Two October 15, 2023 #2
Zander looks somewhat horrified. “I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t connect her death with today’s date. Bailey’s told me a little about it, of course. She said your mom died from a fall while you two were out hiking.” He looks up the trail. “You’re taking me to the place where your mom died?”
Elsie winces. Now that he says it out loud like that, the idea of this anniversary hike does sound bizarre.
She picks up her backpack and slips her bottle in the side pocket.
“This is weird, right? I don’t know what I was thinking.
I shouldn’t have asked you to come. I’ll just—I’ll head up alone.
” She sidesteps around him on the steep slope to continue up the trail.
But Zander takes her hand to stop her, the warmth of it around her cold fingers. “You misunderstand,” he says. “I feel honoured that you asked me to come with you today.”
Honoured. Was he putting her on? “It was Bailey’s idea—”
“I know what it’s like to lose someone,” he says. “It’s important to mark a death anniversary, to remember the people we’ve lost.”
He’s being too kind. Isn’t he? What has Bailey told him? “I’m doing better now—” she starts.
“Do you need a hug?” Zander asks.
“I guess?”
He wraps his arms around her, and she pats his back. It’s an awkward but not altogether unpleasant experience. He’s warm and smells of cucumber soap. Elsie relaxes into the hug.
But then, too soon, he steps back. “Okay, let’s keep going.
” He continues up the path through the trees, slowing his pace to accommodate hers.
As she follows, she once again finds herself glancing at his glutes, so she forces herself to look down to the Douglas fir needles and cones beneath her feet, the little mouse tails under each of the cone scales.
She wheezes and puffs. Her boots grow heavier.
Finally, nearing the summit, she looks up to see a figure through the trees, at the lookout.
Another hiker? But after the next blink, the figure is gone, and she questions whether she saw anything at all.
A few more steps and the stoic Douglas firs give way to a plateau of rock bathed in sunlight.
Somewhere close by, a raven makes the knock-knock sound, like two wooden blocks banged together.
On their hikes, her mother often told her that because ravens mimicked other songbirds and had so many calls, people often assumed they were hearing many birds when there was only one.
“Is this the place?” Zander asks, holding out his phone, the app that’s directing them.
Elsie steps over a pile of fresh bear scat, hoping the animal isn’t still around, then looks up and gasps.
The old woman she saw during the eclipse is standing at the cliff’s edge, facing her, but arms out, as if about to let herself fall.
The white lace of her nightgown, the crinkle and wobble of flesh under her arms. She winks at Elsie and takes one step backwards and disappears, quite literally, into thin air.
There and then not. Elsie’s mind can’t process it.
She steps to the cliff edge and looks over but sees no body tumbling down the mountain below her.
The woman didn’t fall. She really did just vanish. But she was there.
Wasn’t she?
Somewhere close by the raven squawks. Haa! Haa!
“Is this the place?” Zander asks again.
She turns and scans his face. But it’s clear he’s seen nothing of it, not the old woman or her disappearance.
“Elsie?”
“Yes, yes. This is it.”
“Are you alright?”
To hide her panic, the shake of her hand, she reaches down to retrieve a chocolate bar wrapper that someone left behind. She pockets it for disposal later in the garbage can at the gravel parking lot below.
But Zander sees it, this shift in emotion. “Is this your first time back here?” he asks. “Since your mom passed?”
“No. I hiked up with my sister and Dad, to spread my mother’s ashes, and then again, alone, every year on the anniversary of her death.
Marcus and I came up here a few other times.
” Before she went into hiding in her sister’s basement.
Marcus had understood her compulsion to revisit her mother’s death, or at least he had at the start.
“Marcus?” Zander asks.
“My old boyfriend.” Elsie tugs at the collar of her jacket.
It once had a tag, which she cut off, but the nub remains, a constant irritation.
Marcus was her first love, her only love.
During her time at university, she’d spent every free moment with him and their friend Amy.
Marcus was the star she orbited. And then, two years after her mother died, when she needed him most, he left.
Zander slides his hands into his pockets and tilts back on his heels as they both take in the valley and, beyond, the Pacific Ocean stretching out before them. “Are you seeing anyone now?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “I’ve tried dating apps—” But the constant swiping and meaningless chat is exhausting.
The few dates she went on trashed what little self-esteem she had left.
The men, and one woman, told her she was too talkative.
Too know-it-all. Too rude. Too anxious. Too sensitive. Too intense. Too . . . much.
“I know, right?” he says. “You put yourself out there just so some stranger can reject you. Over and over. Or you think you might have something with someone, and they ghost you.”
Like Marcus had. “Hey, it looks like someone has already been to the cache today,” she says, to change the subject.
There’s a book lying on top of the plastic bin within the hollow of a cedar.
It’s about the size of a trail guide, small enough to put in her pocket.
Even though it rained earlier that morning, the book is dry.
“Weird that they’d leave it out like that,” Zander says. “It would get ruined.”
Elsie kneels and reaches towards it, but just as it was five years ago, this cache is just out of reach.
She feels the tears prickling as she recalls her mother falling down that scree to her death in the rocks below.
She shouldn’t have insisted they get to this cache.
If she hadn’t, or if she had managed to reach her mother in time, her mom might still be alive.
“Careful,” Zander says. “Want me to get it?”
Elsie stands to shift out of the way, and he lies on the ground next to her.
With his long arms, he easily reaches the cache.
He stands, holding out the bin with the book on top, and she takes it.
The cache is bigger than most, square, about the size of a shoebox, but plastic, waterproof, with a locking lid to keep out the elements.
After she tucks the book under her arm, she opens the bin.
Inside, there are the usual trinkets people leave in a cache. Plastic toys, keychains, foreign coins.
“What happened to your mother, exactly?” Zander asks.
Elsie puts the lid back on the bin. “Neither of us could reach the cache, so Mom climbed down the rocks to get it. She handed it up to me but the branch she was hanging onto broke, and she lost her footing on the rocks. I tried to grab her.” Elsie’s face crumples.
“I almost fell myself,” she says, trying to rein it in.
“But then an angel saved me.” And she immediately wishes she could rewind the words back into her mouth.
“An angel,” Zander says. His eyes narrow.
“I mean, a woman grabbed me, stopped me from falling.” But then the woman had just disappeared, like the ghost woman did minutes ago.
There, and then gone. She never got a good look at her.
She knows it’s magical thinking to believe an angel had saved her, and she had left religion behind when she was a child, but the strange event had all the markers of divine intervention.
Still, she can’t tell Zander that. Especially not after she questioned his belief in astrology.
“I’m so sorry, Elsie,” he says.
She wipes the snot from her nose with the sleeve of her rain jacket, leaving a shine there. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.” Not so long ago, really. Just five years, and it feels like yesterday.
She puts the bin on the ground and turns her attention to the book that was left on top.
It’s titled, strangely, The Pocket Atlas of Nostalgia and Longing, even though the cover is decorated with the phases of the moon.
The pages feel odd, too smooth. Elsie opens it to the halfway mark to find it holds a circular map with crosshairs pointing to a location at the centre, indicating longitude and latitude.
The map is surrounded by two concentric circles divided in twelve and dotted with symbols of the planets.
“An astrological chart,” Zander says, his eyes widening.
“You didn’t leave this here, did you?” Elsie asks.
“How could I? I’ve been with you all this time. It was raining when we left the parking lot together. This book is dry.”
“Did you make it, then?” He could have arranged for someone to take it up here before they arrived. But why would he do that?
“Me? No,” Zander says. “But I’d like to meet whoever did.”
She studies his face for a moment. He seems to be telling the truth. “I guess I’ll need something to offer in trade.” Elsie rummages in her backpack for her trail guide and snugs it into the cache. She signs the log and closes the lid.
“I’ll put this back,” Zander says, taking the bin.
As he lies on his stomach to put the cache back in the hollow of the cedar, Elsie studies the cover of the pocket atlas.
The phases of the moon in a starry sky. She opens the atlas to the first page, titled “The First House: Self,” intending to work her way through the atlas pages in order, and she feels a tingling sensation in her hands, then an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
Somewhere close by, two trees chafe against each other in the wind, generating a metallic squeal like a rusty gate swinging open.