Still 4 days left in the contest: Comment on this post! You could win a book or magazine subscription (details here) and you'll be making me happy (details on that here.)
Song for this part: "Do It Again," The Kinks:
All around her were the same trees that she had seen in her vision. The car had stopped, although the engine was still running. The air in the car felt still, and humid, and thick and wet. It felt like the breath of trees.
She looked around, noting all the details. The ticking of the car engine as it idled. The scraping sound of Chuck’s shoes on the back of her seat. Ansel’s hands, sitting flat on his legs, wedding ring on his left ring finger. Stephanie’s head craned to the left in the rearview mirror. The flutter of sunlight through the leaves.
Saoirse opened her door.
“Everyone out,” she decided. They got out and stood there, waiting.
“Is this the spot?” Ansel asked. “Where you saw him?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It was from further away in my… vision… but I think this is the spot.” Saoirse held her hand up to shield her eyes and looked around in the distance, trying to see if this were the spot or if the spot was about a quarter-mile away as it had been when she’d seen it. Then she realized that the sun wasn’t in her eyes and lowered her hand, a little sheepish. She wondered if the sun could be in her eyes, here. Only if she wanted it to be? “It’s the spot. He was standing by this tree.” She shuffled over and waded through the ferny underbrush, and looked up. “He was touching it.”
“Feeling it?” asked Stephanie.
“No, he had his hand on it, like this,” she held her hand out to the tree and just before it touched the palm, she stopped. What would she feel? She reached a little further, put her palm on the bark, and shut her eyes tightly.
It felt like bark.
She opened her eyes again. “And he was looking up at it. That’s all I could tell. That’s all I could see.”
“Is he still here?” asked Stephanie. She held Chuck’s hand.
“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. She listened. “I don’t think so.” What had William Howard Taft been doing here? “Spread out,” she said. “Look for… something.”
They didn’t question the directive. Saoirse looked at Ansel, who smiled at her. He closed his car door and turned to his right, stepping carefully through the growth. Stephanie and Chuck moved off towards the back of the car. Stephanie had stopped holding his hand; Saoirse was about to say something, but then thought What could happen to him, here? He’s either already dead and nothing worse can happen, nothing BAD can happen, or he’s not here at all.
She turned back to the tree that she thought William Howard Taft had been touching. She put her hands on it again, both hands this time, and pressed against it. She leaned her forehead against it. She tried to picture again the scene as she’d envisioned it. She had been in the After for only about a day now but had twice seen William Howard Taft and had been taken places by him. He must, must, know something, she thought. The bark of the tree was scraping her forehead. She heard footsteps around her, her family receding in the forest as they looked for something for her.
She stood there, head against the tree, and tried to just think. A leaf tickled her right calf. She heard the leaves stirring around her, in a slight breeze. She remembered the desert. The tidal pool. The ocean. She tried to cast her mind back: how had she gotten them here? If everything was exactly the way she wanted it here, and that was a big if, then shouldn’t she know already what William Howard Taft was doing here? Why he was appearing to her in visions?
She opened her eyes and looked around again. Ansel was about twenty feet away, swishing his foot around and brushing aside branches as though he was looking for a golf ball. Stephanie had come back to the car and was sitting on the trunk and looking at her.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for. I’m not even sure who William Howard Taft is,” she told Saoirse by way of explaining her lack of effort.
Then she wondered, if he was, if he had died, too, then wasn’t he better off here, where everything he ever would want would be given to him?
And if so, wasn’t she better off here?
Suddenly, she had a crazy notion that if the After was Heaven, and Heaven was in the sky, then maybe she should dig down, just keep digging down and down and down until she fell through the bottom of the After and landed back on Earth. She tried to take a deep breath and wondered if she’d inhaled any air at all.
She looked off to her right then, and saw William Howard Taft talking to Chuck. Chuck was standing and staring wide-eyed at William Howard Taft, one finger in his little mouth, the other hand held up behind his head. William Howard Taft said something, smiled, and tousled Chuck’s hair. Then he stood up and disappeared.
Saoirse ran over there and knelt down in front of Chuck, feeling the moist dirt release water and her knees getting wet. She turned Chuck to her and held him by the shoulders.
“What did he say to you?” she asked, nicely.
Chuck just stared at her.
“Did he tell you what he was doing here?”
Chuck just stared.
Stephanie walked up behind her and knelt down, too. She looked at Chuck and then at Saoirse.
“There’s no footprints,” she said. Saoirse looked and saw she was right. Chuck’s footprints were there, and when Saoirse stood up, there were knee prints from her own knees (but not, she saw, any mud-stains or smudges on her knees from the damp earth) but no footprints from William Howard Taft.
“Also,” Stephanie said, “I don’t know if Chuck can answer you.”
Because I don’t want him to, thought Saoirse, but she did want him to answer her, very much. Or thought she wanted that. She was confused and stood up, fists clenched at her sides. “How does this stupid place work,” she said. “How does it work and how can I get out of it?”
She did not expect an answer. She sighed and looked down at Chuck.
“You could answer if I really wanted you to answer, couldn’t you?”
He just looked at her and dug in his ear.
She turned back around towards the car, then turned around again and picked up Chuck, hugging him to her.
“I don’t want you to answer.” She looked at him. “I want you to be like this and I want us to be getting off the plane and everything’s fine.”
He leaned in and put his forehead against hers. They touched noses. She loved that he did that. She smiled and wanted to cry but she didn’t, not right away, and she wondered if she could cry, here. She felt like she should be able to cry if she wanted to, if she really wanted to. But how could she cry? What was she crying about? She wanted to cry because this was not her life… but it was. It was her life, her family, her son pressing his forehead to her own, all her life except that she was still standing in the middle of this forest, and William Howard Taft had been here – twice – and those parts were not her life. And not what she wanted.
She carried Chuck back to the car, sat him on the trunk, but quickly pulled him off of the trunk and put him on the ground. The mud, she knew, was squishy and wet and he’d like that and she didn’t have to worry about laundry anyway. She decided to get the keys to open the trunk but found she had them in her hand. She opened up the trunk and wondered: Why wouldn’t it just open when I wanted it to open? Why do I need keys? Why do things have to be locked in the After?
In the trunk was a picnic basket and she pulled it out and began unfolding the blanket.
“Are we staying here?” asked Ansel.
“Why not?” asked Saoirse. She swallowed, hard, and looked at him. “Isn’t here as good as anywhere?”
“Sure. I suppose.”
“Why is it?” Saoirse asked him, suddenly.
“Why is what?” Ansel asked.
“Why is here as good as anywhere for you? Sure, it might be good enough for me, but why is this your After, also? How can we want the exact same things?”
Ansel sat down and ate a sandwich.
“I don’t know,” he said, simply.
Saoirse wasn’t satisfied with that but did not know what to say. Stephanie sat down, too, and Saoirse looked at her for a long while.
“Do you remember?” Saoirse asked her. Stephanie knew what she meant.
“No,” she said.
They both looked at Ansel.
“Dad?”
Ansel looked away.
Saoirse did not press him and looked at Stephanie again.
“Do you want to be here?”
Stephanie did not, as she might have in life, play it dumb; she did not say “What, here?” and look around the forest. She did, though, shrug, and said “I don’t have a choice,” but then thought about that and said “Why would I want one?”
“Why would you want a choice?” Saoirse asked.
“Right.”
Saoirse was stumped by the question as well as the fact that there was no answer she could think of. She dropped some crumbs from her sandwich. She looked down and saw the crumbs were gone. She wondered if Stephanie meant she had no choice to be here in the After, or here in Saoirse’s woods in the After.
“It’s everything anyone wants,” said Stephanie. “Everything I could want, right here. Right now. Anytime. Why wouldn’t I want that? Why wouldn’t I choose, if I could, to be somewhere where nothing bad ever happens, where everything is exactly the way I like it, where I can do what I want when I want and how I want, and nobody is in my way and we never have to work and never have to suffer or be delayed or… hindered.” She took a bite of her sandwich and Saoirse waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
“But that’s not life,” said Saoirse. “It’s not the way things are supposed to be.”
“Mom,” said Stephanie, but paused.
Ansel leaned in, instead. “We’re not in life anymore.” He touched her knee.
Saoirse swallowed. “I know,” she said. “But I want to be. If this is supposed to be anything I want, it’s not. Because it’s not life.”
“I don’t know what you think is wrong with it,” Ansel said.
“Nothing is wrong with it,” Saoirse agreed. They sat in silence a moment. “That’s what I don’t like,” she admitted. “I don’t know how to say it, exactly, but it’s that, I think, that nothing is wrong with it. I guess I thought at first that I just missed being alive, and didn’t want to be … dead… but it’s not that, because I don’t feel dead, anyway. Stephanie’s right, this is perfect, or it’s supposed to be, and I don’t feel dead at all. I don’t feel like a spirit. I can sit here and eat my sandwich and feel the dirt underneath me, feel that and know that I’m not going to have to worry about these pants and I suppose I don’t have to worry, either, about tooth decay or getting fat from eating mayo on a sandwich, so it’s not that I miss life that way because this is life, only it’s better, I know.
“But it’s not. Even though I can sit here and eat a sandwich that I didn’t have to make and didn’t have to worry about spoiling and didn’t have to worry about having the grocery money to pay for it, it’s not perfect. So something’s not working for me…” her voice trailed off as she looked up from her sandwich, because when she looked up, she realized that William Howard Taft was standing there.
“Come with me,” he said, and leaned down and touched her shoulder.
0 comments:
Post a Comment