A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  “Crazy?”

  Trevor met her challenging gaze. “Maybe. Is that why you kept it a secret? Because you knew people wouldn’t know what to make of it? Isn’t that why you still keep it a secret?”

  “How do you know I still keep it a secret?”

  “You’re practically invisible on social media. You’ve written no books, you’re not on TV. If it weren’t a secret, I wouldn’t have had so much trouble trying to find you.”

  “So then it won’t surprise you when I say that I am the wrong person to seek help from. I can list on one hand the number of people in my life now that know I can see ghosts. I don’t exercise that ability. I tolerate it. I can’t help you. And I can’t help Emily.”

  Trevor frowned. “But of course you can help Emily. You can tell her it’s not true. That her mother isn’t on that ship. If I tell her you can see people who have died, she’ll believe me. And if you come to the Queen Mary and look for Laura, and you don’t find her, you can tell Emily she’s not there. You’re the only one who can tell her she’s not there.”

  “I’m not the only one. There are—”

  “You’re the only one I trust to do this. We used to be friends once. Won’t you do this for me? This one little thing?”

  “What you are asking isn’t just a little thing,” she said. “I make myself known to whatever might be on that ship and I open myself up to all kinds of attention. I get by in life unnoticed because the Drifters don’t know I see them.”

  “The what?”

  “The ghosts. They are real, whether you think they are or not. If I poke about that ship looking for your deceased wife, I will have to deal with whatever else is there. If there are ghosts there, they will know I can see them. I look different to them than other people do. It’s like . . . like I will have a glow about me while I am actively looking for Laura and it will hang around me when I leave. And that means when I come back home, I will still have it. I don’t want that kind of attention. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “What what is like?” Trevor’s eyebrows were knitted into a frown.

  “Having them following me around, hovering over me, disrupting me, asking me questions I can’t answer. They don’t belong here, and the longer they hang around, the more they lose their ability to think rationally. I can’t reason with them. It’s terrible.”

  Trevor stared at her. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “I know all about terrible,” he finally said. “It’s terrible to bury your wife and to have to tell your little girl her mother is never coming home. It’s terrible for your six-year-old daughter to suddenly think her daddy has it all wrong, that her mother isn’t gone forever, she’s on an old boat in Long Beach harbor. It’s terrible when your daughter cries every day for you to take her back to that ship.”

  Brette had not expected such a response and had no words at the ready. She stared back at Trevor openmouthed.

  “You’re right,” Trevor went on. “I don’t know what it is like to experience what you do, but it can’t be worse than what I am going through right now. We were supposed to be on a plane back to Texas today. But Emily doesn’t want to leave LA. All she wants is to get back on that ship.”

  His eyes held her gaze, willing her to not look away from him.

  “What is it you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Just come to the ship. Walk the length of it. Tell Emily whatever you want. Tell her you see other Dwindlers, or whatever you call them, but that you don’t see Laura.”

  “Drifters. And what if I get on that ship and she is there? What am I supposed to do then?”

  Trevor frowned. “She died in a car crash on the 405. I told you that. You’re not listening.”

  “No. You’re not listening. The ones that stay, drift. They look for places to hover where the membrane between this world and the next is thin. If there are ghosts on the Queen Mary, it’s probably because that ship is located in a thin place. Long Beach is just a few miles off the 405.”

  He rubbed a hand across his forehead as if to scrub away the notions he didn’t know how to make sense of.

  “I need to know if things were all right between you when . . . when Laura died,” Brette said.

  “Yes,” Trevor replied, his voice terse with emotion.

  “Did you ever get the impression she was afraid of what happens to us when we die? Was she overly anxious about that?”

  Trevor shook his head. “No more than any of us.”

  “I can only see the ones who don’t cross over,” Brette said. “If Laura’s on the other side, she won’t be on that ship.”

  “All I am asking you to do is tell that to Emily. Assure her that her mother is . . . that she’s not here anymore. And that if she were, she’d want Emily to go on with her life.”

  “She may not believe me.”

  “She already doesn’t believe me. If anyone can convince her that her mother isn’t a ghost on that ship, it’s you.”

  Fifteen

  Thursday morning dawned sultry and still. It would likely be warm on the ship, Brette thought, as she lay in bed after turning off the alarm on her cell phone. Drifters didn’t seem to care what the temperature was, but she’d found they were easier to see when the air was damp or chilly. A warm environment usually meant a more transparent appearance. She would have to be more intent about looking for them, which in turn would draw more attention to herself. Not the best way to keep a low profile.

  Brette breathed in deeply to steady herself before rising and looking again at the photo of Laura that Trevor had texted to her. She’d had to convince Trevor that she needed to be alone when she went to the Queen Mary to look for Laura. Having Emily with her before she’d had a chance to check it out was definitely a bad idea, and having Trevor there wasn’t the best situation either. She wanted some time to acclimate to the ship. If there was a thin place on board—and with all that she had read about it, she was fairly convinced there was—she needed to assess it without a skeptic like Trevor asking a million questions.

  She’d asked for a personal day, telling her supervisor she needed to visit a grieving friend. Trevor was only too happy for her to go as quickly as she could, but Brette had her own reasons for visiting the ship on a weekday. The smaller the crowds on the decks, the more easily she would be able to do what she had to do and the sooner she’d be done with it.

  She’d also decided to forgo explaining to Keith in detail her impromptu decision to drive up to Los Angeles to see a former high school classmate. She sent a simple text to that effect the night before. Calling to tell him the scope of that visit would be making it a big deal. And it wasn’t a big deal. Keith was going to call Friday night anyway and she could tell him then.

  Brette rose from bed and showered, choosing a pale pink cotton dress that she usually felt pretty and confident in. She needed that boost. She had spent the evening prior reading up on the Queen Mary’s history and its reputation for being haunted.

  She had learned that the British luxury ocean liner made its maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1936, that kings and queens and movie stars had walked its decks. During World War II, it had been commissioned as a troop carrier, painted gray, and nicknamed the Grey Ghost. In 1946, via many crossings, the ship transported twenty-two thousand GI war brides and their children from England to the United States and Canada. By 1967, air travel was the preferred mode of passage across the Atlantic. The Queen was sold to the City of Long Beach in California. Too big for the Panama Canal, the ship sailed around Cape Horn and up the coast of South America before permanently docking in Long Beach. It had been a floating hotel and museum ever since.

  Of the most concern to Brette were the multiple claims that more than one hundred fifty spirits lurked on the ship, including a little girl in the long-emptied second-class swimming pool, a beautiful woman often seen dancing alone in the Quee
n’s Salon, and a dark-haired man roaming about in what had been the first-class staterooms. There had been multiple accounts over the years of water running and lights turning on in the middle of the night, phones ringing in the early morning with no one on the other end of the line, a piano playing on its own, doors slamming, and the lingering fragrance of things long since passed. Brette had wondered if perhaps a Drifter who’d once been a mother saw Emily and broke the barrier between spiritual and physical to touch the child and comfort her. How else could Emily have experienced what she claimed she had? Trevor had said neither he nor his mother had mentioned to Emily that ghosts apparently frequented the ship.

  During the ship’s years at sea, only forty-nine deaths had been reported aboard. If there were more than a hundred Drifters on the Queen Mary, where had they come from and why were they there? What if some of them weren’t Drifters at all, but malevolent pranksters, enjoying the attention that paranormal activity elicited and pleased to entice the naïve into believing they could be trusted?

  She did not want to attract the attention of even one of those.

  As she sipped a cup of coffee at breakfast and ruminated on what she had gleaned in her research, it was clear that she would need to step aboard the Queen on full alert. If there was even half that amount of transcendent activity on the ship, she needed to make the first pass alone. Brette hurried through the rest of her morning routine and was out the door by seven fifteen.

  Traffic was ample but smooth heading north out of San Diego on Interstate 5, and except for a few stretches of stop-and-go, she made good time. By ten twenty-five, Brette was taking the Queen’s Highway exit and the black-and-white ocean liner was suddenly in view, its red smokestacks piercing the blue sky. The ship looked old and yet timeless as Brette parked her car and then began to walk toward the ticket office. She purchased a passport for the day, was apprised of the numerous tours she could take, and made her way through the entrance and to the dockside elevator that would take her to the promenade deck.

  She could sense the electrical pull of something—or many things—charging the air around her, and the fine hairs on her arms and neck began to tingle as her ticket was scanned and she stepped into the elevator. A moment later she was standing on a permanent gangplank that linked the present with the past. The wood of the promenade deck seemed to welcome her as she stepped onto it, and the oxygen in the air immediately seemed thinner somehow. The deck was weathered to a warm patina from eighty years of footsteps across it, and it looked like the edge of a portal, as though if she walked across it in either direction, she would be borne away to another time. Brette paused for a moment before taking another step forward. There was something very different about the ship, different than what she had expected, even with its famed notoriety. At once, she could tell there was veiled truth to the unexplained stories that sold tickets and kept paranormal enthusiasts interested. Under the sensationalism, the mystery, the entertainment value of the ship being hailed as haunted, there was weight here, and she knew within the depths of her being that there was no way she could continue farther onto the deck without being noticed.

  A shiver ran up her back at that same moment.

  And she knew she had already been spotted.

  “I mean you no harm,” she whispered, and a mother and father with their two young children stared at her as they walked past.

  She stood still as a trembling breeze caught her in its gauzy grip, swept up around her, lifting wisps of hair off her neck.

  Brette was being scrutinized, but she could not tell by whom. Most Drifters, when they realized she had the Sight, concentrated their energy on being seen. She was an anomaly to them, and they were usually curious. But not this one. She didn’t know if it was male or female. Young or old. Hostile or welcoming. Alone or with others.

  Brette stood still and let the breeze swirl into nothingness as whatever Drifter had taken notice completed its examination.

  “I mean you no harm,” she said again, this time louder. A man wearing a headset and studying the map of the self-guided tour looked up for a moment and then continued on.

  “I’m just here for a friend,” Brette murmured, thankful that the other people around her were many feet away, looking at ship brochures, taking selfies, or strolling the deck.

  The air grew very still, and Brette wondered for a moment if the invisible Drifter had been satisfied with her and left. But the hairs on her body were still fully charged with electricity. The Drifter was hovering over her as if deep in thought about what to do with her next.

  “Please,” Brette whispered, closing her eyes. “I promise you I am only here to help. I promise you. I want no trouble with anyone. I’m just . . . looking for Laura. If she’s here, she is new.”

  The breeze swept over her again, knocking a ball cap off a man’s head as he walked past Brette and sending him chasing after it. A tour guide and his entourage were a few feet away and a handful of the ticket stubs he held fluttered out of his grasp.

  “What in the world?” the guide said, as he and several of his guests chased after the pieces of paper.

  Brette said nothing as the breeze swirled again into stillness. The tour guide and his people moved on.

  But the Drifter remained. Was it convinced she was not there to exploit or demand anything of it? Was she free to continue? Brette didn’t know.

  “Will you help me?” Brette murmured, attempting a different approach.

  And a tiny gust of warm air fluttered at her ear.

  Come, it seemed to say.

  And she felt pressure at her back, gentle but firm, prodding her forward.

  She wasn’t just being welcomed, she was being drawn in with a surprising force, and yet she did not pick up on malicious intent. It was rather a sense of urgency, as if this Drifter that refused to materialize wanted her to see something or do something. Maybe both.

  “Laura?” Brette whispered the name as she moved forward into the interior of the ship. She hoped that the Drifter would show itself now, but as she stood in the beautifully appointed main hall with its wide central staircase and art deco features, she found herself amid a clutch of mere mortals readying for tours or stepping out of the gift shop.

  “What is your name?” Brette said softly to the air around her.

  An older woman with blue-gray hair smiled at her as she walked past. “Why, my name’s Mabel!” she said brightly. “What’s yours?”

  “Um . . . Brette.”

  “Nice to meet you.” The woman walked away.

  The Drifter that had ushered Brette inside was now gently pushing her toward the central staircase. Trevor had told Brette that Emily had felt Laura’s arms around her when they were on the bridge, which Brette knew was in the opposite direction of the steps. She tried to turn toward the bow but was met with an invisible wall of resistance.

  “Look. I don’t know what you want,” Brette whispered.

  Come . . .

  The command was not audible but Brette heard it nonetheless. The Drifter pressed her toward the staircase leading to the lower decks. Brette had never been at the will of a Drifter before. Unease rippled through her. She almost wished she had asked Trevor to join her.

  “I mean you no harm,” she said for the third time as she took the first stair.

  The Drifter said nothing in return but continued to push her downward, past the M deck and down to the A deck, where the ship’s hotel lobby was located. The Drifter pulled her gently toward the starboard side and down the paneled, carpeted hall that stretched from one end of the ship to the other. Stateroom doors of richly burnished wood gleamed on either side. A transparent wisp seemed to hover for a moment at the farthest end and then disappear, leaving Brette to believe a second Drifter had darted away upon seeing her or the Drifter that accompanied her.

  She was propelled at a gentle but insistent pace down the hall, passing
doors and little alcoves right and left. There was no one else in the hallway.

  “Please, tell me your name,” Brette said, but there was no response from the Drifter.

  She was about to ask again when the Drifter pulled her to a stop in front of a little hallway that led to two staterooms. The doorknob of A-152 suddenly turned and Brette stepped back to make room for whoever was coming out of the room. But there was no one at the door. It swung open and she felt the Drifter press her in.

  “I’m not going in there,” Brette said sternly. “That’s someone’s hotel room.”

  But the force at her back propelled her forward and a second later she was standing just inside the cabin. A new king-size bed dominated the room, and there was a flat-screen TV attached to a wall, but other than those evidences of modern-day life, the rest of the room had the look of a 1940s movie set, from the light fixtures to the cupboards to the faucets in the little bathroom just visible at the door.

  “I don’t need to go in,” Brette said, although it appeared no hotel guest had been assigned that room.

  But the Drifter urged her inside. It occurred to Brette that perhaps the Drifter had once been a passenger. Perhaps a young passenger. Maybe it was a child that was tugging her forward. She felt a strange compassion for the Drifter that would not show itself.

  “Was this your room? Is that why you brought me here?” Brette found herself asking, hoping that if she showed interest, the Drifter would become visible so that she could gauge its age and intentions.

  But the Drifter said nothing. Instead, a cabinet door on the far wall opened slowly. Brette stepped forward and bent down to look inside it, her heart pounding. It was empty.

  “Whatever was there is gone now.” Brette straightened, and as gently as she could, she said, “You can go, too, you know. You don’t have to stay here. You can—”

  The Drifter pushed Brette back toward the open door and pressed her outside. As soon as Brette was standing in the little hallway, the door slammed shut.