FALLING STARS
Chapter Forty-One
April 14, 1996
Rose was sitting in a sunny corner of her
living room, throwing a pot on a wheel. The spring sunshine shone brightly
through the window, which was open a crack to let the cool morning air in.
Outside, the fields and hills were covered with green grass and wildflowers.
Rose concentrated on her work, shaping the
pot carefully. She had become quite good at pottery making over the past three
years, and enjoyed it. In the kitchen, Lizzy nudged Freddy aside as the little
dog wagged its tail and yipped, demanding to be fed.
The television was on in the living room, and
Rose listened with half an ear to the CNN news report. Some treasure hunter was
looking for more sunken valuables, but her attention was caught by the word
Titanic. Looking up, she wiped her hands on an old rag and walked slowly over
to the television, listening more closely.
As she came to where she could see the
picture, she gasped in surprise. There, on the screen, was the drawing Jack had
made of her eighty-four years earlier. The treasure hunter, Brock Lovett, had
found Cal’s safe and retrieved the drawing.
"What is it, Nana?" Lizzy asked,
glancing at the picture on the screen.
"Turn that up, dear."
Lizzy did as she asked, and Rose realized
that Lovett sought the Heart of the Ocean, the jewel that Cal had placed in his
pocket so long ago before putting her in a lifeboat. He was obviously expecting
to find it somewhere on the Titanic, and Rose wondered if she should tell him
that he was wasting his time.
It was a sign, Rose decided, a sign that it
was time to tell her story of her time on Titanic. Jack, Cal, and Ruth had been
there, too, had seen what she had seen, but they were gone now, and only she
was left to tell the story. She had told parts of it to her family, but she had
never told the whole story. If the untold stories were what Mr. Brock Lovett
was looking for, she wouldn’t disappoint him.
Limping over to the table, Rose picked up her
portable phone and dialed information, seeking the number of CNN, while Lizzy
watched in confusion, having no idea what her great-grandmother was after.
After making several calls, Rose finally got
the number of the Keldysh, out in the North Atlantic. Punching in the number,
she waited.
It seemed forever until the phone was picked
up, and then it was someone named Bobby Buell. He tried patiently to explain to
her that Brock Lovett was unavailable, that he was getting ready to go down in
a submersible, but when she asked if they had found the Heart of the Ocean, he
hurried to find him.
She could hear arguing on the other end of
the line, and then finally the phone was picked up.
"How can I help you, Mrs. Dawson?"
"I was just wondering if you had found
the Heart of the Ocean yet, Mr. Lovett."
"All right. You have my attention, Rose.
Can you tell me who the woman in the picture is?"
"Oh, yes. The woman in the picture is
me."
*****
Early in the afternoon in the North Atlantic,
a helicopter set down on the deck of the Keldysh. Rose, sitting in a wheelchair
with Freddy on her lap, was handed out of the chopper, along with nine pieces
of luggage. Lizzy jumped down after her, while a large man with a shaggy beard
looked at her suspiciously.
"Doesn’t exactly travel light, does
she?" she heard him yell to Lovett as she was wheeled to her stateroom.
*****
Inside her stateroom, Rose was finally able
to get out of the wheelchair and walk around the small space. She carefully
arranged her collection of photographs, which she never traveled without, on a
small table. She stopped and looked at several of them, remembering when they
were taken.
"Are your staterooms all right?"
Rose looked up to see Lovett and the man with
the shaggy beard, Lewis Bodine, watching her from the door. "Oh, yes. Very
nice. Have you met my great-granddaughter, Lizzy? She takes care of me."
"We met on deck, just a little while
ago. Remember, Nana?"
"Oh, yes." Rose slapped her
forehead. She had been too busy looking at the ship to pay attention to
anything else. It was the first time she had been in the North Atlantic since
the sinking. Even the two times she had sailed to Europe, she had taken the
South Atlantic route.
Bodine rolled his eyes, but Lovett looked
more closely at Lizzy, eyeing her with interest.
"Is there anything you would like? Can I
get you anything?"
Rose looked at him. "Yes. I would like
to see my drawing."
*****
Minutes later, Rose was inside a laboratory,
looking at herself across the span of eighty-four years. There was the drawing,
just as she remembered it. It was submerged in a tray of water to keep it from
disintegrating, and it was slightly dirty and torn at the edges, but it was
definitely the drawing Jack had made of her on the Titanic that April night so
long ago.
"Do you really think this is you,
Nana?" Lizzy asked, looking at the drawing skeptically. Her first memories
of Rose were of a woman in her late sixties, and she had trouble reconciling
that image with the picture of the unclothed woman in the water tray.
"Of course it’s me, dear. Wasn’t I a
dish?"
"We retrieved some things from your
stateroom," Lovett told her as Lizzy pushed her wheelchair over to a table
covered with artifacts.
Rose reached for one of the items, holding it
carefully. It was the butterfly comb she had worn the last day on Titanic. A
small piece was broken out of it, but otherwise it was the same as the last
time she had seen it, when she had left it on her vanity before Jack had drawn
her.
She picked up another item, a silver-backed
hand mirror. Looking at it, she told them, "It looks just like the last
time I saw it." Turning it over, she gazed into the cracked reflection,
remembering when she had flung the mirror against the wall. "The
reflection has changed a bit."
Bodine had lightened up once he had been
convinced that she wasn’t seeking publicity. Eagerly, he showed her a computer
animation of the sinking. Rose watched dispassionately, thinking of how
different it looked on the computer as compared to what she and Jack had
survived that night.
"Pretty cool, huh?" Bodine asked,
grinning.
"Thank you for that fine forensic
analysis, Mr. Bodine," Rose told him, a bit crisply. "The actual
experience was...somewhat different."
"Can you share it with us, Rose?"
Lovett asked, producing a small tape recorder.
Rose got up, leaning on her cane. She slowly
made her way over to one of the screens showing images broadcast by the
submersibles below. On the screen was the image of the doors to dining salon.
She stared at the image, memories flooding her mind, and gave an involuntary
cry.
"I’m taking her to rest," Lizzy
told the men. "Come on, Nana."
"No," Rose protested, pulling
herself together. When it looked as though Lizzy would insist, she protested louder.
"No!"
Lizzy stepped back, allowing Rose to sit down
at the table. Rose began her story.
"It’s been eighty-four years--"
Lovett interrupted her. "Just try to
remember something. Anything at all."
Rose gave him an annoyed look. "Do you
want to hear this or not, Mr. Lovett?"
Lovett looked at her in consternation, but
allowed her to speak.
"It’s been eighty-four years, and I can
still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had
never been slept on. Titanic was called the ship of dreams, and it was. It
really was..."
*****
"Fifteen hundred people went into the
water when Titanic sank from under us. There were twenty boats floating nearby,
and only one came back. One. Six were saved from the water, myself
included. Six, out of fifteen hundred."
The old emotions were rushing back to her.
She had told the whole story, starting with the morning that she had boarded
the ship, feeling as though she were being taken back to America in chains, to
the way that Jack had won his ticket, to their first meeting when she had tried
to jump off the ship. Lizzy had been shocked at the news that her strong,
courageous great-grandmother had once tried to commit suicide by jumping off
the Titanic. Bodine had been amused, much to the consternation of everyone but
Rose.
She had also told them of the hours she and
Jack had spent walking around on deck, talking and looking at his drawings. She
had even told them about learning to spit, something she had occasionally put
to good use in the years that followed. They had listened with interest as she
described the dinner party Jack had been invited to as thanks for saving her
life, and the party later in steerage, where she had felt truly free for the
first time.
Lizzy had been surprised at her description
of Cal and his behavior, trying to reconcile the image of the rude, arrogant
young man with that of the polite, elderly gentleman she had known. Rose had
just smiled, understanding better than Lizzy how people sometimes changed with
time. Lizzy was only a few years older now than Cal had been then, and she
still had a lot to learn, though she sympathized with Rose over being engaged
to a jerk. Her ex-husband had matched that description even more than Cal had.
Rose’s eyes had misted over for a moment as
she described the way that she and Jack had flown on the bow of Titanic, and
then she had laughed along with the others when she told them about Jack
drawing her wearing only the Heart of the Ocean--and his reaction when she had
first removed her kimono. Several of the men had smirked when she had mentioned
the Renault, and Lizzy had given her a stunned look, realizing that her
great-uncle Gregory had been conceived in the back seat of that car.
The story of the sinking had been the hardest
to tell. She had spoken of how Cal had framed Jack for the theft of the Heart
of the Ocean, and how she had realized the extent of Cal’s perfidy and had gone
back to rescue Jack. She told of jumping from the lifeboat, and Cal’s rage when
she had run back to Jack. As she spoke of the final hours on Titanic, and of
the way they had struggled to survive, anger had crept into her voice, anger
that had never quite left her, even after eighty-four years.
In conclusion, she had spoken of how they had
wound up in the water, separated by the suction, and how she had found a piece
of wreckage to lay on, attracting the attention of the one boat that had gone
back to search for survivors by blowing on the whistle taken from the lips of
the dead officer. It had been sheer luck that she, Jack, and four fortunate
others had survived, when so many others had perished.
As she looked around, she saw tears in the
eyes of those listening to her story, and knew that Brock Lovett would no
longer think only of the treasure he could find in the shipwrecks. After this,
he would think of the people who had owned those treasures, and who had perhaps
lost their lives in the disasters that had brought the treasures to the bottom
of the sea.