Thirty-Five November 8, 2023
THE UNITED Church is a stucco building, painted white. The giant double doors are indigo blue. Elsie climbs the stairs ahead of Zander but then hesitates. Should she knock? But Zander glides up beside her, takes the handle and opens the door for her.
As she crosses the threshold, Elsie’s first impulse is to look up.
The cavernous room smells a lot like the church her mother took her to, all candles, coffee and old wood.
But unlike her childhood church, which was draped in handmade quilted banners, here grand stained-glass windows line either side.
And, just for a moment, there’s the old woman, the ghost, standing in front of the altar as if she’s the minister of the church.
Elsie and Zander walk down the aisle together hand in hand.
The significance of the moment isn’t lost on either of them, and they glance at each other, smiling shyly.
Once at the altar, Elsie steps back and pulls the atlas from under her arm.
The twelfth house, Zander has told her, is all about the unconscious, secrets, unspoken fears and longings.
A house of dreams and, as the title of the twelfth page suggests, hidden things.
It makes sense, she supposes, that this map would lead her to a church.
(Although she hasn’t stepped foot in one since her mother’s funeral and, in daylight, has no belief in God.
Still, in the dark of moonless nights, she prays.)
“Thanks for coming with me,” she says to Zander. “I didn’t want to face this one alone.” The second to last atlas page, set in the far future, when she’s very old.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” he says.
She looks back at the only other person in the church, a young woman in a hoodie, worried that she’ll witness Elsie’s jump in time, but the girl’s head is deeply bowed, as if she’s lost in prayer, or asleep.
Elsie takes Zander’s hand, reassuring them both, and then lets go as she opens the atlas to the chart titled “The Twelfth House: Hidden Things.” There’s that disorienting déjà vu and then—
Elsie’s no longer in the church, but in a large, pleasant, light-filled room.
The walls, painted a soft sugary white, are bare.
In fact, the room is almost completely empty except for a hospital bed and, beside it, a potted balsam tree decorated with Christmas lights.
A small crowd is gathered around the bed.
Over them, there’s a large window, and in the ceiling above, a skylight big enough to see the clouds.
Outside the window, hummingbirds zip to and from a feeder.
There must be dozens of them. The town beyond is filled with trees.
A tall woman holding a toddler turns to see Elsie. “Oh!” she says. Elsie recognizes her immediately. She looks remarkably like her own mother. That curious smile. “Luna,” she says. Her daughter. Her beautiful daughter, much older than she is now.
Still carrying the child, Luna holds out an arm and embraces Elsie. “Mom!” she says, speaking in a near whisper. “You told us you’d be here today. I’ve been keeping an eye out. When did you arrive?”
“Just a moment ago.”
“Oh, I wish I’d seen that.” She touches the corner of the atlas open in Elsie’s hands. “There it is again, the atlas. I remember it from my graduation. That was over forty years ago.”
And in that moment Elsie sees just how quickly the days will shuffle, slowly at first through the remainder of her twenties, then faster and faster until she finds herself here.
Luna hugs her again. “Wow. I can’t believe this.” She talks to the child in her arms. “Misha, this is Gran-gran when she’s young.”
The toddler pops a finger out of her mouth and points it at Elsie. “Gran-gran?”
“Mom, this is my granddaughter, your great-granddaughter.”
“Misha.” Elsie tucks the open atlas under her arm and holds out her hands.
“May I?” She takes the girl, balances her on her hip, and feels again that delicious calm wash over her.
It’s just like her own mother said when she travelled back in time to that first Christmas after her parents separated.
She knows Misha is family. “Hello, Misha! That’s a lovely dress you have on. ”
Luna beams at Elsie. “It’s wonderful to see you young and healthy like this.”
“It’s good to see you too.” It’s good to see that Luna thrived through whatever events life threw her way. And look! The future lives on through this child. A continuum.
“It’s not Christmastime, is it?” Elsie asks, pointing at the decorated balsam tree. Its fragrance fills the room. “The date on the chart wasn’t for Christmas.”
“I’ll let Mom explain.”
Mom. Elsie glances at the bed. But she doesn’t want to go there yet.
She hugs Misha a little tighter. “Where are we, exactly? Not the church.” The bare room, the door to what appears to be a foyer or a waiting room. There’s a row of egg chairs there, and a cut-out of a butterfly taped to the outside of the open door.
“You’re in a hospice,” Luna says. “The church was taken down many years ago, and this facility was built.”
“A hospice.”
A nurse calls out from next to the bed. “Luna? She’s alert and talking again.”
Luna raises her hand. “We’ll be right there.” Luna takes Misha from Elsie and puts her on the floor. “Ready?” she asks Elsie.
“Yes.” But she’s not. She’s really not.
Holding Misha’s hand, Luna leads Elsie to the bed.
“Everyone?” she calls. “Elsie’s here. Let’s give them some room, okay?
” The crowd around the bed steps back, and a woman in a lilac dress sweeps Misha into her arms. That’s Luna’s daughter, then.
Elsie’s granddaughter. She can see Marcus in her face.
And in the bed, propped up with pillows, there’s the familiar old woman in a nightgown, the “ghost” she’d been seeing everywhere.
Her face is so lined, so changed that Elsie hadn’t recognized the woman as herself.
She’s lost a lot of weight in her final illness.
Her features are shrunken, her skin waxy and, on her hands, transparent, revealing the landscape of veins and bones underneath.
Strangely, her nose seems larger. And her ears definitely are.
(They’ve stretched over the course of a life, dragged down by the weight of the world. Gravity is a bastard.)
“You’re late!” the old woman says weakly, smiling at her own joke. Her voice croaks with age.
“Liz?”
“I prefer Elizabeth now,” she says. “A name that contains my many incarnations.”
“I have so many questions,” Elsie says.
“You always do.”
Elizabeth’s thinning hair is cut short under a colourfully spotted cone-shaped party hat.
The old woman touches it when she sees Elsie looking.
“This is my birthday party,” she says, waving at all the people around her.
“The only gift I wanted this year was to make it to my eighty-eighth. And maybe see one more Christmas. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, so everyone gave me a party today instead.
” She wheezes, coughs and sinks back into the pillow from the effort.
A slick tablet on the bedside ticks her heartbeats in a pleasant tone.
Ting, ting, ting. It seems a ring on the old woman’s finger is a pulse oximeter.
“You need to take it easy,” Luna says.
“What difference does it make, Sweetheart? I’m dying.” Elizabeth smiles sadly at the others, Elsie’s future family and friends. Her granddaughter, her great-granddaughter Misha. “I love you all,” the old woman says. “But now that Elsie’s here, I’d like to have a few minutes with myself in private.”
“I’ll make you comfortable and give you a moment,” the nurse says. She administers a painkiller then leaves the room, her shoes silent on the cork floor.
Misha waves from her mother’s shoulder. “Bye, Gran-gran.” Elizabeth waves back and blows kisses to everyone else as they wander out into the foyer. Everyone, that is, except for her daughter. “Is it really time?” Luna asks.
“It’s time.”
Luna hugs Elsie, then clings to her mother. “I love you so very much,” she says. When she finally pulls away, Elizabeth hangs onto her daughter’s hand a moment longer, then lets her go. At the threshold, Luna turns and says, “Will I see you again?”
“I’m always right behind you, Honey. You only have to turn around, wave and say hello.”
“I’ll be looking for you,” Luna says, holding in tears. She waves before closing the door.
“Funny,” Elizabeth says. “To think those are the last words she’ll say to me.”
Elsie’s never thought of that before, the last words she might hear. The last words she might say. She’d want them to be profound, words that would be passed on from generation to generation. Elsie makes a mental note to get started on that, so she’s prepared when the time comes.
Huh. The time has come.
“You know you’ll die before she comes back?” Elsie asks.
“Of course. I have all the memories you made.” That she’s making right now. “I only have a few minutes.”
“Don’t you want your family around you?”
“I’ve never liked crowds. And I’ve said my goodbyes. In any case, we all die alone, Elsie.” She takes Elsie’s hand and smiles up at her. “We only have our memories to accompany us on that particular journey.”
Outside in the hall, there’s the murmur of voices, her future family, waiting. “What about Zander?” Elsie asks. “I didn’t see him here.”
“He died many years ago.”
Elsie feels her knees go weak and she sinks into the chair by the bed, the atlas open in her lap.
“He lived a good life, a happy life. And you were with him to the end.”
“And Bailey?”
“She lived a full life too. She died quietly in her sleep a few years ago. Her heart just went.”
Elsie puts a hand to her mouth. “Oh! I never thought about her dying.”
“Give her a hug from me, okay? I miss her so much.”
Elsie wipes her eyes with her sleeve. “What about Marcus?” she asks. “We had Luna together. Did we stay friends?”
“Marcus was in our lives for many years.”
“He’s gone too, then.”
“A long time ago. He died when he was still quite young.”
All these people she loved, gone now. The heart monitor ticks them off, one by one. Mom, Dad, Marcus, Bailey, Zander. Ting, ting, ting, ting, ting. How many others?
“We knew Marcus had skin cancer,” Elizabeth says. “But it spread so quickly. And he kept the worst of it to himself. He wouldn’t let Amy tell anyone he was in the hospital. She said he didn’t want people fussing over him.”
“How about you?” Elsie asks. “Did you, we, have a good life?”
Elizabeth waves a hand. “Oh, it was fine, mostly. When I remembered to enjoy it.”
“Anything I should know?”
“You already know too much.” Elizabeth’s clouded eyes follow the shadows, silhouettes of birds, dancing across the wall.
“This past month I’ve seen you everywhere,” Elsie says. “You’ve been haunting me.”
“That wasn’t me,” Elizabeth says. “At least not yet. But you’ve been haunting me, as I look back on my life.”
“Then, the ghost I’ve been seeing—That’s you after you’ve died?”
She shrugs. “What does death mean? I’m always here, in this moment I inhabit right now, in the same way our past and future selves all still exist. You just need a device, like the atlas, or memory, to take you there.”
“But the ghost—What is she? Some kind of tour guide for my life?”
“In a manner of speaking. You might call her the atlas keeper, for your atlas.”
“But she’s me.”
“Everyone is the atlas keeper for their own life journey,” she says, like it should be obvious. “We create our own life maps.”
Elsie turns to see the hummingbirds zinging back and forth to drink from the feeder hanging in front of the window. Their tiny, furious bodies. “So what happens now?” she asks.
Elizabeth squeezes her hand. “Now I say goodbye to this life.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“What about me? What happens now, for me?”
Elizabeth rolls her head on the pillow to look up at Elsie.
“In your time, the moon is about to move back into its dark phase.” Zander had told her the moon would illuminate her twelve houses in this lunar cycle, from dark moon to dark moon.
“Your atlas journey is over, or nearly over. You’ll take the atlas back, to where and when you found it. ”
“So, I really can’t save anyone.”
“No. Remember, for me your future has already happened. It’s my past. Again, the past, present and future are just there.” Elizabeth winces in pain. Her breath is laboured. “I have to go now. And so do you.”
“Already?”
“We only get so much time,” Elizabeth says. “Make the most of it.” She points at the Christmas tree. “Smell that? Balsam. I love that scent.”
Elsie sits with the shadows of the hummingbirds, the scent of the Christmas tree, the quiet spareness of the room, as Elizabeth does.
Her gaze alights on the bed, then the butterfly sticker on the door, then the recycling bin, the three arrows of its symbol folded in on each other into a Mobius strip.
Then, beside her, Elizabeth whispers, “What the fuck?” And the ting, ting, ting of her heart monitor changes to a single continuous tone.
Elsie turns. Her old self is very still in the bed, not breathing, with her eyes wide open, staring at the skylight above.
There’s a startled, delighted grin on her face, and on the tablet, a flat line.
And suddenly the ghost in the nightgown who’s been haunting Elsie this month, Elizabeth, is standing in front of her. She smiles mischievously, holds both of Elsie’s hands and, in closing them, closes the atlas too.