Twenty-Five October 31, 2023
OUTSIDE, THE moon appears full, though it’s waning, casting its eerie grey light through the basement window as Elsie packs the contents of her desk into a box.
It’s just after midnight. Elsie’s buzzy, excited about moving tomorrow, too exhausted to sleep.
A handful of cardboard boxes, pillaged from the nearest grocery, are scattered across the floor.
Other than her work outfit, which hangs in the closet, the junk in her desk is the last she has to pack.
After work tomorrow, and with Bailey and Travis’s help, she will move into Crystal’s workshop.
She finishes emptying the desk, closes the flaps on the box, falls on her mattress and lies there staring up at the stain on the ceiling. She closes her eyes.
There’s a rustling noise. The rat? There it is again.
Is it inside the house or not? Quietly, she gets up, lifts the broom from its hook by the stairwell door and tiptoes to the fridge barefoot, her eyes scanning the floor cast in a net of moonlight.
She stops. Listens. There it is again, but from outside the house.
Then there’s the bang of an empty garbage can hitting the ground and rolling, as if kicked.
Raccoons? She peers through the side window, but from this angle, she sees nothing but the concrete steps, the tires of her car.
She puts her ear to the door. There are footsteps down the outside stairs. And then—
Elsie jumps back as someone bangs on the door. “Ziz, I mean Elsie, open up!”
“Marcus?”
“Surprise!” he says.
Elsie unlocks and opens the door. She shushes him. “Come in,” she whispers, waving.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he says.
“Keep your voice down.”
Marcus puts a finger to his lips. And then he trips and stumbles into Elsie’s arms.
“You’re drunk,” she says.
He pinches the air. “Maybe a little.”
She helps him over to her bed. “Here, lie down.”
He grins lasciviously at her. “Don’t mind if I do,” he says again.
She sits on her office chair. “You were out drinking, in Ladysmith?” Elsie says. “You’re staying at your mother’s.” A pale, thin, anxious woman named Laura who smells of sanitizer.
“Only temporarily.”
“I take it Amy kicked you out.”
He pinches the air again. “Maybe a little.” He pulls Elsie over to the bed and leans into her conspiratorially. “After that evening we spent in the hotel, I realized a few things.”
Elsie covers her face. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
But Marcus takes Elsie’s chin and turns her face back towards him. His breath is skunky with beer. “When you came back into my life, I realized I was only with Amy because she got pregnant.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No.” But she feels a chill run through her. That version she saw of her future, giving birth with Marcus beside her. “You’re not thinking of leaving your family for me, are you?” Elsie asks.
“I guess I should have told you I was living with Amy.”
“You guess? What the fuck, Marcus?”
Her anger seems to sober him up a little. “It was stupid of me. But that day we had lunch, all those years we spent together, it all came flooding back.”
Elsie looks down at his hand clutching hers.
“I wanted you,” Marcus says. “I wanted you from the moment I first saw you composing that haiku at Joe’s Café. I want you now.” He kisses her, long and sweet. Marcus is a much better kisser when drunk.
But Elsie pulls away. “Did you drive here?”
“I’m not sure.” He pats his pockets for his keys. “I think I walked downtown from home.” His mother’s home.
“How about you sleep this off.” She encourages him to lie down, tugs a blanket over him.
“I’m fine,” he says, closing his eyes. “I’m fine.”
She takes her mother’s quilt out of a box and wraps herself in it to sit on her gaming chair, propping her feet on her desk.
Already half asleep, Marcus mumbles, “Come back to bed,” and Elsie wonders if, in that moment, he thinks he’s in his duplex with Amy.
IN THE morning, as Elsie plugs in the kettle, there’s a knock on the door. She unbolts the locks and opens it a crack, thinking it’s Bailey waking her before leaving early for work. But it’s not.
“Zander!”
His hair is a mess. His blue T-shirt is stained. He doesn’t look like he’s slept. “Why didn’t you text back?” he says. “Why did you leave in the night like that? It’s the Parkinson’s, isn’t it? That’s why you ran off. You don’t want to have to deal with it.”
“It wasn’t that.” It was her fear of falling in love and then losing him, losing herself again. Or was it that too? She was afraid she couldn’t handle his care, certainly. And what about their relationship? What would that look like when he was in a wheelchair? “I was surprised.” Shocked.
She glances down at his trembling hand. He flexes it, makes a fist. “How bad is it?” he asks. “In fifteen years. How far have the symptoms progressed?”
Behind her, she can hear the toilet flush.
Marcus. “This isn’t the time,” she says.
“And I’m not sure we should talk about this at all.
” She’s beginning to understand the dangers of knowing too much about the future.
If she hadn’t opened the atlas to the eighth house, if she hadn’t seen their future together, she might be in Zander’s bed right now.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had Parkinson’s? ”
He shrugs, as if the reason should be obvious. “I didn’t want to scare you off.”
She lowers her voice. “Is that why you said you wanted to go slow?” Why he didn’t want to sleep with her.
“Of course it was. I feel selfish even considering getting involved. And if I do, I’m scared that at some point you’ll run away.” He pauses. “And then you did.”
Oh, god. She really did. “But when were you going to tell me?”
“I didn’t want to bring it up until I knew for sure we had something. Something real.”
She takes his hand. “We do have something real.”
But his face darkens as he looks past her. “Do we?”
Elsie turns to see Marcus shuffle out of the bathroom wearing the same clothes he had on the night before, but his shirt is unbuttoned, his lithe torso exposed. His hair is a tangled mess from his restless, drunken sleep.
Zander’s eyes slide from Marcus to the unmade bed behind him. Without a word, he turns on his heel and climbs the concrete stairs two at a time.
“Zander, wait!” Elsie throws on a hoodie and races through the late October rain barefoot to reach Zander as he opens his car door, puddle water splashing up her bare calves. “It’s not what you think.”
Zander laughs angrily at the cliché.
“We didn’t sleep together,” she says. “Really.”
“Not this time.”
“Honestly, we didn’t. He turned up on my doorstep drunk last night. I let him sleep it off in my bed. That’s all, I swear.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Zander says. “He’s here with you, after you walked away from me. You made your choice.”
“I told you, I didn’t—we didn’t—”
Zander reverses out of the driveway, leaving her standing there in the rain. Her hair and clothes are quickly soaked. She watches as he turns the corner. And then he’s gone.
“Who was that guy?” Marcus asks from her doorway.
She marches down the stairs into the basement suite and, after Marcus steps out of the way, slams the door shut. “Zander.” The rest seems too hard to explain. “Bailey’s astrologer.”
“What did he want with you?”
“Nothing,” she says. Not anymore.
“Let me get you a towel,” Marcus says. He disappears into the bathroom and reappears with the large red ragged towel that once belonged to Elsie’s mother.
He tries to dry her hair, but she takes the towel from him.
There are times, like now, when she can’t stand someone else touching her, when it’s just too much, the sensation overloading her already overwhelmed emotions. She bursts into tears.
“Hey, hey,” Marcus says, trying again to wrap an arm around her. She throws off the towel, marches to the other side of her room and sits on her bed.
But Marcus isn’t giving up. He squats on the floor in front of her. “I meant what I said last night.”
Elsie looks into his face and knows that, in the moment, it’s true.
But it’s also not. Her fingers worry the frayed edges of her mother’s quilt.
“Since you left town, I kept thinking that if I could just find my way back to the way things were, before you left, before Mom died, everything would be okay.”
Marcus takes her hand to help her up. “You have found your way back to me.”
But Elsie tugs her hand from his. “No. You need to leave. Go back to Amy.”
“But I love you, Elsie. I always have.”
“I thought I still loved you too,” Elsie says. “But it’s the memory I love, not the reality.”
Marcus stares at her, his jaw clenched, then stuffs his socks in his pocket, forces his feet into his shoes without unlacing them so the backs of them flatten underfoot. He shuffles to the door with his shirt still unbuttoned and climbs the stairs into the rain.
Elsie steps outside too, and from the top of the basement stairs, she watches him march away through the puddles, down the sidewalk, his shoes like clogs, his long body hunched as he braves the rain. And for a third time, she thinks, That’s it, then.