He had not thought about the Josephina Eterna’s sister ship since he was a child and Wallace had shown him newspaper clippings about the disaster. In photos, he and Marian had been two bundled, faceless pupae being carried down the gangway of the SS Manaus by their father. There had been stray mentions of L&O’s other, newer liner, Maria Fortuna, which had only recently gone into service. He walked around the ship, trying to imagine its former splendor. Some merchant seamen had stayed on, and he waylaid an engineer in a corridor belowdecks.
“She had a sister ship that sank, didn’t she?” Jamie asked. “The Josephina?”
“That’s right. Bad thing. Before my time, of course.” Soldiers and sailors were squeezing past in both directions. “Better stop holding up traffic,” the engineer said and was gone, absorbed into the flow.
* * *
—
Jamie had been given a few days’ leave between the Aleutians and his departure from San Francisco, and when the transport plane from Kodiak unexpectedly stopped in Seattle to refuel, he’d decided, on impulse, to disembark.
When he identified himself on the telephone, Sarah Fahey—Sarah Scott—had made a small, indecipherable sound. “Did you get the watercolor I sent?” he asked.
She cleared her throat. “I did.”
He waited for her to say something else. When she didn’t, he said, “I didn’t mean to bother you. I thought of you because I’m in town, but I’ll let you go.”
“Yes,” she said in a vague voice. “Yes, all right.”
He’d gone out and had too many drinks in a bar rowdy with servicemen. The same old bewildered, clutching, yearning feeling rose up in him like something coming out of the deep, roiling the surface. Why had he called her? Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone? If there was one thing he should have learned from their last meeting, it was that she was an illusion, a fantasy, and anything between them was impossible, anyway. Seeking her out yet again was the height of foolishness.
When he’d made the watercolor of Adak’s harbor, it had been one of those golden moments in between storms, the horizon deep indigo while lemony light skittered across the water. Even the ugliest heaps of military junk along the shoreline had been bathed in a heavenly glow, and he’d felt a pressure in his chest—the sublime. As the colors seeped from his brush, he’d been overwhelmed with gratitude to Sarah. She’d goaded him into enlarging his life.
Attu hadn’t driven away his gratitude but had complicated it, shot it through with something dark and heavy as iron ore.
In the morning, he found a message slipped under his hotel room door. Would he please meet Mrs. Scott for lunch? An hour was given, and an address, just down the street. He tried to remember if he’d told her where he was staying, was nearly positive he hadn’t.
He’d thought, right up until the appointed time, that he wouldn’t go, but of course he did. She was waiting at a booth in the back of the dim, grubby diner she’d chosen, out of place in her neat blue suit and pumps, her face tense.
“Nice to see you,” he said. He sat down and began studying the menu. “Do you already know what you want?”
She reached across the table to touch the back of his hand. “Jamie, I’m sorry,” she said.
He put down the menu. “For what?”
“To start, for the way I was on the phone. I was shocked. And my sister was in the room. I couldn’t say anything I needed to say with her there.”
A waiter appeared, an older man in a paper hat with a paunch hanging over his stained apron, pen poised above his notepad. “What’ll it be?”
“We might need a minute,” Jamie said. The guy stuck the pen behind his ear and went away.
“Are you actually hungry? We could go somewhere else to talk,” Sarah said. “To your hotel?” She blushed. “I chose this place only because it’s right nearby.” He slid out of the booth at once. She held out her hands. “I may need your help. My knees are shaking.”
“How did you find me?” he asked as they walked out, her holding his arm.
“I thought you might stay near the museum, so I worked out from there, calling hotels.”
“How many did you call?”
“Seventeen.”
They did not talk much more until later, after he had taken off her blue suit and white silk blouse, after he had unclipped her stockings and rolled them down, divested her of her inner casing of girdle and bra and panties. He worked slowly and methodically, stopping her every time she tried to assist or hasten the process. When she was finally naked on the bed, her hair loose on her shoulders, he’d stepped back and looked at her. She’d stared back, and he’d closed his eyes, testing himself, summoning her image, willing himself to remember.