Free The Moon Around Sarah by Paul Lederer Page A

guess!’ Don said from the doorway. ‘To find your sister! I only wish there was some way I could find to keep from returning her to the bosom of her loving family.’
    Don slammed the door behind him. Both brothers were yelling after him, but he paid no attention. He walked out into the windy, bright day. Fleet clouds still scudded past overhead, casting quick-running shadows. He had no idea of where he was going, what he was going to do. Except to know that he would find Sarah.

    All that Sarah could think of to do was to go back to the pier again. She saw that a few fishermen had returned now that the rain had stopped. There were flocks of wheeling, shrieking seagulls, and two pelicans winged slowly past, flying low over the blue ocean. The breeze was light; there were only a very few intermittent raindrops, but still she was very cold in her light butterfly-and-roses dress.
    The young man with the pictures had not come back. She knew he had gone to try to find Mother, but what if Mother were sick? Edward and Aunt Trish had dropped them off at the pier, surely they would come back some time to pick her up?
    It was more than a little confusing. They said they would come back, but Daddy had the car now. Eric had come back with a bloody face. Edward was walking with him through the rain. Where were they going? It was the rain, she decided. It confused everyone and they had become lost, as she had.
    Walking out on the pier, she came across a crippled bird. Not even a bird yet, really. It was bald all over, no larger than a mouse. It was trying to fly, but it was so small and hadn’t even real feathers yet – only a few black whiskers.
    She crouched and scooped it up in her hands. Where had it fallen from? One wing, if it could be called that, was broken. A tiny yellow beak opened and closed soundlessly crying. Its eyes were bright and terrified and it flapped around crazily, uselessly in her hands for a minute and then was still.
    It was dead. Sarah knew that. She knew what dead meant. It happened to babies too small and weak to live.
    Because they had told her that when Baby had died.
    That was when Sarah still had trouble walking because her insides hurt. When Baby had wanted her so-sore nipples and she had been taken into the parlor to sit near the fireplace in her bloody robe.
    Then Mother and Aunt Trish had gone up the stairs toward the room where Baby cried in her cradle. Mother carried an old silk curtain, one of those which had hung in the parlor when Grandfather had still been alive, and Aunt Trish had carried a pillow; they moved, grim shadows, up the firelit staircase.
    After a while, Baby stopped crying. Then it was time to take Baby into the basement.
    Baby had been too small, they said. Not strong enough for life. And it was true, of course, although Sarah remembered crying for a week afterward. Baby’s little arms were not right. Only that one soft and so-tiny hand reaching for her breast had any real fingers.
    Baby was so small. No larger than the bird in her hands, it seemed.
    Aunt Trish had screamed, ‘God, I never thought I could do such a thing!’ and she had thrown the pillow into the fireplace where it burned, smelling of fetid decay.
    Mother had gone away for a little while then, and when she came home she was sick again. Some man with a big truck had brought her back to the house, but he didn’t come in. He just drove away with his radio loud, and Mother had stumbled upstairs and Edward had helped her move Baby’s cradle out to the shed.
    In the middle of that blue, moonless night, Sarah had gone out naked and taken the cradle out of the shed, moving it down to the basement where she dug Baby up and placed her in her bed. She had put her little pink blanket over her and sung her favorite little baby-song until dawn, when they had come down and found her there.
    They had taken the cradle away and then smashed it and burned it in the fireplace. But no one could take Baby away, and so she still