Seven October 19, 2023
As she hikes up First Avenue, she walks past one colourful, elderly building after another.
In the summer, many restaurants and businesses stay open until eight or nine to accommodate the tourists.
Later in the year, Ladysmith goes through a second tourist season during the Festival of Lights, when First Avenue is decked out in Christmas decorations.
But now, in October, the street is empty of both people and cars.
It’s quiet except for the drum of raindrops against the sidewalk and the steady stream of traffic on the highway below.
Elsie turns left at Roberts Street to walk down to Joe’s Café, her favourite haunt when she and Marcus were together.
But it’s closed. She should’ve slipped away sooner.
She stands under the striped canopy, hands cupped to the window, looking for the ghost that seemed to herald when it was time to open the atlas, but there’s no sign of her. Still, it’s worth a try.
Elsie pulls the atlas from her backpack and, as she opens it to the third page titled “The Third House: Communication,” she again feels that queasy déjà vu—no, nostalgia—and the rain suddenly stops.
She squints and blinks into the bright light of a warm, overcast day.
In front of her, there’s a lineup of locals and tourists waiting to get into the café, most of them wearing masks.
Is this the day, the moment? She once again cups her hands to peer into the café window.
And there they are, sitting in their booth near the back of the restaurant.
Marcus and Ziz, Elsie’s self of the time.
She better make this quick before things go south.
Elsie grabs a mask offered from a box on the table outside and slips it on.
Then she pushes through the line to the door, apologizing as she goes. “Excuse me. Pardon me.”
But what is she going to do now? Appearing at their table would freak Ziz out.
What would others in the café think? That she and her younger self were twins, or two sisters.
And Marcus? She had no story that he would believe.
What could she tell him now that would keep them together? She hasn’t thought this through.
Elsie takes a seat on a nearby stool, within listening distance, to figure something out.
Marcus is just like she remembers. The same baggy clothes hanging off his long, thin frame.
The same goatee and mop of hair. The younger Elsie—Ziz—doesn’t look much different than Elsie does now.
Just thinner, a lot thinner. After her mom passed, she’d pretty much stopped eating.
In the midst of an argument, Marcus leans over the table, both hands up as he pleads with Ziz. “How am I supposed to know how you feel? You don’t respond to my texts. Most of the time you don’t want to do things with me anymore.”
“I’m just so tired.”
“All the time?”
“Yes, all the time.” Her gestures and speech are slow, each word a labour. There are dark circles under her eyes despite the fact that she sleeps throughout the day now. Elsie just wants to hug her.
Marcus leans in further, lowering his voice as he talks to Ziz. “And last night you said you don’t want to, you know, sleep together anymore.”
Elsie remembers. She had found herself turning away from his overtures, the finger he ran down her arm as they spooned, the kiss to her neck.
Where she had once quickly warmed to him and turned to embrace him, she now found his advances irritating, another task on a long list of things she couldn’t accomplish.
She shrugged him off and he rolled over to face the wall.
If only he’d simply held her as she cried.
“It’s not you,” Ziz says now, looking out this café window. “I just don’t have the energy.” Or the appetite. Not just for sex and food, but for living.
Marcus takes her hand in both of his. “Do you want me? I mean, this relationship?”
“It’s not like that. That’s not what this is about.”
“Then what is it about?”
Ziz hiccups a sob before she tries to explain. “Since Mom died—”
Marcus waits for her to continue, but she doesn’t. “It’s been almost two years since the funeral, Ziz. How long is this going to last?”
The girl hangs her head. “I don’t know.”
Marcus lets go of her hand, leans back, runs his fingers through his hair. “I don’t think I can keep doing this.”
Ziz raises her head. In her eyes, there’s fury. “You want to end things?”
“I don’t know.”
Ziz stares at him through greasy bangs, then jumps out of the booth and flees to the bathroom.
Marcus stands as if he’s thinking of following her into the women’s washroom.
But instead, he pulls a gift-wrapped box from his pocket and, after looking down at it for a moment, sets it on the table in their booth.
He goes over to the fridge and rearranges the word magnets into a sentence, a message Elsie hadn’t seen at the time: I miss you.
Then he marches towards the door, pushing past Elsie, not even registering her as she stands to stop him.
“Marcus,” she calls after him, but her voice is muffled by her mask and in the noise of the café, he doesn’t hear her.
He elbows his way through the lineup outside before disappearing down the street.
No wonder he broke up with her. Elsie—Ziz—had been a mess. All this time she’d been focused on how Marcus had betrayed her, leaving when she needed him most; how he hurt her. But clearly, she’d hurt him too.
Elsie picks up the gift box from the table and pockets it as she rushes to the bathroom.
As soon as she steps inside, she experiences a second wave of déjà vu, and then, as she tentatively knocks on the bathroom stall door, she knows why.
She was the woman who spoke to Ziz through the stall door after she ran into the bathroom.
Elsie always thought the stranger was one of the servers.
She never got a good look at her, other than her shoes.
“Ziz?” Elsie knocks on the stall door. “You in there?”
“Who is it?” Ziz asks.
How does Elsie explain? I’m you. An older you. Better if she doesn’t. “I saw your argument,” she says.
“Everyone saw,” Ziz says. “I feel so stupid.”
“You need to come out,” Elsie says. “Go after him. Tell him how you feel, before he leaves for good.” There’s a long silence. “You love him, right?”
Ziz doesn’t answer at first. Then she says, “I guess. I don’t feel much of anything anymore.” Elsie remembers that emptiness. Even now there are mornings when she wakes staring into that aching void.
Elsie puts a hand to the stall door, then thinks better of it and wipes her hand down the side of her wet raincoat. No one ever disinfects bathroom doors.
“Seriously, you need to go after him. If you don’t—” How much should she tell Ziz? As much as she has to. “You won’t see him again.”
Ziz seems to think about that. “Did he say something to you? How do you know?”
“No. It’s just, I’ve been there. You need to fix this. Apologize.”
“Me? He’s the one who should apologize.”
Elsie hears the automatic toilet flush.
“This is none of your business,” Ziz says. “Go away.”
Fine. Elsie will have to handle this herself, then. She’ll keep her mask on, explain Ziz’s behaviour to Marcus, why she’s acting this way, and beg him to come back to the table. But he’ll be at his car by now. She might already be too late.
Elsie leaves her twenty-four-year-old self in the stall and bangs out of the bathroom, skirting the booths to reach the front door, but there, in the lineup outside, she sees the old woman, the ghost. She could be just another senior waiting for lunch if it weren’t for the nightgown, the bare feet, and her steady, haunting stare.
“Hey!” Elsie calls out as she strides towards her.
“Who are you?” She holds up the atlas. “Did you leave this thing at the lookout for me? What is this all about?” At the sound of her raised voice, the whole lineup turns to look at her.
A small child, alarmed, cries in her mother’s arms. And it’s only then that Elsie realizes how she must appear: her hair pasted to her head from the rain of a future day, her raincoat also wet, her worn runners and threadbare backpack.
To them she’s a crazy homeless woman yelling at someone who isn’t there.
The old woman, the ghost, lifts her arm sideways to point down the road just as the sun breaks through the clouds, angling its evening light directly on them.
Then, in the next instant, she’s gone. Elsie holds up a hand against the sun’s glare to see what the old woman was drawing her attention to.
And there’s Marcus’s car driving past the café.
Elsie races up the street after him. “Marcus!” she calls, waving.
But he doesn’t see her. His face, reflected in the side mirror, is blistered with anger, or hurt. He drives on.
It’s only then that Elsie sees Amy in Marcus’s passenger seat.
Her long blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and the scarf around her neck is blowing in the breeze from the open window.
So that’s why Amy stopped returning her messages after Elsie and Marcus split.
She’d chosen Marcus as her friend over Elsie, and probably for the same reasons Marcus had finally given up on her.
Following her mother’s funeral, Elsie had found herself making excuses as to why she couldn’t go out when Amy asked and then had simply not bothered to respond when Amy texted, even as her friend asked how Elsie was doing.
She just couldn’t come up with the energy.
Despite what she thought at the time, Marcus and Amy had, in fact, been there for her.
Elsie was just too sick to see it. The realization has come far too late.
A wind churned by the passing traffic closes the atlas, and Elsie is suddenly back on the empty, rainy street under the awning outside the closed diner.
She opens the page again, but she’s still there, in the dark, her present.
Did she really see it all—the argument, Marcus driving away with Amy—or was she lost in some kind of waking dream?
But then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out the gift Marcus left behind on the table. So, she’s not hallucinating. She was really there, in the past.
Three years too late, she opens Marcus’s gift.
It’s a magnetic poetry kit, so she could create poetry on her fridge at home, or they could do it together as they had when they first met.
Even then, he was still reaching out to her.
And yet, after that day, she never texted him again. No wonder, then, he never messaged her.
But perhaps it’s not too late to change things, to fix things, or at least to apologize. Marcus and she had been friends first, before they became lovers. Maybe they could be friends again.
She clicks on contacts, then on Marcus, types.
Hey.
Nothing committal. A poke to the shoulder, that’s all. A wave across the street. Either of them could just keep walking.
She waits. Maybe he’s changed his number. But then she sees the line of dots waving as he types, and her phone buzzes.
Hey!
Wow.
Long time.
How are you?
Good. And then her thumbs freeze over the screen. What does she say now? She should have composed something, made notes.
Marcus makes the next move. Where are you these days?
Ladysmith.
Still?
Should she have lied? Where are you?
Victoria.
Not too long a drive. Maybe we could meet for coffee. She watches as the waving dots appear then disappear. She holds her breath until they appear again.
How about lunch tomorrow?
Tomorrow. Friday. She’d have to take the day off.
He wants to meet tomorrow.
He wants to meet.