Thirty-Two November 6, 2023
BAILEY DRIVES her car slowly around the high-school parking lot, searching for a spot.
She’d agreed to come with Elsie to the eleventh house location, a Victoria high school.
Lulu’s in the back seat, tongue wagging, breathing in Elsie’s ear, whining.
When Bailey reaches back to scratch the dog’s head, its hair drifts up in the confined space.
Elsie sneezes, wheezes. The inside of her ears, the back of her throat itch.
“Couldn’t you leave the dog at home?” she asks her sister.
“She’d be so scared without her mama.” Bailey scratches the dog’s head again. “Wouldn’t you, Baby? There’s a good girl.”
Elsie winds down her window for some fresh air. Buses come and go. Parents, mostly mothers, slide in behind them, dropping off their kids on this Monday morning.
“They all seem so tired,” Elsie says.
“Who?”
“The mothers.” Their eyes ringed with fatigue as they flee after ridding themselves of their offspring.
The fewer men, fathers, appear just as tired.
Nearly twenty years of parenting has carved worry lines into their faces.
Elsie would be in her mid-forties by the time the child she carries graduates.
She’d burn through the rest of her youth raising this kid.
Why would she want to do that? Why would anyone want to do that?
“I can’t,” Elsie says.
Bailey drives another slow circle around the lot. “We drove all this way.”
“No, I mean I can’t be a mother. These women give their kids too much of their time and energy. Mom gave us too much. And what does a mother get in return?”
“It’s not like that,” Bailey says. “It’s not a matter of trade.”
The parking lot is filled with vehicles driven by students. How do these kids afford cars? “Let’s just go home,” Elsie says. “I’ll skip the eleventh chart.”
“But can you unlock the last chart in the atlas then? Will the atlas, like, restart at the next lunar cycle?”
“I don’t know.” The Pocket Atlas of Nostalgia and Longing came with no guide, other than the old woman who randomly appears and disappears. And a big help she is.
Finally, a woman in a pickup backs out. Bailey taps the steering wheel as she waits for the parking spot, then zips in before another mother, in a battered minivan, can take it.
Elsie unbuckles her seat belt, unfolds herself awkwardly from the tiny car and, carrying the atlas closed against her chest, walks with her sister towards the future.
A sign on the school door reads, All visitors must report to the reception desk.
The building seems more like a university campus than a high school.
A two-story glass window on the far end fills the high open foyer with light.
On one side, an open catwalk runs the length of the building.
On the other, wood panels hang from the massive walls. Steps lead down to an airy cafeteria.
Elsie takes her place in line in front of the Plexiglas over the office window.
“What am I going to tell the receptionist?” Elsie asks Bailey, her voice low, though no one is likely to hear in the roar of voices around them. Students loiter on the steps to the cafeteria and outside, waiting for classes to start.
“Say you’ve just moved and want to check out the school before you register your daughter.”
“I’m twenty-seven,” Elsie says. “The kids here are all teens. She won’t believe it. Anyway, I doubt they want strangers wandering around the school.”
“Then say we’re meeting the counsellor about our younger sister, who we have custody for.”
“Too complicated. And wouldn’t the receptionist check to see if we have an appointment?”
Bailey tries to push Elsie out of the way. “Let me handle this.”
Elsie doesn’t budge. “No. This is my thing. You’re just along for the ride.”
To Elsie’s surprise, Bailey backs off. “Fine.”
Then the bell rings, and a crowd of students pours into the school like a flash flood, smelling of runners and sweat. The sisters, to avoid the press of bodies, back against the wall to the side of the Plexiglas. Then Elsie sees the old woman standing at the far end of the catwalk.
The ghost turns and walks slowly like a sleepwalker, disappearing down a side hallway.
“This way,” Elsie says to her sister. They follow the students along the catwalk, then down the hall, and find themselves in the foyer in front of the amphitheatre where the drama classes put on performances.
The memory of her high-school graduation surfaces.
It was held in a theatre like this, though smaller and more modest. The date on the eleventh house chart checks out too.
June, nineteen years from now. “I think I know what I’m going to see,” she says as she opens the theatre door.
The massive black room’s empty and, when Bailey closes the heavy door behind them, quiet.
The vacuous space is unlit except for the exit lights, front and back, which cast an eerie reddish glow.
“I don’t think we have much time,” Bailey says. “The drama classes must use this space.”
“I’ll be quick, on this end.”
Elsie holds up The Pocket Atlas of Nostalgia and Longing to signal she’s opening it.
When she does, Bailey disappears and Elsie is surrounded by a crowd, all seated.
The amphitheatre is packed. At the front, students are dressed in graduation gowns.
Onstage, teachers take turns calling up students, listing their scholarships or accomplishments as they make their way to centre stage.
Elsie searches the crowd, family and friends of the graduates, until she sees the woman who’s turned in her seat to look at her: Lizzy, in her mid-forties.
She smiles. Marcus is on her right, with Amy beside him.
Zander, in a wheelchair, is on her left.
Bailey and Travis are there too, seated just in front of them.
Two lanky kids in their late teens, a boy and a girl, sit beside them.
Are those Elsie’s niece and nephew? They must be.
She can see her sister in them. There are some other familiar but older faces she recognizes from work or elsewhere, all clustered around this middle-aged Lizzy, sitting behind, in front or to the side.
She’s glowing, Elsie thinks, this older version of herself.
She doesn’t appear harried or tired at all.
Lizzy turns back to the stage and sits up a little taller as the next name is announced: “Luna Campbell-Karlsson.”
Luna. As a teacher reads out a list of scholarships she’s won, a willowy girl strides onstage wearing a graduation gown and cap.
She has Marcus’s blue eyes; Bailey’s erect, confident posture; Elsie’s quirky, rocking gait.
That’s the daughter she’s carrying, this little fish that swims inside her now.
The girl takes her graduation portfolio from the teacher and lifts the tassel to the other side of her cap.
As she makes her way offstage, Lizzy waves at Luna to get her attention and points out Elsie.
Luna races up the middle aisle towards her.
Below, Zander, Marcus and Amy also start to make their way up the aisle.
A kid who has been sitting next to Amy, a boy a little older than Luna, follows her.
Red-haired and lanky. That must be Marcus’s kid, the baby Amy is carrying now, in Elsie’s time.
Luna, breathless, reaches Elsie and hugs her. “Mom!” she says. “You look so young!” Mom. Elsie is this young woman’s mom. “Is this the atlas?” She takes it from Elsie.
“Careful,” Elsie says.
“I know. I won’t close it.” She handles it gingerly. “I’ve heard so much about it. I wasn’t even sure it was real. Mom—you—told me so many stories when I was kid. You visited me before.”
“I held you when you were a baby, and again when you were a toddler.”
“I wish I remembered.” Luna gives the atlas back to Elsie as these older versions of Lizzy and Zander, Marcus and Amy, Bailey and Travis, and Crystal surround her at the back of the theatre along with new friends.
They hug her in turn, murmuring greetings.
Bailey introduces her to her niece and nephew, Olivia and Liam, twins, both in their last year of high school.
Zander rolls forward, smiling. He’s wearing a closely trimmed beard now, and his hair is longer.
There’s a bit more grey. His symptoms have progressed; the tremors and stiffness have worsened.
His voice is softer, his words more slurred.
He squirms involuntarily so that his bearing in the chair is less sit than dance.
And yet, with Lizzy’s help, he stands and hugs Elsie.
He feels just a bit like a stranger to her, like he’s Zander’s older brother.
But there are those amber eyes. His dimples when he smiles.
“We should go out into the foyer,” he says.
“So we don’t disturb everyone.” He sits back in his wheelchair and waves the group of family and friends on as Luna opens the door for him, for them, for Elsie.
Once in the foyer, Lizzy and Zander and the others catch her up on recent events.
Luna’s heading to university, in Vancouver, to do a history degree.
Lizzy’s business is chugging along. She just hired a new GIS analyst. Zander still takes on new clients, but fewer now.
They planted ambrosia apple trees in the yard of their house in Fernwood, on a street adjacent to Marcus and Amy’s.
Crystal still provides live-in care for Zander, in between entertaining clients of her own, though Crystal needed care herself this spring, which Lizzy and Luna provided, as she recovered from knee surgery.
Bailey and the kids got a new dog. Travis bought a motorbike.
And so the days have ticked on, moment by moment, day after day, year after year.
“I don’t understand,” Elsie says to Lizzy. “The atlas shows me turning points in my life. But this is Luna’s day.”
“You’ll get it when you’re a parent,” Lizzy says.
“Do I really have to wait twenty years to figure it out?”
Lizzy touches the atlas Elsie holds open in her hand. “It’s not just a new chapter for Luna,” she says. “It’s a new one for me too. Luna’s stepping out on her own, so I’m taking a step back from my role as a mother. I’m about to redefine myself, just like you are now.”
“I’m redefining myself? You mean as a mom?”
“Or whatever you choose to be.”
Luna, Zander and her friends watch expectantly.
“Are you saying that I can change things?” Elsie asks.
“I’m saying you have a decision to make.”
She knows. But how can she make a rational decision with her future staring her in the face? “This isn’t fair,” she says. They’d planned this gathering, knowing she would arrive. Her future conspiring against her. To exist.
Lizzy laughs. “We’re not here to convince you of anything,” she says. “We’re just here.” She takes Luna’s hand. “We’re here as a result of a decision you made. You could have just as easily made another, that led to a different future, and it would have been okay too.”
Luna holds out the graduation cap to Elsie. “For you. A souvenir.”
Elsie, looking at the cap, waves her hand. “Oh, that’s yours.”
Luna puts it on Elsie’s head. Then she hugs her and that sensation of calm, of belonging, settles over Elsie again. “I want you to have it, to remember me by,” Luna says. In the event Elsie chooses a different path than the one that led her here, to this future, to this daughter.
Luna lets go and Elsie beams up at the girl, who’s a good two inches taller than she is now, more with those heels on.
Elsie can see Marcus in Luna’s face (those eyes!), but also her mother, her father, Bailey, herself.
It’s crazy. Luna is a stranger to her and yet uncannily familiar, like a forgotten word she’s trying to reel to the surface.
Her mother must have felt a similar haunting sensation on meeting Elsie, her grown daughter, this time traveller, on that Christmas morning back in 2002.
No wonder her mother spent the remainder of her life exploring astrology, trying to figure it all out.
She was looking for Elsie. Hoping to see her again. Hoping she had enough time to.
“The ceremony is almost over,” Lizzy says to everyone.
She takes Elsie’s elbow. “It’s time.” She leans into Elsie, speaks into her ear.
“And you’ve got some thinking to do.” Curtained by all these people who love her, Lizzy touches Elsie’s forehead with her own to say goodbye, and holding both of Elsie’s hands, she slaps the atlas shut.