Song for this part: "The Caterpillar," The Cure:
Now, in what she’d once supposed to be the middle of nowhere, sitting on that white fence, Saoirse tried to stop crying and wondered why this house had stuck in her mind-- why it was here. She got down off the fence, and looked around. It looked just as she remembered it -- of course -- and she could not find any detail that was out of place or off kilter.
The grass was yellowed. It was fall, mid-autumn. She tried to think back to the restaurant that they’d been in, to her house, and tried to think what the season was.
It had been summer when they got on the plane to go on vacation.
The grass snapped and quivered under her bare feet. Why are they bare? She wondered. She walked away from the two-lane country highway stretching, behind her, off in either direction.
She wondered whether she was alone here. The sidewalk cement was cold under her bare feet, cold stored up through the chilly autumn night and sealed in by frost in the morning, only slowly released during the day. She turned around then, looking for the sun. It should be off directly behind her, setting, shouldn’t it? They’d been eating dinner at the restaurant. Instead, it was high in the sky, just past where noon might be and her shadow was small below her feet. She turned back to the house and stepped onto the porch.
What am I supposed to do here? She wondered, and pressed the doorbell.
She waited and realized she was holding her breath. Nothing happened.
Where had the people gone? Where are they? Had they been here at all? When she’d driven by with Ansel, after all, she’d seen nobody living here. If the After was populated entirely by what she wanted…
… but it was Ansel who was dead, wasn’t it? She reminded herself. Only she wasn’t so sure, and looked to where the horses had been as she heard a whinny. Two horses stood at the fence again. They looked like the horses she remembered but horses look like horses she thought and rang the bell again.
Could I put someone in here? As she thought that she had to admit to herself: it was not Ansel who was dead. Ansel was not dead and Stephanie was not dead and
“I thought everything was supposed to be perfect here!”
It was not a question. It was a challenge. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she stabbed, savagely, at the doorbell. As she did so, she realized she was not angry. She wanted to boil up anger inside her but could not find it in the swirl of thought. So she mimicked what anger looked like and felt like and she scowled as her tears dried again and she pressed the doorbell one two three four times, ringing it over and over.
“I thought everything was supposed to be perfect here,” she said, more quietly, speaking to the door and then leaning her head against it, feeling the cool of the wood against her forehead and swallowing hard with a throat that felt sore for just a moment and then felt fine.
She tried the door, then, and it opened, leading into a hallway paved with blonde-wood boards that shone with the feeling of softness which only very old, very-much-walked on wood gets. She longed to feel it under her toes and so she put her right foot forward and touched it, stepping inside. The hallway was empty. A stairway led upstairs, off to her right, and a few steps down was a doorway to another room. A door at the end of the hallway was solid and blocked her view; another door off to the right was closed, also.
Standing in the hall, she saw on the walls lighter areas in the paint, rectangular and square, where pictures would have hung. She saw scuff marks on the floor near the door where boots and shoes would be kicked off. She saw the frayed ends of carpeting where knees and feet wore it down on the stairs. She wondered again where are they and moved on into the living room, off to her left, with a large picture window letting in the sunlight and shining on more hardwood floors and a fireplace. There was an area on the floor, more pale and demarcated where an oval-shaped rug had sat. More rectangles, larger, marked the yellow-painted walls out here, walls that were faded now to the color of old dried sunflowers. She moved through the room quickly and saw the fireplace was clean and that there were markings where fireplace tools had hung in a rack. The rack was there; the tools were not.
She went through the empty alcove off the kitchen that would be a dining room and then into the kitchen, all bare cupboards and hooks and more rectangles. The kitchen was painted blue. It was probably a sky-blue at one time but had slowly gone gray-blue, the color blue would be if blue existed only in the winter. The refrigerator was there, an old one, only about five feet tall. She opened it. It was empty and somewhat mottled looking, as though it had not been cleaned for a long time until one day someone had tried their best. There was no stove. There were drapes hanging in the kitchen and she pushed them aside to look out the back window where she could see a swingset, the swings brightly dangling in the sunlight. She went through the other door and found herself back in the front hall.
The carpet on the stairs as she started up was soft but matted down under her feet. She ran her hand over the rail as she walked. It, too, was worn smooth with years and hands and toys sliding on it. There were little holes in the wall, she saw now, nail holes previously used for holding up pictures or decorations or, at the bend in the stairs at the base, probably a coat rack. A small window at the base of the stairs let light up onto her path. She walked up and the stairs curved left. Two doors on the right, two doors on the left. The first door on the right let into a small, empty room. The second door on the right, too. Both empty, both bland. She looked at the two doors on the other side, and chose the one in front of her, at the end of the hall.
This would be the master bedroom. She went in, and realized it took up most of the front of the house. It was not carpeted. There was a fireplace here, too, a continuation of the chimney from down below. The two windows were there. The one on the left was empty, a small wooden ledge looking out of the house. The one on the right, though, had a cushion in it. On the cushion was a pillow, and a cup of coffee. And a book.
She walked over.
The coffee was hot. It still steamed. It was the color of the coffee that she would make, with just a little cream.
The book was the one she’d planned on reading on vacation.
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