The Deep

by Alma Katsu

  “Here she is,” he says as they draw up on a dock. He hands her a piece of paper. “Give that to the first officer.” He deposits the satchel at her feet. Then he leaves.

  Annie claps a hand to her hat as she looks up, up, up at the ship’s four huge funnels, like turrets on a castle. The Britannic is the spitting image of her sister, the Titanic—aside from the paint job, meant to distinguish it as a hospital ship. A familiar tingle washes over her, head to foot, and she is flooded with memories of that first ship. A floating palace in every sense: the grand staircase, the beautifully appointed dining rooms, the posh cabins. She remembers the passengers most vividly, of course, the first-class passengers in the twelve cabins she served as stewardess. They were rich; some of them famous. She remembers the Americans especially, with their peculiar accents and funny ways. So forward, so pushy, so unbound. But then she remembers that many of them are dead and she stops herself.

  No. Now is not the time to mourn. If she looks back too long, she knows what will happen: How the black tides will once again close over her head, and she’ll go under. How the grief and the loss and the horror will be too much.

  For now, she needs to keep her wits about her and find the first officer and get on with things. After all, there is still a mission to accomplish.

  There is still—somewhere out there—the child. Mark’s child.

  She marches up the gangplank. Everyone is in a uniform, without exception, and these are serious uniforms, not the White Star Line livery that she’s used to. The men wear drab olive wool, the nurses in sweeping blue skirts with capes over their shoulders against the chill, faces framed by wimples. Everyone is busy, intent on whatever it is they’ve been set to do. No one pays any attention to her.

  Inside, it’s even more different. She finds it hard to imagine this ship was ever like the Titanic, it’s been changed so much, like a woman just after childbirth—ragged and pale and vacant.

  Inside, it could be any hospital. If you weren’t near a porthole or door, you wouldn’t know you were on a ship. Everything that made the Titanic sparkling and grand has been taken away. There are no deck chairs or card tables, no crystal chandeliers or wicker chaises. It is all antiseptic and uniform. Rows of cots for the patients, cupboards filled with supplies. And everywhere: bustle. Nurses supervise as men are loaded onto stretchers. Orderlies pass by with full stretchers, making their way to ambulances waiting on the dock below, then return with empty stretchers for the next lot. Some patients make their way on foot—arms in slings, heads wrapped, usually escorted by a nurse or orderly. There is as much commotion as on the Titanic’s boarding day. Annie remembers the crush of humanity that had come up the gangplanks that day and instinctively takes a deep breath. So many people, it had felt like she was being swamped by a giant wave. Swamped and sucked under.

  But these are no guests, only survivors, each with a story tucked inside their bandages—wounds, pains, visions of shrapnel, explosions, and terrors she can’t fathom. These are the half dead.

  And the bustling staff have signed on to attend to them, to usher them either back to our world or into the one beyond. An altogether different kind of voyage.

  Ahead, two men confer with a serious-looking man in a crisp uniform—probably an officer. She approaches, paper in her outstretched hand. “Pardon me, but I’m hoping one of you might help me find the first officer? I was told to report to him.”

  The trio stop to look at her. The tall one eyes her up and down with the disapproving air of a schoolmaster, then snatches the paper out of her hand, reading it quickly. “This says you’re a new staff nurse, yes? A Miss Hebbley? Reporting for duty?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Nurses are matron’s responsibility. Epping,” he says, handing the paper off to one of the two men, a thin lad with hair the color of straw, “take Miss Hebbley to Sister Merrick, will you? We can’t have her walking the decks, can we?”

  She follows Epping in a haze as he picks up her satchel and leads her down passageways that are both familiar and unfamiliar. He ducks through traffic easily, constantly looking over his shoulder for her, a bright but crooked smile playing across his face, like sunlight on the water. “We just got in a few days ago, which is why things are so busy. We got over a thousand patients to discharge. We’re about to head out again.”

  “Are you an orderly?”

  “Naw. I’m one of the wireless operators.” He sticks out his hand. “Charlie Epping.”

  They shake. His hand is not large but not small. His grip is warm but formal. His movements are precise. “Annie Hebbley,” she says, her voice soft under his touch. “May I tell you a secret, Mr. Epping? I don’t know anything about nursing.” She’s not sure why she said it—except that the light in his grin makes her feel safe. Or not safe but not invisible.

  And after all, it’s not strictly true. She has spent the last four years watching nurses and knows everything they do and say. She feels she could pass for one, at least. She often feels she has spent her life passing for something.

  She’s not sure what response she was hoping for, but he simply shrugs. “They’ll teach ya. They’ll assign a senior nurse to show you the ropes. You’ll catch on in no time.”

  By now he has taken her to the grand staircase, which, she is happy to see, hasn’t been taken down and replaced with something more sedate. It looks funny to her without the beautiful flocked wallpaper behind it, or plush carpets underfoot, and with the soldiers and nurses rushing by instead of ladies in fine silk gowns and men in evening dress, but familiar all the same.

  “I remember this,” she says, touching the carved handrail.

  He gives her a skeptical look. “You been here before? That wasn’t in the notes.”

  A blush warms her cheeks. “Not on this ship, no, but the Titanic, yes. I suppose now you’ll think me a very unlucky person.”

  “Not at all! Now I remember you from the register. You must know Miss Violet Jessop. . . .”

  “She’s the one who encouraged me to come. We used to be good friends.”

  Epping smiles broadly. “She’s like my big sister. Let me get you introduced to Sister Merrick and then we’ll go looking for Violet.”

  But there’s something about his generosity, his kindness, that makes her feel weighted down and sad. He is buoyant—of another dimension, one that does not experience the friction of the world in the same way she does. His fingers dart around the edges of a cigarette he twirls in his hand, and all she can think is ease. She has never felt that. She is more like the cigarette itself, passed from hand to mouth to earth, sucked dry and then forgotten.

  Or perhaps she is the smoke, blown into the air, made invisible at the meeting of the lips.

  Once they find Sister Merrick, it is quickly apparent that there will be no leisurely reunion with Violet, not for now, anyway. The woman looks down her long nose at Annie. “Thank you, Epping, for bringing her to me, but that will be all. I’m sure you’re needed elsewhere.” It’s clear she doesn’t want him to linger here in her domain, and so he touches his cap to them both and scurries off, leaving Annie with this imposing woman.

  She turns to Annie, again peering down at her. Sister Merrick is tall and stout, with a sagging bosom that strains at the top of her pinafore. “First things first. We will get you a uniform and get you situated in a cabin. Then we’ll start you on duty.”

  “Ma’am?” Annie is already dead on her feet. She was up at six o’clock at the boardinghouse in order to be packed and ready to catch the train on time.

  The nurse gives her a withering look. “You’re coming to us with no nursing experience, Miss Hebbley. In just a few days’ time, we’ll be in a war zone taking on fresh patients. You have a lot to learn and there’s not a moment to spare.” She calls over another nurse, a young one with kind eyes. “Find her a bunk and let her get changed into a proper uniform, and then I wa
nt to see her back here.”

  * * *

  —

  The young nurse’s name is Hazel, a London girl whose sweetheart is fighting on the Continent. She has been on one run with Britannic, she cheerfully tells Annie as she escorts her to the quartermaster for her uniform, and then down to the crews’ quarters on the lower decks. “The hours are long, but the work is very rewarding,” Hazel says through the door as Annie changes into the nurse’s uniform. “Sister Merrick is not so forbidding once you get to know her, but it does pay to stay on her good side.”

  Annie wishes for all the world that she could lie down on the bunk for a little respite from the bustle and noise, but she obediently follows Hazel back to the wards. For the next few hours, she is Hazel’s shadow. The young nurse shows Annie where the supplies are, where to find blankets for the patients who are cold and water for when they are thirsty. The wounded wait to be taken off the ship, impatient to go, but there are only so many ambulances. They stop the pair of nurses over and over, demanding to be released. “You must wait for the clerk to come with your discharge papers. You’re in the military, so everything must be done nice and proper” is what Hazel says to a man who threatens to walk off the ship. “Otherwise they’ll consider you AWOL and they’ll send the police for you.”

  Her most important job, Annie quickly sees, is to listen when they want to talk. At first, she finds the sight of the wounded unsettling—this is the first time she’s seen men hurt this badly, and some are grotesquely disfigured. There are men without any limbs at all, or who’ve had half their faces blown off. Men who struggle for every breath, lungs damaged by gas, and men who know they won’t live for very much longer. Men who talk to themselves in low, nonstop rambles—well, she’s seen people like this at Morninggate so that doesn’t bother her as much. And after a few hours of listening to the men as she changes dressings and straightens beds, fetches water and empties bedpans, she becomes less frightened of them. She finds the work surprisingly satisfying. It’s nice to be on the other side for a change, the one helping instead of the one being helped. The men she has met are discouraged and frightened, not sure what waits for them. They’re wounded and, in most cases, will be permanently handicapped. Their future is suddenly thrown into question. Will they ever be able to work again, or will they be a permanent burden on their families? Will their loved ones still love them? Some tell her about their families back home and—for a lucky few—the women waiting for them. She wants to tell the sad ones, You think you’ve lost everything, but you’re lucky beyond what you know. You’re here, aren’t you? On this grand ship? She wonders what these men would say if they knew that just a few scant days ago, she was a patient herself. Maybe they would find it inspirational—but she fears not. She fears they would judge her, fear her, even, like the staff at Morninggate.

  She comes close to telling one man with great sad eyes. He lies on the cot, staring straight up at the ceiling. He’s not as young as many of the infantrymen, maybe in his early thirties. He rubs his thigh above where his leg ends. “What am I going to do for work when I get home? I can’t be a burden to my Maisie,” he says.

  Annie knows her job is to stand in for his wife. “That’s the last thing on her mind right now,” she tells him as she plumps his pillow. “She’ll be grateful you’re alive and home with her. You’ll see.”

  He kneads the leg. “You don’t know my Maisie.”

  “But I’m a woman, aren’t I? I know how a woman feels, and I tell you, all your wife wants is to have you home again.” She feels a familiar dull ache in her chest. She wishes there were someone in the whole wide world who felt that way about her.

  After four hours on the ward, Annie isn’t sure she wouldn’t follow the impatient young soldier down the gangplank, given the chance. She finds a chair in a corner and sits with her back to the mob, a glass of water pressed to her forehead. Her feet throb; the world spins.

  Annie is just about to hoist herself to her feet—sure she’ll cry out in pain—when Hazel runs up to her. “Come quick, you’re needed on the floor,” she says, pulling Annie’s sleeve.

  Annie can see there’s a problem as soon as they enter the ward. A commotion in the center of the sea of beds. A man is thrashing and yelling, fighting off the orderly who is trying to hold him down. Even from across the room, Annie can see that there is blood everywhere. A sea of red. For a moment, she lurches, sickened.

  Hazel gives her a little push. “Help Gerald. I’m going to find a doctor.”

  It’s not until Annie is at his bedside that she can see what has happened: the man has tried to kill himself. He ripped the dressing off his fresh amputation and opened the sutures. He seems to have cut a ragged line across his throat, too, though Annie’s not sure how he managed that. She stares at him, too stunned to react. Gerald, the orderly, soaked in the man’s blood, has him pinned to the mattress but is helpless to do anything else. He looks bug-eyed at Annie over his shoulder. “Well then? Try to stop the bleeding. Hurry!” The blood loss is severe: the man is already swooning under Gerald’s weight.

  Blood blooms through the dressings, reddening, blackening at the edges. Annie is not sure what to do. She flails around for a second, then sees the man’s stockings on the floor. She begins to move almost without thought: picks one up and cinches it around his thigh as a tourniquet, pulling the knot as tight as she can. Wraps the other around the man’s throat—but not so tight that it will cut off his breath. She rips the sheet into strips and winds it around his throat like a mummy. That’s as far as she gets before the man goes limp and Gerald is able to sprint to the equipment station for a proper tourniquet and bandages. She leans over the unconscious man, fussing with her work until Gerald returns.

  And that’s when she realizes she recognizes the patient’s face. She had been talking to this man a few hours earlier. The one with the sad eyes. His wife’s name is Maisie. He was a roofer before the war. How would he be able to work with only one leg? He couldn’t climb up and down ladders. What could he do now? He was too old to look for another profession, he’d said.

  Hazel returns with a doctor. They both look askance at Annie in her bloody clothing for a millisecond before falling on the patient, the doctor barking out orders for Hazel and the orderly. It’s like a train wreck. She’s crawled from the wreckage: her moment has passed, and Annie can only stagger backward in a daze. This is all her fault. Was there something she’d missed when she’d been talking to him before? She can’t help but feel she should have known he was about to try to take his life. Should have felt it, sensed the will to live slipping away from him like a visceral loss, like a change in air pressure.

  By some miracle, Violet Jessop finds her in the alleyway, swaying deliriously on her feet. “You can’t stand out here covered in blood,” she says, as chipper and full of business as she’d been on the Titanic—as if they’ve been working side by side ever since then, instead of parted all this time. She bundles Annie under her arm, and Annie, weak and overwhelmed, does little to resist. After some trial and error—Annie cannot remember the way to her room, despite the fact that the floor plan is the same as the Titanic’s—they find Annie’s cabin. Violet sits on the bunk while Annie scrubs her hands and face and changes back into her discarded dress.

  “I’m so sorry this had to happen to you, and so soon,” Violet says, shaking out Annie’s thick hair as though she could shake off the day’s burdens. She takes a brush and begins to run it through Annie’s hair. Annie sits on a stool like a schoolgirl. Numb. “I wish I could say it’s not always like that, but the truth is that it can be brutal at times. The doctors say these are the worst battlefield injuries they’ve ever seen. It’s heartbreaking, what’s happening to those poor men.”

  “I’d spoken to him an hour earlier.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.” Violet begins pinning up Annie’s thick hair. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s Sister Merrick. She shouldn’t h
ave pushed you so hard on your first day. Let’s get you a good meal—Have you eaten anything at all today?—and then it’s to bed with you.”

  Violet leaves to start her shift after dinner, so Annie wanders onto the promenade for fresh air before turning in. She looks over the water, the ceaseless rising and falling of it. She turns her face into the wind and she remembers what it’s like being at sea. To be always moving forward, toward something unseeable—the shore again, or the idea of one.

  “Look who I spy! So, tell me, how was your first day?” Charlie Epping is suddenly beside her at the railing, a hand-rolled cigarette pinched between his lips. The wind drags the smoke across her face.

  “It’s all . . . a bit much.” She has trouble meeting his eyes.

  “It’s always rough at first. It will get better.” He takes another drag off the cigarette. “You’re a tough girl, you’ll survive. And how do I know? Because you survived the Titanic. Why don’t you tell me what it was like? Violet doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Wouldn’t it scare you?”

  A stream of smoke is carried over their heads. “Naw. I figure they survived—that means if anything happens to this old girl, we’ll survive, too.”

  What does she remember about her time on the Titanic? All she has to do is close her eyes and it comes back to her. The halls and the bustle and the noise. The fears and the whispers and the secrets. The hidden wanting. The thrash of the waves against the sides of the boat, so far below the deck that their foam seemed like a trick of the light and not the deadly cold it really was. The falling. The screams. The darkness of the night and the little rescue flares bobbing uselessly until one by one, they died out.

  She picks a safe memory, one that won’t frighten him. “Mostly I remember how cold the water was.” She rubs her upper arms reflexively, as though she could rub this phantom cold away.