Eleven October 21, 2023
“Is she alive?” Elsie asks.
Her sister’s face clouds. “What are you talking about?”
“Is Mom still with us?” Please let her be alive.
Bailey takes off her glasses. “Ellie, you’re scaring me.”
“Just tell me. Is Mom alive?”
“She died five years ago. You went on that hike last Sunday with Zander to mark the anniversary, remember?”
“She fell at the lookout?”
“Ellie, what’s this about?”
Elsie drops her bag to the floor and slumps onto a stool opposite her sister. “Telling Mom how she died didn’t change anything. I didn’t save her.”
“How could you?”
Elsie pulls out her phone and shows Bailey the photo she took of her mother and herself with the two younger versions of her and her sister.
Bailey puts her glasses back on. “What the hell is this?”
“You remember that first Christmas after Mom and Dad separated?”
“Not much. I was what? Nine? Ten?”
“We had a guest. A woman we never met before.”
Bailey nods slowly as the memory surfaces. “You thought she was an angel. I thought she was one of Mom’s strays.”
Elsie pats her chest. “That was me. I was there, on that Christmas morning, just minutes ago.”
Her sister stares at her, her eyes magnified by her reading glasses, then hands her the phone. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“Photos can be so easily faked. I just don’t know why you would do it. It’s cruel, Ellie.”
Elsie pulls the Polaroids from her pocket and the cookie tin, scattering them across the counter. “You can’t fake Polaroids,” she says. “Not like this.”
Bailey flips through the photos one by one. “Where did you get these?”
“I took them that Christmas, when I was seven. You must remember. Then I left them in this cookie tin, for me to find when I was older. Well, except for this one.” She taps the Polaroid that she had pocketed.
The colours were brighter than the rest, like the photo had just been taken. “This one came back with me.”
“Came back?”
“From 2002.”
Bailey squints at her, then slides the tin over, paws through the contents. “You kept all this stuff? Or did Mom? Was it in her things? Is that where you got that dress?”
“I told you. I just found the tin. Under the floorboard in the closet at our old house. After I visited Mom in 2002.”
Bailey sifts through the photos again, then takes off her glasses to study Elsie, searching for her tell, the rapid blink. Not finding it, she tilts her head sideways. “You actually believe all this, what you’re telling me?”
Frustrated, Elsie throws up a hand. “Of course I do. I just lived it. Bailey, I’m time-travelling.”
“How can you possibly be time-travelling?” She laughs a little. “I mean, what the fuck?”
Elsie holds up the atlas. “With this. If I open it at the right place, the location on the central map, when the moon is moving through the house, I travel in time. To the past, so far.”
“You’ve gone back in time more than once?”
“At the lookout, I saw Mom die again. I mean for real. Then I went back to my first week at work. Then to the day Marcus broke up with me. And today, I visited Mom back in 2002. The first four locations in the atlas.”
“Did you make the atlas? To support this fantasy?”
“No.”
Her sister sits back, hands limp in her lap, to gape out the window, the glass awash in light after the rainstorm. She startles when a chickadee smacks into the pane and flies drunkenly away. “We’ve got to get you help,” she says. Bailey pulls out her phone, starts a call.
“Please don’t involve Dad,” Elsie says.
But she hears her father’s voice as Bailey puts her cell to her ear. “Hello?”
“Dad, I’m taking Elsie to the hospital,” Bailey says. “I think something’s very wrong.” She pauses, looking at Elsie, as she listens to their father. “No. It’s worse. I can’t explain now. Just meet us there.”
Elsie stands, hugging the atlas. “I’m not going to emergency.”
Her sister walks around the counter to face her. “Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
The sisters stare at each other. The fridge hums and gurgles.
A rat scurries through the walls. One day last month, Elsie shuffled out of the bathroom with a toothbrush in her mouth to find an overfed rat waddling sleepily into the kitchenette like a depressed and unemployed roommate.
On seeing her, the rat scrambled into her newly emptied garbage can and then couldn’t get out.
Elsie dropped her toothbrush and, mouth foaming, rushed to the stairwell, screaming for her sister’s help.
Bailey sighed heavily as she marched downstairs and into the kitchenette where, with a look of calm resignation, she picked up the garbage can, carried it outside and released the rat.
Bailey’s wearing that same expression now. “Ellie, if you really are experiencing what you say you are, we need to get you medical help. Now. This delusion that you’re time-travelling, that you can somehow save Mom—you’ve got to see how irrational it is.”
Elsie, following her sister’s gaze, turns to the full-length mirror on the wall. Her mother’s pink party dress. The wrinkled raincoat. Her ponytail stuck out the side of her head. Her mascara smudged under her eyes.
Bailey holds out her hand, but Elsie doesn’t take it. If she really does have another breakdown, or even if another rat appears in her kitchenette, she knows, now, that she won’t call Bailey for help.
Elsie lifts her backpack from the floor. “At least let me change first?” she asks.
Bailey seems relieved. “Okay. Yes. Of course.”
Elsie gathers her phone, the Polaroids, the atlas and her cookie tin into her backpack and carries it down the stairs to her basement suite. But then, instead of changing, she just keeps on walking, through her apartment and out the side door.