The Sarah Book

by Scott McClanahan

  I said, “And what have you discovered in this search?”

  Sid said, “Only one thing. We’re orphans.” Then I wasn’t talking to Sid the Science Kid anymore. I was googling the word “mosque.” The website said the word “mosque” came from an original Arabic word which meant: place of worship. I thought about how my only tender mercy now was watching the families arrive at the mosque. So I stayed up all night trying to sleep but not sleeping until I awoke the next afternoon just an hour before my kids were supposed to be here. I rushed around trying to clean up the place and wait for their arrival. It was then that I heard children playing and cars pulling up in the parking lot outside. I looked in between the blinds and I saw a parking lot full of Mercedes and nice cars and then I saw a few children playing in the jump house outside the mosque. There were fathers and there were mothers and there were teenagers. There were a couple of tables too, full of food. The people were sitting around the table and eating and fellowshipping with one another. I saw the wrestler Diablo Jr. He was shaking hands and smiling and showing the kids some wrestling moves. There was the meth looking lady I caught stealing our coupons from the mailbox. She was eating and smiling and I wasn’t mad at her anymore. The families were all laughing and the children were running around jumping in and out of the jump house. They all had something I didn’t have in my life. They had love and happiness. They could say, “Asalamalakim” and mean it, but I only wanted one thing from them now. I wanted to rob them.

  A few weeks later, I spit on Big Ugly’s BMW. I always called Sarah’s boyfriend Big Ugly now. For weeks now whenever I saw Sarah’s boyfriend’s car I blew him a kiss. I saw him driving towards the hospital one morning and blew him a kiss. I got behind his car on my way to work one morning and I blew him a kiss. “Would you please stop blowing kisses at Dr. Jones when you’re in public?” Sarah asked me on the phone one day. I told Sarah I didn’t know what she was talking about. I told her I was a man of peace and blowing kisses was my thing.

  Then I said Big Ugly this and I said Big Ugly that. Sarah asked me to quit calling him Big Ugly and wondered why I kept doing it. I told her, “Well he’s big and he’s also ugly.” Then one night I was dropping the kids off at the house and I saw the BMW. I recognized it by the vanity license plate. BABYDOC1. “What a dumb fucking vanity license plate,” I said. “You can’t trust people with vanity license plates.” The car was parked in front of the house and for some reason I just lost it. The snow was falling in big hunks and chunks. I stopped the car and just sat there. The kids were inside my car in the backseat and Sam was about halfway asleep and Iris was kicking her feet against the back of my seat. I looked over at the BMW and then I said,

  “I’m gonna spit on that car.” I opened the back door of my car and got Sam out of the car carrier. I held the handle of his baby carrier seat and walked over to the BMW and just stood there. The snow was falling on Sam’s forehead and melting on his skin. I saw Sarah come to the door and stand in the glow of the light. Then I leaned back and hawked a big ass loogie. I felt it fill my mouth full of warmth. Then I let the loogie sit there on my tongue before I launched it high in the air like a rocket ship. It shot off my tongue tip and lips and sailed high in the air, sailing up high into the air and shooting past the snowflakes until it shined silver in the light from the street lamps and glowed. Then it fell down, down, down until it plopped back into the snow pile on the hood of the BMW. “Fucking Nazi car,” I said. Then I walked down the front yard and left a path of little angel footprints behind me.

  I walked onto the porch and kicked my boots free of snow. Then I opened the door and put Sam inside. “I just spit on your boyfriend’s car,” I said to Sarah and then walked away to get Iris and bring her inside too.

  “Huh,” Sarah said. “What did you say?”

  Then she asked me again as I walked out. “I said I just spit on your boyfriend’s car.” Then I walked and followed my footprints in the front yard to the car. I left another set of footprints in the snow beside them until it looked like two different people had been walking there. I opened the door and tried to get Iris out of the backseat. I pushed down the button on the car seat and then I pulled at it but the buckle wouldn’t come loose. I pushed down on the button on the car seat again and then I pulled. “Shit,” I said “shit.” I finally got Iris out of the car seat and then I carried her through the snow and down to the house. She said, “My pack back.”

  “O shit,” I said. “I forgot about the kids’ backpack.” So I went back to the car and got the backpack.

  Then I walked back through the snow.

  I sat it down inside the front door and Sarah said, “That’s really shitty of you spitting on somebody’s car. I don’t care who it is.”

  I told Sarah she used the word “shit” in front of the children and she was a bad person. But then I thought of something else to say. I told her, “Well it’s real shitty dating a guy who drives a BMW. Doesn’t he know that’s a Nazi car?” She told me she didn’t care and I wouldn’t even know that if I didn’t see it on television.

  I told her, “What? You don’t care about history.” I told her that was the problem with people in this day and age. They didn’t care about history. Sarah looked confused and then she said, “For fuck’s sake, Scott. What the hell does this have to do with history?” I looked at her and I knew she’d divorce me soon.

  I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes but then I had an idea. I walked back to the door and Sarah said, “What are you doing?”

  I told her, “I’m going to go spit on your boyfriend’s car again.” So I shut the door behind me and Sarah followed me.

  I saw Iris behind the glass mouthing, “What?” Then I realized I left the kid’s back pack on the porch when I put Iris inside. So I grabbed it and opened back up the door. Iris started running towards me like I was coming back inside. She put her arms up like she always did because she wanted me to pick her up. But instead of picking her up, I just put the backpack down and then I reached out with my hand to stop her. She was running straight at me and toddler fast. Then my fingertips popped against her chest bone and she stopped. It looked like I’d punched her almost. And Iris’ face looked like this.

  I’m alone.

  So Iris looked confused and Sarah looked confused. I shut the door and walked back up to the BMW at the top of the yard. I traced my tracks on my way up there and I looked back down at the house and I saw Sarah standing in the doorway. She was standing with a baby on her hip and a toddler at her knee. Then I looked down at the vanity license plate. BABYDOC1. I hawked up some phlegm and then I threw back my head and I spit. The spit shot forward and disappeared in the snow in the car. Then I raised my hands high in victory and looked towards Sarah. She had a look on her face like she couldn’t believe it. She was shaking her head like, “What’s wrong with you?”

  I couldn’t say.

  I went home and I told Chris I spit on a BMW and I did it for us and I did it for the lonely people. Chris didn’t know what I was talking about. I told him I was a junkyard dog. I was the junkyard dog of the world and free, but nothing is free.

  The next morning I decided to do better. I decided not to blow kisses at Big Ugly and I decided not to comment on how vanity plates were tacky or how it was even worse when the vanity license plate said BABYDOC1: the nickname of the worst dictator in Haitian history. I laughed to myself thinking what I would tell Sarah about other possible vanity plates her boyfriend could get such as Idiamindada1 or better yet go4polpot1. I imagined Baby Doc with a giant machete cutting off the hands of the children of Haiti and then high fiving the cut off hands of the children together. I imagined the Haitian people starving.

  So I got mad and that afternoon I got drunk. It was snowing outside and there was ice and sleet all over. I started swaying back and forth. The hospital where Sarah worked was just across the road from my apartment. I wandered outside and started walking through the slush of the parking lot of my apartment and then to the
road. I watched the cars and trucks and cars coming in front of me. I looked left and I looked right. Left, right, left, right. I was a little kid. Then I took off running across the street and hopped the ditch. Yee haw. I started searching for Big Ugly’s car and mumbling. “Where’s that shit ass BMW?” I walked down the road and passed Chryslers and Toyotas and Mercedes and pickup trucks and mini vans, but not a BMW. Then I walked around behind the hospital and looked for the car. Most of the cars there were covered in snow now and so it was hard to find. There was a nurse or someone who worked at the hospital smoking a cigarette in her car.

  She was watching me. I thought, “Where in the fuck is it?” The snow kept coming down, but then I saw it. The BMW. I walked towards the car and thought about whether I should key it or spit on it or just throw a rock through the window. But I didn’t do any of these things. I just stood beside his car and then I walked forward. I swept the snow away from the window and I looked inside. In the front seat was a picture, but I couldn’t quite tell what it was. I looked closer and I saw that it was Jones and his son. His son was wearing a Boy Scout uniform and Dr. Jones was wearing a Boy Scout uniform too and they both looked silly. They were both smiling. The son looked like he was about ten years old and he looked like he loved his father more than anything. He looked like he was happy to have his father there. The little boy was holding a trophy and his dad had his arm around him. His dad was a good dad and the son was a good son. But there was a look of sadness in the little boy face as well. It was a look like he knew his daddy would have to leave soon and go away.

  And Dr. Jones looked different too. He was smiling but his eyes were sad. He looked like he knew that we only exist in the stories of others and we are all the breaker of horses. And perhaps something else too. Perhaps that an enemy is never an enemy for long, but also a secret friend. He looked like he was dying because he lived far away from his child and only visited every other weekend. He was far away from his child and if there was someone who knew the pain inside of my secret heart it was probably him. He looked like he loved the children and the children looked like they loved him and he was there and he was with them. But inside of this photograph he looked like he was hiding all of his pain. And so I saw the face in the photograph wasn’t his face anymore. But it had been replaced by another face and he looked different somehow. He looked like someone who I loved from long ago and he looked like someone I knew once, but who I hadn’t seen in years.

  That night I sat and watched a movie and tried not to think about what had happened. I watched a movie about an old couple who travelled to Tokyo to see their children. But when they got there, their children were too busy to hang out with them. So on the way back, the mother got sick and the children had to make a journey of their own to sit by the deathbed of their mother and watch her die. The mother died and at the end of the film a neighbor walked by and asked the father how he was doing. The father was alone now and he just sat and looked out at the sea and he said if he knew things would have turned out this way he would have been different.

  And now years later I can only think the same thing myself. If I knew things would have turned out like this I would have been different. If I knew things would have turned out like this, I would have been nicer.

  After a while Sarah’s job started getting to her. We still did nice things for one another though. It was Christmas two years before the divorce and she had to work a 12 hour shift Christmas day and so we decided to open up our presents on Christmas Eve. We sat under the Christmas tree with all the lights off except for the Christmas tree lights and we made a little pile of our presents in front of us. We talked about how opening presents on Christmas Eve always sucked. Sarah seemed sad. Her grandfather had just died a few months before and there was a teenage girl at the hospital who tried to commit suicide by setting herself on fire. Sarah had to listen to her groan all night until she finally died. And her favorite patient, the little old man she called the pirate, wasn’t doing too well either. Sarah watched him rip out a catheter two times in a row until his penis became a frayed rope and bled like a hose. That night I sat and listened to Sarah tell me about how her grandfather used to dress up like Santa Claus when she was a little girl. She told me how she used to visit him in the summer at the lake in Michigan and she told me about her memories when she was a little girl.

  Then Sarah started opening up her presents. She opened up the purse she already knew about and then she opened up the straightening iron she already knew about. She said, “Hell yeah. It’s a straightening iron.” She said this like she had no idea what the present was before she started opening it and then she opened up another and said, “O it’s a new purse. Yaaay. How did I know?” Then she smiled a smile like she wasn’t the one who picked the purse out.

  I opened up a couple of CDs and then I opened up a new watch she bought me. I said, “O CDs” and, “O it’s a new watch.” Sarah told me she was going to get me concert tickets for a singer I liked, but after a couple of weeks she realized why she couldn’t find any concert dates. The singer had been dead for years. We laughed together and Sarah’s eyes shined, but then she looked sad again. She looked above the fireplace where an urn sat on the mantelpiece. It was an urn containing the ashes of a patient who had died at work. The patient was a seventy year old mentally retarded man who didn’t have any family left to claim his remains. So Sarah brought them home one night so that they wouldn’t just be disposed of by the state. “People are so alone,” she said and then her eyes filled full of tears. We fought when Sarah had brought the ashes home a few weeks before. I told her it was weird as hell and I didn’t want some weird dead dude’s ashes in the house. “Selfish ass dead people,” I said, but Sarah brought them home anyway.

  I patted Sarah’s leg and told her that I was glad she brought the ashes home. Then I asked her what she was thinking. She told me that she kept thinking about how her grandfather dressed up like Santa Claus when she was a little girl and how no one was going to know it or even think about it except for her. It was her memory and it belonged only to her and then she cried a little bit and she told me that she thought it was cruel how everything changes. She told me how cruel memories and stories and people are. She told me the week before a patient had called Dr. Jones the ‘N’ word right to his face. I asked her how he dealt with it and she told me he was professional. He did his job. I told her I was sorry and then she apologized for getting sad but she said that she guessed that’s what holidays were for. She laughed and asked what it all meant and she said it didn’t make any sense and then she asked me what it meant again and why we were cruel.

  I told her I didn’t know.

  That night we fell asleep on the couch and then we woke up a few hours later to the sound of Sarah’s alarm on her phone. She put on her scrubs in silence and she put on her makeup in silence. She put on her sweatshirt and then she whispered for me to go back to sleep.

  She whispered: “It’s Christmas morning, Scott.”

  But when I woke back up a few hours later I felt nervous. I was all alone and the house was cold. I kept thinking of old men dressed up like Santa Claus. I kept thinking of Sarah when she got the telephone call that her grandfather had died and I thought about Sarah walking around in the front yard and the way she put her hand up to her face and then the way her face scrunched and how there were teardrops hanging on her chin like a little chin beard of tears. I thought about how I had tried to comfort her and I thought about Sarah’s face in the Christmas lights and how I wanted to cheer her up when she got home from work. I wanted to surprise her.

  I gathered up this stuffed animal that her grandfather gave her long ago. Then I picked a picture of her grandmother that always sat on the desk. She died when Sarah’s father was young and so Sarah never knew her except in pictures and stories. I found a photograph of her cousin Ashley who died in a car accident when Sarah was a teenager. I found a photograph of Sarah with her pirate patient right after he’d lost his leg. I took everyt
hing I found and I went downstairs where Sarah kept her craft table and all of her wrapping paper. I put them in the Christmas boxes and I wrapped them up new again. I wrapped them up like they’d never been given before.

  Then I wrote little notes on each of them.

  I wrote notes like this: From Grandpa. To Sarah:

  I just wanted to let you know that I’ll always love you. And there’s still a part of me with you. If you look in the mirror—then I am there. Merry Christmas.

  Then I wrote a note from the pirate.

  Thank you for being a nurse. It’s always good when your job is taking care of people and we need more people who take care of people. Thank you for taking care of me.

  Then I wrote one from her grandmother that said, I know you never met me because I passed away before you were born, but I’ve always loved you.

  I put the gifts from the past beneath the Christmas tree and waited for Sarah to come home. Sarah called like she always did before she left work and she asked if I wanted anything from Wendy’s. I told her no. That evening she was in a shitty mood when she got home. I shouted, “Merry Christmas” and asked her how her day was. I jumped up and down. Up and down. She said, “It was quiet. But I think I was just so tired from staying up last night.” I told her not to think about it and I led her over to the Christmas tree and I showed her the wrapped up presents. She told me that she thought we opened up presents the night before, but then I told her that these were the presents from long ago. These were her surprises for the day. I told her that these were the presents from the people of the past who wanted to wish her Merry Christmas again.

  Sarah opened one from the pirate who told her “Merry Christmas,” and thanks for being a good nurse and that he missed her. Then she opened one from her grandmother who told her that she knew she never met Sarah but she wanted her to know that she always loved her. Perhaps we love what we never know most of all. Then grandmother’s note: I hear that you’re thinking about having a baby one day and if it’s a girl baby—you’re thinking of naming her Iris after my own little baby girl who died when she was just an infant. I hope you know that would make me proud.