Twenty-Three October 29, 2023 #2
“That’s why you moved the bed into the living room. The stairs.”
“Yes. It means I’m stuck using that little bathroom off the hall for the most part.” With the tiniest sink Elsie has ever seen.
“Oh, Zander.”
“I knew it was coming. I was prepared.”
But was Elsie? “Did I know? Before—” Before they got serious, fell in love, married, built a life together.
“You know now.”
Of course. Here she is, her present self, in the future, taking this knowledge back to the past with her. Ellie, Elsie, Lizzy, Liz. Where does she even begin? “Do you remember the joke you told me? About a Mobius strip?”
“I’ve got a better one. Past, Present and Future walk into a bar.” He pauses, grinning. “It was tense.”
She laughs.
He scans her face, smiling. “It’s good to see you like this, Elsie,” he says. “Happy.”
Happy. It’s been a long time since she saw herself that way. But yes, last night with Zander, she did feel happy.
“Is something wrong with Liz?”
“Ask her and she’ll say no. But I can’t be alone anymore.
Liz is forced to be around all the time, to work from home.
She worries. And I don’t have the energy to work nearly as much as I used to.
She’s had to pick up the pace to make ends meet.
It’s too much of a juggle. Work, keeping the house going. ” He pauses. “Me.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t see it that way.”
“Doesn’t she? I do.”
She can see the wear on him. The circles under his eyes, a blank, exhausted look that she has recognized in herself in the past. Or perhaps this, too, marks a progression of the illness.
She understands one of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is a lack of expression.
That must be so hard on Liz, her future self, to look into her husband’s face with affection and not see Zander’s love mirrored there.
“I’m so sorry, Zander.”
His head twists away from her pity. “I bet you are. Or will be. For marrying me. You’re thinking of it right now, I know. Ending things before they begin.”
His sudden harshness shocks her. This isn’t the Zander she knows. But she does recognize what’s possessed him. “How long have you been living with depression?” she asks quietly.
He shrugs, or perhaps it’s an uncontrolled movement, she’s not sure. Still supporting himself with the cane, he turns his back on her to take cups down from the cupboard.
“When I get back, should I tell you that you have Parkinson’s? Warn you? I should tell you, right? So you can start treatment as soon as possible?”
Zander turns back to her, smiles sadly. “Elsie, I already know, in 2023.”
Elsie sits back. “What?”
“In your present, I’m already undergoing treatment.”
She stands. “You didn’t think to tell me?”
“I will, or I would have, when the time was right.”
“And when would that be?” she asks. “After we fall in love? After we marry?”
Zander stares at her, his head shaking, but she can’t read his face. The kettle boils and he turns to make their tea.
Stunned by her own response, Elsie sits back down at the table. She wouldn’t abandon him, their budding relationship, just because they face this difficult future together. Would she?
Would she?
But he’s going to leave her, in this long goodbye. She’s already lost her mother and now she’s about to lose her father. She can’t go through that again with Zander.
Can she?
Zander leans the cane against the counter and picks up their mugs to carry them over without this aid.
But on the way to the table, he loses control and missteps.
He drops the mugs he’s carrying, and they smash, sending a slick of tea across the floor.
Shaking, grasping desperately for the table that’s too far away, he topples, even as Elsie stands to reach him.
There’s the sickening crack of breaking bone, the thud of his skull on tile as he hits the floor.
“Zander!” His arm, under him, is wrenched at an unholy angle, broken. Blood oozes from the side of his head. He appears unconscious, or worse.
“Oh my god. Zander.” Panicked, acting on instinct, Elsie dials 911, realizing too late that her phone won’t work in the future. “Help!” she cries out. “Help!” But as she swings away from the table to wake Liz, she knocks the atlas spinning and it slides off the table, closing as it hits the floor.
In that instant, the streetlight outside sputters back on and she’s standing back in Zander’s living room with the atlas closed in her hands.
“No!” She turns in a circle. The couch, the kitchen.
The rainy street outside the window, the ocean rolling out into the dark.
There are Halloween decorations in the yard.
Upstairs, Zander is snoring lightly in his room.
But on that future night, an older Zander is lying on his office floor, alone, broken and bleeding.
She has no way to know if he’s okay, or if he’ll be okay.
She thinks again of the title of the eighth house chart: Sex and Death.
Did she just see Zander’s death, from that fall?
Even if she didn’t, Liz is losing him, bit by bit, to that disease. And of course, Elsie will too.
She looks down at the atlas and realizes her hands are shaking. She can’t go through this again, losing someone she loves, the years of darkness that follow. She can’t.
In the murky shadows thrown by streetlight, she climbs the stairs and, in the guest room, finds her phone, her keys, her wallet, and packs her few things into her backpack as quietly as she can.
But Zander, in the room across the hall, wakes anyway, groggy, talking into his pillow. “Elsie? Everything okay?”
No, nothing is okay. How can she risk loving this man knowing that she’ll only lose him, and herself. “I’ve got to go.”
“Now?” Something drops from his night table as he checks his phone. “It’s not even three.” He appears at her bedroom door dressed in only his pajama bottoms, his chest bare. “Is it your dad? I can drive you to the hospital.”
“No. He’s fine.” For now.
“Then what is it?” He crosses his arms and leans against the threshold. “You opened the atlas, didn’t you? To the eighth house.”
Elsie swings her backpack over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says, pushing past him.
Zander follows her down the stairs. “What did you see?” As she slides on her shoes, he takes her arm. “It was me, wasn’t it?”
She lifts her raincoat from the coat rack and fumbles with the lock on the door with her back to him. “I just. It’s not. I can’t.”
“You can’t what? You can’t do this, us?”
She looks back at him as she opens the door. His naked chest, his fine young body. The tremble in his left hand. He seems so vulnerable standing there. She turns away.
“But you saw us get married,” he says, stepping outside after her.
“I saw a lot of things.”
“And what you saw tonight scared you.”
She flees to her car. Yes, it scared her.
Zander steps out from under the portico as she gets in her car. She takes a last look at him as she starts it. Beside him, in the apple tree, the ghosts of the skeleton couple lift and fall.