Twelve October 21, 2023
WHEN ZANDER opens his door, he grins at Elsie’s appearance. Her poofy pink party dress under her raincoat, her side ponytail. Then again, he’s wearing pajama pants covered in elves.
“I’m sorry for turning up like this,” she says.
“But I didn’t know where else to go.” She had driven down to Victoria thinking, at first, that she could stay with Marcus, as he seemed to suggest at lunch the day before.
But there were expectations embedded in his invitation, and she just wasn’t up to that right now.
In any case, Zander was the one person she knew who might believe her story, or at least listen to it.
Zander steps back to allow her in. “You’re always welcome,” he says. And, as he takes her coat and hangs it for her, she does feel welcome. He’s never been anything but kind.
Elsie slings her backpack over one shoulder as he leads her not to his office, but through the barn door to his private quarters. “Tea?” he asks.
“Please.” She drops her backpack to the floor as she takes a stool at the counter. “Orange pekoe. Decaffeinated if you have it—” she starts on automatic.
“Nothing if you don’t,” he continues. “I have it. And skim milk. No bubbles.”
As Zander fills and plugs in the kettle, Elsie looks around the kitchen. It hasn’t been renovated in decades. White cupboards with wood trim and no handles, butcher block counters, a pantry to the side of the fridge. A hanging wire basket in the corner near the sink holds bananas, oranges, apples.
“You seem upset,” he says as he sets out the mugs, the milk. “Is everything okay?”
Elsie rubs her sweaty palms on her mother’s dress, trying to think of a way to ask the question. “Do you think we can change our destiny? Or another person’s?”
“Are you asking if I believe in fate?”
“I guess.” She undoes the side ponytail, twirling the scrunchy in her hands. “Say I had a time machine. Could I change things in the past?”
He drops a teabag into her cup and pours in the boiling water.
“I don’t know. I’d like to think we can make choices, free will and all that.
The way I see it, astrology isn’t so much about seeing a person’s past or future, their fate, as about seeing potential patterns in a person’s life, issues they may need to address. Why do you ask?”
She finds the Polaroids in her backpack and shows them to him. “I just spent Christmas morning with my mother, in 2002.”
He sorts through the Polaroids again and again, as if shuffling cards, then stares wide-eyed at her. His hand shakes as if he can’t control his excitement. He stands and strides out of his living area, waving her along. “I have something to show you.”
She adds milk to her tea and, taking a sip, follows him. In his office, Zander searches for something on a bookshelf. “You know your mother was my grandmother’s client.”
“Yes.”
“They worked together for years, became good friends.”
He pulls a large notebook from the shelf. “I take client confidentiality seriously. I haven’t even told Bailey about this. But given what you’re telling me—” He opens the journal and turns it so Elsie can read it. The notes are handwritten in an elegant cursive.
“These are Nana’s notes about your mother’s first session.
She came to my grandmother with a crazy story about how her daughter, her grown daughter, appeared from the future one Christmas and told her how she’d die.
She wanted to know when, so she knew how much time she’d have with her kids.
Her daughter had tried to tell her, but she didn’t want to hear it at first. Nana couldn’t say how long she had, of course.
She could only point out likely crossroads, turning points where big changes might happen.
The thing is, your mom told Nana about the atlas, the astrological charts. ”
“Why didn’t you say anything at the lookout?”
“What would you have thought if I told this story at that point?”
“That you made it up.” It would have been a little creepy, in fact.
“Exactly.” He sits opposite her. “In any case, I didn’t believe the story was real at the time. I mean, why would I?”
“And now?”
His face is shining. “Those Polaroids are hard to fake.”
Elsie reads his grandmother’s session notes.
It’s all there: Elsie arriving with the atlas that Christmas in 2002; Ellie thinking she was an angel; Elsie showing her mother her birthmark; Elsie’s disappearance after the old woman closed the atlas.
Although, there’s no mention of the ghost. Evidently her mother simply saw Elsie vanish.
Elsie laugh-cries. It’s confirmation of everything she’s gone through so far.
She looks up at Zander. And here’s someone who believes her!
She quickly and breathlessly tells Zander her story: reliving her mother’s death at the lookout.
Travelling to her first week of full-time work in 2019.
Witnessing her breakup with Marcus. Slipping into her empty childhood house and, on opening the atlas, appearing in front of the Christmas tree and her seven-year-old self who thought she was an angel.
Dressing up in her mother’s party dresses.
The ghost of an old woman who closed the atlas.
“I told Mom how she would die,” she says. “But it didn’t stop her from hiking to the lookout or falling down that cliff. I’m thinking that if I can just finish working my way through the atlas pages, maybe I can go back to the first chart and try again, to save her.”
“Do you think that’s even possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is the old woman?”
“I have no idea.” Elsie drinks the last of her tea. “She’s connected to the atlas somehow.”
“And your mother never told you about any of this, I mean before it happened.”
“No.”
“I imagine she didn’t want to scare you.”
And of course it would have frightened Elsie, to know her mother would die so young.
“Can we talk about the fifth house chart?” she asks.
He sits back. “Sure.”
“Is it too much like work? I mean, during your time off?”
“No, not at all. I find all this fascinating.” He retrieves her file from his desk, which includes a copy of the atlas, and finds the page titled “The Fifth House: Expression.” Zander drags his stool around so they can look at the page together.
“As you’d imagine, this house is all about self-expression,” he says. “Creativity, romance, sex—”
Elsie is at once aware of the heat of Zander’s arm against her own.
“But it’s about casual sex,” he says. “Not real intimacy. That comes in the eighth house. When the moon influences the fifth, you could end up with the wrong partner, either in business or romantically, so watch for that.”
The wrong partner. Elsie shifts away from Zander. It was only yesterday that she had lunch with Marcus and contemplated taking him up on his offer to hook up.
Zander taps the chart, a squiggle shaped like an h with a cross on it.
“Saturn is in your fifth house, imposing boundaries, limitations. I suspect you’ve been highly repressed, by yourself and others.
But Saturn is close to the end of the house, so its influence on this aspect is waning.
” Zander grins at her party dress. “I think we can already see a loosening of Saturn’s hold on you.
It’ll only get weaker now that the moon is transiting through the fifth house. ”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Like I said, the fifth house is all about creativity, what you do for entertainment, the first child—”
“The first child?”
“Childbirth can be seen as the ultimate form of creativity.”
What her mother said: Being a mother changed everything.
“Don’t look so worried,” Zander says. “The house is all about what we do for fun. It’s sometimes called the House of Pleasure.”
“The next atlas trip is actually going to be fun this time?”
“What’s the location on this map?” Zander asks.
“Some stranger’s house up island, in Chemainus.”
“You have no connection to this place or its owner?”
She shakes her head. “When is the moon transiting into the fifth house?”
“Monday, just after lunch,” he says. “The date on the chart is for the end of July 2024.”
“Next year?”
He looks up at her. “Can I come with you on this trip?”
“Maybe. I mean, we can go to the fifth house location together. See what happens when I open the atlas there.” Will she disappear and reappear like the ghost, the old woman?
It seems so. Her little girl self, Ellie, said she did, and, in talking to Zander’s nana, so did her mother.
“But it’s not like you can travel in time with me,” she says.
“No. I didn’t expect to. It’s your atlas.” Zander closes her file. “I have a guest room. You can hide from your family here for a few days until things cool down.”
“I’d appreciate that. Thanks.”
He stands. “Did you have dinner?”
“No.”
“Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“How about veggie burgers? I’ll get them going while you have a shower. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs.”
“I need a shower?” She thinks of her ruined makeup for the first time since she arrived. She pats her face. “I must look awful.”
“Not awful. Just exhausted. A shower helps.” He talks over his shoulder as he turns to the kitchen. “You can borrow anything you want out of my closet. And make yourself at home in the guest room.”
Elsie grabs her backpack from the kitchen and climbs the stairs to the second floor.
The upstairs bathroom is dated but charming.
There’s a claw-foot bathtub and black and white tiles on the floor.
And it’s a whole lot cleaner than Elsie’s.
She slips out of her mother’s party dress and steps into the curtained bathtub to shower the strange day from her person.
When she walks back into the kitchen wearing a pair of Zander’s sweats and one of his T-shirts, Zander is chopping lettuce, onions and pickles. As he places buns on two white plates, he asks, “Do you want cheese?”
“Oh, no thank you.”
“Right. You don’t like cheese.” So, at the lookout, he noticed. Zander slides the veggie burger onto her plate in front of her.
“I know I’m weird,” she says.
“Just because you have particular tastes? I don’t think so. You’re discerning.”
Elsie grins at Zander with giddy relief, like a lonely traveller in a foreign country who’s found someone who understands her language.
“So, what do you think I’ll see on Monday?” she asks.
“When you time-travel?” Zander takes a bite of his burger, wipes the mustard from his chin with a paper napkin. “You tell me. Like I said, the fifth house is all about self-expression. What are you into?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Hobbies.”
“I used to draw.”
“And you don’t now?”
“Not in the last few years.” But once it was one of her many passions.
“Do you play an instrument?”
“I played the flute in high school.”
“And now?”
“No.”
“I imagine you cook for yourself, though, right?”
Elsie bites into her burger as she thinks about that.
In her basement, she cooks ramen. Mug cakes.
Rice steamed in a cooker. Fried eggs. In the evenings, she nibbles on bowls of cereal or Nutella on toaster waffles.
Habits left over from her impoverished student days.
She does take fruit and carrot sticks to work.
“Bailey invites me upstairs a lot, to eat.”
“Do you read books?”
She nods as she finishes chewing. She has begun reading again in recent months, after a long spell where she struggled to focus, to concentrate.
“How about work? I imagine you put a fair amount of yourself into your maps.”
“Not these maps. We make them for logging companies.” She thinks about that. “Well, even those can be pretty. But Dad’s always giving me hell for spending too much time on them.” She puts on a gruff voice. “‘I don’t pay you to make ’em pretty. I just pay you to make ’em.’”
Zander laughs. Those dimples on his cheeks. He stops laughing and there they are, looking at each other.
She wipes her mouth on a paper napkin and slides off her stool. “Give me a sec? I’d like to show you something.”
Elsie thunders upstairs barefoot to the flowery guest room where she left her backpack. She skips back downstairs carrying her laptop and opens it on the kitchen counter. “This is a temporal map of that lightning storm we had in September,” she says, opening the file.
“A temporal map.”
“It shows movement, changes over time.”
“Like the atlas.”
“In a way, yes.”
That storm was conjured by a heat wave and now, as she hits play, the lightning sparks and surges over the map, as the storm flows through the whole southern interior of the province and then to Vancouver Island.
“It’s spectacular,” he says.
“Here’s another.” She pulls up a second file. “This shows the change in flow of a river over the decades. That’s the thing I love about working in GIS. I can bring clarity to complex data and systems, so people can see it, for themselves.”
Zander watches her, smiling, until she grows uncomfortable. “What?”
“When you talk about mapping you light right up. Clearly you love it.”
“I love creating maps, just not forestry maps.”
Zander sits back, crosses his arms. “If you could do anything with your skills, what would you do?” he asks her.
“I wouldn’t be making maps for logging companies.”
“So, you wouldn’t be working for your father.”
She closes the file. “Dad always wanted a family company.”
“Yeah, but what do you want?”
Elsie doesn’t know what to say. What does she want?
To change the subject, she opens her browser.
“This is a story map,” she says. One she built free of charge for a river restoration project.
It’s interactive with a series of photos to click on, showing the work the volunteer organization had done to heal the river over time and what they hoped to accomplish in the future, alongside a chart of the river and surrounding area.
She moves a slider to show how the snaking path of the river has changed, clicks on pop-ups that offer more images, scrolls down for text describing the project.
“You made this?”
“It’s easy, really. There are templates for it.
I tried to convince Dad to let me do work for non-profits, but he wouldn’t go for it.
He couldn’t see the money in it. I told him there is funding available for many of these projects, at least enough to cover costs, my wage.
He just didn’t feel there was enough of a profit margin. ”
Elsie’s phone buzzes and buzzes on the counter.
“Speak of the devil,” she says, picking it up.
“Dad. And Bailey.” There’s been a steady stream of messages and calls from Bailey and her father since she left the house.
She hasn’t answered any of them. “I don’t know what to tell them,” she says.
“They’ll want to know where I am. If I tell them, they’ll turn up here. ”
Zander lifts one shoulder. “So don’t.”
And perhaps for the first time in years, it occurs to Elsie that she doesn’t have to answer to her family—that she is, in fact, an adult.