By sunset the men were baffled, grumbling, hungry. What was the matter with those fucking planes? Were blind men flying them? Eddie said nothing. He was wishing Kittredge were there. It was impossible to imagine a rescue plane bypassing their lucky captain.
The bosun sat vacantly at the bottom of the boat. “Some help you were, lazy bastard,” Farmingdale chuckled with a glance at the others. Eddie sensed he was trying to provoke the bosun into speaking, as if that might change their luck. Eddie wondered if it might. “We know you can talk,” Farmingdale needled him. “Third knows better than anyone.” He cast a sly look Eddie’s way—an invitation. Eddie gave a neutral smile.
On their third dawn, the wind was no more than a breeze. Farmingdale thought they should ride the current one more day before setting sail for land. They sighted a ship far away, but their leaps and cries did no good. In the last of the daylight, they prepared to begin sailing the next morning toward Africa’s long sandy coast. The Elizabeth Seaman had sunk a thousand miles due east of Somaliland. Farmingdale estimated that the current had taken them north, which would make the distance to land even shorter. Sailing with a good westerly wind, they might make landfall in fifteen days or less. The combined rations from the raft and lifeboat—supplemented, hopefully, by fishing and more rain—should be enough to sustain them that long. And they might still be rescued on the way.
Night fell cold and hard. They lit flares at the same time from boat and raft, and continued their watches, hoping to spot a neutral ship with her running lights on. Eddie sat on a thwart, unable to sleep. He thought of the ocean as it looked on pilot charts, crowded with depth contours and shipping lanes and arcs of current. There seemed no relation between those images and the emptiness surrounding him now. Overhead was the extravagant canopy of stars that had so astounded him when he first went to sea, a shimmering excess like the inside of Ali Baba’s cave. Viewed from the deck of a ship, that sky was a spectacle reserved for those privileged enough to see it. Now the stars looked random, accidental—like the sea itself. Anna had stopped coming to him in his dreams; he’d traveled beyond her reach. Eddie understood that he had passed through another layer of life into something deeper, colder, and more pitiless.
He made a third notch in the thwart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
After the dive, Anna turned Lydia’s bed on its side so it leaned against the wall. She closed the door to her parents’ bedroom, moved the kitchen table into the front room, and dragged the radio there, too. She wanted the apartment to be different, to mark the change she felt—the weight of her discovery.
Her father’s pocket watch leaked seawater for several days. When it dried, its hands were frozen at ten past nine. Cupping her palm around its lozenge of weight gave Anna a surge of strength, of protection. It was a relic from an underworld she’d visited once, under perilous conditions, purely in order to retrieve it. She slept with it under her pillow.
Within days of the dive, she knew that she wanted to leave the apartment. Girls weren’t allowed in the rooming house where Bascombe lived. There was a YWCA near her building, but it had a waiting list—and anyway, she wanted to be closer to the Yard. There were rooms to let along Sands Street; she’d seen the odd handwritten card in the window of a bar or uniform shop. She wondered if it might be possible to rent one of those rooms without anyone finding out she was living there. But the wrong kinds of girls did such things, and the danger of discovery was too great.
One evening she chanced upon Rose leaving work. As they walked arm in arm through the Sands Street gate, Anna mentioned her dilemma—rather, a version of it in which her mother had to return to the Midwest to nurse an ill sister, and naturally Anna couldn’t live alone. Rose clapped her hands: her mother’s tenant, a newlywed, had decided to follow her husband to a naval base in Del Mar, California. There would be a room to let in their apartment, on Clinton Avenue! Anna agreed on the spot to take it.
Since she was earning enough money to keep the apartment and rent the room at Rose’s, Anna decided not to mention her move to her mother or aunt. It required too much explanation. She and Brianne met less often anyway, and usually at a picture theater. As long as Anna collected the mail every couple of days, even the neighbors weren’t likely to miss her.
She bought a large cardboard please-don’t-rain suitcase (as her father used to call them), filled it with clothing, toiletries, and Ellery Queens, drank what was left in the milk bottle, and wrapped the butter in a dish towel. She sat once more at the table where it seemed now that she’d spent the better portion of her life—eating, sewing, cutting paper dolls out of butcher paper. The fire escape cleaved the sunlight into slabs, each swarming with dust like the glittering mica flecks in the water of Wallabout Bay. The building felt heavy and still. In the kitchen, she ran her hands over the tin-lined sink where she and her mother had bathed Lydia until she was too big to fit inside it. She looked into the mirror where her father used to shave. Then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her.
Descending the six flights, she half expected a curious neighbor to intercept and question her. But no one came or even—that she could hear—shuffled to a peephole. Perhaps everyone was still asleep. She stepped into the softening air of late March and noticed strangers on the block. A man carried a suitcase, hurrying, looking up at numbers chiseled over doorways. He was arriving.
Anna’s new bedroom was at the back of Rose’s apartment, facing a tree that looked as if it were lifting barbells. An old man on a horse cart delivered butter and milk. Rich people once lived on Clinton Avenue, and the biggest houses had their own stables, empty now, some used for automobiles. Two of Rose’s brothers were in the army, but the youngest, Hiram, was still at home, and he covered his schoolbooks in the same licorice-scented oilcloth Anna had used as a child to cover hers. She adored this new home.
Some evenings, she met Rose outside their old shop and they rode the Flushing Avenue streetcar together, sharing an evening newspaper. Only a few weeks ago, Anna had watched Rose from outside this same streetcar, feeling she might drown in her solitude. She touched the pocket watch.
On afternoons when she dived, she worked later, and Rose knew not to wait. Those evenings, Anna went to Sands Street with the other divers. She was careful to suck a peppermint on the streetcar back to Rose’s, not wanting to smell of beer when she said good night to Rose’s parents.
Living with Rose made it awkward to spend time with Charlie Voss, who was still Rose’s supervisor. Anna went to his office to explain after the marrieds had gone home one evening.
“I understand, of course,” he said. “It’s a shame.”
“I’ll miss you, Charlie.”
“You’ll stop by now and then?” he asked. “When the coast is clear?”