Waiting For Sarah (10 page)

The room seemed empty.

He called, “Sarah?”

The sobbing stopped.

He switched on the light. The room was empty.

“Sarah?” As he looked around the room a peculiar feeling slid about inside his ribcage and pinched his heart. The room seemed unnaturally quiet and still. Something was happening. The dusty air felt suddenly charged with electrical particles and he was reminded of the strange feeling he'd had at Halloween with Robbie and his two young cousins. The light dimmed for a few seconds, brightened again and then went out. Don't panic. Probably just a power surge. Knuckles white on his wheel rims, he looked about him. Dust motes that a few seconds ago had drifted thickly in a beam of light
from the high window now hung suspended in the air, and the pale gray colors of the room seemed to shift and slide and darken like a black cloud drifting over the sun.

The sobbing started again, louder now.

Then he saw her, huddled on the floor behind the table. He pushed himself in and put an arm around her shoulders. She reached out to him and, kneeling, clung to him, sobbing.

He could see that her jacket was torn, ripped in the back, and her dress also, and that she wore only one shoe.

“Sarah! What happened?”

She groaned and shook her head violently on his chest, clinging to him, face hidden. He pushed her away so he could see her face and she struggled against him wildly. Her face was streaked with mud and tears. He saw now that her torn clothing was dirty and bloody. She pressed herself fiercely against him.

He said no more, but held her until gradually the sobbing subsided and at last she let him go and crumpled to the floor with a sigh of despair.

“Let me help you, Sarah. Tell me ...”

She shook her head wildly and started to cry again. Then she sprang to her feet and fled out the door, limping and stumbling with only one shoe. He hurried after her. When he got to the hallway it was deserted. He wheeled madly along the empty hallway to the office.

“Help!” he yelled.

The startled secretaries stopped what they were doing and stared at him.

“Something's happened,” he cried. “An accident!”

Mr. Holeman's door flew open. “What is it?” the principal demanded.

The vice-principal's door flew open, framing a startled Mr. Warren.

“There's been an accident. Sarah Francis. She ran out towards the parking lot. She's hurt bad. Can't get far. Only one shoe. Quick, you've got to find her!”

Mr. Warren rushed out. Mike followed him as Mr. Holeman was giving orders to the secretaries to telephone counselors and maintenance staff.

When Mike got outside — he had to go the opposite way, out the rear of the building and around to the side — he could see nobody in the parking lot. A couple of off-duty teachers appeared. “What's going on?” one of them yelled at Mike. He told them and they ran off, through the parked cars, searching for Sarah. Mr. Warren appeared, saw Mike and hurried over, panting.

“Tell me what you saw.”

Mike told him, as quickly and briefly as he could.

“How was she hurt? Was she hit by a car?”

“I don't know.”

“You said her name is Sarah Francis, is that right?”

“An eighth grader?”

“Right.”

“Go to your class, Mike, and I will know where to find you if I want you. In the meantime I'll have someone check the girl's telephone number and address. Don't worry; we'll find her. She'll be all right.”

He didn't go back to class, but sat in the school office, trembling, waiting for news of Sarah.

The principal's office. Norma had been called in from work. She sat next to her nephew. She looked worried.

“You're sure you have her name right?” the principal asked Mike.

“Of course I'm sure! Sarah Francis. You think I'm making it up?”

The conference had been going on for some minutes. Mr. Holeman was asking the questions from behind his desk; Mr. Warren, sitting slightly behind Mike's wheelchair out of view, had so far said nothing. Holeman was a small man with thin gray hair and an easy, confidential manner. Warren, tall, brown hair cut short, tiny mustache, wore a fierce expression and had a stiff military posture. It was now after 4:30, school was out for the Christmas vacation. Mike had been sitting around the office all morning and afternoon. He'd had no lunch, but he wasn't hungry.

Sarah had not been found.

“Let me make sure I have this right,” said Holeman
mildly. “Mr. Dorfman has you working in the archives room in the library each morning, first period.”

“We've been through all this.”

“Please answer. Just to be sure your aunt understands the problem.”

“That's right, every morning, first period. I'm writing a history of the school for the yearbook committee.” Mike drooped in his chair; he was sore and tired.

“Yes, I understand that, but what about this girl? She's a new student, you say, in the eighth grade. She comes each morning to help. What is the name of her teacher? Whose class would she normally be in at that time of day?”

“How should I know? You have all that information in the school records.”

“But we don't. That's the problem. There is no Sarah Francis enrolled at Carleton.”

“But she's a student here! I know it for a fact!”

“You say that her parents are John and Frances Francis. But there is no family named Francis in this area.”

“That's impossible. They live on Ash Street.”

“Who, besides yourself, Mike, has seen this Sarah Francis?”

“Who? Why, everyone in the school! I told you: she's a student here! Miss Pringle sees her every day in the — ”

“We have spoken with Miss Pringle. She has never seen this girl in the library.”

Mike struck the arms of his chair in frustration. “This is crazy! She must have seen her. What about
her teachers? They — ”

Norma took his arm. “Take it easy, Mike.”

Mr. Warren spoke for the first time. “All eighth graders take English, Mike, as you know. There are three teachers of eighth grade English: Miss Mercer, Mr. Simmons and Mr. Tinley. They do not have a girl named Sarah Francis in any of their classes.”

“You're saying I made this all up. You're saying I'm crazy.”

“No,” said Holeman. “We're not saying that, not at all. But we know you have been under a lot of pressure since your accident and it's possible that you
think you saw
...”

Norma stood. “I think that's enough for now, gentlemen. I'm taking Mike home. He's tired.”

Norma pushed him home. He seldom allowed her to push him. Today he didn't say a word.

The Christmas holiday in the Lower Mainland was celebrated under another blanket of fog. Mike couldn't remember any other year being as bad as this one for fog.

He worried about her.

Norma asked a lot of questions, most of which he couldn't answer. She thought they should seek professional help.

“What do you mean, Norma? I should see a shrink?”

“I'm not sure, Mike. But it wouldn't do any harm to explore the idea.”

“You think I'm mad.”

“No, I don't think you're mad. But we can't figure this out by ourselves, Mike; we need help.”

He shook his head. “Sarah is the one who needs help, not me.”

He wheeled to his room, but the sound of Nor­ma's radio through the thin door distracted him: “
... three teenagers killed in a motor vehicle accident in Surrey ... the UN responsibility for failing to prevent
the July 1995 massacre of seven thousand Muslims in Srebrenica ... ”

On and on.

“Could you turn that radio down, Norma!” he yelled through the door.

She turned it off.

He stared unseeingly at the mess of
Clarions
piled around the room, thinking only of Sarah, desperate to do something, but not knowing what. Then he had an idea: he could check her home, the address she had given him, at Seventh and Ash. What was the number? — 2230, that was it. But it was late; he would go in the morning. It wasn't far; with the new strength in his arms and shoulders he could make it in about fifteen minutes.

But the next morning was foggy and he decided to wait until the afternoon.

By the afternoon the morning fog had lost its brightness to become a damp miasma. Visibility was poor. He could wait no longer; he had to go. Saturday was Norma's day for shopping. He took off, pushing himself up the Fairview Slopes vigorously. He was sweating by the time he got there.

Sarah's block of Ash Street was lined with mature horse-chestnuts — bare branched, but dense and shrouded in fog. He located 2230, but it was a modern condo. He obviously had the wrong number. He checked the whole block; they were all condos. There was no house fitting Sarah's description, no big white house with green shutters and a deep front porch.

What did it mean? Sarah didn't know her own
address? Or she had lied to him? It made no sense.

His return journey down the hill was easier, but he didn't really notice.

Norma wasn't home. He went to his room and closed the door.

His mind was spinning. Maybe he was going mad. Nothing made any sense.

He started going through a bundle of 1980s
Clarions
, staring at them, but not seeing anything. All he could see and hear was Sarah kneeling on the floor of the archives room, sobbing her heart out.

Norma gave Mike a book for Christmas. It was about flying, written by a Battle of Britain pilot. He glanced at the cover and put it away in his room. He thanked Norma and told her he would read it after Christmas.

Robbie had telephoned on Friday, Christmas Eve, and several times on Christmas Day. “Tell Robbie I don't feel like talking,” Mike told Norma.

But on Sunday morning, Boxing Day, with Vancouver still trapped under a damp fog, Mike felt a little better.

“You don't look so good, man,” said Robbie as he pushed Mike along the sea wall towards Granville Island. “Like you haven't slept for a month.”

“I'm okay.”

“I heard about ... you know.”

“Yeah. Everyone thinks I'm psycho.”

“I don't.”

They wheeled along in silence for a while. Then Robbie said, “I've been thinking about it all — the girl, Sarah, who was helping you, and I can see how everything you say might be true, like Patrick Swayze — ”

“Huh?”

“Patrick Swayze. He was in a movie called
Ghost
, an old flick from ten years ago, and he died and came
back to protect his wife, Demi Moore.”

Mike stopped his chair. “So who's the crazy one now! What are you saying? Sarah was a ghost!”

“Well, why not?”

“Sarah wasn't a ghost; she was as real as you and me. Anyway, a movie doesn't prove there are ghosts, Robbie.”

“Maybe, but there's this other movie called ... ”

Mike switched off. It would do no good to tell Robbie about Sarah, torn and bleeding and sobbing; to Robbie it was like a movie, fiction, just another story. Robbie was like his aunt; he didn't believe Sarah was real, believed Mike was hallucinating, thought he was bonkers, thought he should see a shrink.

The trouble with Robbie was he loved telling the plots of old movies, blithely unaware that everyone in the world didn't care about some of those old movies; he was downright boring sometimes, but Mike never complained for fear of hurting his feelings. Robbie finally finished explaining the movie's plot and Mike managed to change the subject.

They sat out on the deck at Granville Island Market, eating ice cream. Robbie hadn't bought any fries yet, but Mike knew he would as soon as the ice cream was gone. English Bay lay beyond, hidden in the fog. Mike said, “All those movies about coming back from death, do you believe them, Robbie?”

“I dunno, Mike. Yes and no, I guess. Sometimes I believe; sometimes I don't. I kid myself that my dad will come back one day, either from South America and the bad guys, or from the spirit world. But mostly
I believe it ain't gonna happen, that I'll never meet him and find out what he's like.”

“You're a good friend, Robbie. I don't ever tell you that, do I? I don't know what I'd do without you and that's the truth.”

He meant what he'd said. He thought of Sarah's painting. Robbie is the one with the big heart, he thought, not me.

Mike lay on his bed. The workers were back again, on Boxing Day for crying out loud! What was it with these guys? Were there no flights to the Caribbean on Boxing Day? The noise of drills and hammers rang in his head, and he really began to believe he
was
going mad.

He couldn't stop thinking about her. The long vacation was an unending torment.

On the last day of December the city celebrated the new millennium. It would soon be the year 2000. There were fireworks and music. Norma stayed home, which was what she usually did on New Year's, she said: it was dangerous to be outside, what with the drunken crowds and the fireworks and the traffic and all the carryings on.

He went out alone before midnight, pushing himself through knots of revelers, across Leg-in-Boot Square and down Bucketwheel. The sea wall here was mainly cobblestones and the going was bumpy, with the ever-present danger of falling. He stopped at a bench near the marina and looked down the inlet towards the lights of the Granville Bridge. There were no people here. It had been raining earlier and the ground was still wet. He watched a tugboat pulling a barge loaded with sand towards the Cambie Bridge; some had to work, millennium or not. On the opposite side of the inlet the bright lights of the city,
augmented with hundreds of red and green Christmas lights, were like a child's idea of what heaven might look like at night. Did they have night in heaven? he wondered. Any drawings or paintings he'd ever seen showed heaven in sunlight, with great fleecy clouds and sunbeams and white-robed angels with golden harps.