"There was a boat. A boat was coming back and I tried to wake you up but you wouldn't move." Rose's face grows pale as she revisits the memory, her eyes far away. "Your hands were so cold and stiff. I thought you were dead. I didn't want to let you go, but I knew that if I didn't get the boat's attention I would have frozen too, and I promised you to go on."
Jack nods, and reaches to grab Rose's hand across the table. "I'm glad you found a way out, Rose. For a long while I wasn't ever sure if you had. I looked on all the lists and there was no Rose Dewitt-Bukater. I saw the name Rose Dawson, but the name Dawson is so common, I couldn't be sure. It was enough for me to hope, though."
"I didn't want to be a Dewitt-Bukater anymore. I wanted to be free of that life. I wanted to honor that promise I made you, and make my own life. On the Carpathia I hid from Cal and my mother, and when I got off I gave the officers your name. I missed you so much, and I was so scared, but I knew if I went back to mother and Cal I would be trapped forever."
Jack nods. "I think it was the cold of being fully under the water after you let me go that shocked me awake," he says, thinking back to the experience. "When I broke the surface you were gone but I could see one boat rowing away and the flashlight of another approaching. I had hoped you were on the other one. I splashed and made as much noise as I could until the other boat saw me, and I passed out after being picked up. Molly Brown was in the boat that got me, though." He smiles a bit as Rose's eyes grow wide. "She had this big fur coat that she took off and put on me, and I think its part of what kept me alive. I don't remember much of being on the Carpathia. I was in a medical wing, and I was pretty delirious. If I had been able to look for you, let alone sit up or talk or do anything but shiver and fight my hypothermia I would have found you in a heartbeat. Molly had been told by your mother that you had not survived. I'm glad she had the sense not to tell them that I had. It wasn't until I was mostly recovered and in New York that I noticed a Rose Dawson on the list."
Rose frowns, looking down at the table. "I should have thought to check the infirmary! I had seen you go under though, so I thought there was no chance you could have survived. I saw Molly on deck once, but was afraid to speak to her in case she talked to my mother or Cal. I knew Cal was looking for me, and he was furious. Of course it wasn't until after the boat docked that I realized why. I was still wearing Cal's coat, and he had put the diamond, and $10,000 in cash in the pockets. I figure at that point he no longer wanted me, he just wanted the money. I never did find out what happened to Mother."
Jack's eyebrows rise. "Rose, that's enough money to live on for about twenty years!"
"I know," she says, still looking down. "I never really let myself use it though. I didn't want to feel like I was living off of Cal's charity. I wanted to make my own life. I did use it a few times in emergencies," she admits, " I used it to find a place to sleep and buy some food those first few weeks, and then to get a train ticket out here, and to pay a doctor when I found out I was pregnant, but I always put back what I did use. It's been so long now though, that I feel like its more insurance than anything else. I won't touch it to buy just anything, but its there in case of emergency, and I will use some of it to send Josephine to University when the time comes, if that's what she wants to do. And the diamond, I knew I couldn't sell. It would be too traceable. It was also all I had left of you; the memory attached to it anyway, until I found out I had Josephine. I spent a lot of time those first few months looking at it and thinking of you."
"I guess with the way things played out its not a surprise we didn't find one another," he says, squeezing her fingers. "I spent two years looking, after I saw that name. I checked anywhere I could think of that you may have gone; a lot of hotels and inns in New York; boarding houses, and shops and theaters and libraries and bookshops. Fabrizio, the lucky devil, survived by bribing passengers in a lifeboat to let him on board in exchange for the bottle of whiskey in his pocket, so we shared an apartment in Brooklyn for a bit until he met a girl and got married, and then I went down to Philadelphia. I knew you weren't with Cal or your mother from what Molly had told me, but I thought maybe you would have wanted to be in a familiar city. I did see your mother once, leaving a restaurant. I don't think she saw me. I read in the paper the year of the sinking that Nathan Hockley had paid off the Dewitt-Bukater debts and given your mother a yearly stipend out of respect for the memory his son's deceased fiancé or some shit like that, so I don't think you need to worry about Ruth Dewitt-Bukater. She seemed to be doing just fine, although I'm sure Cal wasn't too happy about any of it. It was probably all a publicity stunt to earn back their good name after losing so much money on the ship."
"I'm sure he wasn't happy," Rose gives a dry laugh. "He knew that the whole marriage was to save my family's reputation. He loved that. Its what gave him so much power over me, and neither one of them would ever let me forget it."
"I kind of wish I had run into the bastard," muses Jack, "If only to see the look on his face when he realized he didn't win after all." He takes a sip of his coffee, and rakes both hands through his hair, sitting back in his chair now, watching Rose.
"Anyway," he says, wanting to lighten the moment. "After I realized you weren't there, I worked up enough money and took off for California. That was in 1914. We had talked about Santa Monica, and the pier, so I thought maybe…" His eyes grow dark again. "But then the war started, and I knew if I wanted to have a chance it would be better to go in early, before the US even fully entered. It was five years wasted, but here I am, alive and mostly well."
"Your leg," Rose says, studying his face now. "I saw you yesterday in town. I didn't know it was you, really. You were across the street and up a ways, and I thought it was only someone who reminded me of you, but I saw that you were limping…"
Jack nods. "I was on the front lines in the German spring offensives in 1918. I almost made it out of there, but one of my buddies left the trench to check a fuse and took a bullet to the shoulder. I went out to pull him back in and that's when I got hit and the fuse went off all at once." Jack seems far away again as he talks, and Rose can tell that he's sparing her a lot of the story.
"I took one bullet to the shin and another in my thigh, and a lot of cuts and bruises from the bomb shell and the blast, but considering what happened to my buddy I was damn lucky. I was sent back to a base hospital in England after that, and spent a bit in a convalescence home in Surrey healing and working up to walking again before being sent to London for light duty, which mostly meant taking care of army correspondence in an office. They kept a lot of us around for the year after the war ended, and I finally got my discharge and passage home around Christmas this year."
He finishes the story with a very matter of fact tone, and Rose is looking at him as if she's expecting more, but he just shrugs. He doesn't want to give her the details, really. Its not as if he doesn't trust her, but he doesn't think it would help either of them right now to hear the hard bits, and he's not feeling particularly up to reliving the memories just yet. It has been over a year, and he had just recently begun to get over the regular nightmares. She seems to sense his hesitance though, and simply asks "What made you come back here?"
Jack heaves a deep sigh, and throws back the rest of the coffee in his mug before looking around the familiar kitchen. "As you probably found out when you came here, my parents left this place to me in their will. Well," he pauses, "Me and my sister, Julia. Only, Julia passed as well. I was fifteen when it happened. It was a fire in a barn that stood in the field out back," he nods his head in the direction of a window. "It was also my Pa's workshop. He was a carpenter, and made a lot of the furniture for this town, and Eau Claire. Its how we could afford this big house. Anyway, all three of them were in that barn, and I was out with some friends at the time. It was summer, so there was no school, and a bunch of us were out at the lake swimming and goofing off when an officer came to fetch me and tell me the news. They're not sure how the fire started. Their guess was a lamp got knocked over or something but the whole place was wood and straw so it went up quickly. I was told that my father and mother were both in there working when the blaze started and both got out, but then my sister went in to try and save some of the animals and got trapped by a fallen beam, and then my father ran in after her and my mother as well. It all happened so quickly because it as so hot and dry here already. After I was given the news, I couldn't handle being here alone. I was too young and it was all too much, so I just took off, and you know most of the rest."
"Oh, Jack. I'm so sorry." She had heard his abridged version of the story before, and she had found out more from the people around town, but hearing it in his words was difficult, especially when she took into account that he was speaking of the family that had inhabited this house that she had lived in now for nearly a decade. She felt an odd kind of kinship with the people who had lived here. The story of their lives that had been left behind had made her feel closer to Jack, even when she had believed him to be dead as well, and had given her a kind of heritage to pass on to her daughter.
Jack nods, and reaches for her hand again, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles as he speaks. "I got back to the states a little over a month ago, and a discharge stipend only goes so far. I can't move around as well as I used to be able to, so some kind of factory job or shipyard work was out of the question, and with more kids on the way Fabrizio's apartment was a little crowded, but I knew I had the house and whatever may be left in my parents accounts, or at least I hoped I did. It had been fifteen years, so for all anybody in Chippewa Falls knew I was long dead or never gonna return. I knew that the house had either been let or left to ruin, but I figured I had nothing else to lose in finding out. If anything I could find a job in in a school in Eau Claire or something if there was nothing here, but I wanted to see, and I wanted to come and visit my family's graves before I never got the chance. I just got into town yesterday, and I went to see Murphy about the will this morning. That's when I was led straight to you."