Two October 15, 2023 #3
When she looks up from the first page, Zander isn’t there anymore.
Instead, she sees herself, as she was five years ago, when she still went by the name Ellie, slender in green shorts over blue leggings, lying on the ground, leaning over the edge of the cliff.
Below, her mom, Fifi, clutches a cedar branch as she reaches into the hollow for the geocache.
She turns carefully on the steep slope and hands the plastic box, the cache, to her daughter before her gaze lands on Elsie, standing behind.
“Oh!” her mother cries. “Now?” In her surprise, her mom steps back, the branch snaps, and her arms fling up as the rocks of the slope give way beneath her.
“Mom!” Ellie cries. The girl shimmies forward, desperately trying to reach her mother even though it’s no use, and then the edge of the cliff crumbles and she’s sliding.
It all happens so quickly there’s no time to think.
Elsie drops the atlas to the ground where it lands open.
She grabs Ellie’s ankles to haul her back over the edge as her mother tumbles down the scree of this steep slope, disappearing between the larger rocks below.
“Mom!” she cries, echoing her younger self.
But then a wind picks up, ruffling the pages of the atlas.
It closes just as Elsie calls again. “Mom!”
Within that heartbeat, Elsie finds the atlas back in her hands, closed. She’s once again looking down at Zander, who’s still lying on the ground. He glances back at her, before slipping the cache—the plastic bin—into the cedar hollow. He stands, brushing off his hands. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
She sinks to the ground, hugging the atlas. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she says.
Zander kneels in front of her. “You called out for your mom.”
“I think I had a flashback. I saw her die, all over again.”
Zander wraps an arm around her and she leans into him, tucking her face into the crook of his neck as she sobs. He rocks and rocks her. This man she only casually knows. He must be so uncomfortable. She’s uncomfortable.
She pulls away and wipes her face with her sleeve. “I shouldn’t have inflicted any of this on you.”
“Hey, hey.” He rubs her back in the way her sister does, like her mother used to. “It’s natural to feel grief on a death anniversary, especially when you revisit the location of the person’s death.”
But it’s not natural to live the event all over again. Is it? She was there. She opens the atlas to the first page, both fearful and hopeful that she’ll have the experience again. A chance to see her mother one more time, even if in this horrible way. But nothing happens.
“Do you need to go?” Zander asks, standing. “Maybe this place is too . . . triggering?”
She nods, thinking Zander likely wants to escape. “Yeah, sure.”
He helps her up and, after she slides the atlas into her backpack, she follows him down the trail, the odd events she just experienced tumbling in her mind.
The appearance and disappearance of the old woman.
How she was shunted back in time when she opened the atlas.
Her mother’s fall happening all over again.
Her quick save of Ellie. Her collapse on finding herself back at the lookout with Zander. It all happened, didn’t it? Or did it?
The Douglas firs thin out as they descend in elevation, replaced by the more common cedar, arbutus, moss and giant ferns of this temperate rain forest. With each step down, Elsie feels increasingly humiliated over her behaviour at the lookout.
Crying out like that, melting to the ground.
Why would she bring Zander up there to revisit her mother’s death in the first place? What was she thinking?
Back at their vehicles, Elsie drops the chocolate wrapper someone else had left at the lookout into the parking lot’s bear-proof garbage can.
“Are you okay to drive?” Zander asks. “Or do you want a lift?”
She would feel even more tongue-tied than she does now if she had to sit with him in a car. She’d have to make small talk. Or worse, tell him what happened. “I can drive,” she says.
“You sure?” He doesn’t look sure.
She lowers her eyes to the image of Saturn on his T-shirt. “I’m okay,” she says, though she’s really not.
“I guess I’ll go, then,” he says, pointing a thumb at his car. “Thanks for inviting me. Text any time you feel like going on a hike, okay?” He pauses. “Or out for coffee, maybe? I’d like to take another look at that atlas.”
Is he asking her out on a date? No. After her outburst, he’s just being polite, she’s sure. Taking pity on her.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to—” He doesn’t have to pretend to want to hang out with her, even if Bailey told him to.
“I really am looking for a hiking partner,” he says. “On a lot of these trails, like this one, you don’t want to hike alone.”
Elsie pulls out her car keys, dangles them.
“So, you’ll text?” he asks again.
“Sure,” she says, although in the moment she can’t imagine it.
The unbearable embarrassment of what she just went through.
Her theatrics at the lookout. Her sister texting Zander to set up this playdate in the first place.
Zander is right about the need for a trail buddy, though, and about the many dangers of going it alone.
The bears, the cougars, the hazardous terrain.
Elsie has experienced first-hand how easy it is to wander off a well-travelled path and into the forest, to lose her bearings and find herself lost.