Chapter Seven: At the Farm House (pages 21-25)

Song for this part: "Breathe Me," Sia:

It was a voice that was distant and small but sustained and growing closer. She tried to hear what it was saying. Was it calling the same thing over and over? Was it just howling? She could not tell.

She got a thrill and wondered if Ansel had come looking for her. Had she wanted him to come looking for her? It caused a lump in her throat, a muted sorrow, when she realized that Ansel in all this time had not come looking for her and it hurt her. It was not that she believed Ansel did not want to come looking for her. She knew it was not that. Instead, she had come to realize that the absence of Ansel looking for her meant that she did not want him to come looking for her.

And she tried to tell herself that she did not want him to come looking for her because she wanted him to be alive and to be well and to not be moping around the farm house with her. She wanted to believe that and didn’t entirely.

But the voice, the calling that she could hear, was that Ansel? Did that mean that she really did want him to come looking for her? Or that Ansel, too, had died and was here, in the After with her, that they were together because they were meant to be together?

She could not decide if that would be better, or worse. Just as she could not decide whether it was good or bad that she did not have her family with her, that she had left them behind. In the days she sat on the window seat and read and sipped coffee and looked at the horses, she had periodically been proud of herself that at least the initial version of the After had included Ansel and her family and then had choked up that the current version she was in did not. What was she supposed to do here, if not spend time with her family?

She peered out the window in the strange almost-dark of sunset, the twilight that made it difficult to see, even though it appeared perfectly light out: it was the kind of light that filled the last part of day just before sunset, light that acted as if the darkness was there already and so the light was not really trying anymore. She gazed into what soon would be shadows. She looked at the fence where the horses were not today, and she watched the woods. She heard the yell, growing louder and louder. There was no doubt that it was someone calling. It was someone calling out, in a sustained yell, growing louder and louder. She wondered how the person could maintain that yell for so long. She could not pick out the word and could not identify the voice.

It might be Ansel.

She hoped it was Ansel and then hoped that the hoping counted. For something.

The voice grew louder as she stared out the window. Her knuckles were tight around the coffee cup and she could feel them, she knew that in life they would hurt but here they did not. She expected Ansel to drive up or stumble out of the woods or maybe ride up on one of the horses with the other next to him waiting for her.

Still the voice grew and now it could plainly be heard and she wondered how far away it had been at the start, and wondered if it was a voice at all, it was so sustained and so constant, a groan, almost, but too loud, a cheer, almost, but too sad.

Saoirse had attended only one football game in college, and the only part she remembered liking was the part during the kickoff when the crowd, as the team started to line up to kick the ball, would begin a low rumbling yell that grew and grew in volume and in pitch oooooooohhhhoohohohohohohoOHOHOHOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH! Hitting fever pitch and highest volume as the kick went off, at which point the crowd would fall silent, and this reminded her of that and she heard it growing and coming closer. Her eyes remained glued to the outside, peering from her window seat.

She hoped it was Ansel.

She hoped that the fact that the sound had made her think of the school yell was a hint, a clue that it was Ansel, that it was so because Ansel and her college memories were tied up together.

She listened and stared and the sound was almost identical to the college-kickoff-yell. She stared at the woods, at the road, at the fence, as it grew.

As the sound hit fever pitch, she saw William Howard Taft carrying a bundle of something fall right past her window, dropping straight down from above at great speed only to fall flat on his stomach on the ground and lie motionless. And the yell was silenced.