“Why?” she asked.“Why do you want to go back?And where do you want to go back?You know, life has passed you by, or passed your era by, at least.”Saoirse wondered:Could he go back to his own time?Resume his life again?Could she?What would she be going back to?How long had it been since she died?She tried to remember but could not; she could not even remember dying.And now when she tried to count the days she’d been here in the After the number just faded into the haze of all the time spent watching the horses and maybe reading.
“I know that, I suppose.I know that I would not be going back to my old life.Or even my old me.I don’t suppose that if I can get back to life I would still be the president and a person of eminence.But I still … want … to go back.”William Howard Taft spoke deliberately.
They were walking through the carnival, and everyone else around them seemed perfectly normal.Everyone at the carnival seemed as though they were having a day at the carnival, as though they were alive, and nobody acted in any way that she thought was unusual.They ate corn dogs.They squirted water guns at clowns’ mouths to fill up balloons.She and Chuck and all the normal-seeming people rode on the Tilt-A-Whirl and Chuck mushed into her as the car spun around, and Chuck squealed, exactly the way other small children did with their mothers or fathers, and she could not tell the difference between them and her and Chuck but she knew there was a difference between them all and her life.
She could tell that there was a difference between the way Chuck held her hand in this carnival in the front yard of her house on the island in space, and the way Chuck had held her hand when they had gone to the grocery store before… she had come here, to the After. Physically, it felt the same, but there was something different anyway about it.
She needed to pay for their rides, for some reason. She wondered about that even as she found she had the money she needed, discovering at the last moment that she just then had her purse.
When she played a game with Chuck, she won.She’d never won a carnival game before this and tried not to be disappointed that her imagination, that a place where everything was the way she wanted it, where anything, she assumed, was possible, was set up so that she could win a giant stuffed animal?
Nobody noticed that there was a former president sitting on the front porch and not joining in the carnival, a president who wore an outdated suit and steepled his fingers and who would periodically disappear into the house, a house, too, that nobody at the carnival seemed to think was oddly placed, just outside the carnival.
Saoirse did not talk with William Howard Taft the rest of that day. She spent the day at the carnival with Chuck, and it did not make her sad to hold his hand, to smell his hair, to watch him petting the ponies while waiting for his turn to ride one.She did not worry about putting him on the little roller-coaster that she would never have allowed him to ride before -- although she did feel a pang at the thought that in life nobody would be there to protect the children (what if Ansel had actually died ,too?) but she tried to forget it as Chuck gave her a cotton-candy kiss and the day took on the feel of an old videotape of a family vacation, a strange almost-like-deja-vu sense coming over her as she carried Chuck when he got tired and watched him play games and slid down the Giant Slidewith him. The day felt as though she was experiencing it and remembering it and dreaming about it at the same time, or like she was having a realistic dream about a story someone had told her of their day at a carnival.
When she put Chuck to bed, he had a piece of caramel corn stuck to his cheek and she brushed it away and kissed his forehead.He smelt of sweat and popcorn oil and sunlight.She pulled the covers up and he was already fast asleep, hand clutching the crazy-straw he had bought to drink chocolate milk through, the milk curlicuing and swirling and twisting to get to him.
She then went outside and hugged herself in the chilly night air, feeling the dew on her bare feet, at first too cold and then not.
The carnival was gone.She wondered if it would be there in the morning.She wondered if Chuck would be.And William Howard Taft, who she had not seen since lunch time when he’d declined (politely) to join them for lunch. (He had, though, accepted the plate of funnel cake she’d given him, and had taken it inside to eat.)
As she thought over those events, and curled her toes in the dew, she stared up at the moon and wondered what Ansel was doing, and where.
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Song for this part: "Skating Away (On The Thin Ice Of A New Day)", Jethro Tull:
Saoirse ran outside trying to hold back her disappointment that it was not Ansel.Why,she wondered as she ran down the stairs and pulled open the front door and went onto the grass already wet with dew as the sun dropped below the horizon why if everything here is the way I want it is nothing ever the way I want it?Then she was kneeling by William Howard Taft, who was pushing himself up to his hands and knees and looking at the bundle he carried.As she put her hands on his back and asked if he was okay, he looked frightened for a moment and pulled at the bundle of blankets and opened it up and she saw Chuck there, smiling at William Howard Taft and then at her.
He sat up and hugged her and she did not wonder what had happened, for a moment, as she hugged him back and began crying, happy tears from the smell of his hair the way it tickled her nose, his little hands tickling the back of her neck the way he did whenever she hugged him.
“Give Mommy a kiss,” she said through her tears and he leaned back, eyed her up the way he always did, cocked his head, the way he always did, and then pursed his lips and leaned in with a wet peck like he always dead and she cried harder and hugged him tighter and sat on her legs rocking back and forth and pushing her nose into his hair.
After a while, she looked up.William Howard Taft, his shirt looking damp from the dew, was standing and inspecting the surroundings, curiously.He looked down at her.
“We have been looking, quite literally, allover for you.”He sniffed and patted his back.“I don’t even know how we found you.He” pointing to Chuck “Did it, I surmise.I wish, though, that he had found you in a different and more orthodox way.”
“Where … Where were you coming from?”She hugged Chuck again.“You fell right past the window.”
William Howard Taft pointed straight up.“From the sky,” he said.“We fell out of the sky.”
“Was that you yelling?”
“I began yelling quite high up.I do not like heights, and I do not like falling, either.”He sat down on the porch and Saoirse was aware that her knees were growing damp and cold from kneeling on the lawn, but it was a good feeling and she didn’t want to move from her pose because Chuck had his arms wrapped around her neck and was leaning his head into her shoulder.
“Why,” she began, but that wasn’t right.“How?...”That was better but she didn’t have any words to come after it.
“We were in a fire engine,” William Howard Taft said, “A large red fire engine that was operated by men who were very friendly and very helpful and were driving us around the city.I do not like fire engines, either” he said, pointedly, and looked at Chuck again, “We were driving from place to place, a great many of which I did not recognize and could not understand in some cases.Places that were mostly balloons, in some cases.And lots of beaches and the ocean.You and he seem to have those in common.”
Saoirse had, before the vacation, spent a great deal of time showing Chuck pictures of the beach and the ocean and trying to teach him what they were and assuring him that he would love swimming in the ocean.She did not explain that to William Howard Taft.
“The fire engine was not getting us much of anywhere, although Chuck certainly enjoyed sitting in the front seat and watching things, and I mentioned to the driver that we were not finding you.”William Howard Taft put his head in his hands, then looked up again.“And then we were falling.”
He looked around.
“There is not much to this part,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Saoirse asked.
“From the sky, I could see.You have only a little land around here, all bounded by forests.The land extends about as far as you can see from here, and then it ends.”
“Ends?”
“It ends.There is nothing beyond that.You are on a little island of land floating in a void surrounded by faraway stars.We fell onto that from a great height, dropping for what seemed hours.I tried to protect Chuck and it seems that I did.”
“We had better go inside,” Saoirse said.Chuck kissed her again.
The house was still bare inside except now for the kitchen where a small blue table sat, big enough for four to share, with four chairs. On the table were sandwiches and frosted animal cookies of the kind that Chuck liked, with glasses of milk for the adults and a sippy cup of juice for Chuck.She noticed that one plate had a fold-over peanut butter sandwich, which Chuck picked up.
She sat down, suddenly hungry, and wondered when she had last eaten.William Howard Taft sat on another chair and Chuck wandered around the kitchen eating cookies and sipping at his juice and touching the walls with his right hand.They did not talk for a long time, and then Saoirse said “You’d better explain what you mean by there’s not much to this part,’” and looked at William Howard Taft, who said:
“I meant simply that.It is as if this is an island, and a not-very-big island to boot, floating in a void.I don’t know why we appeared here so high up, or far off, depending on how you view it, but we did and we fell a long ways.Perhaps it was because he wanted to do so.”
Chuck paid no attention to William Howard Taft’s looking at him. Saoirse ate some more of her sandwich and watched him.“How do you mean?” she asked.
“Has he talked at all?” William Howard Taft asked her.
“No.You’ve seen him the whole time.”
“I mean since you’ve arrived here in the After.”
Saoirse thought back.
“A little,” she said.
“He has not said a word to me, other than mumbling and babbling occasionally.”
Chuck came over and crawled up onto her lap and sat there.He reached out for his cookies, which she pulled over towards him.Out of habit she broke a few into pieces for him, before realizing that may not matter. It’s not like he could choke here, she thought.
It was now dark outside.
“Why do you suppose that is, that he doesn’t talk anymore?” William Howard Taft asked her while looking at Chuck.
“I don’t know,” Saoirse said.
“Think.”
Saoirse did.She remembered the restaurant where Ansel had told her that Chuck talked to him.She remembered how Ansel said that Chuck had stopped when she told him to do so. Taking his cookies, Chuck squirmed off of her lap and onto the floor.She heard his little shoes pattering as he walked around the kitchen.He went to the doorway to the kitchen and she got up and picked him up and set him back down.William Howard Taft continued.
“We did not stay long at the dinner after you got up and walked away.You announced that you were going to be alone and then you disappeared.I watched the others carefully and they looked after you for a while and then talked among themselves as though nothing had happened and did not seem to pay attention to me, except for Chuck, who kept staring straight at me.
“Then the others faded away and it was Chuck and I sitting there, alone, in the yard of your house.He was on a swing, sitting on a swing on a swingset and looking at me.So I pushed him on the swing and wondered what to do.
“I haven’t seen the others, your husband and other children, since then.We spent a lot of time swinging in the backyard and Chuck appeared to be looking for something.I thought maybe he was looking for you.I kept trying to talk to him, to get him to talk to me.But he would not do so.He didn’t say anything.”
Saoirse couldn’t understand what William Howard Taft wanted from her, after that story, and she did not reply. They sat quietly again.The food and plates and cups were gone.The table was clean.The moon was coming up over the trees outside.Chuck got up and tugged on her hand.
She followed him and they went out of the kitchen and up the stairs and to the room at the end of the hall across from hers.She opened it and inside was a small bed for him, a crib that converts into a child’s bed.There was a dresser and a toy chest.The toy chest was filled mostly with fire engines and fire engine-related toys.Chuck had pajamas on and held up his hands to her.She picked him up and sat down on the floor with him in her lap.Holding him, she read him a book like she used to do, letting him turn the pages.When she was done, she put him into the bed and flopped the blanket over him, loosely, over his head.He giggled and flipped around to his stomach.She tickled his back and patted him on the head and let herself out.
“You’ll find, I think, a bedroom inside that other door,” she said to William Howard Taft, who stood at the top of the stairs.“I’m going to sleep.”
If she partially expected that in the morning they might not be there, she was wrong.Chuck woke her up by climbing into her bed, and she was awakened by a hand pressing her nose down onto her face. He climbed under the covers and laid down next to her, and together they watched the sky outside the windows go from black to dark blue to light blue.Saoirse heard music, then, very faintly, and voices, and mechanical sounds. The music grew louder and the voices grew louder and a balloon drifted by her window and she finally stood up and went and looked outside the window seat where she had sat so long and contemplated the same unchanging scene every day.
The yard and tree and fence and road were still there but they were surrounded now and overwhelmed by a carnival: a Ferris Wheel and a Merry-Go-Round and a Tilt-A-Whirl and games and pony rides and little-kids’ jump castles and fried foods, and there were people wandering around and through the scene, lots of people, people who did not find it unusual that a carnival had sprung up with a house in the middle of it.The horses stood off to the side, by the fence; the carnival had not set up inside their pasture, and people stood near them and patted their faces and fed them cotton candy.Saoirse looked at it and held Chuck’s hand and looked at him, too, and then the two of them went down the hall.She knocked at the door to the room she’d showed William Howard Taft and when she got no answer lightly opened the door.It was empty – literally empty – and the two of them went downstairs.
William Howard Taft was in the kitchen eating breakfast, a large plate of scrambled eggs and bacon with a mug of coffee next to him.Saoirse sat down and helped herself to some eggs.Chuck’s plate was there, with a banana and a foldover peanut butter sandwich again.
“Did you see outside?” she asked.
He nodded.“Yours?”
“I doubt it,” and they looked at Chuck.“But it overlaps with mine,” she said.Then she ate some eggs and asked William Howard Taft: “What’s your After?”
He put his napkin down on his lap.
“This is.”
“How is this your After, sitting in a country house with a carnival outside it?How can that be what you want?”
“I want to find others like me.Like you.Like him,” and he pointed to Chuck.
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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.
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 turned 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.
is own time? Resume his life again? Could she? What would she be going back to? How long had it been since she died? She tried to remember but could not; she could not even remember dying. And now when she tried to count the days she’d been here in the After the number just faded into the haze of all the time spent watching the horses and maybe reading.
