David and I rushed to launch Sweet Pea. The water was calm, a flat, oily surface that dimly reflected the glow of the lantern. The little Johnson motor sputtered to life, and we nosed our way out onto the Lake, keeping the shore off our port side. I sat in the bow, the lantern held above my head, weakly illuminating a small world for us to move in. We could see the light and hear the steady sound of Mother on the horn, and we used this to guide us. David held a compass in his hands and continued to glance at it, even while we were in sight of land, taking bearings. We rounded the point to the east side of Porphyry, carefully avoiding the rocks that lurked below, slippery creatures barely breaking the still surface of the Lake. Dreadnaught was only a half mile offshore, a small island, not more than a large rock with a few scrubby trees clinging to it. With one last glance at the black beach on Porphyry, we adjusted our course and headed out from shore, the fog quickly dropping a screen around us.
Partway across, David cut the engine. We bobbed in the mist-shrouded dimness, our eyes straining and our ears grasping for the entreaty of the vessel in distress. I could hear Mother, sounding the horn with precision. I could hear nothing else. No other horn. No motor. And while I knew that the steam-powered turbine could propel the freighter in relative quiet, I wondered if perhaps she had really been a ghost ship. But no, Mother and David had heard her, too. David took to the oars, and we crept along, slowly, cautiously. I noticed the water change; the swell, barely discernible, had begun to shift, and I knew that we were close to the island, the shore sending the surge back out to us.
“Dreadnaught is off our beam.” I pointed my arm toward a blank wall.
We drifted, the oars dipping, pulling, the water tapping against Sweet Pea’s hull, stalking the ship. There were voices—I heard them, spinning, refusing to settle in one place. They came from in front of us, behind us. They swirled like faeries. David and I followed them, first one way and then the other. The oars dipping.
I called out, my voice a signal reaching across the water like the light, like the horn, but they did not hear. When I finally heard her engines, the deep, pulsing, barely discernible reverberations that traveled through the water, climbed aboard Sweet Pea, and settled in the pit of my stomach, I knew she was close. Too close.
She broke through the fog less than thirty yards away, a specter, rearing like the cliffs of the Sleeping Giant, massive and gray, bearing blindly toward our little wooden boat. We were a tiny cork bobbing on the blanketed surface, far beneath her decks, invisible, and right in her path.
“David!” I screamed.
David was in the stern already, straining with the outboard. He yanked; it sputtered and failed, once, twice, before roaring to life. I cowered in the bottom of little Sweet Pea. The steel hull of the freighter towered over us, and as David turned out of her path, I could hear the tapping of the water as it parted for her prow.
“They think they’re in the shipping lanes. They think that the signal coming from Porphyry is another ship.” David was yelling over the sound of the motor. “We have to find some way of signaling them.”
I looked about the bottom of the boat. We had little of use—our lantern, some rope, a life preserver, a jerry can of gas, our oars. We didn’t carry flares, not on Sweet Pea. The only portable horn was already calling out from Porphyry, where the great booming diaphone sat useless and silent.
David leaned forward to where I sat, reaching one hand out to grab my arm, the other still on the outboard. “Are ya feelin’ brave, Lizzie?”
I looked up into his face. His eyes were bright, mischievous, his hair a mess of disheveled curls. That freighter would be up on the rocks in a few minutes if we didn’t do something. My heart was already racing, my senses heightened. Damn him! I nodded.
“Come here. Take the motor.”
I sidled to the stern and took hold of the throttle.
“Pull up alongside, close as you can get. Hold her steady.”
“What are you going to do?”
David knelt in the bottom of the boat and grabbed the lantern. “Send them a message.”
We ran parallel to the ship, her great massive hull rising meters from the surface, and I worked to steady Sweet Pea in the wake coming off the bow. We were a mosquito, tiny and buzzing, pestering a giant.
“Steady . . . steady!” David leaned over the port side, and Sweet Pea complained, listing abruptly with the shifting of his weight. I pulled away from the ship’s hull, turning too sharply and sending David tumbling against the gunwales. I barely heard the curse. “Come on, Lizzie, you can do this. Nice and steady, now.”
I approached again, running Sweet Pea abeam of the freighter, close enough to be visible from the deck but far enough to be seen by the bridge.
David held the lantern in one hand and picked up the oar with the other. He trained the feeble beam toward the wheelhouse, using the oar to intermittently cover the light. Quick. Long. Flashes. Dashes, dots. Letters. Words.
“Porphyry signal out.”
Again he repeated the message. I couldn’t hold it for a third, and we drifted away from the hull, only “Porphyry” having been completed. David sat in the bottom of the boat, breathing heavily from the exertion.
“It’s a shot in hell they saw that,” he panted. I cut the engine, and we watched all 250 feet of her slide past, heading toward the rocks. There was nothing more we could do.
Without warning, she altered course. A light trained down, searching the water.
“David! David, look!” The light blinked. Dashes, dots.
“I’ll be damned!” David grabbed our lamp again. Dashes, dots.
She altered course again. We sat there, watching as her stern slipped behind the curtain and she disappeared, the thrum of her motors faintly audible, churning toward the great open expanse of the Lake.
We started to laugh, both of us giddy with relief, collapsing to the bottom of Sweet Pea.
I kissed him first. It surprised me more than it did him. He had known, for a long time, he had known.
39
Morgan
“You loved him.” I hug my knees to my chest. It’s almost like she’s talking about different people, when I think of her, and him. They loved each other. A lifetime away.
“Yes, I loved him,” she replies. “I have never stopped loving him. And yet I wish it had never been so. Had I not loved him, I could have saved Emily, I could have protected her.” I think about what it would be like to have a sister, to have someone like Emily, and I can’t. I think, too, about Derrick. I wonder what it is I feel for him. I wonder if it’s love. I want it to be. “Love is not blind, as they say, Morgan. Love blinds us. It is a thief.”
These seem like such harsh words. “How can you regret love?” I ask, my voice softer even than I intended. It’s the emotion of it all. It’s getting to me. “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
“You speak the na?veté of youth with Tennyson’s words.”
I am about to ask her what she means when she interrupts me with a question of her own, one that surprises me. “Tell me about your grandmother.”
I think back to the world he and I shared, to the happy days we spent, just the two of us. He spoke of my mother rarely, and my grandmother even less. “I . . . she . . . I don’t know. He never said much about her.”
“You don’t need to protect me, Morgan. I’m not a fool. Life goes on.”
“Honestly, Miss Livingstone, all I know is that my mom and I both look like her. He said we were a lot alike. I . . .” I don’t know what to tell her. I don’t even have any pictures. I have nothing but the violin and the drawings, Emily’s drawings. Instead I ask her a question. “What happened between you and him?”
40
Elizabeth