BIRD ON A BEAM
A Titanic Fanfiction
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and a story beautifully originated/crafted by James Cameron and I obviously don't own them in any way; it exists purely for entertainment purposes!
SIXTEEN
April 14, 1912
"If you'd have seen the look on that steward's face when I tried to walk into the church service this morning, I think you might be more worried." He laughed good-naturedly but glanced sideways at me. He looked taller in the wool coat, taller somehow than he had yesterday. "I didn't know praying was such a classy affair."
We'd barely spoken since we stepped down from the bow, save for my asking about retrieving his sketchbook. We kept finding ways to walk closer to one another but speaking, at least for me, made my heart burn, melt and and fill up my throat as if blocking its entire passageway. I wondered silently if heart muscles could, in all actuality, spontaneously liquefy from too much stimulation.
"I promise, it's alright, no one will say anything." I swallowed hard, let out a startlingly weak laugh. I actually wasn't sure of that at all. I wasn't sure Mother and Cal had even gone to dinner; there was a private meal hosted by the Wideners, in honor of Captain Smith, at which we'd been expected. I had no idea what could have transpired this evening in my absence, but I could make the educated guess that neither one of my chaperones would break custom even if I had disappeared; that was social suicide at sea. You don't spend this many thousands and thousands of dollars to miss the ball, so to speak.
Barreling with Jack toward the suite, I worked only from adrenaline. I had already decided, while we kissed, to bring him here.
When I tasted his mouth everything that had been building (and not just for these last three days but for weeks and months before him) made sense. He tasted familiar, which is absolutely impossible but with him infinitely possible. The hues of the sunset, I wanted to swallow them whole too, right alongside him, which now that I think about it is the strangest notion. When I grabbed for his head, his hair, I was able to finally fill some of the pages and pages of the hypothetical in my mind. How does one even write a thousand questions in a few days' time? About one person. About the possibility of getting to know one person. About getting to be with one person. Somehow, I had. They ran like a script in my head. His hands on my waist, applying just enough pressure, there was more of it, filling in. Answers, coming fast now. If I could see him drawing, see his process, more of them. If he drew me, if I just stripped down to nothing like one of his French girls, oh God, more.
When we'd walked down to Third Class, Tommy was still sitting at a table in the common room writing in a journal; when he looked up and saw me there, again, he smiled a little less hesitantly this time. But it wasn't lost on me, how it all looked. Poor little rich girl, right, who couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted to slum it in the lower decks with the artist for the duration of the voyage. If only I could scream to him, to them all, that it was about so much more than that. But, then again, why should I expect them to care about my life at all? When I'd come searching for Jack earlier Tommy had put up quite a bit of armor to protect his friend. No doubt Jack had told him about our conversation in the gym. But he'd still helped me, and for that I was grateful. It also wasn't lost on me that when he thought I had looked in another direction, Tommy made a point to wink at Jack, who looked happy but flustered. I suppressed a smile and revelled in how utterly terrifying this all had become in less than an hour's time. My whole world. My whole world was changing by not the minute now but by the thin breath of a second.
"Miss Rose," Tommy took his cap off and gave a little bow as we left the room. I thought, in that instant, that he and Jack must have attended some kind of charm school for handsome vagabonds. Surely.
"Mr. Ryan," I nodded and altogether scurried to catch up with Jack.
It was much more noticeable, Jack walking through the first-class corridors, the reception area outside the Cafe Parisian, than my having darted through a few narrow corridors in Third Class, or even having attended the party the night before. It shouldn't have been so incongruous but it was boundlessly so.
Sunday evenings on ships are usually less formal; some of the First Class families had opted out of the regular seating in the dining saloon, so the tables in the reception were quite full of people lingering over their tea. Many looked up at Jack as if a spider had begun dangling from the ceiling and might attack at any moment in painfully slow maneuvers. It was like an infantry of hats coming to attention, all the women, all the body language. I lifted my chin, steeled myself, and did what until just a few hours ago I might have viewed as the most brazen action of my short life: I reached for his hand, feeling immediately the rough spots on his drawing fingers, and held it tight, fingers threaded, as we walked across the room. He'd held my hand while we were dancing, grabbed for it when we'd walked on the Boat Deck, and our fingers had been in a gentle ballet of their own on the bow, but this was even more. This was an act, out in the open. He looked over at me and bit the corner of his lip as he (at least from my observation) tends to do, and I smiled. We had secrets, didn't we, a whole mess of them already. But I didn't want them to stay secret for long.
With his hand warm in mine, I let some of the nervousness go. I began to talk low but excitedly as we traversed the last hallway of B Deck. I told him about the paintings, that there were paintings in the sitting room that he needed to see. He told me about sneaking into art exhibitions in France. But then he also told me he was nervous to be here with me, and I looked over and up at him in pure wonder. I was overtaken by his honesty, by the glint of the hall lights in his blue eyes, but also I was rather giddy, and as we fell into the room I would have said anything to make him stay.
"It's quite proper, I assure you."
It wasn't proper at all. Nothing I wanted from him was proper.
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
"No, no, no, I think it's a no!" I couldn't stop laughing. I leaned down to put my hands on my knees, take a deep breath. I'd never worn pants before, it felt so odd that my knees were right there, not exposed to the world per se but the form of them slightly so, touchable. Jack had lost it too, completely, and had to sit Jo down at his feet in fear of dropping her. She giggled and began to run her fingers through the sand, grabbing up a handful at a time and squeezing it all in between her palms; it splayed out like a real-life hourglass. The sand is a marvel to her, she thinks she is in another world altogether now. I dropped down to her level and she looked at me as though her own mother had gone mad. I glanced to the water's edge and the horse was still rearing its head, grunting out air from its nose in chortles we could hear clearly even twenty or so yards away. Her trainer, a middle-aged man named Frank who had promised us she was as docile as a housecat, pulled on her reins in desperation. "Jack, what is going on?" I looked up, trying to gage his reaction, truthfully. "I cannot get on that horse, can I?" I snorted myself, not dissimilarly to the horse, honestly, that's how hard I was laughing. My sides ached. "Am I going to leave Jo motherless for a horse ride?"
Jack sighed in jest and sank down to sit with us in the sand. His skin was golden from the past three days in the sun. The weather here in Santa Monica had been more perfect than we could have ever imagined, endless brilliant light and cloudless sky, salt in the air and I had never breathed in something so fresh. Jack said it was almost always like this here, but I could scarcely believe it. I felt as though I'd been kept from something my whole life.
"You don't have to, you don't." He lay back on his elbows and squinted into the sun. "When we envisioned this, we didn't envision her with us did we?" Jack looked at his daughter, and like so many times when he did, his entire demeanor changed; she is every dream he'd ever had, every one his parents had ever had. "We can come back when she's older and she can ride too, we can all ride together, huh?" He smiled and rubbed her back, pulled a stray curl from her forehead. She wore a bright yellow sunsuit, made of linen with diligence by Alma prior to our departure; her shoulders, still rolled into baby fat the shape of dinner rolls, had begun to tan as well. She is her father's daughter.
"No, it's not quite what we thought, is it." I hesitated, bit my lip. I looked down to where Frank and the horse, a white Arabian named Daisy, had eased back into some kind of rhythm. Frank waved up with an uneasy hopefulness, shrugged his shoulders, and began to walk back toward us. I made up my mind. I wasn't going to let this moment go, not this one we'd nurtured in the palms of our hands, carried through a sinking, a separation, all the heartbreak in the world. The idea had survived this long, had crossed a continent, I wasn't going to give up on it now. "I'm going to do it, though, okay?" I jumped up and Jack looked at me in a way he only has once before, and that was when I tossed my shoes aside on the platform in the Third Class common room and began to dance without my stocking feet making a single sound.
"Rose, you don't have to…"
I removed the band from my hair so that I could re-do the loose braid at the nape of my neck, securing some of it from the wind. I loved how I felt right then, on the beach; my white shirt, billowing, barely tucked into the tan riding pants, and I felt so free and unconstricted that I might as well have been naked to the world. When we'd purchased the pants at a specialty store in Denver Molly had me twirl about in the dressing room before she made some wonderfully untoward comment about Jack taking them off of me. In my previous life I would have never faced the world like this, this uncovered, this excitable. "I'm doing it, Jack." I reached down to touch his shoulder. "We can't ride the roller coaster because it burned to pieces." I laughed. Not that fires were funny, but under the circumstances I believe we had license to find the humor. "We could drink the cheap beer until we threw up, but I think we'd be questioning our parenting skills in the process."
"True enough." He laughed. "True enough. But Rose, really, if you feel unsafe…"
"You're here, it's fine, I'm fine. I'm going real cowboy. I have to."
Jack stood back just a few feet, holding Jo, as Frank apologized profusely and helped me up unto the saddle. When I swung myself over, one leg on each side, I felt a sense of deja vu so powerful that I was knocked in the stomach; was it because we had spoken of it exactly this way, the horse's legs working the surf, the pier behind us like a long arm but hazy in the afternoon light? I followed Frank's instructions carefully, my heart fluttering, and caught one more glance of my family before I turned and took Daisy down a ways, bouncing in the water with her. I felt her power, and she seemed to respect me, in turn; I suppose she'd had a bad moment, just like we all can, but she was centered now, she treated me well. We trotted down about a mile or so. Water sprayed at my calves, causing a prickling sensation in my legs. The sunbathers were all behind me, the rows and rows of them; up ahead all I could see was the horizon. I never, ever would have believed that so much of my life would be defined by water meeting sky.
I had ridden some as a child, a little on vacations on the East Coast when I was a teenager, but always sidesaddle and always with close supervision. This. This was freedom personified. As I trotted, trusted the horse in the turn, Jack and Josephine were specks I had to work my way back to and I felt in that moment some sort of revelation. It was two-fold. It was not just that I had them, had them to love and to be loved by, unconditionally. It was not just that we added up to a family, against innumerable and dismal odds. It was that being with Jack and having a family with him made me feel free enough to do the things I wanted to for myself, have moments like this one. I'd been raised to believe that a marriage tied you down to a concept as well as tied you down to the idea and the ideal of a man and a million of his rules stamped out in ink, that it stamped out the individual, in fact; what I'd miraculously found was the opposite. The love we'd found, it made me feel more free than ever.
When I made it back to them Jack was whooping and pumping his fist in the air. If he physically could jump he would have been. Jo dangled from the crook of his elbow and reached out for me, her little mouth open and that "maaa" sound floating on top of the wind. She was so close. Any day now, we said. I remembered then the steps Frank had told me to halt the horse's movements, and as I slowed down I made sure to look Jack in the eye, trying desperately to communicate to him how liberated I felt.
"Wait, for a second, Rose." He nodded, I think, in approval of all of me. I felt bold. "There's someone who's going to take a picture. You look beautiful. Take the picture." A woman in a long black dress had set up her camera on a tripod up away from the surf. I must have looked confused. "It's part of the whole package, I already paid for it." He looked up at me as though I might protest it, but I was so emboldened by being up on that horse that I would have gone along with anything. The woman, older, unsteady on her feet, yelled down for me to smile.
"Mama is so brave, isn't she?" I could hear Jack whispering to Jo, just out of view of the shot, and I suppose that's why the photograph is as perfect as it is; in that instant I felt the pride of them, of myself. I felt all the possibilities stretching before us.
We ate dinner nearby just a couple of hours later. The cafe, with outside service and ice cold beer on tap through a little window on the side of the building, was situated on the northern pier. We had a direct eyeline to an empty extension that had, until a few months ago, been the amusement park that a younger Jack Dawon wore himself out on, riding the coaster again and again, belly full of candies and all the beer. He said now it was much more crowded that he remembered, all of it, even without the park; hotels populated the shoreline, nickel theater signs hung on every corner; there were stretches where you barely see the street level windows of any of the shops for the throng of people. But we'd rented a perfect little cabin far down the beach, and, save for today, had mostly been swimming and relaxing along a more secluded stretch. At night we could hear the crash of the waves because we left all the windows wide open. The water was eighty-seven steps from the front door. We'd counted. We hated some water, of course, but this water we loved. The first night we'd put Josephine to bed and laid on towels on the tiny front porch so we could listen for sea birds, feel the warm breeze. Jack's lips tasted like chocolate (because we'd bought a small box on the train) and salt. I fell asleep like that, splayed out on a towel, but luckily he stayed awake long enough to get us to our bed.
The rental had been a wedding gift from Molly, not anything we could have afforded on our own, and we accepted with ample gratitude. We weren't sure when we would be back. We weren't sure how much money we would have a month from now, or a year from now. We were due up in Napa in just four days.
"Did it feel the same, on the horse, as before?" I sat with Jo in my lap, as she refuses to miss out on any of what is going on anymore; she even pecks at our food now, insatiable, eager to try whatever she can with the two tiny teeth resting in her bottom gums. Jack had taken a ride after me, with the same horse, had been rightfully proud of himself when he mounted it.
"My leg hurt, with that much pressure, getting up there." He sighed and dropped his fork against the table. He looks so forlorn when the leg reminds him of the things he used to be able to accomplish with fervor and ease. But those moments are fewer, more far apart now. "That wasn't great. But once I was up there, yeah. I was thinking about how crazy it is that we made it here, of course." He paused and took a swing of his beer, a dark stout. "But you know what else I was thinking about? Who else?"
I shook my head. I honestly had no idea. I handed Jo another nibble of bread, which she would shred to pieces on my lap, and watched as an array of emotions played across Jack's face.
"Tommy, I was thinking of Tommy." He smiled at me, unafraid of the emotion of the moment, a single small tear in each eye. "Did you know he was coming here?"
I hadn't. I thought of him that night at the party. The way he looked around to take us all in, the way he laughed when the band started up another song, the way you could tell he felt music down deep in his bones. The way he held a cigarette was even joyful. What a soul. Just gone now.
"He had a friend in Los Angeles, who ran a fish market. I wish I could remember the name of it. They'd grown up together in Belfast. He was headed there with nothing in his pockets. I mean, none of us had anything." I swallowed hard and felt nervous, which made little sense, but I suppose I still felt leftover guilt for how I began on that ship, for how I acted before Jack helped to wake me up. "He was headed there just on a whim, just with the hope that he could work with his friend, make enough money to send back home, maybe buy some land one day."
"If he hadn't been kind enough to help me find you that day." I kissed one of Jo's temples and reached across for his hand, which he offered quickly. "Jack, sometimes I feel I owe an apology to you."
"What in the hell, Rose?" To say he looked confused was an understatement, mouth even hanging a little agape. The sun was a dull orange globe right behind his left shoulder, and I almost lost my nerve.
"For how I pulled you into everything so quickly that night, without thinking about who we might have to answer to. I didn't think about your physically getting into trouble for being up in that part of the ship." I took a tiny sip of my own beer, mostly just to buy myself a few seconds as I composed the rest. "I was so spoiled, of course, Jack, you even said it that day." He winced. "It's fine, it was true!" I laughed a little, to break up the tension. "I just...thinking about Tommy made me realize how much I learned in those few days, and I shouldn't have taken so lightly how horrible the restrictions were, for you down there, for all of you." I sighed. It hadn't come out right.
"I think I know what you mean." Half of his mouth raised in a smile. "But Rose, I knew exactly what I was doing." There went the other half. "Exactly. I knew what could happen, but that wasn't going to stop me from following you wherever you asked me to go. You could have asked me to just go ahead and jump off the damn stern before we even hit the iceberg and I likely would have done it." He leaned in then, lowered his voice. "Rose, you jumped back ON TO a sinking ship to be with me, I think we'd moved past all the first class, third class bullshit. You never have to apologize, not for one thing."
I exhaled. I'd been holding my breath without realizing, so my chest heaved. How was it possible that however many times we talked about that night, whether in joy as we remembered the bits before the terror, or like this when we mourned someone or something that had been taken away, he still managed to recount it such a way that my heart sped up, that I fell in love with him even more? I squeezed his hand and then had to grab a napkin from the table to wipe my eyes a bit.
I reached for my glass and raised it high, Jo looking as it went up above her head. "To Tommy, then."
Jack looked overjoyed at my offering and grabbed his own pint quickly, staring right into me, adding just one thing before we drank.
"To Tommy. And to making it count, because God, Rose, are we ever, right?"
Author's Note: Guys. Confession: I have always adored the side character of Tommy, mostly just because of that one fantastic shot of him holding the cigarette at the Steerage party, where he laughs and the music builds up. I always wanted to know just a tad more about him.
As always, please review/comment. I love all the feedback! You guys crack me up, you make my day with your reviews. Jack and Rose are headed to Napa next, with some new adventures to come… see ya soon ;)