Seventeen October 25, 2023
ON CLOSING the atlas, Elsie finds herself back in her father’s home office.
She immediately checks her phone for the time.
Only half an hour until he has that stroke.
She calls him, tapping a pen against his desk as she waits for him to answer.
By his computer monitor, there’s an arrangement of family photos, including a portrait of her mother.
When he picks up, she doesn’t bother to say hello. “Are you alright?” she asks him.
“Are you alright?” he says.
“Any numbness or pain?” she asks. “Confusion?”
He snorts. “Only when it comes to my daughter’s behaviour. Where the hell have you been?”
Elsie bites her thumbnail as she looks down at the coffee ring on his desk. “Can you lift your arms?” He’s talking clearly. That’s good. “Any signs of stroke?”
“A stroke?” he asks. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Elsie’s gaze slides back to the collection of framed photos on the desk, the one of her father, Elsie and Bailey standing on a dock, all of them in life jackets.
(Elsie was the only one not holding up a fish.
She had let it go as she couldn’t bear to see it at the bottom of the boat suffering, in shock, open-mouthed, gills fluttering. So out of its element.)
“Can you just go to emergency anyway?” she asks. “Get yourself checked out?”
“Of course not. Hospitals are overcrowded as it is. I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself.” He pauses. “What’s this about?”
“You’re at work?”
“No, I’m with Bailey, at her house. She’s worried about you. Worried sick.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Her father ends the call without saying goodbye. Elsie throws her backpack over her shoulder and rushes out of the house and, after locking the door, jumps in her car. She speeds to her sister’s place, which is only a few blocks away.
When she arrives, her father and sister are standing on the deck waiting for her. Bailey’s nearly in tears and doesn’t look like her usual tidy self. She’s wearing sweats and her hair is pulled back in a messy bun. It appears she hasn’t gotten enough sleep. “Where were you?” she cries out.
“Victoria,” Elsie says, closing her car door.
“With Marcus?”
“No. Well, yes. But no.”
Elsie jogs up the steps and hugs her father desperately. He’s still walking, talking. And the stroke hasn’t happened yet. There may be time to avoid it altogether if she can get him to a doctor.
“Okay, that’s enough,” he says, patting her back and stepping back. “Why didn’t you answer our texts and calls?”
“I did. I let you know I was okay.” Every day, knowing how they worried about her, she texted, I’m alive. But she left it at that. She didn’t answer their many pleas for answers. She needed space.
Elsie peers at her father, looking for signs of stroke. The dry skin on his forehead, the tiny red veins and indent from his reading glasses at the bridge of his nose. “How are you feeling now?” she asks him.
“You’re letting your anxiety get the better of you,” he says. He waves her in. “It’s cold. Let’s talk inside.” He turns and disappears into the house, expecting Elsie to follow. But Bailey lingers, to make sure she does.
Aside from the open pizza box, the kitchen is spotless and smells like a mixture of pepperoni and vinegar.
Bailey always cleans the house when she’s stressed, scrubbing her grievances from the counters, table, floors.
In the living room, a hockey game plays on the television.
Her father must have been watching as he waited for her.
The announcer’s commentary, blades on ice, the puck hitting the glass.
“Where were you?” Bailey asks again.
Elsie drops her bag to the floor by the coat rack. “I stayed at Zander’s.”
“Are you seeing him now?”
Elsie shakes her head, though, yes, she realizes, they might have dated. He’d repeatedly let her know he was interested, although she didn’t recognize it at the time.
“Zander?” her dad says.
“The guy Elsie went hiking with,” Bailey explains.
Elsie waves a hand. None of this matters right now. “Dad, we need to get you to emergency.”
“Emergency?” Bailey asks. “Why emergency?”
Her father holds out both arms, revealing the roll of his belly over his pants. “Really, Elsie, do I look like I’m having a stroke?”
“A stroke?” Bailey turns to Elsie, alarmed. “Why do you think he’s having a stroke?”
Elsie scans the grey walls, the many home decor signs, the macramé plant hanger at the window, trying to think how to convince her father and sister in the moments she has.
They’ll never believe her time-travelling story.
Outside, a blue heron lazily flies by, making its way back to the ocean shore from some river foraging expedition, a dinosaur on the wing.
“I don’t think he’s having a stroke. I know he is,” she says. “Can we please all just get in the car?”
But her father sits back at the kitchen island in front of an open pizza box and picks up his half-eaten slice, takes a bite.
“Please don’t eat that,” Elsie says.
“I missed lunch.”
“No, I mean, you need to lower your blood pressure, your cholesterol.”
He talks with his mouth full. “Have you been going through my medicine cabinet?”
Bailey turns to him. “You mean, you’re already on meds?”
He takes another bite, wipes his mouth with a napkin. “My blood pressure and cholesterol are a little high.”
“Just how high?” Bailey asks.
“The drugs will handle it.”
“No, they won’t, Dad,” Bailey says. “Not if you eat like this, not unless you exercise.”
“I could cook for you,” Elsie says. “I can move back home if that will make it easier.” She would take care of him, make sure he didn’t have that big stroke that puts him in a wheelchair.
In that instant, the thought is a relief.
She wouldn’t have to find an affordable apartment in this insane rental market.
She could move into his familiar home, take over her old bedroom.
But her father snorts as he takes another bite. “We’d drive each other nuts.”
Elsie checks her phone for the time. Her father’s “mini-stroke” is only minutes away.
She leans across the counter. “Dad, you’ve got to listen to me.
Today, in just a few minutes, at 3:33 P.M., you’ll have the first of a series of small strokes.
And then in a couple of years, you’ll have a big one.
You won’t be able to walk or talk. You’ll be stuck in a wheelchair. ”
“How can you possibly know that?” Bailey asks.
“Because I saw him, okay?” she says. She closes her eyes and shakes her head before saying it: “The atlas took me to the future.”
Her sister’s face loses all expression, becomes a mask. “You think you’ve been time-travelling,” she says flatly.
“I have been.”
Her father and sister exchange the look, and she imagines what they must see: the wrinkled red dress she wore on her date with Marcus, her eyes puffy from crying and lack of sleep.
But then, her father is in pretty rough shape himself.
Exhaustion is weighing him down. He’s losing muscle mass in his shoulders and arms from lack of exercise.
His greying hair sticks out on either side of his balding head. He needs a cut.
“You’re serious about this,” her dad says. He doesn’t ask.
“Yes!”
He stands, wipes his mouth again, and takes her arm, speaking gently, quietly. “Okay, let’s go to emergency.” And for a moment Elsie thinks she’s gotten through to him. But then he says, “Let’s get you some help.”
Elsie pulls her arm out of his grip. “No. I don’t need help. I’m telling you. It’s real. Dad, in just a few minutes from now you’ll have a stroke.”
Her father lifts his coat from the hook by the door, puts it on. His face is too red. “Come on. Let’s go.”
But Elsie steps away from the door. “I’m nearly twenty-eight,” she says. “You can’t make decisions for me.”
“But Elizabeth.”
She picks up her backpack and hugs it. “No!”
Her father pulls her into a desperate hug of his own. “We’ve been so worried about you, Honey. All this only confirms our fears.”
“If you won’t go willingly, I’m calling an ambulance,” Bailey says, retrieving her phone from her pocket.
“Yes, please, do,” Elsie says, stepping away from her father. “Tell them it’s a stroke.” And then she looks down at her phone for the time. “We’re too late,” she says. “It’s 3:33.”
Her father slides down the wall to the floor. His arm hangs limp at his side. “Wha—” he says. “Wha, wha.”
Elsie kneels in front of him. His face isn’t right. It’s slack, or half of it is. The right side of his mouth droops almost comically. He slurs a garbled string of words.
Bailey rushes forward. “What’s happening?”
“I told you. He’s having a stroke.” Just like Lizzy said he would, at 3:33 P.M. “We need to get him to the hospital now.”
“Oh, my god.” Bailey frantically taps in 911.
As she talks to the emergency dispatcher, Elsie cradles her father and murmurs, “It’s okay.
It’ll be okay.” Even though she knows it won’t.
His eyes moisten as he looks up at her, then they grow wide as he points with his left hand at the wall behind.
She turns. There, where the light from the dinner table chandelier fades into shadow, the old woman, the ghost, stands barefoot in her luminous nightgown, hands clasped in front of her, listening, watching, crying.