Twenty-One October 28, 2023
WHEN ELSIE enters her dad’s hospital room, he appears asleep. The outline of his body is tucked into white sheets as if in a cocoon or shroud. But his eyes open when she quietly lifts a chair and sets it down beside him. “What, no coffee?” he asks her.
“Coffee raises your blood pressure.”
He makes a sour face. “I’m suffering from caffeine withdrawal, here.”
“That’s the least of your problems,” Elsie says.
“Where did you get that sunny bedside manner?”
“From you.” She sits.
“You just missed your sister,” he says. “She only just got here, and the nurse shooed her out so I could get some rest.”
Bailey had left Ross Bay Beach shortly after Elsie returned from the future, but Elsie had stayed for a time, sitting on the driftwood log, thinking, breathing, watching the seagulls lift and fall above a distant horizon.
Across that ocean, there was a future she may or may not choose to sail towards.
Her father dead, but a wedding celebration for her, a marriage to Zander.
“I won’t stay long,” she says to her father. She nods at the other bed in the room. “I see you’ve got company.” There an old man rests, eyes closed.
“They rolled him in just after they put me in here.” Her dad lowers his voice to a whisper. “I wouldn’t call him company. He doesn’t talk much.” Under the sheets, the old man’s foot twitches.
“How are you feeling?”
“How do you think I’m feeling?” Her father touches the bandage. “Some doctor just sliced open my neck.”
“Were you scared?” she asks.
“They knocked me out.” But he closes his eyes as a tear runs down his cheek.
She reaches for his hand. “You’re going to be alright, Dad.”
“Am I?” He studies her face, as if she knows for certain.
“We’ll make sure of it.” And in that moment, she feels a rising hope that, together, they might alter the trajectory of his health, that he might live to dance with her at her wedding.
“The doctor told me I can go home in a few days,” he says. “But when I get there, I’ve got to rest up. She said I can get out of the house, back into my routines, in a week or so.”
“But not back to work.”
He sighs. “Not right away.”
“You work too much, Dad. You need time off. In all the years you’ve run this business, you’ve never taken a real vacation.”
“We went to Disneyland.”
“That was over twenty years ago, and you hated it. You couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel.”
“You hated it. You cried the whole time.”
(She did hate it. All that standing in line. The noise. The costumed characters with their artificially cheerful voices. She still has nightmares.)
“The point is, you’ve poured everything into this job, especially after Mom died.”
“You really think you saw your mother again?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see those photos.”
Elsie shows him the photos she’d taken in 2002, only days ago: herself with her mother, Bailey and that little girl Ellie.
He takes the phone from her. “And you really didn’t photoshop these?”
“Did Bailey tell you what she saw on the beach today?”
“That you disappeared and reappeared. Yes, she told me.” He hands her the phone, then lowers his voice. “Listen, you can’t tell anyone this, okay? Not Travis. Not Bailey, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Okay.”
“When I had that stroke, I saw something in your sister’s house. A person.” He hesitates. “A ghost.”
“An old woman in a nightgown?”
He looks up at her, confused. “No. A man. Elsie, it was me. A little older, maybe. But the ghost was me.” He searches her face as if he believed she had the answers. “Does that mean I’m about to die? They say, when you see a doppelg?nger, you’re about to die.”
“Oh, Dad, I don’t think it means that.”
Her father stares up at the ceiling. “He was so real, this other me. I could have shaken his hand.”
“What was he doing?”
“Just standing there, watching. He was smiling, actually, like he was trying to reassure me. Do you think he was an angel? You said you saw an angel on the lookout, a woman, who saved you.”
Elsie snorts a laugh. “She was no angel.”
They sit, each lost in thought for a time.
“Why did you ask if I saw an old woman?” her father finally asks.
“I’ve been seeing her everywhere. She was there when you had the stroke. She’s there and then gone. I don’t know who she is, but she’s connected to that atlas somehow, to the time travel.”
Her father grunts. “You really think you’re seeing the future?”
She nods. Travelling to the future.
“Your mother was gifted like that. She knew how she was going to die, falling off that cliff at the lookout. She just didn’t know when.”
“I told her.”
He squints at her. “What?”
“The atlas took me back to that first Christmas after you and Mom separated. I told Mom how she would die. But it didn’t stop her from going geocaching with me or falling down that cliff. I think she may have become obsessed with it though. She went to Crystal—”
“Crystal?”
“The tarot card reader.”
“Ah.”
“And she went to Zander’s grandmother for astrology sessions, trying to figure out how long she had. How long she had with us.”
“She told me about all this, you know. She knew that young woman who turned up that Christmas was you.”
“You knew?”
“But I didn’t believe her story. Why would I? Then when you started talking about time travel . . .”
“But you acted like it was all bullshit.”
“I guess I was afraid, for you. And sometimes even when the evidence is right there, I still can’t see the truth of it.
Or don’t want to. But your mother had a way of seeing what I couldn’t.
Just like you.” Her father points at a cupboard in the corner.
“My bag of clothes is in there. Hand me my coat, will you?”
Elsie finds his coat in the bag, and he goes through the pockets until he pulls out a magnifying glass, one that slides out of its round case to form the shape of a lazy eight. “I believe this is yours.”
“Where did you find that?” Elsie asks, taking it from him.
“It was in your mother’s junk drawer when I was helping Bailey clean out Fifi’s house after her death. I imagine you left it on the floor at some point, and she picked it up and put it there. You were always leaving your things on the floor.”
Elsie opens and closes it, inspects her own hand with it.
“The day you got that magnifying glass, your mother was at a doctor’s appointment, so I picked you up from preschool on my lunch hour. We were walking down the street, back to the office, when you stopped to look at a crack in the sidewalk. I was in a hurry.”
“As usual.”
“And annoyed that you stopped. But you insisted on showing me that crack, and there was this tiny world at my feet. A forest of moss, miniature flowers, a highway of ants, all within that gap in the concrete that I passed over every day. As we were kneeling, looking at it, a woman stopped to ask if we needed a magnifying glass. I said sure, and she pulled one out of her purse and gave it to you. We spent the rest of the lunch hour looking at that miniature world through the magnifying glass. When I found it again in that junk drawer, I kept it in my pocket as a reminder of a better day. A good day.”
“You carried this with you for the past five years?”
“Like I said, you and your mother could always see things that I miss. I needed a reminder of that. Apparently, I still do.” He looks back up at the ceiling.
“I can’t believe I’m asking this.” Then he turns back to her.
“Elizabeth, I need to know when I’m going to die.
Do you think you can find out using that atlas? ”
She fiddles with the magnifying glass. “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course. What kind of question is that?”
“I’ve already been to the future.”
“And?”
She leans forward and can’t help smiling. “I saw myself getting married.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” he says, a little too overjoyed at the news, as if he’d come to believe Elsie would never find anyone. “How far into the future did you go?”
“Just a few years,” she says.
His face is expectant, his eyes desperate. “Was I there?”
She wills herself not to blink as she nods. Still, the heat rises to her face.
“In a wheelchair? The doc said if I had a big stroke, I could end up in a wheelchair.”
“Oh, no. You were dancing.”
“Dancing! So, not dead? Not stuck in a wheelchair?”
When she blinks and blinks (her tell), he turns away, wincing in pain, to look out the window. A flock of swans flies low, just above the parking lot. “I think I should give up working altogether,” he says. “Don’t you?”
Elsie loops her fingers through his. “Yes.”
“No more steak,” he says. “I’ll get some fishing in. Read some books. Hang out with my girls.”
Elsie wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
Her father turns back to her. “When do you meet this guy, my future son-in-law?”
Elsie tugs on her earlobe. “Actually, I’ve already met him.”
“It’s not that Marcus character, is it? I never liked him.”
“No. It’s Zander.”
“The astrologer?”
“He owns a house in James Bay,” she says, knowing that, at least, will impress her dad.
But it’s not that that interests him. “Do you love him?” he asks.
Elsie laughs, embarrassed. “I haven’t even gone out on a date with him.”
“But he could make you happy? You could love him?”
“Yeah, I think I could.”
“Good.” Her father settles back into the hospital bed, closes his eyes. “I feel so tired. All I’ve been doing is lying around. Why do I feel so tired?”
A nurse in blue scrubs appears at the door. “I have to ask you to leave now,” he says to Elsie. “After the surgery, Brian needs his rest.”
She stands. “Sure.” As the nurse leaves, Elsie leans in to kiss her father’s forehead. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, kiddo.” He cups a hand to her face. “You and your sister look so much like your mother,” he says. “She was the love of my life, you know.”
Elsie straightens. “Mom? But you argued so much.”
“We were both, I don’t know, intense. We argued because I didn’t like that she was so often right.
Pride, I guess, or fear. Either way, it was dumb.
There were so many times when I could have fixed things between us if I’d just listened to her.
But I didn’t. I let everything we had together slide away. ”
The hurt on Zander’s face when she said she was going out with Marcus. The attention and affection Zander had shown her, gone in an instant.
“Do you think Mom would’ve taken you back, if you’d said you were sorry, if you’d tried to work things out?”
“I don’t know,” he says, looking up at her. “I’d like to think so. At the very least, I wish I’d tried.”