One October 14, 2023
IT’S DURING the annular eclipse, this disruption of the natural order, that Bailey springs the news on Elsie. “Ellie, we have an announcement,” her sister says.
It’s Elsie now. She’s been going by Elsie for years. But she smiles brightly. “What is it?”
The two sisters stand on their porch with Bailey’s boyfriend, Travis.
Each of them wears eclipse glasses made of cardboard and plastic.
Even though it’s Saturday, a day off, Bailey is dressed like she’s heading to the insurance office she manages, in straight-legged pants and a button-up blouse, her curls subjugated with a straightening iron.
“Travis and I are getting married!” she says.
Elsie slides her eclipse glasses down her nose to peer at her sister. “What?” She’s still in the T-shirt and pajama pants she sleeps in, and her hair is twisted into loose space buns, which keep coming unravelled. One is barely hanging on now. “You’re getting married?”
“Show her,” Travis says, grinning, standing a little taller.
Bailey holds out her hand. The engagement ring is a modest diamond set in a gold band.
Elsie claps and shrieks, embraces her sister. “Oh, my god! I’m so happy for you!” (And yet, in the dark recesses of her mind, an alarm bell rings.)
When Bailey lets go, Elsie engages in an awkward sidestep with Travis before hugging him too.
He’s also still in his lounge pants as he stayed overnight, like he does several nights a week now.
He has a full beard, which surprises Elsie.
She thought Bailey, after three years of dating him, would have talked him into shaving it off by now.
“We’re keeping it simple,” Bailey says. “A backyard wedding, with a potluck reception.” She hesitates before adding, “On November 12.”
“Wow. That soon?”
“We have been together three years,” Travis says.
“More than three years,” Bailey adds. “And we do want to have kids.”
Elsie knew it. Her sister’s been talking about getting a dog, in a way that makes her think her sister’s biological clock is ticking.
“If I don’t start a family soon,” Bailey says, “like in the next couple of years, I might not be able to start one at all.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Fertility starts to decline for women once they hit thirty.”
Elsie feels her stomach clench. She only has a couple of years before she has to worry about that too.
“Anyway, the lease on my apartment comes up at the end of the month,” Travis says. “I’ll be moving in with Bailey.” Into their matronly postwar bungalow, a rental in Bailey’s name.
“Well, of course,” Elsie says. Travis already treats the house as if it’s his home, thumping downstairs to do his laundry in the small washer and dryer right next to the entrance to Elsie’s basement suite.
Travis scratches his cheek. “Yeah. The thing is we both need home offices.”
Her sister grips Elsie’s forearm as she gets to the point. “Ellie, honey, Travis is taking over the basement.”
Elsie’s suite. It’s dark and smells musty, like wet socks, but the room has good ceiling height, and she’s never going to find anything cheaper. “You want me to leave?”
Travis kneads Bailey’s chronically tight neck. “We would have asked you sooner, but—”
Bailey finishes his sentence. “I wanted to make sure you were in a better place first,” she says.
Elsie puts a hand to her mouth. “You held off getting married because of me?”
“It’s okay,” Bailey says, patting the air. “We’re family. That’s what families do. Take care of each other.”
Behind her sister, Travis grinds his teeth. Elsie knows, from their conversations overheard through the house’s elderly ductwork, that he believes Bailey does too much for her. He clears his throat, apparently to get Bailey back on track.
“We’d like you out soon,” her sister says, “ideally by the thirty-first.”
“Of this month?” Where is she supposed to go? Even if she finds a place, she likely couldn’t afford it.
“Don’t you want to be out on your own?” Travis asks.
“It’s just the rental market is so tight right now.” And that basement has been her lifeboat on rough waters.
“You’ll have to share with someone,” Bailey says.
Share a bathroom with a stranger? The thought brings back the horrors of her university years, the dorm bathrooms furry with bacteria.
“Or find a bachelor suite,” her sister adds. “Something small.”
When Travis gathers Bailey into a hug, Elsie turns back to the eclipse and hugs herself.
The moon has chomped well into the sun now.
Only a thin crescent hangs in the sky, the glistening blade of a scythe.
Even though their rental squats within one of the scruffier residential neighbourhoods, the town of Ladysmith is nested on a steep hill, so they look over not only the roofs of the houses below, but Transfer Beach, where, in the 1900s, the town’s coal and logs were transferred to ferries heading to Vancouver, giving the beach its name.
Perhaps noting Elsie’s stunned look, Bailey pokes her arm. “Hey, you’re going to be my bridesmaid, right?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course.”
“We’ll have to buy you a dress.”
“A dress? I don’t think so.”
“You are wearing a dress.”
“Why November 12?” Elsie asks. “That’s a Sunday, right? Why not get married on the Saturday before?”
“Actually, we chose November 12 on Zander’s advice.”
“You chose it on his advice,” Travis counters.
Bailey looks up at him, smiling. “I asked Zander to work up a synastry chart for me and Travis and—”
Elsie raises one eyebrow. “A synastry chart?”
“Zander compared our birth charts to see how we’d get along and picked out things we need to watch for. He thought November 12 would be a good time to get married, on the last day of this lunar cycle, under a waning moon. I wanted to get married on a full moon, of course.”
“Of course.” Elsie rolls her eyes up to the cobwebs under the porch roof.
“But Zander said a wedding under a crescent waning moon promotes growth and means we’re more likely to stick it out when things get bad. And the new moon is the next day, on the thirteenth. New beginnings and all that.”
November 13 is also Elsie’s twenty-eighth birthday. Given that she’s now forced to move, maybe the new moon will mark a fresh start for her too. Still, she only has a couple of weeks to find a place for herself. It seems she’s constantly blindsided by surprises—nasty, painful surprises.
“I wish I had a guide to my life,” she says to no one in particular, the dark moon. “You know, for major events, so there weren’t any big surprises. I could prepare, then, manage things.” Her expectations, her emotions.
Bailey, so used to managing things, only grunts.
Then, realizing she has put the focus on herself at an inappropriate time, Elsie adds, “Mom should be here, to see you get married.”
Bailey sighs. “Yes.”
“Tomorrow it will be five years since she—” Elsie pauses as she looks back up at the sun, the hole punched into it.
“I’ll be hiking to the lookout again this year.
” As she does on the anniversary of her mother’s death, following the same geocaching trail that she and her mother were on when her mom fell.
“Maybe we could go together this year?” she asks her sister, hopeful.
Bailey snorts, as if overwhelmed by the thought. “I have a wedding to plan, and less than a month to do it. My days off are spoken for. But what about Zander? He goes out hiking almost every weekend.”
“He did say he’s looking for a hiking partner,” Travis adds.
“You got his number?” Bailey untangles herself from Travis to pull out her phone. “Here, I’ll text it to you.”
Elsie’s phone buzzes as she receives the message. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Contacting him out of the blue like that?”
“How is it weird?” Bailey asks. “It’s just one friend asking another friend on a hike.”
Is Zander a friend? She turns back to the eclipse as she thinks about that.
Last November, her sister had inflicted an astrology session with Zander on her as a birthday gift.
They’ve talked during parties that Bailey hosted upstairs or in the backyard, and they chat amicably at his front door when she picks up her sister after Bailey’s monthly astrology sessions at his home.
She could use a friend, and the exercise would help lift her mood.
She really doesn’t want to walk this anniversary trail alone.
Bailey holds up her phone. “I’ll text him, let him know you’ll call.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
Her sister types anyway.
And then Travis points at the sky. “Hey, look, it’s happening!”
In the sky, the giant black lid of the moon slides over the boiling pot of the sun. Bailey raises her phone for a shot as diamonds appear on the thin glowing crescent, all that’s left of earth’s star. “Baily’s beads,” Elsie tells her sister. “That’s what those pearls of light are called.”
“Really?” Bailey claps, delighted. “And it looks like an engagement ring too. A good omen for our wedding.” She pulls Travis close and takes a selfie with the eclipse behind them.
That’s what she captions the photo, Elsie’s sure. A good omen. “The beads of light are only there because the moon is bumpy,” Elsie explains. “We’re seeing the sun’s rays pass through the valleys of the moon’s terrain.”
“Hey, don’t kill the magic,” Bailey says.
She isn’t. (And there’s that familiar sting.) Elsie had so much more to tell them about the eclipse.
Like how, a moment from now, there will be donut-shaped shadows under the trees, the eclipse projected through holes in and between the leaves, which act as mini pinhole cameras. But she keeps her mouth shut.
Just after the beads appear, the annular eclipse reaches its height and the moon covers the centre of the sun, leaving a golden wedding band in the sky, that ring of fire.
The light around them dims, washing the landscape in an uncanny purply hue.
It’s like she’s stepped through a portal to another planet.
The breeze stills. The horse-shaped weather vane on the house below stops turning. It feels as if time has stopped.
A flicker of movement draws Elsie’s attention to the sidewalk.
There’s a figure there, in the gloom of this counterfeit twilight, standing under a Japanese maple.
An old woman in a white nightgown. Her feet are bare.
Elsie doesn’t think much of her appearance as on adjacent verandas, lawns, sidewalks and the shoreline of Transfer Beach below, locals and eclipse chasers from other regions, many still in their pajamas, have congregated to stare up at the sky.
But when Elsie looks back a second later, the old woman has vanished.
She shivers as a wind—warmer air flowing into the air cooled by the eclipse—turns the horse-shaped weather vane on the roof of the house below in the opposite direction.
With the eclipse over, Elsie congratulates her sister and Travis again before they go back inside through the front entrance.
She then slaps down the outside cement stairs to her basement suite in oversized slippers, which she kicks off on closing the door.
(Elsie always preferred to go barefoot, even as a small child.
When she was a toddler, she habitually kicked off her shoes, tore off her clothes and ran naked to the playground.)
With the curtains closed, her room seems drained of colour, like a nighttime landscape illuminated by the full moon.
A mix of hair and human dust, her disintegrating self, has collected around the ornate feet of the vanity that once belonged to her mother.
It’s one of the few pieces of furniture the sisters brought from their mother’s home before selling it.
Other than that, Elsie has little furniture.
Her bed, her desk, her office chair. The few pieces of artwork are her own, sketches and watercolours she did years ago, thumbtacked to the wall.
The potted plants she keeps buying are brown and crispy, having died of light starvation.
From the closed stairwell door, Elsie hears her sister call down from the kitchen. “Hey, Lizard, get dressed and come upstairs. I’m making us all pancakes.” Blueberry, Elsie knows. Their mother always made blueberry pancakes to celebrate a happy occasion.
Bailey and Travis are getting married. Married.
Elsie sighs as she looks at her drab wardrobe, chosen for comfort. The row of black T-shirts, hoodies, stretchy shorts, sweats and yoga pants. It’s a student’s closet. She got stuck somehow, somewhere. She doesn’t know when.
Once dressed, she stands in front of the mirror and rewinds her chestnut hair into buns to keep it off her neck. Her high forehead, thin nose and green eyes are traits she inherited from her mother. Some days when she looks in the mirror, she can almost believe her mom is staring back at her.
Today, October 14, 2023, Elsie is twenty-seven years, eleven months and one day old.
Nearly one-third of her life is over. She lives in the same small town she was born into but has no real friends, other than her sister and Travis.
No boyfriend. She holds a master’s degree in geographic information systems and spends her days crunching data, building maps for forestry companies.
But she works for her dad. And now she’s about to lose her home of nearly five years, her safe place.
She flicks a tear from the side of her eye with her thumb, turns her Mars snow globe upside down and right side up again so that the red dust drifts down over the lonely little astronaut.
God. She’s got to get out of here.
She starts to text Zander, to ask him on the hike, but then deletes it. Being social seems like so much work now. And what if he says no?
From the kitchen above, Bailey yells again, her voice carrying down the stairwell along with the smell of pancakes. “Are we doing this or what?”
“Just a minute,” Elsie calls.
Then again, what’s the worst that can happen? So what if Zander says no? It’s not like she’s asking him out on a date. She starts again.
Hi!!
I’m hiking Devil’s trail tomorrow.
Near Ladysmith.
Want to come?