Ten October 21, 2023 #3
As soon as her mother opens the trunk, both Bailey and Ellie start throwing out dresses.
Elsie lifts her mother’s wedding gown from the floor.
It’s a simple white empire dress with a high waist and beaded bodice.
She holds it up to herself and feels another overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
As a child, she saw herself wearing it one day.
Perhaps she’s holding her future in her hands.
She carefully folds it, lays it gently back in the trunk.
“Here,” her mom says, handing Elsie a velvet and taffeta dress. “Try this on.”
“Oh, that’s not my thing.”
“How about this?” Bailey holds up a pink dress with a puff skirt and sleeves, and Elsie throws it on as her mother shimmies into a gold lamé cocktail dress.
“You look like a princess,” Ellie tells Elsie.
“Just wait until we complete the ensemble!” her mom says. She digs through the trunk until she finds a matching scrunchy and then gathers Elsie’s curls into a single ponytail off the side of her head. “There, now you really are time-travelling,” she says.
Elsie pulls out her phone. “Let me take a few photos of us.”
“What is that?” Bailey asks.
“A phone.”
“That’s a phone? I saw they just released phones with cameras, but nothing like that.” She turns to her mom. “Can I get one?”
Her mother exchanges a glance with Elsie. “I think you’ll have to wait awhile.”
Elsie snaps a few pictures. Here’s proof that she’s time-travelling. Her dad and Bailey will have to believe her. Then again, digital photos can be so easily faked. “Ellie, do you still have that Polaroid camera?”
“I got it for my birthday!” she says.
“Do you want to grab it? Take a few photos of us?”
The girl disappears down the attic stairs and returns with a Polaroid, a child’s camera. They all crowd back together for a few more shots and then watch as the images appear. “Can I have one of these?” Elsie asks.
“Sure!”
Elsie slides on her raincoat and pockets the Polaroid, taking a moment to reassure herself that her phone, wallet and keys are still there too.
“Are you cold?” her mom asks.
“No, I just don’t want to travel back home without my things.” In case she, or one of the girls, accidentally closes the atlas.
“Ah, there’s that.”
Elsie holds out the skirt of her pink party dress, touches a finger to the trunk. “I wonder if this is the geocache I’m supposed to find.”
“What’s a geocache?” Ellie asks.
“It’s like what you find on a treasure hunt,” Bailey says.
“I want to go find a geocache,” Ellie says.
“No!” Elsie cries, and the room goes quiet as her mom and the girls turn to look at her. “I mean, it’s boring,” she says, trying to laugh it off. “Just a lot of hiking.”
“I’ve got a treasure chest,” Ellie says. “I’ll show you.” Elsie slips on her shoes and follows her down the narrow stairs to her old bedroom. The girl walks right into her closet and kneels to lift a floorboard. Within the hole there’s a cookie tin.
“I forgot all about that,” Elsie says.
“You knew about it?” Ellie asks.
“I do now,” Bailey says, entering the room. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Her mother, standing behind her, adds, “Show her only if you want to, Ellie.”
Ellie sits back to open the cookie tin and dumps the contents on the floor.
Pokémon cards; a handful of coins; a plastic tiara; rings, necklaces, and bracelets; a mini flashlight; a miniature metal tool box filled with tiny metal tools; markers; a PEZ dispenser; marbles and jacks; Lego; a magnifying glass. A piece of petrified wood.
Elsie picks up the magnifying glass, folded into an attached round case. It opens into the shape of a lazy eight. “I remember this,” she says. “Why do I remember this?”
“I don’t know,” her mom says, taking it from her. “Where did you get it, Ellie?”
“Can’t remember.” Ellie scoops up her stuff and jams it all back into the tin. Then she places the photos of the four of them into the box on top of it all and puts the lid back on. She slides the cookie tin back into the hole and puts the board back in place.
“You keep that there,” her mother tells her. “It’s a time capsule.”
“I’ll come back and find it one day,” Elsie says.
“Can we open the other presents now?” Bailey asks her mother.
“Can we?” Ellie says.
“Yes, alright. Go!”
Elsie and her mom follow the girls to the threshold of the living room. There Elsie watches her young self leap and twirl through the toys and wrapping paper, pretending to be a ballerina. “I can’t believe that’s me,” Elsie says. “She dances and speaks her mind and doesn’t care what anyone thinks.”
“You’re still that girl,” her mother says. “You carry her inside you.”
Elsie turns back to the kitchen and stands at the counter, fidgeting with the corner of the atlas until her mother joins her.
She keeps her focus on one of her mother’s maps on the wall, a river delta with its many streams flowing out to the ocean.
“You and I are on a hike, on a multi-geocache challenge, when it happens.”
Her mom holds up her hand to stop her. “I don’t want to know when I go.”
But she has to know. “We’re on the trail to the lookout when you fall retrieving a cache.
And I think it’s my fault. I really wanted to get into that geocache and when I couldn’t you took over, climbed down to the tree.
I mean, I should have been the one.” She was so much younger.
“But it wasn’t only that. I go there, to that moment, on my first time-travelling trip and you see me and startle, then you step back and—” Elsie wipes her eyes.
“Promise me you won’t ever go geocaching. ”
Her mother absentmindedly picks up her cold teacup as she thinks about that. “I imagine some of our best times are spent on those hikes.”
“We went out almost every weekend,” Elsie says. “It was our thing. Bailey wasn’t into it.”
Her mom puts her cup back down. “If I gave up geocaching, then we’d lose all those times together, all those memories.”
“But you would live.” Elsie starts to sob.
Her mother hugs her. “Oh, Sweetheart.”
“Please, promise me that you won’t go geocaching, you won’t die.”
“I can’t promise that.”
Elsie withdraws. “Then I’ll stay here.” She holds the atlas open in front of her. “If this doesn’t close, I won’t leave. I’ll just keep it open. Forever.”
“Ellie, you don’t belong here. You have a life to live, in the future.”
“But I want to stay here, with you.” It feels safe, like home. It is home. “You’re the only one who really gets me, who understands me.”
“You’ll find others,” her mother says. “I’m sure of it.”
Elsie plops onto a stool with the atlas open in her hands. “I’m staying.”
But then she startles as the old woman appears right in front of her.
Her sheer nightgown, the crepey skin of her arms, her white bare feet.
That unsettling no-nonsense glare. That’s enough of that.
There’s the metallic smell of ozone in the air and, as the ghost takes hold of Elsie hands, the snap of static in her cold grasp.
The ghost closes Elsie’s hands, palms together, and in doing so, closes the atlas too.
“No!” Elsie cries out into an empty house.
Her voice echoes against the bare walls.
The furniture and curtains are gone, her mother’s maps are gone.
The Christmas tree, the presents, Bailey and Ellie, and her mother are all gone.
Elsie turns a slow circle, with the skirt of the party dress splayed out all around her, until her gaze lands on the dead hummingbird slumbering under the window.
She runs a hand over her hair, feels the scrunchy and single ponytail sticking out one side of her head.
Her mother put that scrunchy in her hair.
She was here only a moment ago. A lifetime ago.
Elsie pulls out the Polaroid, the image of her mother and the three of them, Elsie and the two girls. She was there. She really was there with them, in the past.
The other Polaroids. Ellie’s photos might still be here in her treasure box.
Elsie searches the empty kitchen drawers until she finds a single screwdriver left behind.
She marches down the hall, into her old bedroom, and then, on hands and knees, crawls into the closet where she jimmies the screwdriver around the edge of the carpet, pulling it back.
She pries up the loose floorboard and then laughs as she sees the cookie tin is still in the hole.
She has no memory of it, but her mother must have insisted Ellie leave it there as a time capsule when they moved, hoping Elsie would find it again.
She lifts it out, her hands trembling, and opens the lid slowly, half expecting another time to jump out at her, like a jack-in-the-box.
But there are only little toys and costume jewelry, her mother’s castoffs.
She places each trinket carefully to the side.
And then, under a stack of Pokémon cards (which could be worth a few bucks), she finds the Polaroids.
The images are faded with age, but there’s Elsie as she is now, hugging her mother, and Ellie and Bailey, as they were, as kids. On the bottom of the photo her mother had written, Ellie and Elsie, Christmas 2002. We’re all time travellers!
She is a time traveller. But in warning her mother about her death, did she change anything?
Elsie collects everything back into the tin and, on getting up, rushes through the empty house.
But then, at the front door, she stops. This might be the last time she’s in this house.
She takes a long look around at this echo of her past, and then she steps out into the storm, closing the door behind her.