Five October 17, 2023
TUESDAY MORNING, Elsie throws back the covers and places her bare feet on the cold basement floor.
(Just like she did yesterday. And the day before.
And the day before that.) She stands on autopilot.
Sits on the toilet, pees. Washes her face, brushes her teeth.
Swipes on lotion and light makeup, just mascara and tinted lip balm.
Takes down a T-shirt from her closet and dresses in an almost identical outfit to the one she wore to work yesterday.
Black on black. She packs lunch. Drinks a cup of tea.
Eats an apple. Grabs her backpack and walks the few blocks to her father’s offices, expecting a similar workday to the one she’s had for the past five years.
But there’s the scent of a storm in the air, the zigzag of lightning on the horizon, and she feels unsettled.
Sunday’s events at the lookout are on replay in her mind.
Her mother falling, over and over again.
And the atlas? Who left it there? The old woman, the ghost?
How would that even work? Why did opening the atlas seem to trigger her experience at the lookout, but not at home or work?
As she nears Joe’s Café, it occurs to her that she could try opening the atlas within the cafe now.
It’s the location on the third chart. But does she want to?
Would it trigger a hallucination like it did on Sunday? Was that a hallucination?
She stops at Joe’s Café and sits in the booth she and Marcus used to frequent.
When the server comes around, Elsie orders a cup of tea that she knows she won’t drink (because they serve it with cream, not milk, and don’t boil the water first) but it’s her excuse to sit for a while.
The café has checkered floors, metal barstools along the counter and upholstered booths.
There’s a wall of glass bricks at the far end behind her.
For a while after Marcus left town, and during holidays when he might return to visit his mother, Elsie sat for hours here hoping she’d bump into him, but she never did.
After he broke up with her in this booth, he never phoned or texted, but then again, she didn’t either.
They’d met at this café. On a quiet, boring February morning during reading break in her first year at university, she’d gotten up from her stool at the counter to rearrange the word magnets on the drink fridge into a haiku.
She sat down again and cradled her cup of tea, looking around, hoping for a familiar face, someone she knew from high school maybe. Her first year at university had been a lonely one.
And then she did see someone from high school: Marcus, sitting in another booth.
Tall and lean, with a messy mop of hair and goatee.
She knew his name, as they’d been in the same computer class.
But they’d never really spoken before. His irises were an uncanny blue, inherited from his Scandinavian ancestors, she imagined.
Evidently, he’d been watching her from his booth because he stood and pieced together a poem of his own next to hers.
He smiled at her before sitting back down. They both finished their lunches at separate tables while shyly snatching glimpses of each other. And then Marcus appeared to get a text and, after sliding the word tomorrow into a prominent position on the drink fridge, left.
The next day Elsie came back to the café around the same time and Marcus was in his booth, apparently waiting for her as he watched her come in with those blue, blue eyes. But losing her nerve, she sat on a stool at the counter rather than with him.
After her tea arrived, Elsie stood to create another poem.
Then she sat back down and waited, a finger tapping her cup, her knee bouncing.
Marcus took the bait and got up and, without looking her way, responded with another poem of his own.
But still they ate lunch in their separate spots. It was excruciating, thrilling.
And then on Friday, when Elsie rose to compose her latest masterpiece on the fridge, Marcus got up too and created his own next to her. In fact, they raced to complete them, pulling the words together like they were completing jigsaw puzzles. Elsie finished her poem first.
They grinned at each other. And then Marcus found the word Lunch and nodded towards his booth. Once there, they finally spoke to each other.
“I’m Marcus,” he said.
“I know.”
“Ellie, right?”
“Not anymore.” And she listed off her many trial names to date: Eliza, Beth, Lizzy, all short for Elizabeth.
“How about Ziz?” he asked. “It says, ‘I’m powerful, and maybe even a little scary. Don’t mess with me.’” He paused, smiling. “It suits you.”
Ziz. Powerful. Scary. Really? “I like it.” Seeing herself through Marcus’s eyes, she already felt bolder, braver.
“I’ve seen you around campus,” he said. “What are you taking?”
“Geography and computer science. I’ll be doing a master’s in GIS.”
“Cartography? Mapmaking?”
“And analysis. Data crunching. I hope to work in environmental management. My dad operates a forestry consulting firm. I work there summers.”
“Cool.”
“You?”
“Business. Marketing.” He glanced at the drink fridge, the word magnets. “When I saw you writing poetry, I knew I had to talk to you.”
“Why?”
He grinned. “You had to be the smartest girl in the room.”
Elsie looked down at the Formica table top, rubbed a thumb along its metal edging, a blush heating her cheeks.
“I doubt it.” She never saw herself as smart, even though others—her mother, her father, her teachers, other students—told her she was (and teased her for it).
Most days, in most situations, she felt like a complete idiot.
But here, with Marcus, she felt something else: seen.
They’d talked for hours on that first date. And the next. And the next. And they’d been almost inseparable in the nearly five years that followed. Elsie had come to believe they would always be together, maybe marry, even have kids.
Now, more than three years after he left town, in that same café, Elsie searches the magnetic words and letters on the drink fridge, hoping for a message from Marcus, even though he hasn’t left one in all that time. But it’s just a nonsense jumble.
A baby gabbles and Elsie turns to the one-year-old who is meticulously eating Cheerios one by one in a high chair at a nearby table.
The kid’s mother leans over and kisses his crown, and Elsie feels a sudden, primal desire for a child of her own, a family of her own.
Is baby fever really a thing? Could she have caught it from her sister?
All Bailey’s talk about wanting kids and declining fertility.
Tick, tick, tick. But, thankfully, she’s in no danger of following through on that biological urge.
It’s not like she has sperm donors lining up.
Elsie forces herself to look away from the baby and opens the atlas to the page titled “Third House: Communication,” half hoping, half dreading this will trigger a vision, or whatever that was at the lookout.
But nothing happens. She tries again, but still nothing.
Then a couple of texts come through from her father.
Where are you?
Are you okay?
So, she finally gets up and, before she leaves the café, stops to rearrange the magnetic words into that very first haiku she composed here.
WHEN ELSIE arrives at work, the front door is open, which means her father unlocked it this time.
It’s well after nine. The fleet of company pickups is long gone; Travis and the others in the field crews are already in the bush, or on their way there.
She says hello to Marjorie, their freckled, greying receptionist who’s worked here almost as long as the business has been in this location, then continues past the server room to the staff lounge, sliding her lunch into the fridge.
She changes her wet runners for the indoor shoes she keeps here, a pair of loafers.
Returning to the mapping room, she drops her backpack under her desk and boots up her computer.
Everyone has already settled in. “Morning,” she says to them all. But they’re hidden behind their cubicles. Only Kyle, who sits next to her, greets her back.
“Morning.”
She tries again, smiling at Hannah, who sits across the aisle. She’s the only other woman in the mapping room, a recent hire, a potential friend. “Morning,” she says.
Hannah, all floral prints, eyeliner and painted nails, doesn’t smile back. “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you come in late,” she says.
(Elsie’s father now insists that Elsie arrive before everyone else, as part of the terms of her employment. In the first couple of years that she worked here, following her mother’s death, she had slept too much and regularly arrived at work late, and sometimes not at all.)
“You were away yesterday too,” Elsie says. “I mean, for the whole day.”
“Dentist.” Hannah turns back to her screen.
But Elsie crabwalks her chair into the aisle next to her. “Did you hear Travis and Bailey are getting married?”
Hannah types as she talks. “Kyle told me.”
Kyle pushes his office chair back from his desk to look at Hannah. “Want to go to the wedding as my plus one?” he asks her.
From everyone in the office, a collective “Ooo” rises up as they crane their necks to look over their cubicles.
“No,” Hannah says, still typing.
Mike, one of the mappers, says, “Ouch.”
Kyle retreats back to his desk.
“We could go together,” Elsie says to Hannah. “If you want.” So Elsie doesn’t have to go alone. When Hannah doesn’t immediately respond, Elsie adds, “As a friend, not a date.”
Hannah’s eyes slide to Elsie and then back to her screen. “Well, maybe I will go with Kyle,” she says.
(And there it is again, that familiar sting.)
Hannah leans back so she can look past Elsie. “Have you got an invitation?” she asks Kyle.
“Not yet,” he says, pushing back his chair.