The Sarahs

“He was on a package tour with a stop at the Rhine Falls,” the solicitor says over the phone, long-distance. “He slipped.”

Sarah takes in the news of her father’s death. She hasn’t thought about him in years and is surprised to learn that he was still alive. Prescott—a stuffy name. No, Preston. No, Prescott. She was only an infant when he abandoned them, and hardly older when her mother took her to live in the U.S.

“He bequeathed his property and investments to you,” the solicitor says.

Listening in on the call from Sarah’s cramped kitchenette, her three backup singers sway their sequined hips in unison.

—You’re rich now, baby, they sing. Rich, rich, our girl’s so rich.

Sarah takes a coach flight to the UK. The backup singers, also all named Sarah, are pitch-perfectly confident as they saunter in first class sipping Moët & Chandon. They place orders for duty-free chocolates and Lancôme fragrances that are handed to them in velvet bags as they disembark. Customs? The three Sarahs don’t bother.

Sarah’s father’s property is a two-story corner building with a beauty salon in the front half of the ground floor. The backup singers look up the village road, then at each other, then at Sarah.

“I know,” Sarah says, dropping her duffel bag to the pavement. “Not what you were expecting.”

A long hallway leads into the empty house; her father’s will stipulated that she be given a blank slate. It’s touching to know her father was thinking of her—at least within the embrace of a legal document. She wishes her father’s will clarified whether he really abandoned them, as her mother always maintained, or if it was her mother who left him, as Sarah has come to suspect.

Intoxicated with jet lag, Sarah collapses onto a cushioned patio glider in the neglected garden and falls asleep under the scalloped, floral-patterned canopy. She doesn’t wake until three a.m., her clothes damp. Her backup singers are nowhere to be found.

She goes out and explores the village by moonlight, turning around when she hits paddocks.

—Will she stay, will she go, who’s to know, know, know?

The three Sarahs stand in the road, dressed in puffy jet-black jackets, though they still bare legs she’d die for.

—(Softer) Will she stay, will she go, who’s to know, know, know?

A nightingale answers, though it could be any sleepless bird. Crossing a stone bridge, Sarah discovers that it spans a canal. She goes down to the tow path and walks alongside the narrowboats that are moored for the night. Floating on the nearly still water, they remind her of coffins. She wonders if the canal is deep enough to drown in. She’s not the best swimmer.

—Come home, home, home, the backup singers implore from atop the bridge. She complies.

In the morning she’s pleased to discover that the canal sweeps past the far end of her property, though on closer inspection she finds it’s not the canal after all but a strip of boggy land with a stand of crooked trees at the far end and a farmer’s field beyond.

Hearing an endless clanking of dull bells, Sarah walks through the house and out the front entrance. The street is packed with sheep. A border collie leaps from one sheep’s back to another, filling Sarah with a terrible urge to likewise run barefoot atop the avenue of fleece. The flock move down the street and out the other end of the village with little fuss. Two men with a wheelbarrow and a spade follow to pick up any droppings, of which there are, considerately, none.

With shearing on her mind, Sarah enters the beauty salon on the ground floor of her building. “Do you take drop-ins?” she asks the hairdresser.

“It’ll be a bit,” the woman says, nodding to the client in the chair who’s having her hair colored.

“I just moved in upstairs,” Sarah says. “I suppose I’m your new landlady. Sarah.”

—Upstairs, upstairs in her father’s house, the three Sarahs sing from outside, shuffling back and forth with perfect grace.

“Was Preston your father?” asks the woman in the chair.

Sarah nods and admonishes herself. Preston, not Prescott. Preston Preston Preston.

“Sorry to hear about your da,” says the hairdresser, holding out her hand. “Deirdre. What are you looking to do?”

Sarah examines herself in the mirror, tired of everything she sees. “Shave it all off,” she says. Her backup singers clutch their lustrous hair.

“You must be joking,” says the woman in the chair. “I’d kill for what you have.”

Deirdre rests a hand on the woman’s shoulder and turns to Sarah. “They sell these frozen caps you can wear. Keeps the hair from falling out. My sister-in-law—”

“I don’t have cancer,” Sarah says. “I just want a fresh start.”

Sarah knows about cancer. Her last partner lost his hair from chemo. It was a tough year of treatment made tougher after he left her. She occasionally checks his socials for signs of a relapse.

“As soon as I’m done here, we’ll shave it all,” Deirdre says. “I’ve always wanted to do it myself, but I haven’t the skull for it.”

The woman in the chair startles upright, her head shimmering with foil.

Sarah takes the train into the city the following day where she splurges on an electric bicycle. Her shaved head feels the size of a melon; she feels the breeze lick at every recovering follicle. Heading uphill, depleted of charge, the bicycle becomes mortal and mundane. She strains at the pedals as she nears the office of her father’s solicitor. The three Sarahs form a train as they hold on to the back of her seat. They’re dressed in roller derby outfits of pure spark and sizzle.

—She’s workin’ it, they sing, letting go long enough to double clap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah—she’s workin’ it.

As it’s a Saturday, the solicitor isn’t in. Sarah leaves a message asking him to look into whether her father’s property—her property—extends into the bog. She imagines draining it, amending the soil, and letting gardening fill her days. She checks her list and turns her attention next to furniture, and her lack of it. She finds a shop and, with her father’s money, orders piece after piece without second-guessing herself. Back in the village, she visits the dentist for a long overdue cleaning and cavity filling. Though he seems too young to even be practicing, the dentist turns out to have also been her father’s dentist. His recollections of her father are purely periodontal. He asks if her father is buried in the churchyard; he doesn’t recall a service for him. Sarah adds it to her list of unknowns. Thinking of cemeteries and her mouth’s tombstones of teeth, she wants to tell the dentist something she does know: that in Japan a cemetery is called city of tomorrow. But the dentist has the polisher on and she only remembers the tidbit when she’s back out in the silence of the street.

She calls the solicitor and is told her father was cremated. She feels she should mourn her father in some way, but she knows so little about him. She knows that he suffered from priapism as a schoolboy, which ostracized him until it was fixed. Why her mother told her this, Sarah doesn’t know, and can’t ask now. It may be a lie. It probably is. The one true story she knows is that her father drowned in the Rhine en route to an island sticking out of the rapids. She’s watched videos of the Rhine Falls, seen boats shuttling tourists to a rocky sliver of land standing erect at the base of wide white froth.

Sarah’s new furniture arrives and highlights the shabbiness of her inherited property: the scuffed flooring, the long cracks in the plaster, the grease-yellow hue atop the magnolia-colored paint where walls meet ceiling. She should have had the floors sanded, the walls re-plastered and painted, new windows put in, the heating upgraded—steps a proper homeowner takes when they know they will be living somewhere for as good as eternity. Perhaps her subconscious knows she won’t be staying. Her backup singers slide out of the way of the men bringing in the dinette set. One man tries to get the tallest backup singer’s number, but she’s having none of that. She laughs and shoos him away.

The new sofa is enormous. The new reading chair beside it seems meant for a child. She tells herself to pay more attention to the scale of her decisions. “There,” she tells the sofa, as she makes an adjustment to the chair’s placement. “Now you have a pet chair to keep you company.”

Alone again, she wonders who emptied the house before her arrival. Her father, or a firm the solicitor employed to carry out the will’s stipulations? If her father had it emptied then perhaps his drowning was an act, not an accident. She imagines that he arranged for his Rhine-cleansed body to be cremated on a pyre in the woods in some atavistic ceremony. When you know so little about your father, possibilities abound.

At the solicitors again, Sarah learns that her father’s cremation took place in Switzerland under normal circumstances. His ashes were scattered on the Rhine by a friend who was also on the same holiday—though, technically, the scattering was done illegally. In the course of her appointment, Sarah also learns that the boggy land beyond the garden does not belong to her.

—A good thing, yeah, a good thing, sing the backup singers, eavesdropping outside the solicitor’s door.

“Do you know that in Japan a cemetery is called city of tomorrow?” Sarah asks.

The solicitor places a document in front of her to sign. “I do, in fact.” He reaches for his phone, swipes, and taps. “Ah, here. Read it a few years back. Pico Iyer mentioned it in Autumn Light.”

Sarah doesn’t understand how some people can stand to be so excruciatingly organized. She has the solicitor wire a thousand pounds to a friend to cover the effort of disposing of her belongings. She’s pulling a Preston, though instead of drowning she’ll stay put and try her hand at a new life.

—No one’s anyone without a past, her backup singers sing. Don’t let your past pass you by bye bye.

She receives a call from the solicitor the next day with a bit of good news. Some of the bog might be hers after all, though a surveyor would need to visit the property to be certain. Would she like him to arrange that? She would. She buys gardening tools and a tidy stack of bagged soil. When the surveyor arrives a week later, he informs Sarah that nearly half of her garden is actually within the farmer’s property line. The surveyor doubts the farmer cares, that anyone cares, which Sarah takes as freedom to extend the garden even farther into the bog. It’s the old adage: Good news? Bad news? Hard to say. Stay? Leave? Hard to know.

—Didn’t sign up for this, girl, didn’t sign up for this, the three Sarahs complain, one throwing down a spade, another a sun hat, a third kicking a bag of soil and leaving a small triangular divot. Thick mulch spills for a moment before clogging. The three Sarahs sulk at the edge of the garden, passing a cigarette between them.

Sarah hears the bleat of sheep. She takes off her shoes and strips off her socks, then runs to the door. But it’s a different flock passing through, the sheep dingier, uglier. If she were a sheep, she’d end up as one of these.

Deirdre waves to her from within her salon. Sarah waves back and considers cutting Deirdre’s rent, but that would only spark a friendship of obligation. Some people can’t be her friends, just as some fathers are never known. Sometimes the effects of cancer strike the partner who doesn’t lose their hair. Sometimes you feel like you’re living the wrong life, then an opportunity comes to live the alternate one, but it’s been stripped bare. Sometimes you need an entourage of backup singers to keep your life from unraveling, even if their presence means, unequivocally, that yours has. Sometimes, like a fool, you get your head shaved and think the act has meaning.

The solicitor calls to inquire whether there are any other matters of which he may be of service. That night she finds his invoices in the pile of ignored mail and realizes she’s in arrears, though she chooses to believe he doesn’t handle the accounts personally and that his call was purely a courtesy.

Staggering belief, the weather grows more damp. It puts the three Sarahs in a mood. They move gracelessly. One has begun drinking to excess during the day. Another spends an inordinate amount of time in the bath with romance novels, the door locked. The third has begun chain smoking. They don’t know what to do with her anymore. The three Sarahs need struggle, they need blues, they need to sing of heartache and cheating and loving and striving and respecting and lifting up and tearing down, but mostly of triumph and self-worth. They don’t know how to sing about slouching and watching British Netflix on a mobile phone until the battery dies. They don’t know how to sing about sleeping in until noon in the clothes you went to bed in, takeaway cartons like land mines all over the floor.

But Sarah feels she needs this downtime, this wallowing mourning and sadness—for what, she’s not sure. She doesn’t want heartache and cheating and loving and striving and respecting and lifting up and tearing down. Not yet.

She hands the three Sarahs her bank card and tells them to buy train tickets. “Find someone else to help for a while.”

They look at her uncertainly, though the tall one plucks the card from her hand quickly.

“Go,” Sarah says. “I have the bicycle. I promise to make an appointment with that therapist. I’ll be fine.”

—We believe, we believe, we believe in you girl, sing the three Sarahs as they saunter off through the garden and step across the bog, light as pretend, graceful as forever, their heels not even dimpling the mud.

The scalloped awning of the patio swing keeps Sarah dry from the arriving rain. She eats an orange, distractedly, while staring at the bog and contemplating her father’s boat journey and how loud it must have been, all that rushing water. She imagines he slipped and hit his head on the boat and then didn’t hear a thing as the Rhine filled his lungs. How she came to exist, what she was like in that first year, what love passed between them, the entire genesis of her identity—Prescott took that with him, just as her mother took her version with her. An orphan’s lament.

The rain begins to blow at an angle from which she can’t escape. She enters the house and sits in the little chair and finds that there’s still another wedge of orange left in her bowl, there amid the rinds. She focuses on the sweetness. She focuses on the distant clang of a canal boat’s bell. She clears her throat and, for the first time in years, maybe since she was a child, she hums a tune, finds the words, and attempts to sing.