Chapter Seven
York Prep School
40 West 68th Street
Never before in Rose's life had school been as boring as it was the next morning, waiting impatiently for the lunch bell to ring. When that happened, she was going to dash out of the room as fast as she possibly could and meet up with Jack Dawson in Central Park.
The previous night's events were something of a mess in Rose's mind- she didn't really remember everything that had happened or how she'd been feeling. It was all sort of cloudy, except for Jack. The man who'd saved her life. Despite the fog in her brain that seemed to be swallowing everything else, Jack was a prominent image that had stayed with her all night and into the morning. Everything about him filled her thoughts- his face, his eyes, his hair... how once, when he was a kid, he'd fallen through the ice in Chippewa Falls. Absolutely every word he'd spoken to her, every little movement he'd made, were imprinted permanently on her memory.
Rose hadn't been more thankful for anything before. Jack had saved her from the most horrendous mistake she could have possibly made. That was all she could think about. Well, that, and the fact that he was probably the most beautiful person she'd seen in her entire life. Everyone around her was talking math and science and art and gym and trying to get it to sink into her brain, but there was no room for anything but Jack. She felt that if she had to wait any longer to see him, she just might burst.
"The bell is about to ring," her English teacher, Mr Lesperance, said, interrupting her train of thought, "so I'm just going to remind you that your essays on Lady Macbeth's descent into madness are due Friday. And remember, tomorrow's open house, and I'm-"
Surely he continued to speak, but Rose heard none of it. The bell had rung. She was out of the room and halfway down the hall before any of the other students even registered that they could leave. Once she was outside, it felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from her chest and she was able to breathe again. It took all of her willpower not to run down the street, pushing her way through the crowds of people that clogged the streets of New York at midday. In the back of her mind, she had to ask herself what was wrong with running like a maniac. People around here acted like maniacs all the time. In truth, it was because her mother's influence was always and always would be present in some small form, critiquing, ridiculing... and her mother would not like to see her running down the street like a maniac.
It took a lot of effort to put her mother out of her mind, but she did it. After all, what did it matter when she would soon be off to see Jack? Central Park was really close to her school, and she could be there in less than ten minutes. The only issue was that it was huge- a though that hadn't occurred to her before. What if Jack was on the opposite end of the park? What if lunch was over before she had time to find him? Then she'd never get to see him again!
All of those awful thoughts were racing around her head as she walked through the gates of the park. Suddenly, she felt extremely lost. Rose was beginning to realize that she was in over her head... not just in searching central park for one person, but the whole idea. If her mother ever found out, which she was going to because she'd already invited Jack to dinner with them tonight, she was dead meat. Oh Lord, and what about Cal? What was Cal going to do to her? More importantly, what was he going to do to Jack? Even though she didn't know him very well, Rose could easily see Cal as the jealous type. What had she been thinking last night? Why did she run away in the first place, and how the hell had it lead her to Central Park this afternoon?
Not knowing at all what to do now, or what she was going to say later, Rose suddenly felt really and truly lost. She was standing in the entrance of Central Park at noon on a school day, looking for a man whom she'd met once in her life. How stupid was that?
Still, she had to look for him. He was counting on her, and it was the least she could do. He'd saved her life after all. She walked a little bit farther, passing a sort of grove of trees. As autumn was beginning to set in, their leaves were turning all shades of yellow and orange and red, some of them the exact colour of Rose's hair. A few were already laying on the ground in a small pile, and Rose couldn't help but smile as she watched a few little kids jumping up and down and throwing the leaves all about. When she say their young mothers looking on at their children with pride, however, she couldn't help but feel a pang of jealousy rising in her chest.
Soon, the path she was walking on opened up to a huge lawn that was full of tourists. Rose remembered being there as a child for charity events and outdoor parties that her mother had attended. She'd never seen it in person the way it was today. Sitting in the middle of the lawn was a group of people... three men, an older woman and a little girl. There were easily a 50 yards away from where she stood, but even from such a distance, Rose could tell that one of the men was Jack.
How lucky was she to have found him in such a huge place in less than five minutes? Her spirits were instantly lifted and a smile grew on her face that reached her eyes. She tried to contain her enthusiasm at seeing Jack again, and somehow managed to keep herself from running towards him. She couldn't, however, hide the new spring in her step as she approached the crowd of people around Jack.
Seated on his lap was a little girl of about six with a mass of dark curls floating around her face. Jack appeared to be showing her something in a brown folder, while the other adults watched and listened. As Rose approached them, the little girl looked up, pointed at her and whispered something to Jack. He looked up as well, smiling as he saw her.
"Rose!" he called out, waving to her. She felt that, now that he had acknowledged her presence, it would be safe to run towards him.
"Good afternoon, Jack," she said, trying to sound calm- or at least not like the crazy person she felt like. She wondered who all of the people standing around where- two other men, one about Jack's age who looked to be from somewhere Mediterranean, one a little older; and large woman who looked to be about her mother's age with hair almost as red as Rose's. Were they his family? Suddenly she felt extremely envious. Although she knew it wasn't true, and that there were far more important things in the world for God or whoever it was that looked after them to think about, it felt as though she was the only person in the world who truly knew what it was like not to be loved or care for.
Jack lifted the little girl – his niece? Sister? Cousin? – from his lap and placed her on the ground, still holding on to her little hand.
"Everybody," he said, "this is Rose...?"
"DeWitt Bukater," she answered with a smile, remembering what he'd said the night before. You're gonna need to write that one down for me.
"Right. This is Rose DeWitt Bukater. We met yesterday evening when I was on my way home from the gallery," he explained, shooting a look at one of the men that Rose didn't quite understand. The man looked somewhat shocked, which confused her even more.
"Rose, this is my friend Fabrizio De Rossi," he continued, gesturing towards the Italian man, "Tommy Ryan, and his niece Cora Cartmell." The little girl holding onto Jack's hand smiled brightly and waved at Rose, who smiled and waved back.
"And I'm Molly Brown," the older woman said, before Jack got a chance to introduce her. "I'm Cora's auntie, but on her dad's side. Tommy's her mom's brother."
Okay, so they weren't Jack's family. Rose instantly felt bad for being so jealous of him for no good reason- it made her feel like such a low, pathetic person.
"Lovely to meet you all," she said, shaking everyone's hand and smiling. When she bent down to Cora's level in an attempt to make her feel more comfortable, the little girl cocked her head to the side and made a very precocious comment before Rose even got the chance to speak.
"Your hair is just like your name," she said simply. Rose must have looked confused because she went on to explain, "Well, your name is Rose and roses are red. Your hair is the exact same colour as a rose! It's very beautiful."
Everyone, including Rose, laughed at Cora's childhood sense of wonder. It was very refreshing to see that there would always be people in the world for whom the little things were just as impressive as the big things.
Running her delicate fingers through Cora's own mane of curls, Rose said, "Well, I think your hair is very beautiful, too, sweetheart."
"Thank you," Cora replied politely. "Me and Jack are friends," she explained. "He drew a picture of me and he said I could keep it. Are you friends with Jack?"
Rose looked up at him hesitantly. How was she supposed to answer that question? Jack just shrugged, clearly not having any suggestions.
She looked back at Cora and said, "I suppose we are. Your friend Jack did me a very big favour, and I wanted to tell him thank you. That's why I came to visit him today."
"Oh," Cora said, looking as though she was pondering something extremely hard. "Jack's very nice," she explained, as though that had concluded her thoughts. She was smiling happily again.
"He is, isn't he?" Rose said, straightening up and looking Jack in the eye. He smiled a sort of boyish grin at her, his cheeks turning sort of pinkish. That made Rose think about what was going on. Why had he done that? What was embarrassing about being told you were a nice person? Lots of people were intimidated by her social status, but not embarrassed. Maybe... she thought, trying very hard not to hope... maybe he wasn't embarrassed. Maybe it was something else. Maybe she had really made bad decision in inviting him to dinner that night. Surely there were other ways to thank him. Not that she didn't want to spend time with him, but God, she was going to be in so much trouble. What if her mother never wanted to speak to her again? It was her duty to marry Cal, to re-establish her family's image. If she screwed up, she would surely be disowned or something. Then what was she going to do.
For a moment, Rose had gone deep into her own mind and forgotten where she was. It was Jack's voice – soft, boyish, with a sort of comforting quality that she'd never experience d before – that pulled her out of her trance.
"Guys, umm, is it okay if I disappear for a few minutes? I kind of have to talk to Rose."
Great. Rose really didn't know what to think. A part of her felt as though she could soar high above the clouds with angels all around here. Another part was thinking 'Oh, shit!'
"Can I come?" Cora piped up enthusiastically. She was cute.
Jack smiled down at here sympathetically. "It's a grown up conversation," he explained. "I'll tell when I get back, 'kay?"
Cora looked a little bit downtrodden, but she nodded obediently and turned around to look at the other adults. Fabrizio, smiling widely as he always appeared to be, waved goodbye to them and joined the conversation that Tommy and Molly were having. Jack started walking across the lawn without looking back, Rose trailing at his heels.
When she caught up to him, he said, "Okay, so tell me about last night."
Rose had been worried that he might ask just such a question. Where was she supposed to start? With the day she found out she was going to have to marry Cal? With her mother's constant bickering? The day her father died? The way she'd never truly been able to live a happy life? Last night had been a tragic mix of all of that and more... the emotions swirling around her mind that she couldn't understand- sadness, emptiness, hatred, anger, abandonment... without warning, all of those things welled up in her chest and it became a struggle not to cry.
"I don't know, honestly," she said desperately, looking Jack in the eyes. His eyes were quite amazing... light blue in colour, they seemed a lot older than the rest of his youthful face. It was as though they had seen enough happiness and horror and fear and wonder for an entire lifetime and just couldn't wait to share it all. "I don't even know where to start."
Tenderly, in a way that Rose had never experienced before, Jack put his hand on her shoulder. "How about at the beginning?"
Sighing, Rose put her hand over jacks and gently took it off her shoulder, continuing to walk. "Now, I know what you're thinking- poor little rich girl. What does she know about misery? But before you say anything-"
"Actually, that's not what I was going to say at all," Jack explained. "What I was thinking was what could they have done to hurt this girl so much that she thought she had no way out. So go on."
Rose had never told anyone the story surrounding her father's death, or the things she suspected regarding why Cal was marrying her. In part, it was because she didn't want to spread rumours about her own family, but it was also because she knew it would be far too painful to bring up. She was too afraid to get hurt. Jack was a different story, though. Maybe she didn't know him at all, maybe she was crazy and maybe she was setting herself up for pain, but she felt as though she could trust him. So start at the beginning she would do.
"My father died when I was fourteen. That was the beginning, I suppose."
Rose watched in awe as Jack's face fell. His whole persona completely changed within five seconds. Evidently, that hadn't been at all what he was expecting.
"My God, Rose," he said, sounding heartbroken. "I'm so sorry."
Rose tried to smile at him, to make him not feel so bad, but she couldn't make it reach her eyes. "It's okay," she explained dryly. "I'm managing. But that's not the whole thing. My father had slowly gambled away every cent he'd ever made from about the time I was nine years old. He was a good father and he loved me very much, but sometimes he loved alcohol a little bit more, and gambling was the only way for him to get the money he needed to drink without my mother finding out. She did, though, in the end. He gave it all to a steel tycoon named Nathaniel Hockley. I didn't know any of this until after he died and my mother told me we were broke." She didn't want to continue, not just because of the pain it caused her, but because it was evidently tormenting Jack, as well. Still, she pressed on. "Hockley had a son named Caledon, who at the time was twenty-seven and unmarried. In a last-ditch attempt to get our life back, my dad made an all-or-nothing bet- Mr Hockley gave him all of his money back, or his son got to marry me."
Taking a moment to compose herself and swallow that lump that was developing in her throat, Rose couldn't look at Jack. She faced forward, strong and resolute. There would be no more pain; no more wallowing in her own self-pity. She was stronger than that.
"He put a bullet through his head on July 28th, my birthday. So that's where I am. My father was always the one who tried to give me as normal a life as possible. He enrolled me in a public school, bought me a bike, took me on trips to the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. That's all changed now. My mother doesn't allow me to be a part of the outside world, Cal is a freakishly possessive creep who won't let me breathe, and I'm seventeen years old and I have no future. There's no point in me applying to any universities because I'm going to be married before the next school year starts. My life is over anyways, so I guess I just figured, why not make it official?"
Despite Rose's efforts to keep things moving and not to dwell on the things she was saying, that bit made Jack stop dead in his tracks.
"Rose..." he said slowly, then stopped. Rose looked at him inquisitively, but said nothing. He tried again. "Rose.. I... I had no idea. I'm so sorry. I don't even know what to say. I... I wish there was something I could say or do or..."
"It's okay." And it really was. There was nothing Jack could do and there never would be. She didn't expect that of him. She was just so appreciating being cared about and thought about that she couldn't even begin to expect anything else of him. He had saved her life. He was like her guardian angel- a beautiful angel sent from Heaven to protect her. To make her feel, for the first time since her father died, that she was special and worth somebody's time and effort.
She tried to change the subject so as not to make Jack feel awkward. "Like this dinner thing tonight- it's at the Terrace on the Park, by the way. You're still coming, right?"
Jack nodded. "Of course."
"Right. So this thing, oh Lord, it's going to be full of all these people, all of them exactly like Cal and my mother, trying to tell me what I can and can't do and what I should and shouldn't dream of. That's just not right! I'm not one of them!"
Jack laughed. "That's for sure. But do you know who you are? I mean, really know?"
Confused by his question, Rose asked, "What do you mean?"
Jack crossed his hands over his chest and said, "Well, if you don't know who you are, then how can you expect people to allow you to be just that?"
In all honesty, Rose had never thought about that before, but it sort of made sense. Still, what a presumptuous thing to say! Maybe she shouldn't have said that thing about going to university- then he might not have figured out that she was only seventeen and he wouldn't be treating her like a child.
"Of course I know who I am! What kind of question is that?"
"Who is it then, if you know her so well?"
Oh, now he had her. She had no idea who she was, but it wasn't like it was her fault! She'd never been given the chance to figure it out. How was she supposed to know anything about herself when all her life she'd been forced into a mold of do's and do-not's? And wasn't Jack able to figure that out for himself?
"That's none of your business, Mr Dawson! You are being very rude, I'll have you know. All this time I've been telling you the story of my life, and you have the audacity to ask me if I know who I am! Why don't you tell me who you are, then, besides a guy who carries a folder with him everywhere he goes and saves girls from jumping off bridges! What's in that stupid thing you carry around anyway?" she demanded, grabbing the thing out of his hands and opening. What it held surprised her more than she could have imagined.
The folder was full of some of the most amazing drawings she'd ever seen. They looked like charcoal... charcoal images on drawing paper, but they were so much more. They were people. Rose flipped through page after page of faces... young, old, women, men, happy, sad... each one of them was absolutely beautiful. Each one told a story.
Rose really didn't know what to say know. She had just blown up at Jack for absolutely no reason. Was she bound to ruin everything she touched?
"Jack..." she said, trying to form a coherent thought. "These are beautiful."
Rose wandered off the path a bit and sat down on a bench, still flipping through Jack's folder of drawings. She stopped at one, an older woman sitting at a bar, draped in jewellery. The drawing seemed to be yearning to tell its story; a story that Rose was anxious to hear.
"Who's she?"
"She," Jack replied, sitting down next to Rose and fingering the drawing, "is Madame Bijoux. I drew her when I was sixteen years old, on my second trip to Paris. She would sit in this bar every night, wearing every piece of jewellery she owned, waiting for some long lost lover to come and find her."
Rose couldn't tear her eyes away from Madame Bijoux. In a way, she reminded Rose of herself. Trapped, covered in riches, waiting for something that was never going to come. What is that's what she ended up being, fifty years down the road? She couldn't bear to even imagine it.
"You've been to Paris?" she asked Jack.
He nodded. "My folks took me once when I was eight, and I loved it. I always wanted to go back. After they died, I was sort of making my own way. I saved up all of my money and went to Paris again when I was sixteen. Stayed there for a year, ran and out of money, saved enough up again to get back on a plane and, well, here I am."
She hadn't thought before of the possibility that Jack, too, had lived a difficult life. He seemed far too friendly and giving to know anything about the dark side of humanity. Now, knowing that he'd been there and made it back, he was even more of an inspiration in Rose's eyes.
"I'm so sorry, Jack," she whispered.
"Aw, no need to be sorry," he said, still smiling that perfect, seemingly permanent smile. The autumn breeze danced through his dark blond hair, making him seem even more like a distant, imagined, fantasy character then he already did. "It's sort of made me who I am today, and it's the reason I'm here."
"You know where I've always wanted to go?" she asked.
"Where?"
"The Santa Monica pier." Gazing off into the distance, Rose thought long and hard about what she was going to do with the rest of her life- all of the things she wanted to do, places she wanted to see and people she wanted to meet. For the first time, she was realizing that maybe, just maybe, it was possible.
"Say we'll go there sometime, even if we only just talk about it."
Laughing slightly, Jack said, "Nah, we'll do it. We'll drink cheap beer and ride the rollercoaster till we throw up, and ride wild horses in the surf... How great would that be?"
Rose didn't know what to say for a very long time. She'd wanted to go to Santa Monica all her life, and never in her wildest dreams had she thought it might actually happen. Now, a man she'd met only the night before was telling her she could do all of that and more. Why couldn't she be like Jack? Why couldn't she be the type of person who not only survived but thrived through all of her suffering? Why couldn't she just run off into the horizon whenever she felt like it? She decided, then and there, that she would look back on this moment thirty years from now and consider it to be the moment that changed her life. It was going to be that profound moment in which she would decide to make her own destiny. That seemed like a notion Jack would like- that people made their own profound moments.
"You know," she said, looking Jack right in the eye, "I don't know what I'm supposed to be. I might be a doctor or a lawyer, or maybe an artist. That would be fun. An painter or an actress or a sculptor or an... I don't know... a clothing designer! Why not? And maybe I don't know who I am just yet, but I know what I want to be. I want to be like you." She paused for a moment, trying to find the right words to describe Jack- both his talent for art and his zest for life.
"You see people."
Jack gazed at her for a moment, no longer smiling. He looked very serious now.
"I see you. And you know what you are? A miracle. You've gotta break free, Rose. You've gotta learn to fly."
