A Fall of Marigolds Read online

  The Yard’s upper rooms were an answer to an unvoiced prayer. Celine had offered them to me before I told anyone else I was pregnant, even before I fully realized I wouldn’t be able to keep the Brooklyn apartment on one income.

  She could have charged a lot more for the apartment if she let someone else sublease it, but Celine always insisted the situation was a win-win. Kendal and I had a comfortable if tiny roof over our heads and she had someone she trusted living over her store.

  I left Ruth Courtenay’s fabric at my workstation in the back room, where I kept my laptop and shelves of old swatch books. And then I suddenly realized the afternoon was easing away. Kendal would be getting out of school in less than twenty minutes. It was the first day back after the long summer break. I pulled the apron up over my head, draped it on my desk chair, and went back into the main part of the store.

  Off to get Kendal, I mouthed to Celine, and she nodded.

  I stepped out into the September afternoon. Behind me, Eighty-ninth Street stretched several blocks to Riverside Park, a favorite place of mine and Kendal’s. Just ahead the intersection at Broadway sparkled with a steady stream of cars and our neighboring retailers’ windows. A man walking his dog nodded a wordless hello, and a mom with a baby in a stroller bent to pop a pacifier back into her unhappy child’s mouth. A delivery truck double-parked and the car behind it honked its disproval. The air held only a hint that summer was waning.

  September used to be my favorite month. I liked the way it sweetly bade the summer pastels away and showered the Yard’s shelves with auburn, mocha, and every shade of red. September brought in the serious quilters, those who loved spending frosty nights piecing, stitching, and creating fabric masterpieces. It was a time for getting down to business.

  Even now as I headed out, I could feel the subtle notes of imminent change. The constancy of September’s unflagging return still amazed me, but for different reasons.

  I walked a couple of long blocks, past Amsterdam, quickening my pace as ahead I saw children beginning to congregate outside Kendal’s school, surely the most beautiful public school in Manhattan. The cathedral windows, the sweeping interior staircase, and the sunny, high-ceilinged classrooms appealed to my love of old-world charm. Kendal’s school was another reason I was happy with our living arrangements.

  As I crossed the intersection, I saw my daughter standing in a clutch of other fourth-grade girls eyeing a group of boys who were pushing one another and laughing. Her brownish-black hair shone in the late-afternoon sun, straight and gleaming. So like Kent’s.

  Same with the dimple in her left cheek.

  And the eyes that narrowed into slits when she laughed.

  Kendal had grown over the summer, more than her friends had. She stood a few inches taller than the circle of girls she was with.

  My daughter was going to be tall like Kent, too.

  I waved discreetly and Kendal stared at me for a moment before excusing herself from her friends.

  “So how was your first day back from summer vacation?” I asked brightly.

  “It was fine. And, Mom. Remember at breakfast I told you I can totally get home by myself? It’s only three blocks. And I’m going on ten.”

  I eased us away from nannies and other mothers performing the same picking-up ritual and we headed toward home. “I remember. I know you can totally get home by yourself.”

  “So you agree with me?”

  She was even starting to sound like Kent. So practical and pragmatic. “I said I’d think about it. Besides, I like walking home with you.”

  “Yes, but I am going to be ten.”

  “I know you are.”

  Kendal sighed. “I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s broad daylight.”

  Broad daylight. Where had she heard that phrase? Did anyone even say it anymore? Those two words together had ceased to mean much to me a long time ago. “Lots of bad things happen in broad daylight, Kendal.”

  “Not every day, Mom.”

  “I know,” I said, after a moment’s pause.

  I did know that bad things didn’t happen every day. I wasn’t terrified a kidnapper lay in wait to steal Kendal the moment I let her walk home from school by herself. Worry about what might happen wasn’t what made me hesitant. It was knowing the decision whether or not to allow her to walk home alone was mine to make.

  We had reached Amsterdam. Traffic zoomed all around us as we waited for the signal. “I said I’d think about it. And I will.”

  Kendal frowned. “That’s like saying no.”

  The light changed and we stepped into the intersection. “Thinking about something and deciding about something are two different things,” I said. “I promise I won’t just say no. Now tell me what you did today.”

  Kendal sketched the highlights of her first day back at school, and as we stepped into the Heirloom Yard, she was telling me about the new art teacher’s Australian accent. We had taken only a few steps when I saw that Celine, Leslie, and the owner of the coffee shop next door stood huddled at the cutting table in the middle of the store, obviously looking intently at something.

  As soon as the three of them heard my voice, they raised their heads and turned toward me in unison. Concern and surprise were evident in their faces. Whatever they were looking at had alarmed them in some way.

  “What’s up?” I reached the table before any of them answered my question. Celine held out her hand to gently stop me before I could see what they had been looking at.

  “Molly just got the new issue of People.” Celine nodded toward our coffee shop neighbor.

  “So?” I didn’t read newsmagazines anymore.

  “Some photographer found a memory card inside an old camera bag she had in a storage unit. She thought she had lost it. She hadn’t seen it in ten years.”

  I laughed nervously. Celine wasn’t one for dramatics, but she was scaring me a little. “And?”

  Celine hesitated and then moved aside. A magazine was opened to a two-page photo spread titled, “Tenth Anniversary Preview: Newly Discovered Photos from 9/11.” The largest photo was of a man and woman standing at a curb, staring up at a horror that the camera lens did not show.

  I recognized the scarf I was clutching, with its splash of marigolds, before I saw my own face staring back at me.

  Time seemed to crunch to a stop.

  I leaned toward the table’s edge so that I could grasp something solid as the full memory of that captured moment swirled around me.

  “That’s you,” I heard Kendal say, and I closed my eyes to reorient myself to the here and now at the Heirloom Yard, at the cutting table, surrounded by yards and yards of beautiful fabric. A long-ago voice crept out of the folds of my memory.

  Give me your hand.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Give me your hand!

  I couldn’t breathe!

  “Taryn!”

  Celine’s arms were around me, pulling me back.

  “You were there? You saw it?” Kendal’s words stung, but I welcomed the pain that assured me of where I was. Safe. Alive. With Kendal beside me.

  “I’m all right,” I whispered to Celine. I felt her arms around me relax a little.

  “I’m sorry, Taryn,” Molly said. “I just thought you needed to see it before, you know, people start asking you about it. It will be on all the newsstands tomorrow.”

  “Is my name there?” I whispered.

  “No,” Celine answered quickly. “You’re not identified in the photo, just that man behind you.”

  I steeled myself for a second look, but my eyes were drawn again to the photo itself, not to the caption beneath it.

  The scarf shone like a flame as I held it to my mouth. Behind me, a man in a florist’s uniform held a cell phone to his ear. His gaze—like mine—was skyward, toward the burning spectacle across the stre
et. The embroidered script under ATHENA FLORIST told the world his name was Mick.

  The photo didn’t show that a second later I would be on my knees and the man named Mick would be grabbing me, pulling me to my feet as the world fell to pieces around us.

  My gaze traveled to the caption. The streets were crowded with bystanders and evacuees seconds before the South Tower fell. Manhattan florist Mick Demetriou (pictured above) said escaping the crush of people and debris was harrowing. “I didn’t think we would survive,” he said of himself and the unidentified woman next to him, whom he helped to safety. Demetriou’s cousin, a New York City firefighter, perished in the North Tower.

  “I didn’t know you were there,” Kendal said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were there? What does ‘harrowing’ mean?”

  “Not now, Kendal,” Celine said, and bent to look at me. “You can call the magazine and tell them not to print your name in any subsequent uses of this photo, you know.”

  I couldn’t make sense of what she had just said. “What?”

  “A lot of our customers are going to recognize you. They might call the magazine to tell them they know who the unidentified woman is. Want me to tell them you do not want your name to be released?”

  I couldn’t answer Celine. I couldn’t explain to Kendal why I hadn’t told her I’d been near the towers that day. Or what “harrowing” meant.

  I could only stare at that other me on the shiny page, clutching the scarf of blazing marigolds that had saved my life, and Kendal’s too.

  But not Kent’s.

  An old, familiar companion rose up from the flat folds of the scarf, the same invisible tagalong that had haunted me for years after Kent died.

  A rush of sound filled my ears as I stood there among the hushing bolts of cloth.

  All the fabric in the world could not muffle the roar of my regret.

  Two

  CLARA

  Ellis Island

  August 1911

  IT was the most in-between of places, the trio of islands that was my world after the fire. For the immigrants who arrived ill from wherever they came from, the Earth stopped its careful spinning while they waited to be made well. They were not back home where their previous life had ended; nor were they embracing the wide horizon of a reinvented life. They were poised between two worlds.

  Just like me.

  The windowed walkway of the ferry house connected the hospital’s bits of borrowed earth to the bigger island known as Ellis: a word that by contrast seemed to whisper hope. Beyond the hospital where I worked as a nurse was Battery Park in Manhattan, a short boat ride away. In the opposite direction were the Narrows and the blue satin expanse that led back to everyone’s old country. The hospital at Ellis was the stationary middle place where what you were and what you would be were decided. If you could be cured, you would be welcomed onshore. If you could not, you would be sent back where you came from.

  Except for this, I didn’t mind living where the docks of America lay just beyond reach. I looked to her skyline with a different kind of hunger.

  Five months had passed since I’d set foot on the streets of New York. I could see her shining buildings from my dormitory window, and on gusty mornings I could nearly hear the busy streets coming to life. But I was not ready to return to them. The ferry brought me everything I needed, and the nurses’ quarters were tidy, new, and sea-breeze fresh, though a bit cramped. I shared a room with another nurse, Dolly McLeod, who also worked and lived on island number three, the bottom rung of Ellis’s E-shaped figure. Our dormitory stood a pebble’s throw from the wards where the sick of a hundred nations waited. Their sole desire was to be deemed healthy enough to meet their loved ones on the kissing steps and get off the island. We cooled their fevered brows, tended their wounds, and nurtured their flagging hopes. Some were sick children, separated from their healthy parents. Others were adults who had diseases they had had no idea they were carrying when they set sail. Others were too feebleminded to make their own way in life, and despite their healthy lungs and hearts, they would be sent back to their home countries.

  They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter. Some phrases we nurses had learned from hearing them so often. It seemed there were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted. Many would leave the hospital island healthier than when they arrived, but not all, of course. A few would leave this world for heaven’s shores.

  The work kept us busy from dawn to dusk. Sleep came quickly at night. And there were no remnants of the fire here.

  Dolly and a couple of other nurses looked forward to going ashore on their off days and they would come back to the island on the midnight ferry smelling of cologne and tobacco and salty perspiration from having danced the evening away. In the beginning they invited me to join them but it did not take them long to figure out I never left the island. Dolly, who knew in part what kept me here, told me she had survived a house fire once. When she was eight. I wouldn’t always feel this way, she said. After a while the dread of fire would fall away like a snakeskin.

  I was not afraid of fire. I was in dreadful awe of how everything you were sure of could be swept away in a moment.

  I hadn’t told Dolly everything. She knew, as did the other nurses, about the fire. Everyone in New York knew about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. She and the other nurses here knew that I, and everyone else from the seventh floor on down, had escaped to safety when fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building. They knew that one hundred and forty-seven employees of Triangle Shirtwaist had not.

  They knew that the door to the stairs for the Washington Street exit was locked—to prevent stealing—and that the only alarm signaling the blaze came from the fire itself, as there was no siren to warn anyone. And they knew that garment workers by the dozens—mostly women—fell from windows to die quickly on the pavement rather than minute by agonizing minute in the flames. They knew the death toll was staggering, because it was in all the papers.

  Dolly and the others didn’t know what it was like to have watched as people stepped out of high, fiery windows, and they didn’t ask, because who would ask a question like that?

  They didn’t know about Edward because I had said nothing about him.

  I had only just started working as a nurse at the doctor’s office on the sixth floor and had few acquaintances in New York. Not even Dolly knew that Edward Brim stole my heart within hours of meeting me in the elevator on my first day.

  I had dropped my umbrella and he retrieved it for me.

  “Are we expecting rain?” he said, smiling wide. He was first-generation American like me. I could tell from the lilt in his voice that his parents were European. Like mine. His nut-brown hair was combed and waxed into place with neat precision, but his suit was slightly wrinkled and there was a tiny bit of fried egg on his cuff—just the tiniest bit—convincing me without a glance at his left hand that he was a bachelor. He was tall like my father, but slender. His eyes were the color of the dawn after a night of wind and rain. But he had the look of New York about him. His parents surely had stayed in the city after they had come through Ellis, unlike my parents.

  “Smells like rain,” I’d responded.

  His smile widened as the elevator lurched upward. “Does it?”

  “Can’t you smell it?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Of course he couldn’t. He was from the city.

  The man next to him laughed. “She’s a country girl, Edward. They always know what’s coming.”

  “Well, then. I guess I’m glad I didn’t bother to shine my shoes this morning!” Edward and the man laughed.

  He bent toward me. “Be glad you know when rain is coming, miss. There aren’t many things we’re given warning of.”

  I
smiled back at him, unable to wrest my gaze from his.

  “New to New York?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Welcome to the city, then, Miss . . . ?”

  “Wood. Clara Wood.”

  He bowed slightly. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Wood. Edward Brim, at your service.”

  The elevator swayed to a stop on the sixth floor and the doors parted.

  “My floor.” I reluctantly nodded my farewell. Edward tipped his hat. And his eyes stayed on mine as the doors closed and the elevator resumed its lumbering ascent.

  I saw him later that day as he ran for a trolley car in the rain. And I saw him nearly every day after that, either on the elevator or in the lobby of the Asch Building. I heard him talk about his work as a bookkeeper at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the tenth floor, and I knew the coworker who often rode the elevator with him was a fabric buyer named Oliver. I knew Edward liked Earl Grey tea and macaroons and spearmint, because I could smell the fragrance of all three on his clothes. I knew he liked baseball and his mother’s pastries and English ales.

  He always said good morning to me, always tipped his hat to me, always seemed to be on the verge of asking me something when the elevator arrived at my floor and I had to get off. The day of the fire, just as the elevator doors parted, he asked me whether I might want to see the work floor just before the shift ended. It was a Saturday. The seamstresses on the ninth floor would be finishing at five. I said yes.

  The nurses on Ellis didn’t know I watched Edward leap from the ninth floor to meet me on the street, a screaming girl in tow, her hair and skirt ablaze. The girl had been afraid to jump alone and Edward had grasped her hand as the fire drove them out the window.

  Dolly and the others thought I was spectacularly fortunate to have escaped.

  “You’re very lucky, Clara,” they said.

  I didn’t feel lucky.

  When I was little, luck was finding something you thought was lost for good, or winning a porcelain doll at the county fair, or getting a new hat, or having every dance filled on your dance card. Good luck made you feel kissed by heaven and smiled upon by the Fates.