“Stopping is difficult when you reach dry land,” said Walton.
She had her days to herself, and would take to the deck with a book, holding it up to her face and wearing her blue glasses for extra opacity. The chaise lounges were usually bolted down, but the fastenings were almost always loose; she read to a sway-lurch rhythm. Sometimes, to escape the wind or her fellow man-ships’ doctors were often handsome, but there was always some good reason, gradually revealed, that they were marooned on a boat—she read in the nooks behind lifeboats. After the first few days she’d talk to people, and play: cards on still days, chess or dice or shovelboard when it was windy. Ringtoss was more exciting in high seas, after dinner and wine; after dinner and wine, she’d become a social butterfly. In the morning, the fact that she always found this transformation surprising depressed her.
On land, outside of cities, the reality of travel was difficult. Walton packed an India rubber bath, which liked to collapse suddenly, and his medicines often shattered, the fumes poisoning fellow travelers. Travel meant being wet and cold or dry and hot; it meant hours in enclosed spaces with people who stank of urine and bad meat and heartbreak. Pushy, mustachioed men in uniform, demanding imaginary paperwork at sudden borders; dusty telegraph offices and banks with wayward hours and false coinage; mysterious meat, leathery fruit. It meant chalets de nécessité that either disappeared or overflowed, insects skittering over mattresses or rappelling down at high speed from dark ceilings, the flutter of bats and whisper of mice. Even the best hotels had paperthin walls, so that she could hear Walton snore or hum badly or—most nights—treat her to the suctioning sound of bodies on bad mattresses. He’d opened the wide world for her but sluiced away her joy.
Dulcy was good at washing out clothes, pinning her hair and hat for the wind, daydreaming miles into submission. She was hopeless at speaking anything beyond bits of French, but she could read several languages and was evocative with hand gestures. She knew all about train and ship menus and was particularly well versed in post-disaster hotel menus, tentative stabs at normalcy. After an earthquake, the bread always tasted of plaster dust, and scraps of meat were always high. She’d developed a fondness for lentils and garbanzo beans after nights spent huddled near open stinking pots. She trusted very old cheeses.
???
On her last morning in Seattle, Victor crept away from her room before the apartment began to wake, before the world had any color, a gray shape in gray light. He’d been staring at her for an hour, believing that she was asleep; he would believe anything, sometimes.
She scrubbed herself at the sink and slipped away, too. She’d had plenty of time to think, but only a few hours before the train left for errands that were now necessary. When she came back, Henning’s head jerked around for a long look, but she shut her door in his face. They had all misjudged.
When she opened the door again that afternoon, he was waiting with a bellboy, and they made a last trip to the Seattle station. Victor hadn’t emerged to say good-bye, but he’d given Henning a note to pass on, and Henning didn’t look at her directly when he put it in her hand as he helped the sisters onto the eastbound Empire Builder. They stood in the train passageway and listened to Carrie retch in the cabin toilet. She’d already been sick on her mourning dress.
“What will you do?” Henning asked. He was braiding the silk strings on an extra luggage tag.
“I wish I were dead,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” he said, turning to leave. “You wish you were dead to some people.”
She didn’t watch him go—he’d failed her. She left Carrie to her misery and walked down to the lounge as the train began to roll. No one paid attention; her damage was under her hair, under her clothes, though her lips were swollen and beginning to darken. Her muscles ached, her vulva ached, and she felt almost as nauseated as her sister, but the train would soon reach the east side of Lake Washington, and leave Victor in the fog. She found a seat, and then she made herself think.
And by the time Carrie had joined her, Dulcy saw no reason to accept life as she knew it. She’d worked herself into a new daydream, a new past, a bit of salvation: she’d had a husband, and he’d been:
Handsome, intelligent, and sane. Yet somehow (of necessity) tragic.
A wastrel, with a divisive, disowning family.
Someone in between, someone she hadn’t imagined yet.
Her eyes passed over a quartet of women playing whist and landed on a pale man who’d entered the car and paused, taking his time before choosing a seat. He didn’t bother looking at the sisters Remfrey, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t sized them up from the beginning. Dulcy liked the way he looked, and his expression: both bemused and indifferent. She decided that her husband had been pale and tall and dark-haired, romantically gaunt, nothing like Victor.
The train climbed out of coastal rain and into snow, leaving gulls for crows and ravens. Dulcy faced east with the movement, and the large flakes whipped out of tall dark conifers, aiming at her eyes. Carrie dozed with a magazine on her lap, plump lips open, making small horking noises. Dulcy leaned the side of her head against the window, trying for a position that didn’t hurt, but her skull was bruised, and the glass glowed with cold, and her pride couldn’t quite bear it—one sister snoring, one pasted to a window like a halfwit.
She kicked Carrie’s ankle, and the Harper ’s slid from her lap to the floor, but she didn’t wake. Dulcy scooped it up and found bilge:
Ah, that foolish dream of mine had proven true: I knew her, I knew her, unmistaking, without doubt or hesitancy—and in the dark! How should I know at the mere sound of her voice? I think I knew before she spoke!
Carrie had changed dresses, but she was still aromatic and stained, her pale blond hair flat on her head. She looked like a pretty strand of kelp with a doll’s porcelain face. Their better clothes were buried in the luggage car with Walton’s coffin.