Pre- (Ivy League) School

Chapter 5
Sarah (Cont.)

Chapter Description: Sarah reflects on the past and arrives at the hospital.

The drive to the hospital was very tough. She couldn’t stop thinking about everything that happened with Emily these past 18 years. How proud she was of her for her intelligence, beauty, and charisma. She watched her grow from a sandy haired toddler to an Uber-competent adult ready to take on the world.

Just in the last few years she saw her daughter really blossom, had her first kiss, her first boyfriend, go to the prom and homecoming. There wasn’t a room too big or a challenge too insurmountable to her. She had just been accepted to her dream school, Harvard, among many other acceptances. Ever since she got that, she had been anxious to finally get past high school and move on to the next stage of her life.

Sarah never felt like she pressured Emily into her busybody lifestyle, it had just come naturally to her. She was happy to see her daughter had such a drive to succeed. But Sarah saw in Emily much that others did not. At home, Emily was much more relaxed, but was telling her family a lot more than she let show. She felt almost burned out, that she had so much going on that she didn’t think was sustainable. Her parents told her she didn’t have to take on so much, but Emily couldn’t stop her compulsion to never slow down.

She had begun babysitting in middle-school, for her younger brother, for his friends, and for people around the neighborhood that knew her. Emily had told her mother that by age 14 she thought she had changed more diapers than she had ever worn. Sarah doubted that, but did the math in her head and it definitely seemed possible.

Sarah was 45 and had led a very modest life, waiting a much longer time than she had thought to have children. She became a stay at home mom following Emily’s birth, previously being a secretary for shipping company, checking manifests and looking for discrepancies. Compared to that, motherhood had been a breeze. Her husband was a manager at a local bank branch, who brought home enough to keep their growing family happy, but had gone through lean times as well.

She snapped back, and looked at the lines passing on the road and realized that she was in total auto-pilot, she hadn’t thought about anything on the road for minutes now. This trip down memory lane had grounded her in reality, and she now realized that maybe she was just seeing things when she saw that baby being carried out, wrapped in the shirt that composed a makeshift blanket. Her daughter was resourceful, maybe she had escaped the building? Even if she was still in there somehow, there had been no bodies reported, so no one was quite sure what even went on inside.

She pulled up to the gate for the parking garage, grabbed a ticket and pulled in. She saw that her husband and son had just pulled in, and hugged them tightly for a few moments, then they began to head inside, scrapbook in tow.

The receptionist had thought they had come to visit an elderly patient, since those were the only people that came in with scrapbooks, to jog the memory of their elderly relatives who had forgotten more than they had remembered. She began to direct them to the elderly ward, but they had to inform the receptionist that they were there to see the babies that had been brought in from Marble Hills. She directed them to the makeshift infant ward and informed them that they might not be let in. They thanked the receptionist and headed up to the third floor.

When they arrived at the door, they joined several other groups of parents, though it seemed as if Amy had not arrived yet. They were being refused at the door by two police officers. It seemed as though they were never going to be let through. But then a high ranking official arrived at the hospital, and told the officer to let the parents through. 

It seemed that the investigators had viewed the surveillance tape at the school, and had discovered the true, unbelievable nature of what had happened.