Sarah Before

by Craig Shepherd

  Nervously approaching the long line of checkout counters, she couldn’t be picky about how she got out of there. The checkouts not in use were typically blocked by a chain, she knew that much even if she couldn’t see it. Slowing down to survey the obstacles ahead of her, she noticed someone walking towards her. Not her imagined kidnapper and violent rapist, she was sure of that from the colors this person wore. Their top half presented itself as a rectangular white figure with a smaller, blue rectangle below. She identified this as the white store uniform and blue apron worn by the majority of staff at the Everyday. Something far in the deepest recesses of her mind knew this could only be a friendly face who was willing to assist but her flight response once again kicked in without ever giving the rational thoughts a chance to move forward. She headed for the checkout lane right in front of her which was fortunately only being used by one customer.

  Avoiding a collision with a fellow customer, she stumbled recklessly through the checkout lane, however her hip did connect with the trolley, sending a bolt of pain into her side. Too flustered and disoriented to offer an apology, she clumsily kept moving until she was greeted by the electric sliding doors holding her salvation – her escape from the panic.

  Once outside the cool air hit her harder than it would most, owing to the sweat that had formed on just about every bit of exposed skin she offered up to the elements. But it didn’t chill her in an uncomfortable way, quite the opposite. It was one of the most refreshing sensations she could imagine, the sweet cold air pushing tiny beads of sweat across her skin, instantly changing their temperature and increasing their power to cool her skin beneath them. She opened her nostrils and heartily took in as much fresh air as she could. Her chest was still heaving faster than she wanted, but being free of the stuffy, recycled air inside, she instantly found it easier to catch her breath.

  As she savored the seemingly magical paradise which was, in reality, a graffiti covered asphalt carpark with trolleys strewn in every place except the return bays created for them, Sarah realized she was standing barely three feet from the sliding doors. As her vision slowly returned to her, she realized she wouldn’t feel truly safe until she was shut inside her house, trying to put back together the pieces of herself which had been broken today.

  For the sake of caution she clutched the handrails tightly while descending the four steps down to the carpark. She was aware she looked like a toddler still learning the intricate art of climbing down stairs, but she didn’t care one little bit. She’d prefer to avoid further embarrassment by at least navigating a four-step terrain without falling.

  Still a long way from being a hundred percent herself, Sarah knew her senses would return gradually on the walk home, and the nausea would also continue to fade. With one last anxious look over her shoulder, she turned her attention to Western Avenue and made her way home.

  CHAPTER 3

  Walking slowly towards home, Sarah needed to let her mind stray from the events of the store. As much as she wanted to be inside her house, she didn’t want to rush. To do so would risk heightening her anxiety, so she took the opportunity to stroll at an even pace, letting the cool breeze brush over her.

  The moment made her thoughts drift back twenty years, to a place so distant now it was like telling herself a fictional tale. Like the story of a life she never really lived, and although they were her own memories, she recalled them in her mind as though the Sarah before was a made-up character, such was her disconnection from the life she once held. A life free of the panic, a life so free, with all the hopes and possibilities of a colonial explorer as the ropes were dropped from his ship and the wind began to slowly push his sails in the direction of brave new worlds.

  Sarah Benson had first met Jason Laurent in 1997, while she was a student at Pokona University, basically killing time with a degree in Arts and Social Sciences while she waited for some epiphany to guide her to a life of fulfilment and career achievements. He was a laborer at Jackson’s Timber – not as educated as her, but certainly not dim, and more than capable of holding up his end of conversation in social settings that life in the timber yard would not normally place him in. Not exactly a traditional match made in heaven, but for them it worked. For a while at least.

  She had grown up in a good household. Her mother was a typist for a small but busy advertising firm - the only one in Pokona, and therefore as busy as such a place could be in a city with its population of twenty-five thousand and economy which relied heavily on agriculture and factories. Her father was a laborer much like Jason. Connected industries, but a stark difference in the type of work. Tom Benson worked for a building contractor and did a lot of the grunt work on countless homes springing up in town during Sarah’s childhood. She fondly remembered the times the family travelled anywhere by car, her father would invariably point out homes and relay his version of the contribution he made to their current formation. The playful way her mother would roll her eyes at these claims led Sarah to believe perhaps her father had exaggerated his involvement, but she never cared. She loved her dad and looked up to him the way that most daughters do.

  Both of her parents had been tough on her when it came to matters of education and household chores, but there was always a lot of love in their home. Weekend trips to the beach, picnics, walks to the park for seemingly endless days of playing on swings, slides and climbing frames. Her father was never afraid to let his inner child shine through on these occasions and join in the fun. A tall, heavy set man who the little girl version of Sarah considered to be a giant, wasn’t physically built for cramming his strong frame into the small leather seats of a playground swing set, but that never stopped him from squeezing in and swinging happily alongside his daughter. The image of her father next to her, laughing as his dark, messy hair flopped around his head as he swung back and forth had never left Sarah’s memory, even as she grew older and those days became further and further back on the road of life. None of her friends had had a dad like that growing up, and she couldn’t be happier to have the hulking, full of love Tom Benson tucking her in at night and never failing to set her mind on a path to a restful sleep with stories from one of her many books.

  Her mother was a housewife first, and a typist second. Truth be told, she had probably been firmer than Sarah’s father when it came to discipline. Sarah hadn’t had any brothers or sisters, and Helen Benson was going to make damn sure her little girl made something of herself. In later years, Helen would explain while her job as a typist had given her a sense of pride when combined with her role in running their household, she always wished she had achieved more in her career and this was why she had always been tough on Sarah. The irony of adult Sarah marrying her laborer fiancée while she had no particular career path aside from her part time position as a travel agent was not lost on her. It certainly wasn’t lost on her mother either, who had been supportive of her daughter’s wedding plans in her usual, loving way, but privately wept some nights when the house was dark and she was alone. Secret tears for the daughter who had unwillingly, yet ever so obediently followed in her own well-trodden footsteps.

  Jason hadn’t been quite as lucky when it came to his childhood. His mother had passed away when he was eleven, her lung cancer leaving behind a trail of destruction amongst him and his two older sisters who were thirteen and fifteen at the time. The wreckage left behind from that emotional cyclone crashing its way through their family was such a devastating mess his father was never equipped to repair. As with a lot of families in this part of the world during the late 1980’s, Jason’s mother didn’t work, favoring the opportunity to stay home and tend to the running of the household and raising the children while his father, a leading hand at a bottle manufacturing plant, worked long hours to provide for the family financially. Unfortunately for Jason and his sisters, their father’s diligent ability to provide financially had not allowed him the time to develop skills in other areas, such as providing emotionally for his young family when his wife was first di
agnosed with lung cancer, nor when she passed quicker than anticipated a mere seven months later.

  Jason’s older sister Beth carried the heaviest weight thrust upon them by their father’s failings. Being the oldest, she took on a parental role in their fathers’ absence. While she bore the burden of becoming a teenage housewife and a mother figure to her younger siblings, Jason wore the scars of his father’s gradual mental decline more visibly than his sisters. As their father’s drinking became worse, his behavior also became more unpredictable. He had never been a violent man in the past, but was a man of few words who had never mastered the art of outwardly showing his love for his children or his wife. Jason would tell Sarah during their courtship that his father saw providing for the family as his main job, almost a burden to bear, and that he never wanted to end up like that.

  As time went on, and the broken, disheveled bag of bones that used to be Oliver Laurent continued to wash away his heartbreak in an ever-rising river of bourbon, the once non-existent beatings started. Beatings that would never be spoken of the next day. Whether his old man could even remember them, Jason had no idea. By the time he became too drunk to use his fists on the boy, all the love was gone from their home. Swept up and dragged away in the undercurrent of cheap liquor which hadn’t succeeded in washing away even an ounce of Oliver’s heartache, but had unintentionally carried all the love he had left out to a deep, black sea from which nothing ever returned.

  Throughout the turmoil of his upbringing, Jason had been able to achieve a high school education, a debt he would owe to Beth until the day he died, however further study was beyond their means and frankly was beyond Jason’s desire for what his father had cynically called their ‘book learning’, during the life lessons he would administer while liquored up. He left school at seventeen to work at Jackson’s Timber where he had remained, hardly achieving greatness in the eyes of many (Sarah’s mother, for one) but developed a reputation as the hardest working and most dedicated employee on the staff.

  Sarah first met Jason at her friend Christina’s house in the summer of 1997 during a barbecue which stretched into a longer evening of drinking and partying. In Pokona, even timber workers and arts students were bound to have some shared friends somewhere along the line.

  Although the fairly large gathering had started at lunchtime and finally crawled to a sleepy, drunk-too-much end in the small hours of the following morning, Sarah hadn’t really spoken to Jason much aside from being in the same group of people sharing a conversation at various times throughout the festivities. It wasn’t until a week or two later when she had seen him sitting alone outside Twisty’s Café one Saturday afternoon as he ate what Sarah figured was a late lunch.

  She initiated a conversation as she approached the faded green metal tables outside the cafe. It wasn’t much more than small talk, but Jason had been friendly and they’d exchanged phone numbers with a promise to call some time and go for a drink. Despite the banality of the conversation, and Jason’s lack of confidence which could easily be dismissed as a lack of interest, she found something intriguing about him. Others might see him as the quiet guy from the timber yard but Sarah had seen something more.

  He was handsome enough, but it was his eyes she’d been drawn to. She would later recall it wasn’t actually the color or shape of his eyes which had caught her own, it was more the sad story hiding behind them. There was more to this young man than his outward appearance indicated, and she was intensely curious to find what dwelled beyond the slightly scruffy, work-worn outer shell sitting in front of her.

  Two years later as they prepared for their wedding, Sarah wouldn’t exactly say she had discovered all there was to know about Mr. Jason Laurent, but she was a lot further along the path than she suspected anybody had been before. She had always been a very open person during the two years they had shared together, but had often been irritated by the nagging feeling he knew so much more about her than she did about him. Perhaps naively, she figured that was fine. They had the rest of their lives to discover all there was to know about each other.

  It hadn’t been long until she was pregnant with their first child. At that stage, Jason had been offered a foreman position at Jackson’s Timber, but declined. His boss thought the world of him, and more importantly, trusted him, however Jason enjoyed his job as a laborer. He was respected, knew what he was doing, and he was good at it. He felt the extra responsibility and paperwork that came with the foreman position just wasn’t suited to him. Sarah was working full time then too, having not moved on from Pokona Travel Centre as she’d always thought she would. Even her mother had accepted her decision after several arguments and long periods of not talking.

  She had carved herself quite a niche by specializing in planning accommodation and activities for people travelling around the country by car or RV. She’d identified this market back when she was working part time, as many people didn’t have the foggiest idea where to start in terms of booking accommodation and sightseeing activities. After spending almost three weeks working with one customer to plan a driving holiday, she realized nobody was offering packages with this kind of planning, and while that had taken a lot of work, she knew she could simplify the process by being prepared for the future. She had developed standard accommodation packages, even negotiating discounted rates with several motel chains around the country and included all of the popular leisure activities as add-ons, fully customizable by the customer themselves. Since the increased presence of the internet, it wasn’t just Pokona’s residents she’d ended up booking trips for, but people all around the country and even overseas travelers. Her packages had become the cornerstone of Pokona Travel Centre’s business. She loved the work, and with bonuses, she’d actually been earning more than Jason at that stage.

  So much had changed between then and now, as she stood on the broken concrete porch in front of her house and the question of how long she had been standing there crossed her mind. It was easy to get lost in the past, especially when it was so much more comforting than her present state of mind. Her present state of life. As soon as she realized her gaze was now fixed on the spider web thin cracks that spread out across the concrete ground beneath her feet, it felt as though her walk through the sun-soaked field of long lost memories had been swamped by dark storm clouds, and it occurred to her that her memories were not unique at all.

  Not special, but rather like a range of summer dresses in a small town’s only department store. They looked nice enough when you bought them, and it even felt great to look at photos of the times you wore them with a youthful sparkle in your eyes and a smile on your face, but the reality was that thirty other young women had worn the same dress that summer. They probably also felt the same as you did when their boyfriend had conveniently forgotten to use protection in the back seat of his car, saying it was OK because he loved you, and with one session of awkward fumbling and a careless ejaculation he had caught himself a mother for his child and a housewife to take care of things while he worked and drank with his friends afterwards.

  The storm clouds of her mind came in heavy there, and she told herself this wasn’t what had happened to her, but she only half believed it and the beauty of her memories began to splinter and crack like the porch she stood on.

  She pulled the screen door back and unlocked the deadbolt, but as she stepped through the doorway and made her familiar motion of placing her purse on the small telephone stand to her right, she stopped dead in a freeze frame of half confusion, half despair. She didn’t put her purse down right inside the door like she had done upon arriving home to every single house she had ever lived in, because she didn’t have her purse. Her mind raced, trying to figure out where it was, as her right hand resting on the door handle became clammy and slick almost immediately. Her stomach flipped and before she had a chance to do anything more than step back onto the porch and lean over the cold, weather beaten metal railing, her throat pulled inward on itself in a violent constriction of muscle
s. Her whole lower jaw pushed forward as she coughed, bringing with it the contents of her stomach which she thought were probably already loosened inside of her by the close call at the grocery store. She dragged a sweaty palm over her forehead, trying to sweep hair out of harm’s way as the next sickening wave filled the empty cavern of her mouth on its way into the garden below her.

  Sarah’s stomach heaved in and out a few times as she tried to take as much clean air into her lungs as she possibly could, thinking the deep breaths would calm her entire system and put an end to the vomiting. After sticking with this plan for about a minute, she was confident she’d been right and stood up straight again, tilting her head back to take another long drag of air through her nose. But it didn’t take away the scratching feeling inside her head as her mind ticked over in a scattergun way, trying to think of where her purse was, and where she last had it. She continued trying to solve the puzzle while quickly making her way back inside, pushing backwards on the door to close it behind her. She stood with her back against the door for a good minute before she turned and secured both locks, as well as nervously pushing the scratched golden door chain into place. Her hands trembled, making it difficult to get the end of the chain into the latch. Her front door opened into a modest living room, and she was able to take a few quick steps and carefully lower herself into the faded brown lounge chair, a hand cautiously poised on each arm of the chair to ensure she didn’t fall in her frazzled state.