Twenty October 28, 2023
AFTER DRIVING down to Victoria, Elsie finds a place to park near Ross Bay Cemetery, which is right across from the entrance to the public beach.
There, her sister waits for her dressed in a puffer jacket and winter boots.
The beach is a thin strip covered in pebbles and strewn with driftwood.
On this moody Saturday, a few people walk their dogs along its shore.
Bailey bends to greet a young woman’s labradoodle as it frolics by.
Freighters sit on the water in the distance.
With the atlas under her arm, Elsie jogs across the road at the crosswalk and then, on reaching the entrance to the beach, she hugs her sister. “Any news about Dad?” she asks, stepping back. She shoves her cold hands into the pockets of her hoodie.
“Sounds like things went well. He was just moved into recovery. We can see him in a couple of hours.” Bailey takes in Elsie’s face, her swollen eyes, her red nose. “How are you doing?”
Last night, Elsie had refused Bailey’s invitation to dinner, and instead hid in the basement, crying. When she woke late, her sister was already gone. “I’m okay,” she says as she takes out a tissue and blows her nose.
“You’re not okay,” Bailey says. “Neither am I. But Dad’s going to get through this. We all will.”
“It’s not that.” Or not only that. “I went to see Marcus yesterday. It didn’t exactly go as planned.” And then it all comes spilling out. Pregnant Amy. Asshole Marcus.
Bailey listens with a slightly constipated look on her face and then, when Elsie’s done, she says, “It’s shitty, but maybe it’s for the better? You can finally move on. Get on with your life.”
Elsie blows her nose again. “Maybe. But now what?” She feels like she’s been on hold for years, mooning after Marcus.
“Can we talk about this later?” Bailey rocks back on her heels. “It’s cold, and I really want to see you time-travel.”
Elsie stuffs her tissue in her pocket. “Sure, I guess.” She knows her sister is sick of hearing about Marcus. She can’t really fault her for that. She’s sick of him too.
“Where do we go to open the atlas, exactly?” Bailey asks. “It’s a big beach.”
Elsie doesn’t bother to check the coordinates on her phone because she sees her: the old woman, the ghost, watching her from just down the beach near a piece of driftwood, a log.
Her bare feet on sand. Her wispy hair and the skirt of her nightgown remain still even though a breeze blows Elsie’s bangs in all directions.
“Right over there,” she says to her sister.
As she points, the old woman disappears, yet Elsie has an uncanny feeling that the ghost is still watching her, that she’s always been watching.
They walk down the beach and then, on reaching the driftwood, Elsie holds out the atlas. “Ready?” she asks her sister. “Should I just go ahead and open it?”
“The seventh house, right?” Bailey says. “This should be interesting.”
“Why?” Elsie asks, wary.
“It’s about partnerships, relationships, right? Open it, see where it takes you.” Then her sister’s smile drops. “But don’t forget to ask about Dad, if you don’t see him.”
“I will.”
Elsie opens the atlas and, after that initial moment of disorientation, finds she’s no longer on a cold and lonely winter beach, but a nighttime summer seashore filled with laughing people, illuminated by strings of lights hoisted on poles above their heads.
There’s a DJ, the jostle of dancing bodies on a roughly constructed temporary dance floor.
To the side, tables of food and drink. Above them a full moon reflects in the ocean water.
Faces come into focus, one after the other.
Her father’s employees, people she worked with, and others she hung out with at university and thought she’d left behind.
Crystal holds a toddler wearing a blue-and-green princess costume.
It’s Luna, not much older than when Elsie last saw her in her father’s home, a few months maybe.
There’s Bailey, dancing with Travis. Apparently, the party has just gotten started.
She cranes her neck to look until she sees her: Lizzy. Older than when she saw her last, but not by much. She’s spinning in the centre of the dancers and wearing her mother’s wedding dress, with a high waist and beaded bodice. On her head, a crown of white roses, baby’s breath.
It’s her wedding reception. Her wedding.
But where’s her father? She rises on her tiptoes to scan the crowd, looking for him, for his wheelchair.
When she can’t find him, she weaves through the pulsating crowd, with the open atlas pressed against her chest, towards this older version of herself who isn’t afraid to dance in public.
She takes Lizzy’s arm. Under the strings of lights, the bride is glowing from the day’s sun and the exertion of the dance.
The pits of her wedding dress are damp. She smells of cumin.
Lizzy laughs. “It’s that time already?” she asks Elsie.
“Where’s Dad? Is he in long-term care?”
Lizzy smiles sadly. “Don’t you think Dad would be here if he could?”
“He’s dead, then?” Elsie scans the crowd again, unbelieving. He can’t be gone. He’s too young. He hasn’t yet hit retirement.
Lizzy wraps her arm around Elsie. “You were there the day he died,” she says.
“I don’t understand.”
“That day you visited us in Dad’s house, earlier this year.” On Saturday, January 23, 2027. “That was our last day together. He died that afternoon, in his home, with all of us around.”
That was only three days ago for Elsie, on Wednesday.
“You knew he was going to die. That’s why you invited everyone over that day.
To say goodbye.” But Elsie, eager to get back to her own time, to warn her father, had closed the atlas to leave before anyone else had arrived.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks. “I would have stayed.”
“Elsie, you’ll have to live through his death soon. Once is enough.”
It was. Elsie had relived her mother’s death over and over until she could see nothing else. Eventually, she would have to find a way to let go. But right now, on this beach, the old grief flares, reignited by the new. She stands there in the crowd, suddenly alone.
Lizzy gives Elsie a quick, fierce hug and whispers in her ear. “He loved you very much. He was proud of you.”
Loved. Was proud. Past tense. Above her, the twinkling lights, the dome of night sky. Across the street, the many headstones of the cemetery, silhouetted in the dark.
Lizzy takes her hand and swings it, encouraging her to let it go, to dance. “In your time, Dad is still alive. Celebrate that! And this is my wedding, Elsie. Wouldn’t you rather know who you’re going to marry?”
“Sure,” Elsie says, her voice flat. “Who are you marrying?”
In answer, Lizzy twirls Elsie, releasing her hand, and Elsie spins into Zander’s arms. He’s all decked out in a suit, and there’s a boutonniere in his lapel, a wedding ring on his finger.
He grins, dips her. His intelligent face sparkles with curiosity and expectation, and for a moment, her mourning for a future loss evaporates.
Oh, my god. She’s going to marry this man.
Or at least that’s a version of the future that’s out there, only a kiss away.
But then he twirls her again and in the jostle of dancing bodies, the atlas snaps shut.
She stumbles onto the pebbles of this winter beach and her sister catches her before she falls.
For an instant, she thinks she can still hear the music, the communal chatter of the wedding guests leaking through the portal into her future.
But in the next instant, there’s only the asthmatic shriek of Western gulls, the hiss and roar of waves.
The summer beach is somewhere out there on the horizon.
But right now she’s here, in this wintry wash of grey on grey.
“You phased!” Bailey says. Her sister’s face is fevered with excitement. “You phased in and out of existence!”
Dizzy, Elsie puts the heel of her hand to her forehead and stumbles again as she loses her balance.
Her sister offers a hand to support her. “So, what did you see?”
“A wedding reception.”
“Yours?”
“Maybe.”
Bailey slaps her arm playfully. “Out with it! Who did you marry?” When Elsie doesn’t immediately answer, her sister tilts her head. “It was Zander, wasn’t it?”
A shy smile plays up one side of Elsie’s face.
Bailey jumps, claps. “Oh, my god! You’ve got to tell him.”
“I don’t know about that.” What will Zander do if she tells him they’ll marry? It was only Wednesday that he distanced himself from her after her date with Marcus. If she told him, would he run away, like Marcus did when she hinted at their future together? It would be too much.
“Was Dad there?” Bailey asks.
Elsie looks down at the pebbles, shakes her head.
“He would be there if—”
“Yes.”
“So, he has maybe four years?”
“Less.”
Eyes watering, Bailey stares up at the seagulls circling them. “The question is, do we tell him?”
Elsie glances over at the cemetery. The many trees and tombstones, the elderly woman in a tweed coat talking to her dead husband.
Here, in her present, her father is alive.
There, in the near future, too soon, he’s gone.
She wants to hoard the days between, stack them in a storage unit for safekeeping so she can visit them at will.
“Telling him could make a difference,” Elsie says. “Knowing might scare him into changing his habits, so he lives longer.”
“Or it might only scare him.”
“Would you want to know?” Elsie asks.
“When I’m going to die? No. Absolutely not. You?”
“I don’t know.” Then again, are the events the atlas has shown her fixed, immutable?
Apparently not. In her fifth house atlas journey, she saw herself in Crystal’s workshop, giving birth to a baby fathered by Marcus.
She has clearly put an end to that future.
So, she can choose another fate. Is that what her marriage to Zander represents?
An alternate future to the one with Marcus?
If that’s the case, then are there other futures she hasn’t even considered?
Undoubtedly. At her feet there are a multitude of pebbles, each a spotted planet, a potent possibility.