Sarah Before

by Craig Shepherd

  She hadn’t noticed the other person sitting in the passenger seat of Jane’s car. The person who had flown from Pokona to Calston on the first available flight after speaking to Jane. The person who Jane had asked to wait for a few minutes while she tried to speak to Sarah first, hoping to avoid a major meltdown on the part of either woman.

  A frightened, shivering figure crept into the light and ambled nervously towards the front gate. After eight years of absence, Sarah knew immediately who the person standing anxiously at the end of the path was. Josie.

  Sarah turned her head away, moaning and sobbing as her body tried to hide away from her whole history which seemed to manifest in the woman standing before her.

  Josie walked towards them, climbing the steps until she stood inches away from Sarah. But her demeanor was cold. There was fear in her eyes, but it wasn’t a lone emotion. There was sorrow. Resentment. There was no longer any love. The only thing comforting Sarah was the absence of pity in Josie’s gaze. Facing the demise of her finely cultivated new life, and the death of her embellished memories of the past was bad enough, but she couldn’t handle Josie’s pity.

  Sarah clung to Jane, and buried her head in her chest for a moment, trying desperately to avoid her childhood friend. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel Josie’s eyes still burning into her. She lifted her head to meet her gaze again and momentarily stopped sobbing, like a child hiding behind one parent to escape admonishment from the other. This was what Sarah had been reduced to.

  She broke away from Jane when the full reality of the moment hit her. Josie was here, which meant Jane probably knew everything. She knew the things Sarah had told her during those emotional kitchen table conversations had been lies. Not deliberate lies intended to hurt, but the false reality Sarah had created in her head as a way to avoid facing up to what she had done. Until now, she’d been able to believe those lies herself.

  “Why, Liv? After all this time, it’s the only thing left I want to know. Why?” Josie’s voice wavered, but stayed the course. A tear broke free when she finished speaking.

  “I…I, don’t know,” Sarah spluttered between a recurrence of bellowing sobs. She was completely empty.

  She had tried so hard to create her own memories, perhaps a mixture of reality and fantasy, but memories she could live with. Ones she could sleep at night with. She had built a new life for herself, and while it was never the life a little girl would hope to grow into, it was hers. But like the glass doors of Apartment 7’s balcony, it had all been shattered when Jane spoke the name. Olivia. The word was like an explosion of fire.

  Jane began looking over Sarah’s shoulder towards the house. “Sarah, what’s that smell? Is that fuel?”

  Sarah’s hair was matted on her face, and she just nodded. Jane didn’t need to probe any further to work out what Sarah was in the middle of doing. What she didn’t know was whether Sarah intended to leave behind a burning wreck of a house. (Again). Or had she intended to be in the house when she set it ablaze? Josie’s eyes widened, her lower jar dropping open in horror.

  “Jesus, Liv! Do you do this everywhere you go? Is this what you are? Who have you got in there?” The words began in shock, and moved to fury before the sentence was over.

  Sarah stumbled away from Josie and her accusatory words, falling on her hands and knees. Not only was her past rising like a building demolition video played in reverse, she was also coming to think all the events of the last month must have been in her mind. Wild hallucinations. The by-products of a rapidly unravelling sanity. Had something set it off, or had it just been a matter of time? She didn’t know, and couldn’t tell if it mattered now.

  The sound of sirens in the distance filled the still of the night, and Sarah cocked her head upwards. The fire, she thought. If it was real, somebody would be coming to help. She looked at both the women in front of her without knowing what expressions she was hoping to see, but finally felt some kind of relief. The sound of the fire department getting closer provided more questions than answers, but it told her she had clung onto some level of lucidity. The explosion in Apartment 7 had been real. But how far did that reality stretch? What else from the last month had been real, and what did any of it mean?

  Jane turned sharply to Josie. “You didn’t!” It was more of a statement than a question. Sarah watched on, confused.

  “The minute I knew the address, I called the police while you were getting ready. What did you expect to do, give her a hug and tell her it will all be OK? She’s a murderer, Jane. She was my friend, and I loved her, but all the love and compassion in the world isn’t going to bring back those two precious children and her husband.”

  Jane felt compassion for Sarah, but all of Josie’s concern for her friend’s well-being had been eaten away by years of grief. By the triple funeral she’d attended. By the times she had woken in the middle of the night, remembering the two tiny coffins Noah and Lizzy were buried in. By the nightmares she’d had of children screaming in their father’s arms while he was unable to free any of them from the inferno Sarah had started on the afternoon she had run crying from Mel’s house in the middle of a movie without ever offering an explanation. By the eight years of questions, and wondering why. Why Sarah (Olivia) had decided ending her family’s lives was the only way to ease her troubled mind. The years of her and Mel laying blame at the feet of Sarah’s doctor’s, her therapists, and even each other for not doing enough to help. Lives beyond Sarah’s own family had been irreparably damaged, and nothing was going to take away the pain caused when Sarah’s mind unraveled the first time.

  Sarah was stunned when the two police vehicles parked on angles on the street in front of them, with officers quickly exiting the vehicles while the flashing red and blue lights remained on. Her brief moment of hope, that sweet second of thinking her hallucinations could have actually been real was just taken away from her. The sirens were for her. Not for the fire in the apartment. There was no fire in the apartment.

  Jane burst into tears. Josie turned her back and broke down. Sarah was handcuffed and walked down the path towards the police cars by two officers. Tears streamed down her face, and she screamed in protest, calling the names of her two former friends who couldn’t bring themselves to look in her direction.

  As she looked back over her shoulders at the final ruins of friendships, she felt lighter knowing this would be the last mess she would be able to leave behind.

  Back in Pokona, when she was Olivia, her mind had been broken, so damaged, that the only option she could see was to end her family’s life. To end the suffering they endured for having to live with her. Nothing about her illness worked in a logical way, but that was perhaps the most inconceivable of all. Her mental snap had occurred right at the point things were improving. The day she’d shared with Josie and Mel had been the first glimpse of a light at the end of the tunnel, and maybe she’d been spooked. She couldn’t even remember clearly what triggered it. She’d spent so many years constructing a new reality, one where the death of her family wasn’t her fault, and now the real details were out of her reach.

  All she knew clearly was she had been responsible. She had broken down at Mel’s house and driven home recklessly. Setting a fire in the laundry, she had signed her family’s death certificates and driven away in tears, resolute she had done the only thing she could to free them from their burden. And then she chose to run. She will never know why she didn’t just run before killing her husband and children. Or why it shouldn’t have been her own life she ended. None of it made sense, and until now, it had been better that way.

  In the brief moment as she was being helped into the police cruiser, Sarah saw that no matter how intricately you put together a replacement history - replacement memories – nothing would ever truly change the past, and she no longer needed to try. She could take responsibility for her actions, and at least try to find some peace.

  With one last tearful glance over her shoulder, she was comforted by the sickening
truth of her existence. For better or worse, she would always be a memory.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Craig Shepherd is an author based in Tasmania, Australia.

  Sarah Before is his first novel, and he is planning many more.

  Twitter: @cshepwriter

  www.craigshepherd.net