The next day she woke up with the room clear and bright and mostly empty. She sat up on the bed, her feet not reaching to the floor, sitting on the only furnishing in the room. When she slid down off the bed the floorboards were cool but not. She stretched and yawned once and looked at the window. The book was there, and a cup of coffee was there. She turn
ed back and the bed was not there. She wondered if there was any furniture in the rest of the house.
Then she wondered if the horses were outside. She went over to the window and picked up the cup of coffee and sipped it and found it to her liking again. Out on the lawn there was frost still on the grass in the shadows. Neither of the horses was at the fence and she could not see them anywhere.
She sat down in the window and watched the road as it laid there.
At the end of that day, she was still in the window. She put the coffee down as the sun turned red above the trees. She picked up the book and wondered how much, if any, she had read that day. Neither horse was there presently, although she had seen them once or twice throughout the day, she thought. She had not left the window seat that day.
The book had some of the corners of pages turned down, as she would sometimes do when she wanted to mark a page to later read something to Ansel, or sometimes the children. She turned to one of the pages in this book and looked to see what it was she might have wanted to remember later and read to someone but could not pick out a phrase that seemed to be important enough to remember.
She watched the sunset again and watched the moon come out again and watched the trees stand stolidly under the moonglow again and saw the horses walk by and when the lamp came on behind she stood up and realized that she was wearing the UW OSHKOSH t-shirt again and again could not remember what she had been wearing a moment before and again laid down in the bed, turned out the light, and slept.
It went on that way for some time. She lost track of the days and did not know if she should keep track of the days. Sometimes she wondered if she shouldn’t be doing something, trying to set out on the road, or maybe a horse, to find the rest of her family, but when she thought that she would realize that she had no car and could not ride a horse and did not know where they might be or how to get there from here; she was certain that this was the house she and Ansel had driven by, so long ago, but that certainty did not help her because she could not remember where her house -- their house-- and her family might be in relation to this place. It wouldn’t have helped anyway, if she knew what direction to go, as she could not think how to make a car appear. She ate nothing and was not hungry; she had her coffee and the book that each time she could not remember reading. She tried to not to think of what she should be doing because when she did, she got teary-eyed again and a lump came in her throat.
One day, she wondered if she had sent them all back or banished them or done whatever it is that happens to the people one creates in the After. She forced herself to consider the idea. It seemed the straw she had grasped at -- the idea that Ansel or someone else was dead instead of her and that she existed in someone else’s world -- was not correct. If it were, she reasoned, she could not have walked away from them and they would be here; if Ansel wanted her in the After, he could keep her there, couldn’t he? But thinking that had then made her wonder well, don’t I want him here? She followed that with the idea that she must not want Ansel around because he was not here, which had made her cry again.
She’d noticed that when she cried, it rained.
That was one day. On another day she made an effort to determine whether she had made everyone else disappear when she’d gotten up and said she wanted to be alone. If she could do that, if saying something, could make it happen, why was she just sitting here day after day after day? Why couldn’t she make a car appear, or make her family appear and bring them here? Why hadn’t they been here? Why weren’t they here now? Were they out there looking for her?
Thinking about those things had not made them happen.
A different day, she tried to piece together why there was no furniture here and what had been shown in the pictures on the wall.
Each time, she stopped thinking about these things because they made her cry and that made it rain and that made the day go by faster and she did not want the days to go by faster. She did not want the days to go by at all, and it seemed they did not, not really, as each day seemed to be about the same as the day before. The sun set at about the same time as far as she could tell, each day-- she was only guessing because she did not know what time it was, ever, without any clocks here. On the wall in the room a faded round spot might have been where a clock hung, but it might have been only a mirror. It did not matter what had been there, because now there were no clocks in the house. Day after day it was just her, the window seat, the coffee, the book, and when she needed it, the bed and nightstand and table trio.
And, one day, a distant sound, one she heard just before the lamp came on.
It was like the wind, rushing, she thought, and she looked out the window. It was the first thing that had been different in a long time and it caught her attention.
It was not the wind. It was a voice.
It was a voice from very far away.
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