The Moon Around Sarah

by Paul Lederer

  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.

  He caught her expression and said, ‘Start looking. I’ll take the other side of the street.’

  They moved off along the avenue, searching for their lost daughter with a single purpose, separated by the roar and hiss of the passing traffic and by the neglectful years between them.

  Don March trudged back along the narrow street toward the pier. Passing cars threw up dirty mist, spattering his clothes. He had set out on his walk in heated anger, but within a few blocks he had calmed down; he was not a man to harbor anger long. Sarah’s brothers had infuriated him, but in the end they meant nothing at all to him. Let them suffer their own banality and its penalties alone. He wanted only to find Sarah; nothing else was important.

  As he calmed down, he noticed with surprise that he carried his Nikon camera around his neck; snatched up from the table out of sheer habit.

  Don’s thoughts were still tangled. He wanted to help Sarah. One of his flaws, a friend had said once, was to believe he could save the world: maybe he should have been a priest. But even a priest with his vows of poverty had more resources than
Don March did just then. What possible help could he be to anyone? His own eviction notice was just around the corner of the calendar.

  It was a lonely, cold and windy day, quite spectacular in its way with the play of sunlight on the shifting water, the foothills still in cool shadow, the remnant clouds gilt-edged. Recognizing this on one level, the photographer felt no inspiration to try capturing fresh images with his camera. Maybe it was time to accept the inevitable: his time here was finished – artistically and financially. He had done all he could in both areas and managed to fail quite dramatically in each.

  Yes, he thought, I would make a great savior for another unhappy person.

  Of course Sarah was not unhappy; it seemed not, anyway. Maybe her brother was right – she might be just as happy in an institution as anywhere else.

  Living there for the next forty or fifty years….

  He walked onto the pier, nodding to one older woman he knew from the bakery in town. And then he saw Sarah halfway down the pier, the breeze buffeting her slender body, twisting her hair. She still tightly gripped her huge hat with the pink ribbon.

  She seemed to sense his coming and she turned her head to look at him, her smile welcoming and uncertain at once, her body unconsciously graceful in its casual stance. Donald reached instinctively for his camera.

  The wind shifted her dark hair across her huge, wistful eyes. Her expression was pleased, wondering, and for only one split-instant fearful and lost in the deep apprehensiveness of loneliness.

  Donald took ten rapid shots until the 35mm camera stuttered and beeped once to notify him that he was out of film.

  He walked on toward her, the gusting sea breeze lifting his pale hair. He leaned beside her on the pier, looking downward as she had been before he had approached, seeing the blue reef where crabs scuttled.

  She looked to him enquiringly, her eyes falling to the camera around his neck.

  ‘Yes, I took a few pictures of you. I hope you don’t mind. You are rather exquisite, you know. At certain times….’ He paused for a long while as the surf, still heavy from the storm, battered the pilings and threatened the activities of the crabs. ‘You seem to know things … and I don’t know exactly what they are. You are an enigma, is what I mean. I don’t know if that photographs well.’ He looked now at the long sea and not at her, ‘There are dreams all around you, Sarah. I wish I could enter them and understand you better.’

  Sarah understood all of his words, of course, but his meaning wasn’t exactly clear to her. She knew that the young man did like her. He had taken her picture. Maybe he liked her well enough that one day he would pin her picture up on his wall as he had done with the naked girl looking out the window. He would have captured the essence of the moment, perhaps: a wind which no longer blew sweeping her hair across her eyes, a breaker caught in foaming half-curl; a surge of expectancy never completed.

  Why was he so desperate to catch passing life and hold each moment forever? He was a very sad young man, she thought, but very kind.

  For a long time they stood silently beside each other on the dark pier, watching the crabs. Once he put his arm around her shoulders and once she placed her small hand on top of his as it rested on the rail.

  A huge surge of incoming surf washed the crabs from the shallow reef and Don withdrew his hand.

  ‘Come on, he said. ‘We’ve got to get you back to your family. They’re all out looking for you.’

  Family, he was thinking, was a hell of a word to use for that pack. A woman like Sarah – could she possibly be unloved? They showed no such emotion. Maybe they were just all too self-involved and greedy to take the time for unnecessary displays. It was incredible he thought, glancing at the pretty, smiling young woman. Now, to avoid responsibility they were willing to institutionalize her. He clenched his jaw and turned her, leading Sarah back toward his studio, the grumbling of the assertive sea covering the sound of his muttered curses.

  ‘We’re almost there, Sarah,’ Don said with false heartiness. Her eyebrows raised just a little questioningly, and her smile seemed to falter. ‘I couldn’t find your mother,’ he went on, ‘but your two brothers are there. Edward?’ He didn’t think the other brother’s name had been mentioned, or if so his rush of anger at their scuffle had kept him from noting it. ‘Almost there, and then you can go home. Christ! You’re probably starving by now, aren’t you? I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that. Well, they’ll give you a big lunch at home.’

  Sarah was hungry, but not intolerably so. Poppsy would be hungry, though. Mother and Aunt Trish said the dog was old and didn’t need much food, and so they only fed her once a day, but Sarah always slipped her food later on. Poppsy would be hungry and her dog eyes would be sad because she wouldn’t know where everyone had gone.

  They trudged up the wooden outside steps to the door of Don’s studio and he swung the door open for Sarah and then, stepping inside, he smothered a curse of disgust. Her brothers had gone! They had left no note – Don searched the table, his cork board where the photographs were pinned haphazardly. No note. Nothing. They had just gone – abandoning Sarah again.

  Sarah walked to the wall where Don stood and began looking again at the photographs pinned to the sheet of cork. March walked away, feeling the tension in his every muscle. He sat in the white-painted chair and slammed the palm of his hand down very hard. The cameras on it shook; the Pentax fell forward on its face. Don didn’t even notice.

  At the sound, Sarah glanced at him over her shoulder and he grinned meaninglessly. She turned to face the photographs again.

  ‘Sarah, Sarah,’ he said to her back, ‘now what should I do with you, girl? Exactly what is there to do with someone so innocent and so doomed?’

  Four

  ‘JAKE!’ DON MARCH called out, as he walked into the oily garage fronting the broken concrete alley. A bearded man of forty, flannel-shirt cuffs rolled up to show dirty, long, underwear-sleeves beneath, turned to him. He had a huge deep-sea fishing reel with a hundred yards of steel line partly disassembled in his hands.

  The fisherman grinned, ‘Hello. Don. What’s happening?’

  ‘I’d like to borrow your station wagon if you don’t mind,’ the photographer replied.

  ‘I told you, you could use it any time,’ Jake said. He put the fishing reel down, wiped his hands on a slop-cloth and reached into his pants’ pocket, ‘Besides, you’re about the only one who knows how to drive it.’

  The station wagon was a yellow and white 1956 Chevrolet with a three-speed column gearshift. It had its quirks, the major and most annoying of these being its insistence on wanting to go into reverse when the driver was trying for second gear. Don had used it on several occasions to haul his equipment on a photographic shoot and had become accustomed to the old rust-bucket’s ways.

  ‘Here you go, buddy,’ Jake said, dropping two keys on a ring into Don’s hand. ‘What is it? Got a hot date?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Yeah, hey, I saw that girl you were with this morning,’ Jake said, ‘good-looking woman.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, thanks, Jake.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ the fisherman said, and he immediately got back to work on his equipment.

  Not long after Don and Sarah had returned to the studio, he had noticed the white business card on the floor under his table. Bending to pick it up, he wondered if maybe he hadn’t been too quick to curse Edward Tucker. Maybe he had left this for him and it had blown off the table. However, there was the mark of a paper clip indented on the face; it seemed more likely that it had simply been knocked free of an attached letter as the brothers hurriedly shuffled their contracts.

  It was not Edward’s business card. There was no note scribbled on the back either. The card read: ‘Northshore Medical and Convalescent Center’, gave an address on Braxton Road off the Coast Highway, and, in smaller letters in the right-hand corner, had imprinted: ‘Dr Alan Gerard, Chief of Psychiatry’.

  Don vaguely remembered having seen the place.
A grouping of low pinkish buildings arranged in a rectangle, a few scraggly star-pine trees growing uncertainly around it, the stark hills rising behind it.

  ‘I wonder if I was supposed to find this?’ Don mused.

  Sarah looked at him, turned and wandered to where he sat, card in hand.

  ‘Is that where they intend to put you?’

  Maybe Edward had left it purposely; a place for Don to take Sarah if he found her. The wind gusting through the open door could easily have blown the card to the floor. Perhaps that was where the brothers had now gone and this was their way of letting Don know? Maybe not.

  ‘Anyway,’ Don said, more to himself than to Sarah, ‘I’d like to have a closer look at that place. It’s only a mile or so up the highway.’

  And, he thought, he would like to talk to Dr Alan Gerard. There was so little he understood about Sarah. Perhaps the doctor could explain a few things to him? He wanted to get a few matters clearer in his mind before he volunteered to deliver the woman to this sterile-appearing place, not knowing what they intended for her.

  ‘Wait here, Sarah,’ he said, slipping into his green jacket again, ‘and this time,’ he added, putting a hint of command in his voice, ‘I mean it. I’ll only be a few minutes. I promise you.’

  Then he had gone downstairs to find Jake and borrow the old station wagon.

  Returning, he had found Sarah sitting obediently in the middle of the room on the white-painted chair. He smiled despite himself, feeling that his mild admonition had been too harsh.

  ‘OK, I’m back. Now we’re going to take a short ride.’

  Sarah wore Don’s old red-and-black checked hunting jacket over her thin cotton dress as he steered the bulky, salt-rusted station wagon northward along the coast road. Her eyes were bright and eager as she looked out of the window, her hair drifting in the wind. Each bend in the road offered a changing vista, and for Sarah it seemed each was excitingly new, filled with the thrill of discovery.