Three October 15, 2023 #2
“I’m not sure.” After her session with Zander last year, Elsie had tossed the chart in her desk and forgotten all about it.
She’d likely thrown it out in the year since.
Astrology was Bailey’s thing, not hers. “It can’t be my chart,” Elsie says.
“Why would anyone publish my birth chart in an atlas?”
Bailey puts a hand on the page titled “The Second House: Possessions.” “You should get Zander to take a look at your birth chart again. He must have the chart on file.” She pulls out her phone. “I’ll see if he can book you in sometime this week.”
Elsie stands, reaching across the counter to stop her. “No. Bailey, please don’t.”
“What day works for you? I guess it’ll have to be an evening session. We can head down to Victoria after work.”
“Can’t you go alone?” Elsie asks.
“It’s your thing. Zander won’t talk to me about your chart. Privacy concerns, and all that.”
“Please don’t text him,” Elsie begs. “Today was awful, so embarrassing. I can’t face Zander again. I just can’t.”
Bailey weighs the phone in her hand. “Okay. Chill. I won’t text him.” Her sister deletes the message without sending, holds up her phone as proof.
Elsie sits back down. They sip their tea. The faucet drips.
“Please don’t tell Dad about today,” Elsie says. “You know how he gets.” Overly protective. He’ll try to fix things.
Bailey puts down her cup but doesn’t commit either way.
“Seriously,” Elsie says.
Bailey offers her a hand, palm up across the counter. “We only worry about you because we care. You know that, right?”
BACK IN her basement suite, Elsie drops her backpack to the floor and falls into her office chair, exhausted, wrecked.
Today she watched her mother die all over again.
It was so terrifyingly real. Her body is still buzzing with loss.
She stretches her neck, looks to the ceiling, groans out a sob.
In the early days after her mother’s death, her sister held her, rocked her, as they both steeped in sorrow.
They made each other tea, handed each other sandwiches, bought each other flowers, watched movies together.
On Sundays, they made blueberry pancakes to remember their mother by.
Bailey packed Elsie’s things and moved her out of their mother’s lonely house and into her own home.
They shared their anguish in those early days.
But no one, not even Bailey, will understand the depth of this strange second round of grief, five years after the first. Elsie can barely understand it herself.
But she’s an analyst. She needs to understand it.
She lifts her bag to her lap and pulls out The Pocket Atlas of Nostalgia and Longing, opening it on her desk.
It’s slim. There are only thirteen pages altogether, and the last page is titled the same as the first. When she was up at the lookout, a wave of déjà vu had overwhelmed her as soon as she opened the atlas to that page.
And her vision of her mother’s death had abruptly ended when the atlas closed.
And yet, when she opened it a second time on that cliff, nothing happened.
And here again, nothing. Did opening the atlas trigger her vision or not?
It seems too much of a coincidence that the first chart holds a map and the coordinates of the lookout at its centre.
She checks the coordinates, longitude and latitude, for each of the other pages, feeling a rising sense of panic.
Many of the map locations are places Elsie has been to, that mean something to her.
That can’t be a coincidence either. The first, of course, is the lookout, where she lost her mom.
The second is her place of work, her dad’s offices.
The third is downtown, at Joe’s Café where, for years, she and Marcus had hung out.
The fourth is her childhood home where her family lived before her parents’ divorce.
The sixth is her father’s house and the tenth is Bailey’s rental. Zander’s house is the eighth. Zander’s?
The other maps are for random locations she’s never been to, or at least she thinks she’s never been to. A house in Chemainus. A beach in Victoria. The airport. A school. A church.
Elsie flips back and forth through the atlas, comparing one chart to the next.
The inner circle on each page is the same and does seem familiar.
She pushes back from her desk, opens each drawer and rifles through the contents: tax returns; broken ear buds and frayed power cords; her own drawings (mostly animals) and the coloured pencils Bailey keeps giving her, to encourage her to draw again; lip gloss; an inhaler; an N95 mask; a bottle of hand sanitizer; noise-cancelling headphones; a granola bar (past its expiry date); a single condom (also past its expiry date); a stress ball; a passport application; a handful of USB flash drives; a fidget spinner; a piece of petrified wood.
And then there’s a crystal suncatcher on a fishing line, which she’s had since childhood.
She’d meant to hang it in front of the basement window on moving here nearly five years ago.
She sets the crystal on her desk next to her Mars snow globe, and then she spots her birth chart sticking out from under the clutter.
She lays it next to the atlas page titled “The First House: Self” and compares the planetary symbols, incomprehensible squiggles on the page.
It’s the same. She turns to the next page, then the next and the next.
Her birth chart appears on every page of the atlas.
Someone really did make this for her. But if not Zander, then who?