Fateful (32 page)

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 newsworthy. 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
Titanic
found!”

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 looking 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.

I cry until I feel like it’s impossible for me to cry any more. One of my hands closes over hers, the only good-bye I can give her. I never even knew whether she was Inga or Ilsa. Then I gently cover her with the cloth, wishing it could keep her warm.

Stiffly I rise and walk to the next body. Then the next. And the next. I think I am almost numb to the horror of it, that I can bear anything, until I pull back one more cloth and see who lies there.

Mikhail.

He lies there as perfect as a statue; his slicked-back dark hair and Vandyke beard aren’t even mussed. The man might as easily be sleeping. Mikhail looks like he had a peaceful death, and his body is here for his loved ones to bury, assuming he loved anyone. There’s no saying which emotion is stronger: my outrage at the fact that his worthless body was recovered when so many others weren’t, or my relief that at least he’s dead.

But I tell myself that’s no way to think. Being glad Mikhail died on the
Titanic
means being glad the
Titanic
went down.

I can’t grieve for Mikhail, but I can cover him up decently, I suppose. So I lift the cover again to pull it over his head—

—and his icy-cold hand clamps around my wrist.

I gasp. Mikhail’s eyes snap open, as focused and malevolent as ever.

He’s alive.

Chapter 30

THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING. AND YET IT IS. AS I GAPE down at Mikhail, his hand tightens around my wrist, and a shadow of his old mocking grin appears on his face.

I scramble away from him; his fingers lose their grip. But I stumble against another body and it paralyzes me for an instant. Mikhail pushes himself into a sitting position, then manages to stand. He’s still weak, but he’s definitely alive.

He
can’t
be.

“This is a bad dream,” I whisper. “Only a nightmare.”

Mikhail rasps, “I told you we were gods.” His voice sounds like that of a dead thing.

I look wildly around the shadowy blue rink, as if this will make the driver and attendant magically appear by my side. Our only witnesses are the dead.

“Last night—must have been—the full moon,” he says. “In times of great danger—great cold—the initiated go into a place beyond the laws mere mortals are prey to. Then the moon awakens us. Restores us to life.” Mikhail grins. “Do you see now how magnificent we are?”

I can’t speak. I can’t think. A dead man is talking to me.

“Night is falling. I can feel it.” Mikhail’s eyes close for a moment in satisfaction. “Soon my strength will return. Then I can change. I can be restored.” His eyes open, and he focuses again on me. “I can eat.”

I run for the door. Mikhail’s on my heels, our footsteps echoing in the space. “Help me!” I cry out, but apparently the men waiting outside can’t hear. There’s only my voice echoing,
Help, help, help, help
, throughout the icy morgue.

He’s not as fast as he was before—still weakened from enduring the sinking and his long, mysterious sleep—and I think for a moment I’ll make it out. Then I feel Mikhail’s hand grasp the sleeve of my coat and spin me around.

I stagger back and manage to twist out of his grasp once more. As he snarls in frustration, I realize that we’re more or less evenly matched now. I stand a chance. If he wants a fight, he can by God have one.

My fingers curl into a fist—thumb on the outside so you don’t break it, Ned told me once as a joke—and I smash that fist into the side of Mikhail’s face. It hurts my hand, but it hurts Mikhail too; he shouts in real pain, and that feels so good the aching in my fingers means nothing.