Waiting For Sarah Page 8

  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.

  24 ... no sarah francis

  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.

  25 ... professional help

  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.

  26 ... do you believe?

  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 m
onth.”

  “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.

  27 ... the new millennium

  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.

  Fireworks exploded on the Fairview Slopes; rockets rode the night sky.

  The first day of January wore another heavy gray cloak of unseasonable fog.

  It was Y2K, the year 2000. It was supposed to be a techno version of the Black Death. But the world hadn’t almost come to an end as many so-called experts had foretold; computer microchips had somehow managed to slide digits efficiently and obligingly from 1 to 2, from 1999 to 2000. Airplanes failed to fall from the skies; telephones and electrical grids did not break down; civilization failed to crumble. Everything, in fact, seemed perfectly normal. No Doomsday, no meltdown, nothing. It was, Mike thought, a little disappointing.

  He stayed home, working half-heartedly on an English essay, due soon after the holiday. The semester had been a hard one; taking three heavies like History, Math and English in the same semester had been tough. Then there was the additional eleventh grade work; what was supposed to have been a “few make-up units” had turned out to be a heavy burden: reading Macbeth for English, and extra work in math, chemistry and physics, not to mention Dorfman’s history essays. Teachers saw their own subjects as the most important — miss reading Macbeth, for example, and your brain would self-destruct. He had kept telling himself that none of it mattered, but ingrained work habits demanded that he do the best he could. In the evening he watched TV with Norma until the news came on. Norma liked to watch the news. He didn’t. TV news was as bad as radio news, a continuous litany of tragedy and death. Who needed it? He took his English essay and a few Clarions to his room. The newspapers were on his lap. The headlines on the front page jumped out at him.

  His heart froze.

  CARLETON STUDENT MURDER VICTIM

  BODY OF MISSING TEENAGER FOUND

  The search for thirteen-year-old Sarah Francis, missing since the evening of Friday, December 17, 1982, came to a tragic end the next morning when her body was found in bushes near Charleson Park in False Creek.

  The Carleton High eighth grader was reported missing by her parents, John and Frances Francis of 2230 Ash Street after she failed to return home from a school debating practice.

  Sarah was the Francis’s only child. Her funeral will take place on Thursday, 10 a.m., at St. Augustine’s church.

  The Vancouver Police Department is asking for help in their investigation: anyone who saw Sarah on the Friday evening, or who saw anything or anyone suspicious is asked to contact the Vancouver Police immediately (more on p.3).

  His hands trembled as he examined the date of the newspaper: January 1983, New Year Edition.

  A thirteen-year-old girl named Sarah Francis died seventeen years ago.

  Murdered.

  His heart bursting, he turned to page three. In the center was a picture of Sarah, his Sarah, the same Sarah Francis who had helped him in the archives room.

  The picture appeared to be her seventh grade elementary school photograph, with a black border around it. She was smiling.

  Then followed:

  (cont’d from p.1) All of us at Carleton High, students and faculty, mourn the loss of one of our brightest and best. Eighth grader Sarah Francis’s brutal murder has caused a loud scream of anger and grief to be heard throughout the city.

  Sarah came to Carleton High in September from Sanderson Elementary. Teachers there characterized her as a bright and popular student. A gifted pianist and musician, she was the winner of several trophies for her outstanding performances in music festivals and competitions throughout the Lower Mainland.

  Jennifer Galt, her best friend, told the Clarion in a tearful interview, “Sarah was the kindest and most genuine person I’ve ever met,” and, “I’m going to miss her every day for the rest of my life.”

  The Attorney General is calling on the federal government to institute the death penalty for child killers.

  Sarah, torn and bleeding, sobbing wildly. The image seared his mind. It was there forever; it would never go away. She had been murdered on Friday, December 17, 1982. He struggled to recall the date of their last meeting, when she was sobbing in the archives room. He remembered: it was also Friday, December 17
, the same day and date exactly — except it was seventeen years later, in 1999!

  He did not show the newspaper to Norma or to Robbie, but kept the story to himself, saying nothing. Instead, he lay on his bed staring at Sarah’s watercolor pinned on the wall — the one of himself in his chair as a dark head and red heart — and at the clouds of his Westland Lysander ceiling poster, thinking of Sarah, hearing again that wild sobbing, seeing her thin body in its ripped dress falling through clouds, falling and falling.

  28 ... hurrying as fast as i can

  Century 21. Tuesday, January 4.

  Leinster Co-op seemed to exist in an endless state of semi-completion. The repairs were still unfinished. The contractors had added more blue tarps, this time to the east end of the building, and there seemed to be more scaffolding, more ropes, more ladders and buckets. The building was suffocating under its blue mantle; Mike could swear he could hear it sighing and groaning. Outside, the mist and fog continued, everything dark, damp, dull.

  Norma spoke with the doctors at Rehab and tried to persuade Mike to cooperate with them, but he refused to go. “I’m not crazy,” he said. She brought a psychiatric nurse to the apartment, but Mike refused to speak to her, locking himself in his room and not coming out until the woman had gone.

  Norma had started going out once a week, on a Tuesday evening, to a support group at the Rehab Center.

  Mike returned to school after the holiday and was happy to be allowed back in his own dusty library room; Mr. Holeman thought it best that he finish what he had started. This time, however, the door was to be left open and someone, Miss Pringle or another staff member, would look in on him from time to time to make sure he was all right.

  Sarah did not come.

  He missed her.

  Later, as he sat in Mr. Talbot’s Math class, only half listening to Talbot’s gravelly bleat, the door opened and in she walked. Mike blinked and shook his head, not believing his eyes. It was Sarah! She was scanning the faces, searching for him. The sight of her squeezed his chest, made his heart plunge like he was bungee jumping off the Lions Gate Bridge.