Becoming Sarah

chapter FIVE


So Sarah was a trust fund kid. That took care of my money worries. Nine thousand dollars sounded like an obscene amount of cash. It was just a few days past the first of the month, so Sarah's account balance should be high. I could live like a queen on that kind of money and take care of my mother, too.

Also in the shoebox I found a handful of pay stubs, postcards, and photos. The pay stubs showed that Sarah had worked a few hours a week at a bookstore downtown, for just above minimum wage. The pictures showed her with female friends, mostly - at a nightclub, in Halloween costumes, in caps and gowns at a graduation ceremony. Several showed her with an older couple, the woman bony and expensively dressed, the man silver haired and sophisticated. Her parents? No siblings - apparently she, like me, was an only child.

“I got the perfect daughter already,” my mother liked to say, “so who needed more kids?” Anyway, maybe she hadn’t had the chance. My dad took off when I was two and though she’d had boyfriends she never remarried.

A wave of homesickness swept through me, but I pushed it away.

Also in the shoebox was Sarah’s passport. I flipped through the pages and studied the stamps. She’d been to Mexico, Thailand, the Bahamas, Italy and France. I’d always wanted to go to France. I watched an old Audrey Hepburn movie on TV once, when I was 10, and ever since I’d daydreamed about Paris. It looked so romantic with all the narrow streets and little shops. I wanted to walk along the Seine, to wander through the Louvre. On my bedroom wall, I had a poster of a bunch of people sitting outside a little French bistro. I liked stare at it and imagine I was there with them.

I’d even picked French to study in school, though everyone told me I was crazy. “You live in California,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You’d use Spanish every single day. It might help you get a job. Who on earth are you going to speak French with?”

I could be stubborn, though, and on that issue I was. I couldn’t get that picture out of my head: me drinking coffee at a little table outside a bistro in Paris, just watching the people walk by.

I put the shoebox back where I’d found it and crossed the room to the bed. On the bedside table, in silver frames, were several photos. Sarah, laughing, her arm around a guy with blond hair and rock-star stubble on his jaw. The blond guy again, grinning into the camera lens. He’d rolled up his sleeves to show bronzed and muscular forearms. In the photos, they looked like the perfect couple.

In the spare bedroom, I switched on Sarah’s MacBook and went through her files, but I didn’t find much, just a few grocery lists, downloaded photos and music files. If only she’d kept a journal. More than anything, I wanted a peek inside Sarah’s head.

I went to Facebook, but it asked for a password, and after a few attempts at guessing, I gave up. Whatever she’d used, it wasn’t as simple as her phone password. I guessed she’d have a lot of friends, but unless she’d decided to broadcast her deepest thoughts, I wouldn’t get to know her better on Facebook anyway.

I wandered through the apartment, poking into drawers and opening cabinets. What else could I learn? I found a leather-bound organizer and set it aside to look through later. In the spare room, above a bookshelf, I found a framed diploma from Ithaca College in New York: a bachelor’s degree in English. I let my fingers walk over the spines of Sarah's books. Novels, mostly mysteries. A few college textbooks: short story collections, classics, lots of poetry. The spines were creased and broken. She’d read most of them, then; maybe she was rich and spoiled, but she wasn't stupid.

At random I pulled out a volume of poetry by Sylvia Plath. The book fell open to one dog-eared page. “Lady Lazarus” was the name of the poem. Someone, I assumed Sarah, had highlighted a few lines:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

I read the rest of the poem. Dark, depressing stuff, all about suicide and death.

The bathroom was revealing, too. The medicine cabinet held several prescriptions - antibiotics, past their expiration date; a skin cream; eardrops; sleeping pills; and Zoloft, an antidepressant, prescribed by a Dr. Shin. Her psychiatrist? It made sense. She’d skipped her appointments. Maybe she’d stopped taking her pills. If she was depressed, it explained why she might have tried to kill herself. I closed the medicine cabinet. I’d had plenty of problems, before, but I’d never considered suicide, not seriously.

She’d had it all, Sarah had. Beauty. Money. Two parents. A gorgeous boyfriend. A college education. Yet, apparently, it hadn’t been enough.

I took myself out to lunch at a café on Haight Street. As shell-shocked and awful as I felt, there was something to be said for being 24 years old, fashionably dressed, with money burning a hole in my pocket. The waitress ushered me immediately to a big table by the window; had I been 16, in my usual baggy jeans and hooded navy blue sweatshirt, overweight and plain, I doubt I would have gotten such good service.

I craved a burger and fries but ordered a sandwich and salad. I didn't buy the idea of a higher being; I never had. But if some force had put my consciousness into Sarah, whether as reward, punishment or random chance, it made sense to treat this body well.

I soaked up the sunshine, savored my lunch, and watched the parade of life outside on the sidewalk. A girl with hot pink hair. A guy on a skateboard. Two middle-aged women, holding hands. A dreadlocked mom with a stroller. A homeless man, leading a cat on a leash.

Life was all out there, under my nose, and I was grateful to breathe in and out, to chew and swallow. I was glad to still be around to love my mom and Maria, even if they didn’t know it yet.

But part of me was also exhausted just thinking about what lay ahead. I figured I’d pretend, for now, that I was Sarah – at least to her friends and family. Meanwhile, I’d figure out a way to get my old life back. There was no reason I shouldn’t have the best of both worlds.