘She takes care of the both of you. And now Trish is leaving, isn’t she?’

Raymond stared ahead. Two identical white Nissans whipped past them, going very fast. They threw up muddy water spray so that Raymond had to turn on the wipers. The window washer reservoir, damn it, was dry. Didn’t these people know how to take care of anything? He cursed as he succeeded only in smearing some muddy water across the windshield.

‘It’s all, all right now though, isn’t it?’ he said with deep acrimony. ‘I guess you’ll have enough money now to go and drink yourself to death, won’t you? And there won’t be a
person on this planet who cares enough to even try to stop you. It sure as hell won’t be me.’

Ellen didn’t reply, but stared straight ahead. The town appeared and then disappeared beyond the hills as they followed the winding cliffside road.

‘Where are you taking me?’ She asked after another mile.

‘To Sal Dennison’s office. Have done with all this crap once and for all.’

He glanced at her sad trembling face with its lacerated forehead, her throat where the skin had begun to sag, the graying hair, probably curled and arranged this morning, but now thin and limp where it escaped from a blue scarf. His thoughts, beneath the level of his present anger, were much the same as Ellen’s: had they ever been young lovers, alert to each other’s needs, trying to please? Youthful, eager and happy…? It was so long ago it became lost in the clouds of distant memory – someone else’s life.

‘It’s quicker if you take Madison Street,’ Ellen said without looking at him, ‘that’s the way Edward always takes us.’

Deliberately, Raymond went past Madison and continued on through the slow heart of the northern beach town.

‘I was trying to help,’ Ellen murmured in weak
protestation
.

‘I’m hoping to spot Sarah. Do you believe she walked all the way back here and went up that way?’ he asked acidly. But they both knew he had chosen the longer route out of sheer spite.

Nevertheless, they both began looking for Sarah as the car crept through the traffic in town. Ellen pointed once.

‘I think that is the bar I was in.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ he answered, brittle. ‘It was the one on the next block. Christ, can’t you even remember where you get drunk?’

‘You don’t need to bully….’ The bus stop bench caught her eye, ‘I left her right there, Raymond! On that bench.’

‘Well, she obviously isn’t there now, is she?’

‘We could ask around in a few of the nearby shops, couldn’t we?’ she suggested.

As ready as Raymond was to deride anything Ellen might offer, he had to admit that it was an idea. Perhaps Sarah had taken shelter in one of the numerous small shops along the boulevard.

‘OK, we’ll give it a try,’ he said. He spoke quietly, but the Buick’s tires shrieked as he jammed on the brakes and swung to the curb. He clambered from the car, Ellen following shakily, glancing guiltily but wistfully at the bar.