Remembering Sarah
Page 1
REMEMBERING SARAH
CHRIS MOONEY
ATRIA BOOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney
REMEMBERING SARAH
Also by Chris Mooney
Deviant Ways
World Without End
CHRIS MOONEY
REMEMBERING
SARAH
ATRIA BOOKS
ATRIA BOOKS
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by Chris Mooney
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mooney, Chris.
Remembering Sarah/ by Chris Mooney.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.
2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction.
3. Missing children—Fiction.
I. Title
PS3563.O565R46 2004
813′.6—dc22 2003066278
First Atria Books hardcover edition April 2004
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ATRIA BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases,
please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798
or business@simonandschuster.com
eISBN 13: 978-1-4165-6333-4
ISBN 13: 978-0-7434-6378-2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Dave Crowley for answering all the legal questions. Richard Rosenthal, Chief of Police for the Wellfleet Police Department, and John “Zeke” Ezekiel. All mistakes are mine. Big thanks go to Greg Jackson for all the stories.
Thanks to Jen, Randy, Elvis and Pam Bernstein, who read through the early drafts and gave me the honest feedback I needed. For Sarah Branham for keeping me on track.
My deepest thanks to Mel Berger and the amazing Emily Bestler, for once again finding the story within the manuscript and pushing me until I got it right. Every writer should be so blessed.
What follows is a work of fiction. That means I made everything up.
For Jen,
Always
REMEMBERING
SARAH
His memories would always be dominated by churches. The night before his mother left,Mike Sullivan sat next to her in the front pew of St. Stephen’s. At least twice a week, when they needed a place to hide, they would come here, and after praying, if she had some extra money, they’d head over to the Strand,Belham’s downtown movie theater where three bucks got you back-to-back James Bond movies. Most of the time they’d head over to the public library where his mother would check out her weekly fix of paperback romance books, all of them with titles like The Taming of Chastity Wellington and Miss Sofia’s Secret.
It was the snow that had driven them back inside the church that night. They had been on their way home from the library when the light snow suddenly turned bad, the wind howling so hard that Mike wondered if the car would tip over. Traffic was backed up everywhere, so they pulled into St. Stephen’s to wait out the storm. Belham was still shoveling out from last month’s whopper, the Blizzard of ’78; now, not even a month later, a weatherman on the radio was predicting another storm for northeastern Massachusetts. Mike was eight.
The church was packed with people waiting for the roads to be cleared. His mother picked up one of the three travel magazines she had checked out from the library and started to read, her face serious but relaxed, the way she looked when she prayed. She was a petite woman, so small that Mike would tightly clasp his hands around hers, afraid that if he didn’t somehow keep her anchored to the ground, she’d blow away. She flipped a page in her magazine, her free hand caressing the beautiful silk blue scarf she wore around her neck, the scarf imprinted with ancient pillars and statues and angels and looking completely out of place against her bulky winter jacket.
“It’s rude to stare, Michael,” she said in a soft voice. Even when she was mad, which was hardly ever, her voice stayed that way.
“I don’t have anything to read,” he whispered. “How come the library doesn’t carry comics?”
“You should have picked out a book on woodworking.” She turned around in her pew so she could face him, the magazine still opened up on her lap. “That birdhouse you made me for Christmas, I saw you working on it in your father’s workshop. Saw the care you took when you stained it.”
“I did a good job.”
“No, you did a terrific job,” she said, and smiled. That smile made men stop and take notice of her. That smile reassured him that everything was going to turn out all right.
“Where did you get that?”
“Get what?”
“That scarf.”
“This thing? I’ve had this for a long time.”
His mother’s lies were as easy to spot as her bruises. She was careful never to wear the scarf around Lou, putting it on only after she left the house, taking it off and stuffing it in her jacket pocket before she got home, and Mike also knew she hid the scarf, along with the photo albums, in a box marked SEWING in the basement. One early Saturday morning, after Lou had left for work, Mike had caught her in the basement, removing the scarf from the box—the same hiding spot for her photo albums.
She caught the question in his eyes and said, “The scarf was a gift from my father. He gave it to me our last Christmas in Paris. I just don’t want anything to happen to it.”
“Paris. Oo la la.”
Smiling, she placed the magazine on his lap and pointed to a color picture that showed the inside of an old church. The walls seemed a mile high, made of cracked white marble, the domed ceiling painted with a stunning portrait of Jesus Christ exposing his heart to the world.
“This is the Sacré-Coeur church,” she said proudly. “C’est l’endroit le plus beau du monde.”
When he heard his mother speak in her native French, heard the way the words rolled off her tongue, it made her seem more like the exotic young woman he had discovered in the black-and-white pictures pasted in the photo album. Sometimes, when he was alone in the house, he would sit in the cellar and study the pictures of his grandparents, his mother’s friends, her home—everything she left behind in Paris to come here. The way these people dressed reminded him of royalty. At night, Mike would lie in bed and dream of an army of Parisians who would come to his house and rescue him and his mother.
“The pictures really don’t do it justice,” she said, and then leaned in closer. “The first time I stepped inside that church, I knew God was a real presence that could be felt and could fill you with love. But you have to believe, Michael. That’s the key. Even when life is bad to you, you have to remember to keep your heart open to God’s love.”
“This picture has gargoyles.”
“That’s Notre-Dame. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Gargoyles on a church. That has to be the coolest church in the world.”
“Michael, do you ever wonder what goes on outside of Belham?”
“Not really,” he said, his eyes fastened to another picture of a gargoyle, this one with its fangs bared, ready to leap down from the sky and strike down mortal si
nners who dared to enter.
“Are you curious?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Mike shrugged, flipped a page. “Everything I know is here. The Hill and the Patriots and all my friends.”
“You could make new friends.”
“Not like Wild Bill.”
“William’s an original, I’ll give you that.”
“Dad said the problem with Paris is that it’s full of French people.”
“Your father’s not a brave man.”
Mike whipped his head up from the magazine. “But he fought in the Vietnam War,” he said, not quite sure why he was defending his father. Mike didn’t know what the Vietnam War was—well, not exactly. He knew war involved guns and knifes and bombs and lots of blood and lots and lots of dead people. Mike had seen several old black-and-white war movies on TV.
“Holding a gun or hurting someone doesn’t make you brave, Michael. Real bravery—true bravery—involves the spirit. Like having faith your life will turn out better when it looks like it won’t. Having faith—that’s real bravery,Michael. Always have faith,no matter how bad it looks. Don’t let your father or anyone else take that away from you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
His mother reached into her jacket, came back with a black velvet box and placed it on top of the magazine.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A gift. Go ahead. Open it.”
He did. Inside was a gold chain affixed to a circular gold medal the size of a quarter. Etched on the medal was a bald man cradling a baby. The man, Mike knew, was a saint. The halo was always a dead giveaway.
“That’s St. Anthony,” his mother said. “He’s the patron saint of lost things.” She took the chain from the box, put it around his neck and then clasped it, Mike feeling a shudder when he placed the cold medal under his sweater, against the warmth of his skin. “As long as you wear it,” she said, “St. Anthony will keep you safe. I even had Father Jack bless it for you.”
“Cool. Thank you.”
The next day she was gone. Her car, an old Plymouth Valiant with rust pockets mended with duct tape, was parked in the driveway when he came home. Mike expected to see her in the kitchen, reading one of her paperback romances by the table near the window. The house was quiet, too quiet, he thought, and a sense of panic he couldn’t quite identify brushed against the walls of his heart. He went upstairs to her bedroom, and when he turned on the light and saw the neatly made bed, he bolted back down into the kitchen, opened the door for the basement and descended the stairs, Mike remembering how lately his mother sat down here in one of the plastic patio chairs and lost herself in her photo albums. When he hit the bottom step, he saw the box marked SEWING in the middle of the floor. He removed the box top, saw that the photo albums and the blue silk scarf she kept hidden in there were gone, and right then he knew, with a mean certainty, that his mother had packed up and left without him.
The Shape of My Heart
(1999)
CHAPTER 1
It was probably the weatherman’s hyping of yet another potential nor’easter that triggered the memory of his mother. This morning, Friday, he and Bill had been in Wellesley, starting in on a two-floor addition and kitchen renovation for a newly divorced mother with too much money and too much time on her hands when a light snow started to fall. Bill flipped the radio dial over to WBZ, the all-news station, and heard the weatherman talking about a major storm-front coming in late tomorrow afternoon that, after it left sometime late Sunday night, would dump somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve to sixteen inches of snow over eastern Massachusetts. Bill heard that and gave Mike a look, and by two, they both decided to quit early and take the girls sledding.
The problem with the plan was Jess. Since last month’s incident, Jess had put a ban on sledding. Yes, what happened was an accident—Mike hadn’t seen the other sled until it had slammed into them. And yes, Sarah had tumbled across the snow and whacked her forehead on a patch of ice—not bad enough to warrant a trip to the ER, but they took Sarah there anyway, Jess announcing along the way that sledding at the Hill was over, end of discussion. If Jess wanted to live in a bubble, fine, that was her choice, but it didn’t mean he and Sarah had to live that way too. By the time Mike pulled up into his driveway, he had a solid plan in place.
Jess stood in the kitchen, a cordless phone wedged between her ear and shoulder as she picked up the stacks of file folders on the island table and shoved them inside one of those cardboard filing boxes. She was dressed in some sort of power suit: black pants and a matching jacket, the wide collar of her white shirt spread out like wings to reveal the new set of pearls he had given her for her birthday. Jess was in charge of St. Stephen’s Annual Spring Craft Fair to raise money for the church’s after-school daycare program. Her partner and co-chair had dropped out at the last minute due to a family illness, and with the Fair seven weeks away, Jess was left to shoulder all the details herself.
Jess’s eyes shifted up from her packing, puzzled as to why he was home so early.
“Finished early,” Mike whispered. He kissed her on the forehead, then grabbed a Heineken from the fridge.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that.” Jess hung up the phone, looking frazzled.
Mike said, “Your meeting with Father Jack still on?”
“Still on. How bad is the snow?”
“The roads are fine. They’re already out plowing.”
Jess nodded, sighed. “Shirley’s running late—car problems—and since you’re home, I was wondering if you’d mind watching Sarah when she comes—”
“Go. What time will you be home?”
“Probably not until seven.”
“Want me to grab dinner?”
“The steaks are already defrosted and in the fridge. I’ll do the rest when I get back.” Jess scooped up her pocketbook and coat and hurried out the back door to the garage.
Ten minutes later, Mike was sitting in the chair-and-a-half in the family room, reading today’s Globe and working on his second beer when he saw Shirley Chambers’s red Honda Civic pull into the driveway. Sarah was six, the smallest in her class, and as Mike watched her run up the walk to the front door, her Barbie backpack bouncing against her back as one hand waved goodbye to Mrs. Chambers, the other pushing her glasses back up her face, he wondered when his daughter’s growth hormones would kick in, help her catch up to the rest of her first grade class.
The front door slid open and Mike heard Fang, the big, burly bull-mastiff puppy they’d given her for Christmas, come charging from upstairs. Mike got to his feet and ran to the hall just as Fang bounced off the bottom step and jumped up on Sarah, all forty-plus pounds of him knocking her flat on her butt. Her glasses fell off, skidded across the floor. Sarah screamed.
“It’s okay, Sarah, I got him.” Mike picked up Fang, the puppy’s tail wagging a mile a minute, snorting as he licked Mike’s chin. Sarah whipped her head back and forth, searching the floor, her world a blur.
“My glasses, Daddy.”
“Remember what I taught you.”
“I need my glasses,” Sarah said again, lips quivering. “I can’t see without them.”
He wasn’t going to run to her. That was Jess’s job. No sooner did Sarah’s glasses fall off (and they fell often, sometimes five, six times a day), no sooner did she take a tumble or bump her head and Jess would be right there to scoop her up. Mike knew how much the world loved to kick you in the ass, and when it did, it sure as hell didn’t offer you an apology or a helping hand. Sometimes it kicked you again. Harder.
“Daddy, help—”
“Do you want to go sledding with Paula?”
Her lips stopped quivering. Sarah sat perfectly still on the floor.
“Okay then,” Mike said. “If we’re going to go sledding, you’ll need your glasses. Now they were just on your face, right?”
“Yes.”
“But what if—”
“You can do this. Now just relax and do what I showed you. You’re a big girl, right?”
Squinting, Sarah scanned the floor, patting the hardwood with her hands, and found her glasses less than a minute later near the closet door. She picked up her glasses and put them on, her face beaming.
“My girl,” Mike said. He put Fang back on the floor, told her to watch one of her videos while he took a quick shower, and then headed upstairs, stopping to pick up the cordless phone off his nightstand in the bedroom.
“I just left the house,” Bill said. “You want me to stop by and pick you up?”
“Let yourself in. I’m going to jump in the shower.”
“See you in five.”
The plan didn’t include Jess coming back home. Mike was in the shower when she walked back inside the house for the box of files she’d left on the island table. When he turned off the water, he heard shouting.
“But Dad said we could go sledding,” Sarah cried from downstairs.
“Sarah, I said no.”
Shit. Mike stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and quickly dried off.
“But why?”
Tell her the truth, Jess. Tell Sarah that you don’t like her going sledding, that you don’t like her jumping off diving boards and doing cannonballs in the pool or hopping on the back of a jet-ski or snowmobiling because fun equals risk and risk equals danger and danger lurks on every street corner in the world, just waiting to take you out if you weren’t careful. That’s what happened to your father, right? If he had been paying attention to the road and the snow instead of fiddling around with the radio, he would have seen the drunk driver.
Jess said, “No sledding. That’s it.”
“But Dad already said—”
“One more word and you’ll get a time-out, young lady.”
Mike heard Sarah stomp out of the kitchen and into the family room. He put on a clean pair of boxers and was in the process of sliding into a fresh pair of jeans when he heard Jess’s boots clicking down the hallway.