Sarah Before

by Craig Shepherd

  “It doesn’t make sense, does it? How easy would it be to just move the things bothering you? But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t, and to this day I still don’t understand why. It’s like a wall shot up right in front of the basic common sense part of my brain and nothing was getting out of there. It was such a simple problem. Barely even a problem, just a minor irritation, but for the life of me, in that moment, I had absolutely no idea what I could do about it, I suppose that was my first panic attack,” said Sarah, continuing on in a lighter tone of voice. The voice that says ‘we can laugh about it now,’ to explain she had just laid down on her bed and cried. No more vomiting, no more hot flushes, just tears, while Jason was in the doorway cleaning up the remains of Sarah’s breakfast.

  During the story, Jane had replaced both of their beers. Sarah went on to tell explain that although during the next twelve months as her panic attacks became more frequent, she craved a shoulder to cry on yet couldn’t bring herself to confide in Jason. There was a distance between them which seemed to grow wider with each passing month, and while this made it easier to hide her problems from him, she admitted it had only added to her mental anguish. She loved Jason, and there was really nothing obvious to indicate he didn’t feel the same for her, but the communication just faded out, like a bad phone connection which starts with the odd crackle and ends with nothing but static.

  “I wanted to tell him about the attacks. I wanted somebody to understand me, and who better than my husband, but maybe I was embarrassed more than anything. It scared me to think my capabilities as an adult, more importantly as a mother and wife, were slipping away from me. I figured if Jason knew about the attacks, he would want to leave. What if he thought I couldn’t be safe around the kids?” Sarah remembered this lack of faith in her husband was one of the most irrational parts of this whole period. She saw now that with simple communication, explaining things to him, her fears would have disappeared almost instantly. They could have talked about getting her some help before things went any further. But instead, she had suffered in silence.

  “That’s an understandable fear. I mean, you didn’t really know what was going on yourself, so it would have been hard to imagine someone else getting it,” replied Jane.

  “That was the problem. I had my chances though. One time, the kids were asleep and Jason was helping me clear things away after dinner. This was maybe six months after the first attack and he asked me straight out if everything was OK, and even told me I hadn’t quite been myself lately. It wasn’t usually his way to talk like that, so I was caught a little off-guard. Rather than take the opportunity to talk to him, I just threw out the easiest excuses that came to mind. I was tired, hadn’t been sleeping well, I just needed some good rest. I wanted to tell him I felt pushed aside, that the only things we shared anymore were two children and an address. That I would sometimes lie awake for hours wondering what had happened to them. That I sometimes got so overwhelmed by the strangest things I would burn from the inside out and throw up and I didn’t know why. But what came out was I was tired, and it would all be fine,” Sarah said with remorse.

  After that, Sarah continued, she had spent hours in deep resolve to talk to her husband about it ‘later that night’. But ‘later that night’ never came. Not in the twelve months after her first attack, at least. She had known way back then it was silly, and knew she had been underestimating Jason. Despite his casual and serious outward demeanor he also possessed a loving and caring heart that would have seen him take her in his arms and hold her while she cried out all the pain she was keeping inside.

  Now, many years on from that time, Sarah could only despair that an invisible torturer in her mind had prevented her from embracing what she had.

  Hearing the way Sarah’s voice dropped under the weight of the loss she clearly felt, Jane tilted her head back, draining the remains of her beer bottle. She gave the empty bottle a shake, and almost shrugged her shoulders with a child-like smile.

  “I guess I win,” said Jane as she glanced across the table to see there was still a small amount of liquid in her host’s bottle. Sarah tried to shake off the lowering of her mood, and took down the final mouthful of her drink.

  “I can’t believe it’s almost eight o’clock Jane, I’m so sorry to have kept you here all this time!” Her voice lifted again, aware she sounded a little forced, but happy to have navigated the conversation away from her past.

  “Don’t apologize, this has been great. Honestly, since Joe and I split, I haven’t really had much of a social life. It was nice to just hang out and talk to someone away from work.”

  Sarah could hardly fathom it, but Jane sounded honest. It was nice to let herself feel good in someone’s company again, and the smile slowly spreading across her face came naturally. With the smile wrapping around her words, Sarah replied “I should let you go anyway, you probably have work tomorrow.”

  She didn’t really want Jane to go, but by the same token it had been a long day and she had noticed the first signs of tiredness creeping in. She sensed it was more of an emotional drain than anything else. The rollercoaster ride of the panic attack in the Everyday, to having one of the best evenings she could remember, had taken its toll and she would sleep soundly tonight.

  “I do. I heard this weather is sticking around for a while too so I’ll probably be up early scraping the frost off my windshield.”

  Jane was right too. Despite not having much cause to use a vehicle in recent times, Sarah did still have a car. She only really kept it for the long drives from one town to the next when she was moving. Those drives weren’t without their stresses, but it beat making the journey on a crowded bus. She had found those trips difficult, but when the furniture was gone from one house, en-route to a new start in the back of a removal van, there was simply no choice, agoraphobia or not.

  As they both stood up and slowly moved in the direction of the front door, Sarah waved away Jane’s attempt to clean up the empty bottles. “They’re fine, I’ll fix it. Jane, I can’t thank you enough for what you did for me today with the groceries, and I had a really great time tonight as well,” Sarah’s voice was sincere with gratitude. She didn’t bear witness to many acts of kindness these days, and what Jane had done for her was something she never imagined someone would do. “You really have to let me make it up to you somehow.”

  “Seriously, it was no problem. But I really did have a good time tonight. I mean, I know you probably can’t get out, but we should do this again some time. If you really feel you have to do something for me, how about you cook one night and I’ll bring some more drinks. I’m a terrible cook, and plus I’d love to hear part two of Sarah’s Story,” Jane quickly spoke again. “If you want to tell me more. You don’t have to of course,” her voice became serious all of a sudden, thinking she may have overstepped a boundary, but Sarah hadn’t taken it that way.

  The thought did cross Sarah’s mind though, that the rest of her tale wasn’t something she had shared with anybody really, and it certainly wouldn’t make great party conversation.

  “Of course, I’m more than happy to share,” she said, unsure whether this was a lie or not. She might need to convince herself before convincing someone else. “And I’d love to cook. It’s been so long since I’ve cooked for anybody else.” This part was true. She had never been a gourmet chef, but she considered herself to be fairly competent in the kitchen. In recent times though, cooking much more than the most basic of meals, generally from a can, hadn’t been needed.

  “Great! Sometime next week? Tell you what, I’ll give you my number and you let me know what you need from the store. I’ll bring it with me.”

  Jane’s offer didn’t seem strained at all. It was somewhat hard for Sarah to comprehend. Like two old friends for whom favors were done and accepted without keeping score. Sarah supposed it would take some getting used to again, the whole way friends interacted. She wasn’t even sure the two of them could be considered friends yet, but in that moment i
t didn’t really matter. It was the closest thing to friendship she had experienced in a long time.

  As they neared the door and Jane lifted her jacket from the back of the couch, Sarah simply looked at her with raised eyebrows and a smile. The expression was very clearly saying ‘thank you. You’re doing so much more for me than I could ever expect’.

  She opened the door as Jane was zipping up her jacket, and an icy gust of air was pulled into the house. They exchanged phone numbers, Sarah scribbling Jane’s on the back of an unopened ‘To the Householder’ envelope which sat on the telephone stand while Jane keyed Sarah’s number straight into her phone.

  “Ok, you let me know when and we’ll make it happen,” said Jane. “Don’t wait at the door, you’ll let all the heat out. I’ll talk to you soon!” She shuffled out the door and onto the porch, quickly opening the metal gate at the front and disappeared into the fog which was intensified by the dull glow of streetlights. Sarah did wait though, at least until she saw the headlights from Jane’s car blast into the fog and pull down the street to her right, disappearing out of view.

  As Sarah shut the door, she paused for a second before something made her open it again. She thought something caught her eye as the door shut, but wasn’t quite sure. It was difficult to tell at first glance. Looking across the street she thought the fog seemed to be moving, somersaulting around itself and drifting upwards. But that wasn’t what first caught her eye. She initially thought she’d seen another flash of light in her peripheral vision as she turned.

  Taking a full step onto the porch to look through the fog to her right, there was definitely a car moving down the street. Two cars in fact. Jane’s and another one trailing about 300 feet behind. The hanging fog seemed thicker than it was, catching the dim orange saturation of the streetlights overhead, locking the light inside it and carrying it through the night. Jane’s car was almost completely out of view. Neither car was particularly visible in these conditions, but she could clearly see the orbital glow of two sets of headlights, both looking like huge fireflies, one leading the other on a slow tour of Western Avenue.

  What troubled Sarah more than the car was the light catching her eye as she shut the door. It wasn’t the light of a car driving past with headlights already burning, it was more of a flash. Like the flash of headlights turning on. A moving car would have slowly lit up the area in front of it as it rolled down the street, very much a gradual illumination, but she saw the darkness being instantly swallowed by the soft orange and white fog as the headlights flicked on.

  The way the fog turned over on itself when she first opened the door bothered her too, and she figured it could only have been caused by the trail of exhaust fumes left behind by a vehicle that had just pulled away. Trying to imagine the effect of an already moving car again, she figured a car would just cut through the fog, leaving a long trail of emptiness behind it – not a twisting, somersaulting pattern suspended in one part of the street, slowly floating upwards. It could only have been caused by a stationary vehicle idling in one spot before driving away.

  I did see that, didn’t I? Sarah thought to herself, remembering that very first thought as she pulled the door behind her. The car had been waiting for Jane to leave.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sarah stood on the porch for a moment, gazing down Western Avenue to her right where both of the car lights had vanished into the fog. She walked back inside, closing and locking everything behind her and wondered what she could do. It was a fairly busy street, and it was only 8pm. There was every chance a car leaving the area at the same time as Jane was nothing more than a coincidence.

  At the very same instant though? She tried to push the thought away, mentally scolding herself for twisting a situation that could be perfectly innocent. It was the man in the supermarket all over again.

  It was incredibly strange though, and even if she was trying to play it cool with her thought process, she couldn’t deny it was unnerving to see a car start up and pull away down the street behind Jane’s car immediately after she left. But even if there was something sinister going on, what was she going to do? She had Jane’s number but she wouldn’t answer while she was driving, and she couldn’t imagine what on earth she would say anyway.

  Hi Jane, just wanted to let you know there was possibly a lunatic on your tail; just be careful on the way home.

  After a night where Sarah had finally made a normal, healthy human connection for the first time in years, did she really want to guarantee never seeing Jane again by putting on a grand display of paranoia immediately following her departure?

  She considered sending a text message to make sure she got home alright, but thought that would be overkill even for a teenage girl who had just finished a first date with the boy she had lusted after for months, let alone a grown woman who had just made a friend. Trying to decide what to do, she took the envelope holding Jane’s number in her hand and sat down on the lounge chair.

  Sarah’s mind straight away showed a film reel of Jane pulling into her driveway, only for the trailing car to park on the street with its lights off, a maniac in black clothes stalking his way silently to her car while she fumbles for her handbag, suddenly rushing at a terrified, screaming Jane as soon as she exits the car, plunging the moonlit silver of his blade into her soft flesh over and over and over….

  Stop it!

  If something happened to Jane, she wouldn’t forgive herself. Although she knew if something like that happened, a text message wasn’t going to do much to stop the impending bloodbath. There weren’t a lot of history’s killers who had been scared off into the night by the beeping of an iPhone receiving a text. As though her horrible thoughts had crashed through a window and fallen to the ground, a sensible thought came to her, and she started typing a text message after all.

  ‘Hey Jane, just wanted to make sure you got home safely, I didn’t realize how icy it was out there.’

  Sensible. It wasn’t going to stop Calston’s newest serial killer, who was only currently active in Sarah’s mind, but at least she would find out if Jane arrived home safely. There was nothing out of the ordinary in being concerned for someone driving on icy roads. She decided to wait for a few more minutes before pressing send. Jane would probably be alerted to the message and she didn’t want it to come through mere minutes after she had left Sarah’s house.

  There were bottles to clean up, so she grabbed a jacket of her own and carried the empties from the kitchen table, out the back door and dropped them in the recycling bin, hearing the sound of at least one of them breaking as she let them fall into the bin at once. She lit a cigarette and stood on the back porch until taking the last drag and dropped the butt into the smoker’s tray before going back inside where she hit the ‘Send’ button on her message to Jane.

  Although it was early, she was too worn out to do much else with the day, so she carried her phone with her while brushing her teeth and changing into the thin cotton track-pants and old t-shirt that had become her favorite sleepwear over the years. She flicked on the bedside table lamp before turning off her bedroom light. As she sat her phone at the base of the lamp and lowered herself onto the bed, her phone screen lit up with a text message notification.

  ‘All fine! Thanks again for tonight. I’ll talk to you soon!’

  Sarah let out an audible sigh and allowed her shoulders droop, like she was physically expelling the concern from her body. She hadn’t been literally holding her breath, but it felt as though a sizable pocket of oxygen must have built up inside her over the last ten to fifteen minutes. Telling herself the other car must have just been a coincidence, but not completely believing it, she at least knew she could stop worrying for tonight and get some sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  It took three days for the cold snap to break over Calston, once again allowing the sun to shine through the clouds which were still scattered in a moving landscape of whites and greys. It was still far from warm, but with a bit of heat in the midday sun,
Sarah finally decided to spend some time outside, taking the opportunity to sit on her back porch with an old book she had found. She remembered buying ‘The June Remembrance’ by David Mennie in a second-hand book store several years ago but had never gotten around to reading it, and figured today was as good a time as any.

  Wearing jeans and a t-shirt, the sun felt nice on her arms until it routinely fell behind a passing cloud and she realized a chill hung in the air. Still, the warmth was only hidden for brief moments and she was OK with that. She kept her phone on the table in front of her, as she was still yet to hear from Jane and was giving some thought to calling her later in the day to arrange dinner, maybe even for tomorrow.

  She was barely into the second chapter of her book before a shiver crawled over her skin. Looking up to the sky she saw the sun was still very much alive and out in the open. It was still beating down on her too, but the chill she felt wasn’t particularly related to the comings and goings of the clouds above her. Looking left and right, she surveyed the small back yard around her. Not much more than two rectangular sections of grass separated by a broken concrete path leading to a rusted old washing line in the middle of the yard. Behind that there was nothing but a wooden fence which had no doubt once been a rich, deep brown and had now faded to patchy grey.

  A tin garden shed rested in the corner. Sarah had never used it as the top hinges on the door were broken, leaving it hanging on a tilt to the right. There was a small pile of bricks in front of the door to keep it from swinging open. The grass was overgrown in front of the shed, seeming to grow from underneath the shed itself, jutting out through the gaps in the bricks, which gave her an indication of the last time there had been any garden maintenance done.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary in her yard, nor had she really expected there to be. The shiver across her skin made her feel someone was watching her, and she knew right away it wasn’t her overgrown backyard that required her attention. She knew where she had to look, and she did, instantly giving rise to a surge of fear. There was no immediate danger to her, but the fear was such that there may as well be a wild animal stalking through her backyard with its eyes fixed on her, ready to pounce and tear her apart.