Distant Waves (21 page)

The water was so frigid. We had to find Mimi and Thad. Why hadn't they materialized beside me and Tesla? Where were they? I was sick with worry. "Mimi!" I shouted at the black ocean. "Thad!"

"I don't see them, but they're in luck," Mrs. Brown said. "Look at that."

In the far distance, something glowed and streamed across the sky like a comet. "Is it a shooting star?" one of the rowing women asked.

"I hope not," said Mrs. Brown. "I'm thinking it's a flare from a rescue ship." 

Emma opened her eyes and clutched for my hand. Grasping it, I sat beside her. "It's okay. You're safe," I assured her.

"No," she said with a chilled quiver. "Jane, I don't want to leave." Her voice was so faint I barely heard her.

"Of course you do, Emma. A ship is coming for us. We're going to be saved."

"No, not that," she said, shaking her head slowly. Her voice was so nearly inaudible I had to bend low to hear her. "I won't leave," she whispered hoarsely. Then her eyes closed and her head lolled over.

"Emma, wake up!" I shouted. "Emma! Emma!"

I kept shouting at her until Mrs. Brown drew me away. "She can't hear you anymore," she said softly. "She's in a better place."

"No!" I shouted, tears exploding from my eyes. "Emma! No!"

I didn't want her to be in a better place. I wanted her with me, right there in the freezing lifeboat -- alive.

***

I
don't remember much about the trip to New York on the
Carpathia.
Amelie slipped into unconsciousness before we were even on board. Since she was one of the more critically ill, they found a cot for her; many others had to sit up or lie on the floor. The doctor said she was in a coma.

The official report was that Emma had died of hypothermia, meaning she'd frozen to death, but the doctor allowed that she no doubt had many broken bones and other internal injuries. Amelie had two broken legs and frostbite on her toes.

Blythe saw what had happened to them from her lifeboat. Through the course of the first day on the
Carpathia,
she made five attempts to tell me what she'd witnessed, but each time couldn't get through the entire horrific tale without breaking down in heaving, racked sobs.

That night, as I sat on a wooden chair beside Amelie sleeping on her cot, Blythe came in and sat at the foot of the cot. Once again she tried to tell me what she'd seen. She took a deep breath to calm herself and began.

At about two in the morning someone remarked that 
there was a person walking way up high near the funnels. Blythe looked up and knew instantly that it was Amelie and guessed she was still sleepwalking. Then she spotted someone else climbing after her.

"It was very hard to see, but I knew it had to be Emma," she recalled miserably. "She reached her, too. But just as she did, the ship seemed to snap in two and the front end sank into the water very fast. The front funnel broke off and flew toward the water. At the same time, Emma and Amelie went flying into the air."

An image from last year flashed in my mind: Amelie on the roof, silhouetted against a field of stars; Emma dreaming she was flying through the night. Had they somehow known what would happen to them?

I didn't want to think of them hitting the water from so high up. It must have been horrible. "They were so injured, yet they hung on for an hour and a half more," I said.

Once again Blythe dissolved into deep, pain-racked sobbing. "I pleaded with the lifeboat captain to go back to look for them. I begged and begged, but he wouldn't. He said it was too dangerous. He said if I didn't calm down, he'd knock me out. Really, Jane, I tried all I could."

I put my arms around her and together we rocked as tears ran down my cheeks. "Shh. Shh. You did all you could. No one could have done better."

"Do you really think so?" she asked through her tears.

"Yes! I know you did."

Shutting my eyes, I let the tears fall, not even trying to control them.

Blythe and I sat there holding on to each other for a long time. Finally, I realized she'd fallen asleep on my tear-drenched shoulder.

I settled her onto the cot at Amelie's feet and covered her with a blanket. Then I went out on deck to search once more for Thad and Mimi. I hoped with all my heart that they'd been rescued. The intensity of my need to find them was so strong I felt as though I could almost will them to appear.

People from all the different classes sat mixed together out on the deck. The
Carpathia,
I learned, had picked up 750 passengers. Fifteen hundred other passengers and crew members had died.

Fifteen hundred souls lost!

Revised lists of who had lived and who had died were going up hourly as bodies were retrieved by the
Californian,
which had shown up much too late to be of help to anyone.

Thad and Mimi were, as yet, unaccounted for, and so I continued to search. I hoped maybe they were passed out, like Amelie, and no one had identified them. I read a story once where a person was hit on the head and had forgotten his own identity;
amnesia,
I think they called it. I let my inventive mind work overtime to come up with stories in which they survived.

I came upon Juliette LaRoche sitting on a deck chair, holding both Simone and Louise as she stared out at the ocean. I'd learned from Blythe that she already knew her husband, Joseph, was dead. The pain in her eyes was heartbreaking to see. "Blythe is sleeping," I told her. "Can I help you in her place?"

She smiled sadly. "No, thank you. I have lost the best husband on earth. No one can help me."

Tesla came by and saw me with Juliette. For a moment I looked at him hopefully, but his expression told me there was no need to even ask if he'd seen Mimi or Thad.

Louise started to whimper, and Juliette went to find the girls something to eat. I got up and walked the deck with Tesla.

"I never dreamed it would turn out like this," he said. "I will never be able to forgive myself."

"Thad and I are the only ones left who know what really happened," I said.

"Then you must tell," he said.

I shook my head. "The man who tampered with your earthquake machine is to blame. And I think he must be dead. I haven't seen him anywhere, and we'll never know who he was working for."

Mother met us at New York Harbor, having gotten onto another ship almost immediately after the
Titanic
sailed. Her face looked like it was permanently swollen from days of relentless crying. She had contacted the White Star Line and learned of Emma's death and Amelie's condition. She knew Blythe and I were safe and Mimi was missing.

When Blythe and I came down the gangplank, she rushed to us through the waiting crowd, gathering us both in her arms. Her emotional tears, at once happy and tortured, set Blythe and me off in a matching torrent yet again.

"And Mimi?" she asked. "Anything?"

I shook my head and a stricken cry came from her like I've never heard. It was as though someone were choking her while she screamed. And then she swooned. A man nearby steadied her gently to the ground. In moments, she regained consciousness but dropped her head into her hands. "I don't know how I can go on," she murmured.

Amelie was brought to Saint Vincent's Hospital. We stayed with her around the clock, performing all the duties required to keep her fed and clean.

"Mr. Stead was right; he died by ice," Mother said as she and I sat around Amelie's curtained-off bed with the amber lights turned down low, while Blythe slept curled in an armchair nearby. It was late and most people were asleep.

"I heard he was very dignified," I told her. "They say he went to the ship's library with Colonel Astor, where they sat together and waited for the end."

"He was a dear friend," Mother remarked.

"Mother? Jane?"

Mother and I both looked up quickly to Amelie.

Had she spoken?

"Mother?"

We sprang to her. "Amelie! We're here, darling," Mother said excitedly. "How do you feel?"

"My mouth is dry. What happened? Where am I?"

"We'll tell you everything later," Mother said, no doubt not wanting to upset her. "You're talking, dear."

"Emma is talking."

Mother and I looked at each other, shocked. "You know about Emma?" I asked cautiously. "I
am
Emma."

Mother gasped. "I know the difference between them," she said to me. "I've always been able to tell them apart. That is Amelie."

"Amelie is here, too," she said.

Blythe had awakened and quietly come to the foot of the bed, watching. "That's Emma's voice," she whispered. "Emma said she wouldn't leave," I recalled softly. "I haven't," Amelie said.

***

B
ack in Spirit Vale, we had a memorial service for Emma, even though she was very much with us. We had another one for Mimi. Although we had no body, she was presumed to have drowned.

Mother took down her sign and announced that she was done contacting spirits. "While that ship was sinking, the spirit world overwhelmed me with messages and warnings. At one point I was so frantic that I tried to jump overboard to swim to you. The ship's captain finally had me sedated. I never want to go through anything like that again."

Instead, she went back to working for Aunty Lily at the hotel, keeping books and managing things.

Another sign went up in front of our house, though. Amelie changed her name to Amelie-Em and became one of the most sought-after psychics in western New York. With the force of their combined personalities, Amelie-Em was a vibrant, forceful woman, not at all the fey, winsome girls they had once been. In fact, she became
the
force in Spirit Vale, much as Mother had been before them.

It seems strange to refer to one person as
them,
but 
that's how we all came to think of Amelie-Em, almost as if they were Siamese twins attached at some psychic intersection of their metaphysical selves.

I grieved deeply for Mimi and Thad. Every day I had to remind myself that they were really gone, because, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't believe it. I constantly spoke to them both in my mind. I even imagined that I heard answers, though I suppose I was only imagining what they might say. If I ever told myself I had to let go of them, the pain was crippling and I couldn't do it.

Mimi had been my dearest friend. Thad was my greatest love. How could they be dead? It was too cruel. I couldn't bear it. Most of my days were spent in my room, crying. My only pleasure was sleep because there I could see them in dreams so vivid they were like visits in another time and place.

I never stopped feeling their loss, but in May I got word that my article on Tesla had won me the internship at the
Sun.
Mother did not immediately agree to let me go. But I desperately needed to get out of Spirit Vale, where everything reminded me of Mimi. In the end, my relentless pleading wore her down and she consented.

"Take me with you," Blythe pleaded.

I couldn't, though I promised she could visit often. 

Everything about working for the
Sun
was thrilling. Well, maybe the work was less than stimulating. I read endless reams of copy, checking for typographic errors like missed commas. I sometimes aided the art department in inserting small type that had been missed in the first go 'round. I often returned to my room in a town house owned by an elderly couple in the West Twenties with ink on my hands and face. To get there, I had to pass a building with black-gated windows and a black wrought-iron fence that was the Astor Counting House. Every time I went by, the pain of the previous April came back to me anew. I soon found a new way to go.

One evening I went down to Chinatown to see Li in her father's restaurant. I got to the front door but stopped before going in. I hadn't realized this was the same place I'd eaten with Thad. I clamped a handkerchief to my face to soak up the rush of tears as I hurried away. That night I cried myself to sleep, curled in a ball in my small room.

Those six months were a time of bitter loneliness for me. I spent my days alone in the museums and reading. I had finished every Sherlock Holmes adventure and so began reading them over again beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia," the very first, written in 1891. It surprised me how my perception of Holmes had changed since I first encountered him. Where I had once thought him to be a god of dispassionate reason, someone I should emulate, I now saw his very human flaws. He was moody and 
irritable. He had no friends other than the understanding Dr. Watson. Even his fervid attention to detail began to strike me as abnormal.

I kept reading the newspapers, too. There was a hearing held in the Waldorf-Astoria to determine what had gone wrong with the
Titanic.
A panel declared it had been too large a ship with too small a rudder. There was no mention of the crack in the rudder. I wondered if they ever even knew about it.

One day I came upon an article written by George Bernard Shaw in a paper called the
Daily News and Leader
claiming that the heroism of the people on the
Titanic
had been exaggerated and romanticized. I was outraged! I remembered seeing the playwright outside Stead's rented town house and recalling he was supposed to have been a good friend of his.

A day or two later I came upon a rebuttal written by none other than dear Dr. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He said, "It is a pitiful sight to see a man of undoubted genius using his gifts in order to misrepresent and decry his own people." He was Stead's real friend, and I thought more highly of him than ever I had before.

I also kept clipping accounts of Tesla and the rumblings of war in Europe.

That year, Tesla had more money worries. His creditors at Wardenclyffe Tower were demanding their money back. With Colonel Astor gone, Mr. Boldt demanded twenty 
thousand dollars in back rent. Tesla sold him the scrap metal from the tower to pay his debt. Eventually Tesla was forced to move out of his beloved Waldorf-Astoria. I had no idea where he was living.

Tesla was nominated for the Nobel Prize in science that year for his work with high-frequency resonant transformers, but when he heard he would have to share the award with Edison, he said he wouldn't accept the nomination. He could have certainly used the money from that award, but once again he was too principled to compromise.

When the time came for my internship to end, my editor asked if I'd like to stay on as a paid assistant. I jumped at the chance. The couple I was staying with said I could stay on if I started paying rent, and I agreed.

That would have been the rest of my life.

But then, something remarkable happened.

***