Promise Me This (19 page)

Daniel snorted, but Michael thought he looked pleased.

After breakfast Daniel paused briefly by the open door. “If you’ve strength in your legs for it, we’ll walk the boundaries of the land today, Michael. I’ve been lookin’ over Owen’s plans. We’ll need to get crackin’.”

He was gone in a moment. Michael looked at Maggie, who raised her brow. “Well, you weren’t planning on deserting us, now were you?”

“N-no, mum,” Michael stuttered. “But I didn’t know as you’d want me . . . want me to stay.”

Maggie placed her hand on Michael’s shoulder. “We have need of you, Michael. And I believe you have need of us. If we care for and look to one another, we three souls can grow our own family.”

“And Annie,” Michael ventured. “I promised Owen that I would work to bring Annie to America.”

“And Annie.” Maggie half smiled—tentatively, Michael thought. “As soon as we can. And as soon as she’s ready, if she’s willing.” She brushed away whatever seemed to worry her, then smiled again. “Our Owen chose his friends wisely. We shall sink or swim together.”

Michael squeezed Maggie’s hand, the first impulsive human touch he could remember giving since he was little, since Megan Marie. Something swelled in his heart that he could not name, but it carried him through the long morning, through his long trek with Daniel around the perimeter of Allen’s Run Gardens.

“You can fish in this creek if you like. Maggie likes fresh fish, so it’s a good cause to take the time now and again.”

As near the docks in Belfast as Michael had lived, he had not fished. Uncle Tom thought fishing a lark and made certain Michael had enough work and chores to keep him from larking about. But Michael remembered his da angling along the Shannon and thought it a glad thing.

Together Michael and Daniel walked the thirty acres of Allen land. Daniel ticked off the plans Sean Allen had detailed before he died, the things they had tried that worked and the things they had tried that had not.

The more Daniel showed Michael and the more Michael felt the strong New Jersey sunshine on his face and inhaled the freshly turned earth, the more he felt as though he’d been there before. He knew that was impossible. But it seemed as if sometime long, long ago, before the time of his remembering, he’d felt just this way, just this warm and safe. It was something akin to the way he’d felt with Owen.

Half the morning passed before a stitch caught in Michael’s side, before a sudden shortness of breath and weakness in his legs took him by surprise. In that weariness, the shaming voice of Uncle Tom crept into his heart, and the familiar regret for losing Megan Marie washed over him. Raw grief for Owen flooded his soul.

Michael could not understand himself or his sudden swing of emotions.

Daniel appeared to take no notice but guided their steps back to the house. “A good idea to rest awhile before dinner. Maggie Allen will blame me fierce if you’ve no appetite for her cooking.”

“I’ll be able to work by tomorrow, Mr. McKenica. I’m sure of it.” Michael did not want to disappoint or vex the man who’d acted so kindly toward him.

“Not tomorrow, Michael, but soon,” Daniel McKenica answered. “You and your strength will grow into it, by and by. You’ll see.” He picked up a hoe leaning against the back porch and started away, then called over his shoulder, “You’ll be needing to call me Daniel. I’m Mr. McKenica to them I don’t care to know better.”

April turned into May. Even as the British inquiry into the
Titanic
disaster was called in London, Southampton continued to mourn its dead and rallied to aid those left behind. Benefit concerts, fund-raising sporting events, and collections of every sort—public and private—raised money for families of the tragedy. Even memoriam postcards were sold, though the sight of them turned Annie’s stomach inside out. She couldn’t imagine who would treasure the picture of a ship that had killed their father, son, or brother.

As Annie heard nothing from Aunt Eleanor and nothing more from America, the foreboding and numbness she’d hardly noticed growing inside her began to take focus. She thought a good deal about the cost of independent living—apart from fund-raisers and memoriam postcards—and how one might go about it. She watched girls and other young ladies—one only a couple of years older than herself—who walked to work at the tea shop Owen had frequented, and another who fairly flew to and from the milliner’s shop down the road, always late, going and coming. She tried to imagine herself in their circumstances, and she wondered what she might do to earn her own living, if ever she needed to do so.

She was wondering just that when Miss Hopkins sent word that after Annie’s French class, she should stop in her study.

Annie could not think what she’d done to be called into the headmistress’s office. She’d not snuck out to the docks since Aunt Maggie’s letter arrived. She had faithfully conjugated her French verbs and done all the sums required of her by the mathematics teacher. Her copybook was clean; she’d swept the dormitory floor and made her bed with tidy corners.

Annie was still ticking off her “well-done” list, hoping to discover her own infraction, when Miss Hopkins’s office door opened.

“Come in, dear. I have wanted to see you, to have a little talk alone,” the headmistress began.

Annie was not at all certain she wanted to have this talk with Miss Hopkins, though she could not—or would not—own why.
Let me have done something silly—something genuinely stupid. Let it be that!

Miss Hopkins drew Annie to the horsehair sofa beside her low tea table. “I have received a letter from your aunt in America, Annie.”

Annie’s breath caught.
Why would Aunt Maggie write Miss Hopkins?
She was certain that she didn’t want to know.
Stop time. Stop time. Stop time.
The words rattled through Annie’s mind.

“It seems there has been some sort of mix-up.” Miss Hopkins appeared distressed, though trying very hard not to show it. “I have tried to contact your aunt, Miss Hargrave, in London, to learn if she has heard any news or to know how I should proceed, but I have received no response.”

Annie sat very still, except for a slow, almost-imperceptible turning of her head from side to side. A whirring began in the tiniest part of her brain, spinning faster and faster, until the noise was a great, pummeling grindstone wearing grooves in her temples.

Miss Hopkins knelt on the floor in front of her, taking both of Annie’s hands in her own. “Your aunt Margaret Allen wrote to me that the young man who appeared at her home in the days after . . . after the ship went down . . . was not your brother. He was wearing Owen’s coat and he had, indeed, been with Owen on board, but—”

Annie jerked her hands away. She stood, shaking her head vehemently, and covered her ears.
Lies! Lies! Lies!
But she could not say the words.

“Annie.” Miss Hopkins’s voice was firm but gentle, and she pulled Annie’s hands from her ears and held them at her sides. “Your aunt sent this. She wanted me to give it to you. She wrote that she explained everything in a letter tucked inside, but she did not wish you to be alone when you opened it.”

Breakfast rose in Annie’s throat. She knew what the book-shaped package held before she tore the brown paper wrapping free. It matched the size and weight of the book she wrote in every day, the journal she’d promised to share with Owen when they were together again at last. Owen would never have taken his journal from his coat pocket—not willingly. He carried it there always, just as surely as he carried his small rake and spade in his trouser pocket and his watch in his vest.

Annie closed her eyes tight against the world. “It’s a mistake,” she whispered, hoarse. “Owen is in Halifax or New York—another ship found him. He is all right. He will come for me. He will come for me.”

Miss Hopkins took Annie in her arms as the girl’s insistence turned to trembling and the trembling to wracking sobs.

Annie did not remember how she found her way to bed that night. But she woke the next morning, her face damp against a tearstained pillow, Owen’s precious journal pressed tight to her chest.

She remembered only that she’d read Aunt Maggie’s letter, alone, by dim lamplight. The letter told the story Annie had already known in some part of her mind—a door she had quietly locked against the truth: It was not Owen but Michael who had survived
Titanic
’s foundering. It was not Owen but Michael who had made his way to the Allens in New Jersey. It was not Owen but Michael who was sick and now recovering. It was not Owen but Michael who lived and breathed and would surely one day laugh and sing again—though Aunt Maggie wrote that he mourned deeply for his friend.

Michael blames himself for living, and I think he would rather not except that he made a vow to Owen to bring his life’s work to us, to forge new life in these weak gardens, and to bring you, dear Annie, to America and safety.

“It isn’t fair,” Annie cried, “that Owen gave his life, while Michael, nothing but a foundling and a stowaway, lives!” She knew it was Owen’s doing that Michael wore his coat, carried his dreams. She knew it because she knew Owen.
But why? Did it have to be a trade? One life for another?
Annie beat her fist into her pillow, shook and crumpled it. She clung to the tear-wet pillow slip.

Near dawn Annie dressed by the light of the half-moon shining through her window. She tucked Owen’s journal into her cloak pocket, tiptoed down the back stairs and out the door. Not even Cook was up.

She walked to the last gardens Owen had created, the lovely gardens surrounding the town hall, and sat on the bench they had shared as the sun set on Easter Sunday.

Annie watched, all around her, as morning dawned on Owen’s garden. Chilled, she pulled her cloak tight about her. When the sun rose just enough to read by, Annie opened Owen’s journal.

The town clock struck seven by the time she’d finished reading. Miss Hopkins would be calling the girls to rise for prayers and breakfast. She would discover Annie missing. Annie wondered idly if it mattered.

She read of all that Owen had thought and prayed in the days before his death. She knew that he had loved her, that he’d wanted her to be safe and happy. It warmed Annie to see it written in his own hand. She knew now that he had also loved Lucy Snape and had vowed in his heart to love her child. She knew he had claimed Michael as his younger brother and that he’d pledged himself a son to Aunt Maggie and Uncle Sean, to do all for them that he could no longer do for his own parents. Owen had planned a life for all of them in America, as one great and happy family.

But none of it would be, because Owen was dead and Lucy Snape was dead. She had seen Lucy’s mother at church, dressed in mourning. Baby Margaret would go on living with her grandparents, and Michael would live in New Jersey, and Annie would . . . Annie did not know what she would do.
What will become of me when this school term ends? When Owen’s funds are gone?

The rising sea breeze dried the tears on Annie’s face. She didn’t know how she would go on, only that she must. Owen would have insisted.

Annie ran her fingers beneath the bench, searching for the letters Owen had carved there—their own sweet secret, their special place:
Owen & Annie Allen
. The indentations in the wood were precious to Annie, and she loved them. She swept her hand the length of the bench and was surprised to find something more on the far, far edge.

Annie knelt on the ground and peeked beneath the bench. She read Owen’s neat carving of their names within an oval. Beyond it she saw crude letters scratched:
MICHAEL
.

Annie fell back from the bench as if she’d been scorched. She stood and stared at the bench that had been sacred to her, trying all the while to steady the ramming of her heart against its cage. So low was her whisper that not even the wren perched on the nearest shrub heard. “I hate you, Michael Dunnagan! I shall hate you till the day I die.”