A Song Across the Sea (10 page)

Now! Now! Tara propelled herself upward as fast as she could go. She’d already let one person die tonight. She wouldn’t let this old woman die, too.

Would the lifeboat still be there? What if she’d already been written off as dead? She was nearing the surface now—she could sense it. The hand gripping Mrs. Rutherford’s arm was weakening, but she knew that if she let go, even for an instant, she’d never find her again. What if they broke the surface and found themselves all alone in the midst of the ocean? What if…

Air. Her face felt it first. Chill, wonderful air. She hauled Mrs. Rutherford’s head out of the water and greedily drew in great lungfuls of air, kicking her legs to stay afloat. There were gasping sounds somewhere near her ear. Mrs. Rutherford was still alive.

Something dark and tangible hovered above the waterline, not more than ten yards away. Exhausted, she swam slowly toward it, still towing Mrs. Rutherford.

They’d waited. The lifeboat was still there.

•  •  •

It seemed as if the night would never end, nor would the chill ever leave her bones. The priests were wrong, when they described hell as a fiery pit. No, hell must surely be like this—cold and black and bound by water.

“Why did you do it?” The feeble voice came from somewhere near her. It was Mrs. Rutherford, finally showing some signs of life. She’d been unconscious since being brought on board and wrapped in a blanket. Now, she pulled herself up to a sitting position and fixed weary eyes on Tara.

“Why didn’t you leave me alone? I wish to die.”

“No you don’t. No one wants to die.”

“I do.”

Tara’s temper snapped. The strain of all that had happened that night was too much for her.

“Do you think you’re the only one who’s sufferin’? Is it because you’re rich that you imagine the world should stop turnin’ just because you’ve lost someone you love? Me brother Paddy is dead. Six years old, that’s all he was, and he’s dead because I couldn’t hang on to him. Your husband, at least, got in a bit more of life than that.”

Mrs. Rutherford stared at her, stricken. “Lionel and I were married for 41 years.”

“Then be thankful that you had that much time together. And stop bein’ foolish. No one wants to die. No one who’s thinkin’ straight.”

Mrs. Rutherford was quiet for awhile. Tara looked away. She wasn’t terribly proud of herself for rebuking a grieving old woman. It was just that—

“You’re…the girl on the ladder. The one who spoke up to the steward.”

“Me name’s Tara McLaughlin, Mrs. Rutherford.”

Mrs. Rutherford nodded blankly.

“What about…that young man you were with? On that ladder.”

Tara shook her head. “I’ve no idea what happened to Dominic.” Dominic—his kiss, his smile—seemed like a long-ago dream. “I can only pray that he made it. He had to see to his mother and grandmother. I’d me brother to look after.”

And what a job she’d made of it. She mustn’t let herself think of Paddy. The pain from it was worse than ever.

“I saw your husband, there on the deck. Right before the ship went down.”

Was it a mistake to mention this? It was difficult to look into Mrs. Rutherford’s face, so naked were the emotions on display there. Maybe it would have been kinder to leave this woman in her self-imposed stupor. But Tara couldn’t ignore the pleading, hopeful look she saw now. Her companion needed to hear more. She sighed, wondering what would be the right thing to say. It didn’t help that she was unaccustomed to speaking with someone of Mrs. Rutherford’s social class. They were from different worlds, and would never be conversing like this if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary circumstances in which they found themselves tonight.

“He was sittin’ in a deck chair. Actin’ calm. He looked…calm. He was smokin’ a cigar.”

Mrs. Rutherford sniffled, but almost managed a smile. “He does love his cigars. Did he… Did he say anything?” About me, was the unspoken ending to the question.

Tara started to shake her head, then hesitated. Would it be so wrong to give this poor woman some small shred of happiness?

“He told me…he felt better for knowin’ you were safely off in a lifeboat.”

Mrs. Rutherford lapsed into a peaceful silence for awhile, then: “He made me get into it. Told me he’d be along in the next available boat, but we both knew that wasn’t true.”

“Your husband was a true gentleman,” Tara said.

“Yes.” She sighed. “Oh, how will I go on without him?”

Tara thought bleakly of Paddy.

“You will because you have to,” she said dully.

•  •  •

The sea turned choppy in the dismal hours before dawn. Waves buffeted an inflatable boat that wended its way slowly toward a convoy of lifeboats several miles away. Sea spray stung the eyes of its passengers, including those of a petite, nervous woman who cradled the head of a small boy in her lap. It was not her son, Danny. No it was not. She blocked from her mind the images of red-haired Danny and her husband, God rest their souls. They were gone. She was a widow, but not childless. God had taken her Danny from her, but he’d sent this wee lad—just Danny’s age!—to take his place. It was only right.

Padraig stirred and opened his eyes. “Tara?”

“Hush, little man.”

He looked up at her, dazed. “Mrs. Flaherty? Where’s me sister Tara?”

“Your sister is dead. Drowned, with all the others. You were floatin’ all alone when we pulled you out of the water.”

“No! You’re lyin’! I want Tara!”

“Sure and I wish she was alive, along with me Danny and Tim, but she’s not. She’d want me to take care of you, Paddy. I know she would. A little boy, all alone in the world. We have only each other now. Lay your head back down, Padraig. I’ll look after you now. I’ll be your mother…”

If Padraig had been older, he might have been troubled by Mrs. Flaherty’s brittle smile, by the glassy look of satisfaction on her face.

But he was only six years old. He lay back down to sleep so that he wouldn’t have to think about anything. Not about Tara, or his mother, or what he might face in the days ahead.

Mrs. Flaherty stroked his hair and smiled to herself. This little one was hers now. Danny was dead. Padraig was alive. Out of all the little boats fanning out from the watery burial ground of the great ship, God had seen to it that Padraig was pulled into the selfsame one in which she sat.

It was fate.

•  •  •

Tara listened to waves lap against the sides of her lifeboat. She heard someone singing—a fragile, plaintive melody that carried out over the cold, clear air like a seagull in flight. She recognized with surprise that it was her own voice, but didn’t stop. Music was the only thing still alive in her. Perhaps it would sustain her.

Her voice gained in strength, each note reverberating with emotions colored from the palette of her soul. The song crested, then subsided. She felt not at peace, but as if she had temporarily put the pain at a distance.

When the last notes died out, a new sound took their place. Applause. An officer started clapping, then several people near him joined in. Soon, all the passengers in the lifeboat were clapping for her. Even Mrs. Rutherford shook herself temporarily out of her trance, to stare at Tara in amazement.

“What a magnificent voice you have, my dear,” someone said.

Tara blushed.

Mrs. Rutherford leaned toward her and took her by the hand. “Where did you learn—?”

“Look!” A shout interrupted her. “There! On the horizon.” A distant flash briefly lit up the sky, then winked out. A moment later, a dull boom sounded out over the water.

The officer in command of the lifeboat looked pleased. “That’s very good news, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a steamer, coming in our direction. She’s firing off rockets to let us know that help is on the way.”

It would be some time before they were rescued. The steamer was still miles away. A chillingly exquisite dawn illuminated the wretched expanse of ocean where so many had died. Bit by bit, the sun spread a brilliant coral glow over the widely scattered lifeboats and smaller, inflatable crafts.

Into view came four enormous icebergs reaching hundreds of feet into the air, dwarfing dozens of smaller bergs in the indigo water surrounding them. They gleamed with cold radiance, as many-faceted as diamonds. The shadows that crawled across their deadly, impassive faces turned them first mauve, then dusky blue, then blush.

Tara, reluctantly, thought them almost beautiful.

•  •  •

The lifeboat maneuvered alongside the Carpathia with some difficulty. Instructions were shouted; lines were quickly dropped over the side of the ship and the lifeboat was made fast.

Along with the other Titanic survivors, Tara climbed up a rope ladder that was dangling over the Carpathia’s side. One steward had a hot mug of coffee ready for her, another threw a blanket around her shoulders. She was so grateful for their kindness that she wept.

The four days it took the Carpathia to reach New York might have been forty, for all Tara knew. She kept herself apart from the other survivors, standing at the rail and looking out over the uncaring sea for hours on end, oblivious to the numbing wind. She ate little and hardly slept at all, although she dutifully lay in the bunk that had been provided to her and closed her eyes for hours at a time. Several times a young ship’s officer tried to engage her in friendly conversation. Once he offered her a tour of the Carpathia, which she declined. She preferred to remain within the confines of the deck, like a prisoner who’d sentenced herself to a narrow cell. She preferred to be alone.

It was on the Carpathia that Tara realized she’d lost her money pouch the night of the sinking. It was doubtless resting on the floor of the ocean, forever out of her reach. Sure, she felt guilty for even thinking of money when she’d lost so much more—her brother—but she was now penniless. It made her miss the little farm back in Ireland all the more, because now she had nothing to show for it. The hard work her mother and father had put into it, and the labor she herself had endured, just to keep it going all those years after her father died—it was all for nothing. The farm might never have existed.

The crew and passengers of the Carpathia lavished kindness on the bedraggled souls they’d plucked from the sea. Toothbrushes, combs and articles of clothing were donated; some passengers even sewed jumpers out of steamer blankets for the children. Tara accepted the small offerings that came her way graciously, if without enthusiasm.

If only she could travel back in time and change what had happened. She and Paddy could have gone and lived with Aunt Bridey and Uncle Kevin and their noisy brood. Or, she’d have kept the farm somehow, to turn over to Paddy when he was old enough to manage. She’d betrayed her father, casually discarded the land he’d worked so hard to own, and had been punished for it. Was it God’s hand in this? Or the devil’s?

She rarely saw Mrs. Rutherford, who was comfortably ensconced in First Class quarters. The older woman spied Tara on the deck once and waved to her, calling out, but Tara pretended not to see her. She wanted nothing to remind her of the night Paddy died. When Tara discovered the loss of her money pouch it did cross her mind, briefly, to ask Mrs. Rutherford for a small loan. Just enough for food and lodging during her first few days in America. She quickly rejected the idea. It wouldn’t do at all. Mrs. Rutherford might take such a request to mean that Tara expected her to be grateful for pulling her out of the water that night—that Tara had only done it because she knew Mrs. Rutherford was wealthy.

She’d go hungry before she asked for charity.

On the deck one day, Tara encountered Dominic’s grandmother, accompanied by a somewhat younger woman she knew must be his mother. When she tried to break through the inevitable language barrier and ask about him, both women dissolved into tears. “No let-a men inna boat…no let-a men inna boat,” the mother cried, over and over again. So Dominic was dead. It was one more thing she couldn’t bear to think about.

One morning Tara passed the dining saloon and failed to notice a small, nervous woman seated inside who shrank back in alarm. The woman tossed a shawl over the face of the child sleeping beside her. When Tara was safely past, the woman shook her charge awake, took him by the hand and hurried away. If Tara had turned around she would have noticed an unusual scar on the back of the child’s hand: a rough-textured, berry-colored mark that looked like the result of a bad burn, long since healed over.

But Tara didn’t turn around. She resumed her customary place at the rail and watched the foaming, churning wake spin out in twin streams behind the ship.

The Carpathia steamed on relentlessly toward the New World.

“H
ey, lady! Watch where yer goin’!”

Tara leaped out of the path of the horse-drawn wagon that careened toward her. Its driver scowled impatiently as his wagon rumbled past. As angry as she was at him, she still marveled at how he guided the horse so quickly through a street teeming with vehicles, greengrocers’ carts piled high with fresh produce and, most of all, with people.

She’d never envisioned a city with so many people. The Lower East Side throbbed with humanity, a pulsing mass formed by newcomers from all corners of the earth. Two Rumanian men in white, full-sleeved tunics and embroidered vests argued prices with an urchin selling sweet potatoes from a pushcart. Tall, black fur hats crowned their heads. Bushy mustaches shook under hawk like noses as they haggled with the vendor. A family of gypsies hurried past, the mother in voluminous skirts, the father and sons in short jackets and cloth caps. Mustachioed laborers digging a ditch alongside the street wore stained overalls, heavy work boots and fedoras. They spoke to each other animatedly in Italian, reminding her fleetingly of Dominic. She heard English and Irish accents, and fragments of conversations she guessed to be in Swedish and German, Russian and Yiddish. Particularly exotic to her were several women with skin the color of dark chocolate. She couldn’t keep herself from staring at them as they passed. The startling blackness of their complexions was emphasized by the tropical colors of their loose-fitting cotton dresses. On their heads they wore bandanas, twisted into elaborate shapes. Their accents sounded French. She tried to remember her geography lessons from school. These women must be from the French West Indies.