My head hurts. I look up at the stars and imagine Alec’s face among the constellations. Or is that a dream? I can’t tell dreams from reality any longer.
“She won’t last the night,” someone says. “No telling how many will freeze to death before help comes.”
“How long will that be?”
“No one knows.”
The words don’t seem to have anything to do with me. I don’t feel cold any longer. I’m not shivering. The sensation that fills and numbs me is a sort of second cousin to heat—not warm and yet equally as comforting.
I think, This must be death.
Live for me, Alec said. So I can’t die, not yet. I remember how much he wanted to see the sun rise again, and so I make a deal with myself. I will hold on until daylight. I will watch the sunrise for him. Then I can let go, and we’ll be together again.
There’s more darkness, more crying. Some surprise in the night as new people are discovered in the lifeboat—Chinamen who have been hiding under the seats. The sailors say they’re stowaways, but I recognize one of them from down below. His eyes meet mine briefly, and with a clarity that seems to be part of dying, I understand immediately what happened: They realized the ship was sinking, suspected nobody would let a Chinaman onboard a lifeboat, and hid to save their own lives. I think they did right. I wish Alec had done the same.
The others are angry. Then they’re quiet. Still the rowing. My head feels too heavy for my body. Pain sometimes shoots through me, but as a pale, distant echo of itself. It hardly matters.
Finally, some endless time later, I see the horizon turning faintly pink. Dawn has come. It can end now.
But even as I lift my head for the sunrise, I hear someone shout, “A ship! It’s a ship! We’re saved!”
I feel nothing. It doesn’t seem real, not even when we row up next to it, not even when they begin lifting us out in slings, one by one. I can’t hold on to the sling, so they tie me in. Then it’s like I’m floating, banging up along the side of a ship, like my fall from Titanic in reverse. I wonder if I will find Alec again on the deck waiting for me. Maybe none of it was true; maybe I’ve been trapped in some kind of nightmare.
Instead I fall onto a wood plank deck, and worried faces crowd around. One of them is Myriam’s. When she takes my hand, I know it’s all been real—all of it—and the horror is even more powerful than the fact that I’ve survived.
Chapter 29
AS OUR RESCUE SHIP, THE CARPATHIA, ARRIVES IN New York harbor on the night of April 18, we are greeted by such throngs of people as I’ve never seen or imagined in my life. Rain pours from the skies in a deluge, but that is not enough to deter the thousands of curiosity seekers who have come to see the survivors of the sinking of the Titanic. The ones with the cameras are no doubt reporters. One of those even jumps into the water, trying to get hauled onboard and thus nab the exclusive story.
Myriam and I watch the bedlam from our vantage point, a porthole a couple of decks below. We’re in a nice cabin, one turned over to us by kindly Carpathia passengers. Though the doctors weren’t very optimistic about me when they hauled me up from the lifeboat, Myriam bundled me in blankets and made me drink mug after mug of hot soup until I finally asked her if she was trying to feed me to death. At that point Myriam proudly told the doctors that if I was strong enough to be rude, I was strong enough to live. While I still feel wretched, I can walk around a bit now, so I guess she was right.
“Let’s go,” I say to her. “We can press through the crush if we have to. I don’t want to be on a ship again as long as I live.”
“Soon. The first- and second-class passengers have to leave before we can.”
“Of course.”
We watch our fellow survivors walk out silhouetted by flashbulbs, many of them in the fur coats that represent the only things they saved from the Titanic. Mostly they’re women, but more first-class men than you’d think got away. A few of them even got their dogs on lifeboats; one lady struts out with her pet Pekingese in her arms. There’s a young girl, my age, who helped Myriam with me on deck and who turns out to be the newly made widow of John Jacob Astor. There’s Margaret Brown, the tough-talking American woman who apparently had to save her lifeboat from the ineptitude of the sailor who was supposed to run it. And there’s Beatrice Lisle in the arms of the kind woman I handed her to on the night of the sinking. We were able to talk this morning; she sent a Marconigram to Viscount Lisle, who will come to Boston to collect his lone surviving child as soon as he can. I watch little Bea vanish into the crowd, the last link to everything in my life that came before.
At least I saved her, I think. At least I did that.
But that’s only one life, one rescue. Yesterday as I tossed and turned in my borrowed bunk, passing between hallucination and dream, it seemed to me as if I had to watch all the others die.
I saw Mrs. Horne cowering in a corner of the Lisles’ cabin, refusing to face the water even as it rose to cover the elegant carpets and the furniture, to swallow her whole.
I saw Lady Regina and Layton in one of the corridors, staring at the onrushing tide almost in outrage that the water could dare to interrupt their journey.
I saw Howard Marlowe smoking a final cigar on his private promenade deck, taking what comfort he could in the memories of the wife he’d lost and his pride in the son he believed he’d saved.
I saw George on the bridge with the captain, shouting orders to the last, hoping that by doing his duty he might save a few others.
Worst of all, I saw Irene and Ned already beneath the waves and beyond any hope, her dress and hair flowing out around her as the two of them reached toward each other. As the water closed deeper and deeper over Irene and Ned, they floated into a kind of embrace, the last one they could ever share.
This morning I walked the length of the deck, leaning feebly on the doctor’s arm. He said it would do me good to walk. But what I was really doing was looking for them—all the ones I lost, the ones whose deaths I had dreamed. I wanted the visions to be only dreams.
But none of them were there. They’re all gone, forever.
I never saw Alec, either in my dreaming or on the Carpathia. I can’t bear to think about what happened to him. Perhaps my mind spared me that vision because the sight of his death would kill me. And as awful as I feel—as close as I came to the end—my heart stubbornly keeps beating.
Live for me, Alec said, and it appears I must.
They gave me a new dress, a gray frock donated by some Carpathia passenger with better manners than taste in clothes, and tossed out the red one ruined the night of the sinking. Before they did, though, I collected the two things I needed from my pocket. The first is the two ten-pound notes Irene gave me, crumpled and still damp; it doesn’t seem like money now, more like a farewell present. The second is even more precious. I take it into my palm now: the silver locket Alec gave me at the end of the one night we had together. He said it would protect me; maybe it did.
The face of Alec’s mother looks up at me. Her husband and son are with her now. Should I take comfort in that? I can’t.
Myriam makes a small sound in the back of her throat, and I focus again on the gangplank to see some of the Titanic’s surviving officers departing. They all stayed aboard until the last, just as George did, and went down with the ship. But some of them were able to climb atop an overturned lifeboat and save themselves. George wasn’t among them. She must be tormented by the idea of him thrashing in that frigid water, trying to save himself and coming so close, but failing just the same.
I know better than to say kind words she’d see as pity. Instead I put my arms around her and rest my head against her back. Myriam rubs my hands and says only, “Still cold.”
“Yes.” It seems like I’ll never really be warm again.
Once all the first- and second-class passengers are gone, those of us from third class are allowed to leave. The reporters left already; poor people’s versions of events are apparently not newsworth
y. But a few family members are there waiting for their loved ones. Myriam helps guide me down the gangplank, supporting me against her shoulder, until she walks into the embrace of her cousins. I stand back, awkward and unknown, thousands of miles from anyone besides Myriam who cares about me or even knows my name.
I glance over my shoulder at the Carpathia. From one of the porthole windows, I can see the Chinese men from my lifeboat peering out. America has a Chinese Exclusion Act, it seems—alone among the survivors, they aren’t allowed to come ashore. They are even more unwanted than I am. It’s no comfort.
APRIL 25, 1912
I sit by the window of the Nahas family’s tenement apartment, looking down at Orchard Street. Once upon a time, I suppose there was an orchard here, impossible as that is to believe now. New York City is larger and brasher than I ever imagined, and if there is a louder part of it than the street below us, I never want to hear it. Hundreds of people mill through every moment: Children, dogs, workmen, young mothers, peddlers, pushcarts, and once, I swear, a monkey on someone’s shoulder.
“How are you so quick?” Myriam says. She winces as her needle pricks her skin again, and sucks her thumb once to clear the sting. “You’re almost done already.”
My piecework for the pink dresses her cousin’s garment business makes is folded next to me, save for the final bit in my hands. “I sewed part of almost every day for the past two years. Practice makes fast fingers.”
“You could get a job in a proper shop, sewing like that.”
“I will soon,” I promise. “But I wanted to help out here a bit first. To repay you all for taking me in.”
Myriam huffs. “You know you may stay as long as you like. I meant only that you are quite skilled with a needle and thread.” She scowls at the crumpled sewing in her lap. “And I am not.”
I laugh—it’s not much, but the best I’ve managed since the night of the sinking.
As much as I’ve come to like the Nahas family, and as good as they’ve been to let me recover my strength here, I know I can’t intrude on them much longer. This four-room apartment is a kitchen, a dining and work room, the room with the sewing machine, and a single bedroom. Seven people live here, including me, and when the two children go out to play in the streets in the morning, they are instantly replaced by two other seamstresses who work for the family business. The dress dummy is only a few feet from the sink. There’s a water closet, which is nice, but it’s three floors downstairs, and we share it with apparently half the population of the city. As soon as I had my strength back, I went to work sewing for their business to earn my board and repay them for their generosity, but I’m a burden already and would soon be a nuisance.
“I can’t decide where to go,” I say.
Myriam pulls her needle through, not looking up at me. “In such a hurry. You don’t like it here?”
“You know that’s not true.”
“I know.” We are better friends than two weeks’ acquaintance should make us, but together we lived through an experience nobody else could ever imagine. And we share our wordless grief for the men we loved too briefly. It won’t be easy to leave Myriam, and her brusque words mean only that she won’t find it easy to watch me go.
“We have options now,” I point out. This means what it always really means: We have money.
The entire world seems to be horrorstruck at the fate of the Titanic; every newspaper headline has screamed about the ship’s sinking since we arrived in New York. Apparently the thing to do in polite society is to form a relief committee, because already there are dozens. Two ladies in fancy hats and coats arrived last night, as shocked by the scene on Orchard Street as I was at first, and proudly presented us with gifts of money. It’s no fortune, but combined with Irene’s ten-pound notes, it’s more than enough to start over with. Some I’ll give to the Nahas family to thank them for taking me in, but what will I do with the rest?
Myriam says, “You could set up some sort of a shop.”
“Perhaps.” But what would I sell? I think again of poor Irene, and how badly she wanted a new life of her own. “Maybe we should go out West and become cowboys.”
“I don’t care for horses.”
Below us, a newsboy appears with the afternoon edition, and I set aside my last bit of sewing. I don’t want to hear anything else about the Titanic—not about the hearings or the fact that Bruce Ismay, the head of the White Star Line, saved himself while others died, not about any of it. Just as my hands settle on the windowsill to close it and shut out the din, though, I hear, “Bodies from the Titanicfound!”
I freeze. Beside me, Myriam takes a deep breath, as if steadying herself.
“Extra, extra!” The newsboy’s high voice pipes over the crowd. “The ship Mackay-Bennett recovers dozens of bodies from the sinking of the Titanic! John Jacob Astor said to be among them! First-class passengers being taken to Nova Scotia for identification of the remains! Others buried at sea!”
Myriam and I look at each other, stricken. “Alec,” I say. “And George.”
“Not George,” she says, though I can tell it costs her. “First-class passengers, they said. If they found George, they—they put him back in the water.”
How horrible, to think of George being drawn out of the cold Atlantic only to be sunk into it again. It would be better if they never found him at all.
“How would they even know who was first class and who wasn’t?” I ask, but I answer myself just as quickly. “The clothes, of course.” Even in death, it matters whether your dress had been trimmed with lace, or whether your shoes were polished oxfords instead of worn brogues. It’s the difference between a grave your loved ones can visit and being dropped into the water in a sack with stones at your feet.
But Alec was in first class, and the good coat he wore would have told them that.
Dozens of bodies, the newsboy said. They report now that fifteen hundred people died that night. That means there’s no guarantee Alec’s body was among them.
But there’s no one else left to identify him—to see that he’s buried as he ought to be.
When I look over at Myriam again, she says what seems like the last line of a conversation, not the first: “Yes, of course you must go.”
I embrace her tightly. If this is the last thing I can do for Alec, then I mean to do it.
May 2, 1912
Halifax is a town on the coastline of Nova Scotia, and as I step off the train a few days later in my new clothes and warm coat, I think I might as well start over here as anywhere else. Smaller than New York, but larger than the village I was born in, and there’s a softness to the late afternoon sky that I like. Like someone poured cream into the blue.
But Halifax is on a harbor, and I don’t know if I want to see the ocean every day of my life. I’m not sure I ever want to see it again.
My hand slips into my pocket, where I feel the cool links of silver against my palm. If I find Alec here, before he’s buried, I intend to put the locket around his neck. It’s a way of symbolizing that he’s with his mother again—and silver can’t hurt him any longer.
I expect it will be difficult to find the place I seek, but as soon as I tell the man at the train station that I want to identify a body from the Titanic, everyone’s at my service. A driver with a horse and cart is only too happy to take me to a hotel so I can go view the dead first thing in the morning.
“I can’t wait until morning,” I say. Putting this off any longer would be torture. The recovery ship arrived two days ago, but I wasn’t able to get up here any faster. Thinking of Alec lying here, unknown and alone, has tormented me all that time. “I have to look for him now.”
They pity me so much that this works.
I am taken to the makeshift morgue—in a curling rink, of all places, though I see the need to keep dead bodies near ice. The caretaker meant to lock up for the night but lets me in immediately. “We’ll all wait outside,” he says. “Give you your privacy. If you find the fellow you’re l
ooking for—”
“I’ll come get you.”
Then I will have to bury Alec. As horrible as that sounds, I must hope for it, because the alternative is that he is still sinking down into the Atlantic, never to be found again. It will rip my heart out to see him dead, but I want to see him. Even like this.
But when I walk into the rink, my resolve falters. The sight is more horrible than I ever imagined. Dozens of dead bodies, shrouded in white sheets, all of them laid out on ice. The few lights left on in the rink seem to shine blue upon the ice, as if the bodies were still floating on water. My shadow is long and watery.
Stupid, to be afraid of dead bodies. I force myself to step forward. My shoes slip against the ice, and I have to be careful of my balance.
The dead lie in long rows. I realize I will have to pull back the cloth and look on the face of each one, except for those few too short, fat or obviously female to be Alec. I will have to confront each of the dead and remember them screaming their last in the water.
If that’s the price of finding Alec, I’ll pay it.
I screw up my courage and pull back the first cloth. Too young, a boy of hardly sixteen. He had freckles.
This one is too old, too dark. He died with his evening suit on. I remember how some of them played cards and drank brandy in the lounge until the end.
This one turns out to be a thin woman—and I gasp as I realize who it is. One of the elderly Norwegian ladies from my cabin lies there, hands curled up by her chest as if she were still trying to huddle under her red-and-white blanket.
I sink to my knees by her side. Tears well in my eyes as I stroke her snowy hair, but I don’t begin to sob until I realize why she’s here—why the salvage crew mistook her for a first-class passenger. In her ears are the beautiful pearl earrings she so prized, the ones she lent to me in an act of unselfish kindness. She must have put them on as she left her cabin, finally, too late, convinced of the danger, hoping to save the one heirloom possession she valued most. She did.