A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  An hour or so later she heard movement at her door. The knob turned and the door cracked open.

  “It’s only me,” said a whispered voice. The door closed and Marc switched on a flashlight. He had a wool pullover in his arms, some cheese and nuts, and warm coffee in a flask.

  “Sorry I can’t bring you hot food. The aroma would draw too much attention.” He bent down and handed her the food and pullover.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Annaliese whispered back to him as she took the garment and pulled it over her head.

  Marc stood and reached for the soup pot. “I’ll take care of this and be right back.”

  “I am so sorry you have to do that,” Annaliese said, feeling her cheeks grow warm despite the cold.

  “S’all right.”

  The young man disappeared and then returned a few minutes later, setting the pot back down. “Need anything else?”

  “Maybe a watch or a clock?”

  “I’ll try to bring you one tomorrow. We are leaving for the return trip in the afternoon. When the engines are running, it won’t matter so much if you make a noise. But until then you need to sit tight. Understand?”

  She nodded. “Did it work? Does everyone think I am dead?”

  He stood. “It worked.”

  “Thank you, Marc.”

  “Simone told me you are wanted by the Nazis.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. She wondered what else Simone had told him. “Yes.”

  “She told me you swam across a river into Belgium to flee Germany during the war.”

  “I did.”

  In the semidarkness she saw him crook an eyebrow. “They’re not in power anymore.”

  Annaliese swallowed a knob of fear. “The one who wants me is.”

  This seemed to satisfy the young man.

  “It takes five days to go back across. It’s not safe for you to come out, even at night, to stretch your legs.”

  “I know. I will be all right.”

  Marc nodded and then headed for the door. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Marc. And thank you.”

  He opened the door carefully, peeked through the seam of light to make sure the corridor was empty, and then he was gone.

  For the next five days and nights the ritual was repeated. Annaliese would spend her awake hours either mentally or physically performing the dance steps she knew. Marc would come each night around midnight—he had found a watch in the lost and found for her to use—and bring her cold leftovers from the evening meal, plus fruit and bread for the next day’s breakfast and lunch. She missed the sun and the sensation of light on her face, but with each day that passed she knew she was that much closer to getting to Paris and Simone’s Résistance contact.

  On the last night before they were to dock at Southampton, Marc brought her a maid’s uniform, a woman’s coat, and a pair of sunglasses.

  “I will come for you when it’s safe for you to get off the ship with the rest of the crew. Your eyes won’t be used to the sun, so the glasses will help you get off without looking like you’ve spent the last six days in the dark. My friend’s ship leaves for Cherbourg a couple of hours after we dock, so we don’t have a lot of time to sneak you aboard his ship. And for God’s sake don’t say a word to anyone. I’ll tell anyone who might see us that you’re Danish and you don’t know English.”

  “You could lose your job,” Annaliese said as she fingered the maid’s uniform. “So could your friend.”

  “Clive and I spent the war hiding out in bomb shelters with our mothers. We wanted to do more, but no one would let us. This feels like our chance to do something.”

  The risk the young man was taking was too great for her not to tell him the truth. “I don’t know what else Simone told you about me, but I am not a double agent.”

  Marc shrugged his shoulders. “Are you wanted by a Nazi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t spoil it for me.”

  And with that, he turned on his heel and left her again in darkness.

  As when they had docked in New York, the moment came when the engines fell silent and the massive propellers stopped turning. Annaliese rubbed talcum powder over her skin and scalp to rid herself of any body odor from not having bathed in a week. Then she put on the maid’s uniform, plaited her dirty hair, and pinned the short braids in a coil around the back of her head.

  Soon she heard movement at the door and then Marc’s familiar voice.

  “Put the sunglasses on. We need to go right now.”

  Annaliese shoved the glasses onto her face and emerged into the brightly lit corridor. Marc took her arm and hurried her down the hallway and to stairs that led upward.

  “Remember. Don’t say anything. You sound too much like a German,” Marc said.

  That is what I am, Annaliese wanted to say.

  She kept her head down and the coat tight around her body as she let Marc guide her down unfamiliar passageways and finally to an exit and gangway that was for crew only. They emerged from the ship to gray skies and a sun hidden in a bank of clouds, almost as if it knew Annaliese was not ready for its brilliance. As they walked down the platform among other disembarking crew members, Annaliese turned to take one last look at the Queen Mary. The stately ship filled her field of vision, and Annaliese was overcome with a desire to bid farewell to the serene vessel that had saved her.

  Her footsteps faltered and Marc tugged on her to keep moving.

  “Danke,” Annaliese whispered over her shoulder to the ship. She brought her fingers to her lips, kissed them, and blew.

  “We have to hurry,” Marc said.

  Tears of gratitude mixed with sadness rimmed her eyes as Annaliese turned around to face another Cunard ship moored nearby: the one that would take her to France, to Madame Didion.

  To freedom.

  Thirty-eight

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  PRESENT DAY

  Brette immersed herself in work after returning from New Mexico, and in going to the gym before heading to the hospital each morning, and in making complex meals for dinner each night to distract herself from her warring thoughts. Keith said nothing more about returning with her to the Queen Mary, and Trevor’s calls and texts finally stopped. Her mother had called the day after she got back, and when Brette told her everything that Simone had said, Nadine had asked Brette what she was going to do next.

  “I’m not going to do anything,” Brette had answered.

  “But you said you thought this situation with the ghost on the ship was tied to your decision about whether to start a family,” Nadine had replied.

  “I was wrong. It’s not tied to anything. I am clearly in over my head. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  She thought her mother would be happy to hear her say that, but Nadine’s tone was one of maternal concern when she asked next if Brette wanted to meet for coffee to talk more about it. Brette had told her the last thing she wanted to do was talk more about it. The weariness that had come over her in New Mexico had stayed with her, even as she attempted to distract herself. She told her mother the same thing she had told Keith on the way home from the airport.

  She was tired.

  While she wanted Keith to just let her slide back into the way things had been before he started talking about having a baby again, she could see that he was tired, too. He was weary of her way of handling what she didn’t want to handle. The Sight was pulling on them even when she wasn’t using it, and when she mentioned this to Keith the second week after returning from New Mexico—as a way of proving to him it was not something to wish on a daughter—he’d muttered as he left to go on a run that it wasn’t the Sight that was yanking them apart.

  She watched him jog away from the house that Saturday afternoon, and she lowered herself onto the couch, her heart heavy. He was
blaming her for the tension between them, not her bizarre ability. She could almost hear his voice in the room telling her that you don’t deal with something by pretending it doesn’t exist. Her phone rang then and she slowly rose from the couch to retrieve it.

  Nadine was calling. She hesitated and then tapped the icon to answer. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Are you doing anything right now?”

  “What? Why?”

  “There’s someone here at the inn who wants to talk to you.”

  Brette raked her fingers through her hair. “I don’t want to talk to Trevor. I can’t help him. I can’t—”

  “It’s not Trevor who’s here. It’s Maura.”

  “Maura.”

  “Lucille’s daughter.”

  For a second Brette was at a loss for words. “She’s there? At Willow House?” she finally said.

  “Yes. And she’d really like to see you.”

  “How in the world . . . ?”

  “She’s living in Mexico now. In Baja. I flew her up so you could talk to her. I really think you should come over.”

  For years Brette had wanted to have a family member to talk with about the Sight. The opportunity was suddenly right in front of her and she felt more alarm than excitement. What if she was to learn there was no way of coming out on top, of being in charge of the Sight instead of being mastered by it? What if Maura told her the best she could hope for was that it didn’t drive her mad?

  “I don’t know . . .” Brette began, but the sentence fell away half-spoken.

  “Please come talk to her.”

  She agreed, left a note for Keith, and grabbed her purse and keys. Twenty minutes later, she arrived at Willow House as the sun was inching toward the horizon and the Pacific. Her father had told her once that if she caught the sun setting over the ocean, at just the right moment, there was a green flash that lit the horizon for a fraction of a second. She’d watched the sun set over the sea a thousand times growing up, looking for the green flash, and had never seen it. But her gaze was drawn westward even as she walked up the path to the front door, as if she still believed it could happen at any moment.

  Brette stepped inside, past the main room and lobby, and headed toward the kitchen, where she heard voices. As she rounded the corner she saw her mother standing near the stove and pouring from a teakettle into a cup. A few feet away stood a woman who seemed about Nadine’s age, perhaps a little younger. Her graying hair, still mostly brown, was long and frizzy and held back from her face by a tattered scarf wound across her head like a gypsy might wear it. Her skin was wrinkled and brown and sun-kissed, and she wore a denim skirt, a man’s button-down dress shirt tied at her slim waist, and a fringed vest that looked like it had come straight off a 1970s movie set.

  “Brette! You’re here.” Her mother set the kettle down and turned to the stranger in the kitchen. “This is Maura.”

  “Hello.” Maura stepped forward with her hand outstretched. Silver and turquoise bracelets jangled on her wrist.

  “Hi.” Brette shook her hand.

  “I was just getting Maura caught up on the family,” Nadine said cheerfully, as if Maura had just been out of touch for a few months instead of three decades. She handed Maura the mug. “Cream or sugar?”

  “This is fine. Thanks.” Maura took the cup but directed her attention back to Brette, looking deep into her eyes.

  Brette found herself wanting to look away.

  “Maura and her husband, José, own a vineyard in Baja,” Nadine said cheerfully, as though the three of them were neighbors on a cul-de-sac meeting each other for the first time.

  “Where can Brette and I talk?” Maura said to Nadine, apparently uninterested in small talk.

  “Oh. Well, there’s the back porch there,” Nadine answered, her brow crooked a tad. Clearly Maura wanted to talk to Brette alone.

  “Is it private?”

  “Guests don’t have access to it.”

  Maura turned to Nadine. “And what about moms and dads?”

  Nadine smiled weakly. “I can go find something to do.”

  Maura smiled back. She motioned to the back door. “After you, Brette.”

  They made their way to the porch and Maura closed the door behind them so that it latched. They took seats on two cushioned chairs with a wooden table between them. Just past the wooden railing ahead of them was a bit of rocky ledge, then a drop, then sand, and then the lacy surf.

  Maura looked about the railings and slats as if she had lost something. “Who comes here?”

  “Beg your pardon?” Brette said.

  Maura turned her head to face her. “It’s a woman, isn’t it? She’s been here a long time. But she knows you don’t like her.”

  Brette’s mouth dropped open.

  “She’s still here but she hides when you come.”

  “I never said I didn’t like her!” Brette managed to say.

  “Just because you didn’t say it doesn’t mean it’s not true. She knows you don’t.”

  “Aunt Ellen told me not—”

  “Yes, yes, I can quite imagine what Auntie Ellen told you. And how’d that work out for you? Life’s been a breeze, has it? Is that why your mother searched the globe for me, bought me a plane ticket to come here when I’ve heard nothing from anyone in the family for God knows how long?”

  “I . . .” But Brette had no response at the ready.

  “What is it about the Sight you want to know?” Maura’s gaze on her was compassionate and yet perturbed, as if she was both happy and annoyed to have been asked to come to Brette’s rescue.

  “What has my mom told you about me?” Brette asked.

  Maura took a sip of her tea and then set the cup down on the little table. “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “She told me you saw your first ghost here at this house when Ellen was visiting, that Ellen told you they would ruin your life if you paid any attention to them, that there was nothing you could do for them anyway and the best you could do was pretend you didn’t see them. She told me that you’ve pretty much lived your life as though you didn’t have the Sight, but now your husband wants to start a family and you’re afraid you’ll pass it on to a girl. And on top of that, you tried to do a favor for a friend by scouting out a ghost on the Queen Mary but ended up meeting an entirely different ghost who latched on to you but you’ve no idea what it wants or even who it is. You’ve had no one to talk to about the Sight and you feel like you’re doomed to an existence of toil and trouble with no one to show you how to take control of your life. Do I have that about right?”

  Brette frowned. “More or less.”

  “And what do you know about me?” The woman relaxed back in her chair as if calmly ready for whatever Brette would say.

  “Only what my mother told me a couple of days ago when I found out about you. You are like your mother. Aunt Ellen told my mom you indulged in the Sight.”

  Maura tossed her head back and laughed. “Indulged!? That’s good. I haven’t heard that one. Tell me, what do you think it means to indulge in the Sight?”

  Brette shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You actively use it. You spend a lot of time with the Drifters.”

  “Drifters? Is that what you call them?”

  “That’s what Aunt Ellen called them. She said your mother had to be institutionalized because of how much time she spent actively using the Sight.” Brette sheepishly added, “She thought you were headed for the same fate.”

  “And that you would be, too, if you indulged in the Sight?”

  “Yes.”

  “First off, my mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and on top of that she had a mental illness,” Maura said. “Having the Sight didn’t make her crazy and it didn’t kill her. My mother’s lifestyle choices destroyed her body, and the mental illness is what put
her in that institution. Second, it is not an indulgence to use the abilities you’ve been given. You can misuse or abuse an ability by being stupid with it, but it’s not a mistake to make use of a skill when you clearly have it.”

  “But it doesn’t feel like an ability. It feels like a curse. I don’t understand it.”

  Maura laughed lightly. “Whose fault is that? You don’t understand it because you ignore it. Treat a gift like a curse and of course it’s going to make you miserable. Why do you think you’ve been given eyes to see the space in between this life and the next?”

  Brette had never known the answer to that question. “I don’t know.”

  “Why do you think heaven allows some souls to hang back when their mortal lives end? Why do you think there’s a place in the in-between where they can do that? Haven’t you ever wondered these things?”

  “I didn’t know where to go for the answers!”

  Maura sat forward in her chair. “Okay. Look. Some answers in life you can certainly find by asking. Some you find only by searching. Those answers come when you look for them, not when you ask for them. You haven’t even looked.”

  “That’s not true. In college, I tried to be more active. I tried—”

  Maura threw up a hand to silence her. “Your mother told me what happened to you in college. That was not you looking for answers, that was you being stupid. You were looking for affirmation among your peers by messing about with Ouija boards and ghost hunting. You of all people should’ve known the spiritual realm isn’t populated solely by earthbound souls. That was a foolish thing to do. Do you really think that’s what I am talking about?”

  Anger and frustration boiled up inside Brette. But so did a spurt of hope. “I don’t know how to control it, Maura. I want to, I really do. I’m tired of pretending this isn’t who I am, but I don’t know what to do. I can’t give this to a child! How can I?”

  Maura was quiet for a moment. “Control, then. Is that what you want?”

  Brette nodded as she flicked away tears that had sprung to her eyes.