Ten October 21, 2023
There, at the old house, the streetlight flickers off and on in the stormy darkness over a for-sale sign that has been pounded into the lawn.
The one-story ranch, sitting empty, has a spooky feel to it.
The two dark kitchen windows seem to watch her.
She and Bailey used to pick the blossoms of the snowball bush growing out front and hurl them at each other, but now the bush is just a bundle of sticks without leaves.
The concrete on the walkway is cracked and pooled with water.
Nevertheless, it appears the owner made some attempts to tidy up the place for sale.
There’s a fresh coat of white paint on the outside walls, a newly planted apple tree by the garage and potted chrysanthemums on either side of the front door.
Other than that, though, not much has changed on the exterior since her parents sold the house over twenty years ago, during their divorce.
Elsie checks her phone. It’s time. She takes the atlas out of her backpack and, hugging it to protect it from the downpour, rushes to the house.
She knocks first, but of course there’s no answer, so she tries the door and finds it, as expected, locked.
Careful to keep the atlas out of the torrential rain, she opens it to the fourth page.
But nothing happens. She’s in this same day, this same storm.
Perhaps she should have phoned the realtor, asked for a showing, so she could open the atlas inside.
She lifts the garden gnome by the snowball bush, but there’s no key there.
She checks the ledge over the door, under the mat, tips back the potted chrysanthemums. Nothing.
But then she remembers; there’s a window off the mudroom door that had a busted lock.
It was rarely opened, even when her parents owned the house, so perhaps the succession of owners never noticed or fixed it.
She ducks around the corner under the roofline and tries the side door first. It won’t budge.
But the lock on the adjacent window is, in fact, still broken.
She shimmies it open an inch, then, after scanning the blank face of the neighbouring house, opens it all the way.
She finds a bucket, overturns it, and steps on it to climb inside.
It’s an awkward effort. The window is small, and she’s forced to drop the atlas to the floor before doing a near handstand, her feet hanging out the window.
And then she falls in a heap. She jumps up, brushes off her hands and, before closing the window, checks the alleyway to make sure she hasn’t been seen breaking in.
To the right of the mudroom, the kitchen sink sparkles in the streetlight.
The counter is bare. While there’s a fridge and stove, there’s no kitchen table and nothing on the walls.
The house smells of citrus cleaner. She wanders down the hall, looking into each of the empty bedrooms before standing at the threshold of what once was her own.
The smallest room in the house, with a window at one end and a closet at the other.
The hardwood floor has been covered over with carpet.
But there’s no furniture here. No window dressings.
The interior is freshly painted, a stark, clinical white.
It’s so empty. The pencil marks gauging her height on the door trim were long ago painted over.
Even without opening the atlas, she feels the ache of nostalgia, a longing for her childhood.
But there’s no evidence that it was ever here.
Everything, except this shell of a house, has been wiped away.
She circles back to the living room and sees something on the floor under the window.
In the dusk, it appears to be a pine cone but then, turning on her phone’s flashlight, Elsie finds it’s a hummingbird, its iridescent throat glinting in the beam of light.
Only a day or two dead. It must have slipped into the house during a showing and become trapped.
Elsie imagines its desperate attempts to get out, hitting this large window over and over again, until it finally fell to the floor, unconscious or exhausted, and died.
It seems, as Bailey would say, like an omen. For good or ill, she’s not sure. She steps into the middle of this empty room and, after taking a deep breath, opens the atlas to the page called “The Fourth House: Home.”
She experiences that same queasy déjà vu, the disorientation, but the sensation of nostalgia hits harder this time.
Feeling faint, she stumbles to the side, nearly falling into a Christmas tree.
It’s not the artificial one her mother put up for years, but the real balsam that Elsie and Bailey had begged her for in 2002.
Its fragrance fills the space. Her mom had given in and bought that tree, knowing it would be their first holiday season after her separation from their father.
This day they would spend the morning with Mom, the afternoon with Dad.
The room is familiar and yet she had forgotten so much. The textured orange walls and shabby chic furniture that her mother painted and sandpapered to make them look aged. Her mother’s framed maps hang everywhere.
“Who are you?” The high-pitched child’s voice comes from behind her.
Elsie twists around to see the girl—herself, Ellie—standing in the hall. She’s only seven, big-eyed and curious, wearing panda bear pajamas and moose slippers. All at once, Elsie recalls the memory of a stranger turning up inside the house on this Christmas morning. It was her. Elsie.
“Are you an angel?” the girl asks.
“An angel?”
“You just appeared,” Ellie says. The girl’s gaze slides to the angel at the top of the Christmas tree.
Right. This year, the girls had posed in the nativity scene during their church Christmas concert: Ellie dressed as an angel; Bailey as Mary, who watched over baby Jesus, an uncannily realistic doll swaddled within a feed trough donated, for the occasion, by a local farmer.
The thing had smelled nauseatingly of goats.
“Sure, I’m an angel,” Elsie says and puts a finger to her lips. “But you can’t tell anyone, okay? It’s our secret.”
From a bedroom down the hall, Elsie hears her sister’s childhood voice. “Lizard, who are you talking to?”
“An angel,” Ellie says.
Bailey appears behind Ellie, her hair tangled, wearing flannel Pokémon pajamas. She’s ten. She and Elsie stare at each other, these sisters out of sync. And then Bailey calls, “Mom? Mom!”
There’s a sleepy groan from her mother’s bedroom. “It’s too early, honey.” But then her mother wanders into the living room anyway, yawning and rubbing her eyes, wearing a bathrobe over the shorts and Nirvana T-shirt she habitually sleeps in.
Elsie clutches the atlas to her stomach, the ache too much to bear. “Mom?”
And with that her mother sees Elsie standing there, cradling the atlas, her hair soaked through from the rain of 2023. “Ellie, Bailey, come here,” her mom demands, and Elsie can see the panic in her mother’s face as she draws the girls close. “What are you doing in my house?” she asks Elsie.
“Don’t worry, Mommy,” Ellie says. “She’s an angel.”
“Angels aren’t real, Lizard-breath,” Bailey says. She turns to her mother. “Is she one of your strays?”
Strays. Their father’s term for not only the dogs and cats their mother fostered, but for the women and girls from the shelter where she volunteered on weekends.
Her mother brought both humans and animals home with her, sometimes to stay over in the guest room.
If she saw a woman hitchhiking, she stopped to pick her up.
She chatted with homeless people begging for change or meals at the drive-thru until the cars behind her honked.
Once when Elsie was out with her for a day of shopping, she saw a young woman sitting on the train tracks, clearly distraught, likely suicidal.
Her mother pulled the car over and jumped out to ask the woman, “What do you need?” The woman, hugging herself, said, “A ride home, I guess.” On the drive, as Ellie listened, huddled in the back seat, the woman told her mom about her bipolar disorder, the desperate low she found herself in.
Her mother listened, murmured reassurances.
Had the woman been waiting for a train to hit her?
Or was that a cry for help, a hope that someone would stop?
Her mother walked the woman to her door to make sure someone was there, to care for her.
As a child, Ellie was frightened by these people, as she didn’t then understand their sometimes odd behaviour. The young unhoused man, with frostbitten toes, who spent his time yelling at the wall when he was with them. The traumatized terrier who wouldn’t stop snarling at them.
Is that how her sister saw her now, as a stray, a poor feral creature? Is that how Bailey saw her in the future?
It seems her mother is also afraid of her now. She drags the girls into the kitchen to retrieve her flip phone. “I’m calling the police.”
Elsie follows. “No, I—” How can she explain?
“She looks like you, Mommy,” Ellie says to her mother. “In that old photo.” The girl points at the family gallery hanging on the wall by the front door.
Her mother’s eyes settle on the image of herself shortly before she and Elsie’s father were married. Her chestnut hair, high forehead, thin nose. She turns back to Elsie. “Who are you?” she asks.
“Can we talk privately?” Elsie puts a hand on Ellie’s head, the girl’s hair warm and soft. “I promise I can explain.” Sort of.
Bailey, seeing an opportunity, asks, “Can we open our stockings now?”
“Okay,” her mom says, but the girls have already disappeared into the living room. “But no presents yet,” she calls out. She turns to fill the kettle. “I get the feeling I’m going to need a caffeine hit.” And then, over her shoulder she asks, “Coffee or tea?”