Thirteen October 23, 2023
MONDAY AFTER lunch, Zander takes Elsie’s hand to pull her up from the couch where she’d been scrolling on her laptop. “It’s time,” he says. “The moon just transited into the fifth house.” He slides his jacket from the back of a chair. “Let’s go time-travelling.”
“Dressed like this?” Elsie is wearing Zander’s blue sweatpants and hoodie. Here, at his place, she has no clothes of her own, except her mother’s party dress.
He looks her up and down. “Why not?”
“Don’t you have clients this afternoon?” she asks, grabbing the atlas from the coffee table.
“I cancelled them.”
She follows him into the hall to slip on her shoes. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He grins at her. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“What?”
He takes her hand. “You’re the most exciting adventure of my life.”
Elsie feels her heels lift from the floor as she begins to float. There’s a long moment where he holds her gaze, but then, as he turns to leave the house, she gets it: It’s not her that’s exciting Zander. It’s the atlas, the time travel. And with that, her feet are back on the ground.
“So where are we going today?” he asks, as they get in the car. “What’s the location on the chart again?”
Elsie flips to “The Fifth House: Expression” in the atlas, then checks the coordinates and clicks on a street view to show him. “It’s someone’s house. In Chemainus.” A split-level with what appears to be a sizable workshop to the side.
“Why would the atlas take you there?”
“I don’t know.”
Zander rubs his hands together before starting the car. “Then let’s go find out.”
THE SPLIT-LEVEL in Chemainus is as nondescript as it appeared in street view: white with green trim, peeling paint, a few neglected tea roses still blooming along the walkway. The porch is strung with wind chimes that tinkle in the light breeze. But the place seems familiar somehow.
A sign on the door announces: Crystal Sweeney. Tarot Card Readings. By Appointment Only. And then offers a telephone number. Elsie stops on seeing the sign. “Oh,” she says. “I’ve been here before.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure.”
Zander looks at the door. “You want me to—”
“No. I’ve got this.” Elsie tucks the atlas under her arm and knocks.
A woman opens the door dressed in a white peasant blouse, jeans, green Crocs. She’s carrying a few extra pounds and has a soft earth-mother vibe about her. Even though she’s likely still in her fifties, her face is lined from years spent under the sun, in her garden.
“If you’re here for a reading,” the woman says, “it’s by appointment only.” She studies Elsie uncomfortably long. “Do I know you?” she asks Elsie. “I know you, don’t I?”
“You do look familiar. I’m Elsie and this is Zander.”
“Crystal,” she says, touching her collarbone.
Crystal. Elsie thinks of the crystal on her desk, the one she carried with her from childhood. A flicker of memory surfaces: the light thrown by countless crystals hanging on fishing lines in front of a stranger’s window.
“You’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses, are you?” Crystal asks.
“No,” she says.
“Mormon?”
“No.”
“They come around trying to convert me a lot. I imagine it’s the sign that attracts them.” Tarot Card Readings. “Selling anything else?”
“No.”
“I’m not donating either. I can barely make my mortgage as it is.”
Zander nods in sympathy. “I run a small business myself. Astrology readings.”
The woman’s face brightens. “Then you know.”
“We don’t want anything from you,” Elsie says. “Other than to step inside.”
“Why?” And then Crystal’s gaze drops to the atlas under Elsie’s arm.
“Can I see that?” Elsie hands the book to her.
“The Pocket Atlas of Nostalgia and Longing. You don’t forget a title like that.
” She gives it back to Elsie. “You’re her daughter, aren’t you?
You look like her. And she brought a Polaroid.
I remember your face.” Crystal taps her lips.
“What was her name? Something French, like what you’d call a poodle. Coco. No. Fifi.”
Oh! “That was my mom, Sophia!”
Crystal chuckles like she’s not at all surprised by any of this. “Small world. You want coffee? Tea?”
On entering Crystal’s home, Elsie sees crystals, prisms, hanging from fishing lines in front of the windows, shooting shards of light in every direction. It’s like walking into a disco. “I remember these,” Elsie says. As a child, she was fascinated by them. “You gave me one. I still have it.”
“You were just a wee thing then. Your mother didn’t want you to hear our conversation, so I gave you a crystal and sent you into the garden to play with it. You were bouncing rainbows off everything with that prism.”
“I remember.”
“I certainly remember that day. It was one of the strangest tarot card readings I ever did.” She nods at the kitchen table as she plugs in a kettle. “Have a sit.”
On the table, a pack of tarot cards. In the living room, shelves jammed with books. A crocheted blanket has been cast across the back of the couch like a net. A calico cat sits atop it, staring at Elsie with sleepy green eyes.
“Your mother was looking for answers,” Crystal says. She puts cups down in front of them, instant coffee in one, a teabag in the other.
“Answers?”
“She told me all about that atlas, gave the title. She said her daughter, her grown daughter, had used it to travel back in time and warned her about her own early death.” The woman states this far-fetched story as if it were a commonplace occurrence, a recounting of a trip to the mall.
“And you believed her?”
Crystal pours boiling water into their cups. “Honey, after reading tarot cards for this many years, you’ll come to believe almost anything. It’s weird out there.”
As if to prove the point, a peacock struts into view outside and displays its feathers for the garden gnome.
Crystal returns the kettle to the counter.
“Your mother wanted to know if her death was a done deal, and when it would happen.” She rounds up spoons, milk, sugar.
“I couldn’t give her the date. I sent her to an astrologer for that.
I figured Maryanne could offer her more on that front than I could.
But yeah, the cards confirmed she was looking at an early death.
” Crystal takes a seat with them. “She did pass young, didn’t she? ”
Elsie nods, looking down at her cup. “Five years ago.”
“They always leave us too soon.”
Zander sits forward. “You sent Fifi to Maryanne? In Victoria? That was my grandmother.”
“Oh! You’re Alexander!” Crystal shakes his hand in both her own. “I knew your grandmother from way back. I used to go to her for readings myself.”
Elsie and Zander exchange a glance. It seems their lives are more entangled than they had imagined.
“So, why’d you two pop by?” Crystal asks.
“To open the atlas,” Elsie says. “The coordinates for the map on the next page is for here.”
“Seriously?” Crystal laughs again. “Well, go ahead. Open it! Your mother told me how you closed the atlas and disappeared, right in front of her.” The old woman had closed it, but Elsie doesn’t bother to explain.
She stands and lifts the atlas. “Okay, I’ll just—” She closes her eyes, bracing herself, and opens the atlas to “The Fifth House: Expression.” But she feels none of the disorienting déjà vu and vertigo.
She opens one eye. She’s still in the kitchen, with Zander and Crystal looking up at her from the table.
“That’s it?” says Crystal.
Elsie closes and opens the atlas again. “I don’t understand.
I didn’t go anywhere.” But then, out the window, Elsie sees the old woman standing in front of the workshop door.
All around her the trees and bushes sway in the wind.
A dust devil swirls nearby. But the old woman’s nightgown and wispy hair are unmoving.
She stares at Elsie with piercing eyes and then, in the next instant, is gone.
“This isn’t the place,” Elsie says, still looking outside. “It’s the workshop.” She waves a hand in its general direction. “Do you mind?” she asks Crystal.
“Nothing in there but my husband’s tools and junk.”
“He won’t mind?” Elsie asks.
“John died,” Crystal says, flatly. “A decade ago.” But in her demeanor Elsie recognizes an active grief. A heaviness in the air around her.
“I’m so sorry.”
Crystal grabs a sweater and tosses it on, turning her back on them. “I’ll unlock the workshop.”
They walk a gravel path through a winter garden: kale, scallions, leeks, spinach, beetroot, chard and arugula.
At the end of the property, a fenced area contains a muddy pond and mixed fancy fowl: Silkie chickens, Muscovy ducks, Chinese geese.
Wisteria vines drape over the workshop roof, and at the entrance, wasps have built a nest over the porch light.
Mercifully, the insects have vacated, but Elsie can see why Crystal left it there.
It’s a curvaceous paper sculpture, gnawed wood fiber and spit, that glows from the light of the bulb within.
Crystal unlocks the door and turns the greasy knob, and dust lifts as they enter the workshop, swirling in the light soaking through the dirty windows.
The air is infused with the smell of sawdust and walnut oil.
Wood projects in various stages of construction sit on workbenches and tables as if John is just about to return to complete them: a jewelry box without hinges; the parts of a coffee table, not yet assembled.
A mostly finished kayak hangs from the ceiling above them.
There’s a door to a small bathroom with a shower, the only room in the workshop.
A mini-bar fridge sits under a counter where John made his coffee and used a microwave.
Maybe he ate his lunches out here on weekends when Crystal entertained her clients.
Elsie turns to Crystal and Zander, to say she’s ready, then opens the atlas to the fifth house again. In the instant before time shifts, she catches Zander watching her with the giddy anticipation of an eclipse chaser who is about to be enveloped by the shadow of the moon.