by Jaden Wilkes
Surfacing
Like Falling
Jaden Wilkes
Dedicated as always to my loving husband
and patient children.
And to my dear Virginia Duke and LM.
Thank you for putting up with
hours upon hours of hand wringing angst.
And last but not least, the amazing community of
authors and readers I have found myself in.
Your hard work and enthusiasm have become the
bright lights guiding me through the darkness.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
CHAPTER ONE
Sarah sat with her head down and her hands on her lap doing her best impression of a good Mennonite girl. This was her last church service before finally escaping to university and it was seemingly taking forever. She knew there were things she would miss about this place, but church was not one of them. She could barely concentrate on what was being said and didn’t join in when everyone ended the prayer with an “amen”. It startled her and she looked up, hoping nobody noticed. Of course her eldest brother spotted her daydreaming and was now scowling at her. It isn’t such a big deal, it’s not like I killed someone, she thought, but averted her eyes immediately. She wasn’t going to start a stare down with Noah, the brother who most took after their stern father, she was sure to lose. Three days, she reassured herself, closed her eyes and fought the urge to slip back into fantasy. I’ll be long gone in three days.
She opened her eyes and tried her best to suppress a yawn. This drew the attention of her mother who shot her a sideways look of disappointment that froze Sarah in her seat. Sarah kept perfectly still during the rest of the sermon, ignoring the trickle of sweat sliding down her spine and the crazy itch on her knee. She vowed to be the perfect daughter for once if it killed her, she could do this.
After service her mother pulled her aside and whispered “Remember to invite the people we talked about” in a fierce voice. Sarah’s family was having a going away party for her that afternoon and in their small Mennonite community it was considered extremely rude if she didn’t personally invite each and every guest. Sarah hated standing out though, she survived her family by hiding from them as much as possible, and public events by disappearing into the background. The thought of approaching several people she’d known her entire life sent her into a near panic, she just didn’t do well with others. The stupid thing was that they all knew about the party, she was just being forced to uphold some old tradition for the sake of her family’s reputation. It isn’t even in the Bible, somebody just made it up some time and it stuck.
Sarah was exhausted by the time they drove home. Her mouth was dry and her hands were clammy. Come on body, how does this even make sense? Her mother spoke nonstop about the upcoming event and her father drove slowly, staring ahead and barely responding, only supplying the occasional grunt in agreement when he deemed it necessary. Sarah’s stomach twisted and growled, drawing the attention of her little sister Rebecca.
“You never make it a single Sunday without your stomach going crazy!” Rebecca giggled and pointed at her noisy midsection. Rebecca was a bright and bubbly 14 year old, the baby of the family. She also had an iron disposition and could manage the traditional Mennonite Sunday fast with ease. Sarah, on the other hand, always felt weak and shaky by the time they were able to eat their one large meal in the afternoon.
Sarah’s mom turned around and snapped “Girls, settle down! You’ll eat when it’s time.”
Sarah looked at Rebecca across the back seat and suppressed a giggle. It never failed, this exact thing played out every Sunday. Sarah thought she might not miss many of her family when she was gone but she would definitely miss Rebecca.
*****
“Sarah, you’re not stirring. Pay attention or you’ll ruin it.” Sarah’s mother broke through her daydream. She had been imagining her first day of school, wondering what the classrooms look like and if she could handle the transition from high school to university.
“Yes mom, I’m sorry,” she replied and began stirring the pot of plumamoos, a hot fruit soup that was popular at most Mennonite gatherings. She loved the flavours, but hated the work that went into producing it. Sarah had a bit of a lazy reputation among her siblings. It wasn’t that she hated work, she just preferred to be curled up somewhere away from the crowded house with her face in a book. She was addicted to reading and usually snuck books home from her high school library on a daily basis. That was the one positive thing about being forced to attend public school in her ankle length skirts and hand sewn blouses.
Sarah grimaced, still stirring, and fought the urge to slip into her daydreams again. Her back ached and she was dripping sweat, it was hot outside and even hotter in the kitchen. She heard the back door slam shut and the loud piercing voices of her nieces and nephews. Each of Sarah’s five older brothers had married young, and married well. Their wives were all dutiful and were working on overpopulating the planet, sometimes two at a time if you consider David’s wife Mary and her set of twins. Sarah shot them all a warning glare, that she wasn’t in the mood to be teased today, but nobody caught it and all the kids raced past her one by one, taking swipes at her skirt on the way. If only she had the backbone to stand up to any of them, but all her brothers were like small clones of her father with the same long, disapproving faces and downturned mouths. Their children were bratty because they knew that they could get away with it, nobody took Sarah seriously.
“So the big day is coming soon,” said Mary, her overpopulating sister in law as she approached the stove. She was 25 and far along in her fourth pregnancy. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, I really do.” She reached out and touched Sarah’s arm, there was a flash of something in her eyes. Was that longing?
“I don’t know if I’m looking for anything necessarily. I am just happy that mom and dad are giving me this chance,” Sarah replied, hoping she kept her words modest enough. She didn’t want to be seen as bragging about her education. It was unseemly and she was still afraid her parents would change their minds.
“I’m sure you’ll find something though, how could you not with such an amazing opportunity?” Mary said, rubbed her stomach and sat down at the kitchen table. She started stuffing the perogies Sarah’s mom was rolling out and cutting. Potato and cheese, Sarah’s stomach growled again, both women looked up from their work at the sound. Mary laughed, Sarah’s mother frowned.
“She’d better find a husband fast,” her mother said. “Before he finds out how much this one eats and how many meals she burns.”
“I’ll treat my husband like a God,” Sarah said, feeling a little sassy, “I’ll give him burnt offerings.”
Mary laughed and said “Sarah! You are so funny!”
Her mother looked at her, pursed her lips and muttered “Such rudeness. Lord please help
this child of mine find a strong hand to guide her.”
Sarah lowered her head and got back to stirring, her stomach protesting the entire time.
*****
Once, when they were 13, Sarah and her best friend Naomi snuck in to see a movie at the small theatre in town. Most Mennonites didn’t ban things like music or movies, but Sarah’s family wasn’t like most Mennonites. They were old school fundamentalists, like ‘Amish Lite’ as Naomi would say and laugh. Most Mennonites dressed like normal people...well, almost normal, their pants always seemed a bit too long and their shirts a bit outdated, but mostly they blended in. Sarah’s mother insisted in hand making everything the kids wore, except for underwear and the yearly sensible shoe purchase.
The movie was magical, Sarah could still close her eyes and get back to that place. The actors were beyond good looking, the popcorn was perfection and the vibrating bass of the speakers was almost too much. She didn’t remember exactly what the movie was, some action thriller filled with explosions, cars and lots of passionate kissing. At this moment though, there was one scene that stood out for her. The heroine had just survived an assassin hit and was sitting in the middle of Times Square Station looking off kilter and out of sorts. The crowd of people passed around her in slow motion, completely oblivious to her suffering as they went about their business. They were filmed in sepia, the heroine was in bright colour.
Sarah felt like that heroine right now. The house was packed with people who were supposedly there to send her off. This was possibly the last time she would see some of them for months or even years, and not one of them talked to her. She was hunched in a cloud of misery on the living room sofa, half eaten plate of food on her knees and a bundle of nervous snakes squirming in her stomach. She couldn’t eat, she felt invisible and she wondered if she would ever come back here again.
She got up and walked through the crowd to the kitchen. A couple of people made small sounds of congratulations in her direction as she passed, but she kept walking. She set her plate on the table and turned to head outside. On the way out she heard Old Milly, their closest neighbor, ask her mother “Is she ok? Should I go after her?”
“She’s fine. If anything she could do with eating less. She’ll end up a chubby little thing by the time she’s thirty,” her mother laughed. “Hopefully she’ll be long married by then.”
“Oh Edith, you don’t have to worry about that one, she’s pretty. She will have no problems finding a husband.”
Sarah shut the door behind her and balled her fists to keep herself from screaming. It had been a lifetime of this, always being picked apart because she couldn’t shell peas or bake a perfect loaf of bread. The days spent listening to her mother tell her “You’ll never find a husband if you can’t do this or that...” and the nights spent hiding under her covers reading and dreaming, her passions surfacing like fevers, burning brightly at night to disappear in the light of day.
She ran past the main barn to the west pasture and lay down in the middle of it, letting the sun warm her face and the light turn everything golden. A few cows stared at her, curious, but went back to chewing grass when they realized she was just visiting their world, not intruding on it. She felt the grass under her body, cool and moist, and allowed the buzzing sound of grasshoppers calm her mind. Three more days, that’s all you have to wait, she reminded herself. Three more days and all of this will be your past, but not your future. She reached down and hiked her skirt up to her thighs to help herself cool off, savouring the kiss of the breeze on her bare skin. She smiled imagining her mother’s reaction to finding her daughter, grinning and exposing herself in the middle of the cow pasture. Sarah wondered where she had tipped off the path of righteousness and ended up becoming so argumentative. Even now she was full of crazy thoughts and ideas. She imagined herself reaching down and sliding her fingers into her underwear, rubbing until she hit the forbidden sweet release she had been craving so much lately. She felt sometimes as though she was in a constant state of arousal with all her urges and desires, for knowledge, for experience...for sex. I wonder what it’s like, to lay with a man. She whispered “Kiss me, I’m yours” to the wind and closed her eyes. She felt like she was floating away and grabbed a hand full of grass to keep herself tethered to the earth. Where did this overwhelming longing for more come from?
Ten years ago Sarah walked into the public library when she was supposed to be picking up eggs from her mother’s friend who worked in town. Their chickens had been moulting so her mother grudgingly decided to buy some, handed Sarah a crumpled wad of bills and explained where she could meet Faith. Faith had recently lost her husband and was forced to get a job as a receptionist at an insurance company to cover the bills. The women in the church would tsk tsk like it was a bad thing, but Sarah secretly thought Faith radiated happiness now.
She got to the insurance place to find Faith was on her lunch break. The lady at the reception desk suggested she spend the hour in the library next door where it was cool. Sarah’s heart had jumped, guilt flooded her, but she couldn’t possibly resist. Most Mennonites were completely fine with their children reading anything they wanted, but Sarah’s mother took offense to Sarah wanting to read anything other than what was already in their house, and Sarah could only read the Bible so many times.
She still thanked God for those stupid moulting chickens. She made friends with the librarian that day and got her own library card. A few months later she picked up what she thought was a novel and was instantly hooked on the field of human evolution. She knew about it from taking science at school, but it was considered a false testimony in her house so she never paid much attention. The book she found was about Lucy, an early human ancestor, from that moment on just the word australopithecine made her happy, the way it rolled off the tongue. She imagined this is what prayer was supposed to feel like, the same connection and magic she got when reciting lists of early hominid species. The idea of God had never really taken hold, she always assumed she was unworthy, that her lazy mind prevented a meaningful connection. She would often glance around at church and envy the looks of pure joy on people’s faces when they felt filled with the holy spirit. Sarah was a much more logical thinker and the idea that we were all created on the whim of a vengeful being a few thousand years ago unsettled her. It was much more comforting to imagine yourself with a deep, millennium old biological connection to every living thing on earth. If her parents knew this is how she felt, they would be devastated so she kept these things to herself. She hid her science magazines the way her wayward brother Elijah hid his Playboys, out in the barn in the tack room, underneath a bin of grain. It was their one shared connection.
After Lucy there came other books about evolution, paleoanthropology, archaeology. If it was old and involved digging stuff up, she was all over it. The librarian would special order journals for Sarah to devour along with the usual texts and books. It became her entire life and filled a hole that she didn’t realize was there.
Three more days, I can do this, she thought as she pulled her skirt down and sat up. She looked around at the wide open field, the green grass blowing in the wind and the big eyed cows grazing their lives away. Three more days and I can leave the pasture, I don’t have to be a big eyed cow sold off to my future husband. I can do this.
She walked back to the house, some of the party guests were already leaving and the sound of choppy laughter flowed over the yard. She sighed, brushed herself down again, and went back in to face her family.
CHAPTER TWO
Sarah flipped her hair back and thought once again about getting a pixie cut. If she didn’t have such a baby face she might be able to pull it off. Sadly she lacked the cheekbones for it, but at least she had stopped braiding her long hair and now let it hang free. At the moment the wind was not agreeing with her decision and she had to pull hair out of her eyes before she tripped and landed on her face. It also worried her that her parents would kill her if she cut it all off, and even though she'd
successfully fled to BC, she was still concerned about their reactions if they found out. Up until she and Naomi actually boarded the bus a little over a week ago, she hadn't been convinced they would ever let her go. It all worked out though, and here she was, rushing across the university for her first day of classes.
She did stumble on the stairs going up to the Academic Quadrangle, she was wearing a long hand sewn blue cotton skirt with a buttoned up white blouse and flat canvas sneakers. She realized now that she looked alarmingly like a character from one of her favorite book series, Little House on the Prairie. Her parents still dictated her wardrobe, although at 18 and out from under their thumbs, she was now determined to start buying her own clothing. She passed a beautiful girl with short black hair, a short skirt, knee high leather boots and dark made up eyes. She turned her head and almost tripped again. She felt like an idiot, staring, but yeah, she really needed to update her church mouse wardrobe. Those boots...those gorgeous boots!
Simon Fraser University itself was a series of blunt, grey concrete buildings set in steps down the gentle slope of Burnaby Mountain. It was designed in the sixties by architect Arthur Erickson, and was considered one of the pinnacle achievements of his career. Sarah researched the university before their move and devoured every brochure they had given her in the student services building. She came up here a few days ago to map out her classrooms and figure out which bus stop to get off at. She and Naomi had wandered the quiet campus and marveled at the architecture and sweeping views of the mountains to the North and Vancouver to the South. It was exhilarating to be here, on her own, pursuing her dreams.