Dedication
To the victims and survivors of the final voyage of RMS Lusitania and those who loved them
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: Sarah
Chapter 2: Caroline
Chapter 3: Tess
Chapter 4: Sarah
Chapter 5: Caroline
Chapter 6: Tess
Chapter 7: Sarah
Chapter 8: Caroline
Chapter 9: Tess
Chapter 10: Sarah
Chapter 11: Caroline
Chapter 12: Tess
Chapter 13: Sarah
Chapter 14: Caroline
Chapter 15: Tess
Chapter 16: Sarah
Chapter 17: Caroline
Chapter 18: Tess
Chapter 19: Sarah
Chapter 20: Caroline
Chapter 21: Tess
Chapter 22: Sarah
Chapter 23: Caroline
Chapter 24: Tess
Chapter 25: Sarah
Chapter 26: Caroline
Chapter 27: Tess
Chapter 28: Sarah
Chapter 29: Caroline
Chapter 30: Tess
Epilogue: Sarah
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Also by
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Sarah
New York City
May 2013
The evening had turned blue and soft, the way New York does in May, and I decided to walk to the book club and save the bus fare. According to Mimi’s Facebook message, the group was gathering at her apartment on Park Avenue, deep inside the plummy center of the Seventies—at least thirty minutes from my place on Riverside Drive—but I didn’t mind. I was a New Yorker, I could walk all day. Anyway, a brisk hike (so I told myself, scrolling through the Mimi message chain for the millionth time that afternoon) would settle my nerves.
I allowed myself plenty of time to get ready so I wouldn’t arrive late. Lateness was unprofessional, Mom used to tell me, dressed in her ladylike suit and smelling of Youth Dew and good manners. Select your outfit the night before, leave ten minutes early. All good advice. I’d already laid out a pair of indigo skinny jeans and a silk blouse, and I only changed my mind about the blouse twice. My favorite wedges, because they loaned me a few necessary inches without trading off my ability to walk. Collar necklace, hair in ponytail. You know, just the right kind of casual, threw-this-on-without-thinking elegance to set those Park Avenue yummy mummies back on their Louboutins.
The necklace itched my collarbone. I undid the ponytail, redid it. Changed necklace. Grabbed Kate Spade tote and tied Hermès scarf to handle. Took off scarf. Started to tie it back on and stopped, because the whole scarf-on-handbag look was kind of aspirational, wasn’t it? Or was I overthinking again? Checked my phone and realized I should have left five minutes ago.
So off I went, sprinting, as usual, across the Upper West Side and Central Park, lungs burning, ankles wobbling, while the softball games wound up noisily and the lovers met after work, hand in hand, heading for wine bars and tapas, for apartments and takeout. When I wasn’t in a hurry, when I was just strolling or even sitting on a bench, eating a hot dog with ketchup and mustard but no onion, I liked to study them, my fellow New Yorkers. I liked to pick someone out from the crowd, some man in a suit, loosening his tie, checking his watch. I tried to divine his life, his history, the peculiar secrets hidden in his past. Mom used to tell this story about the dinner parties they once had, before Dad left, and how I used to peek through the banister when I was supposed to be sleeping and watch the guests, and how in the morning I would bombard her with questions about them, who was married to whom, who did what for a living, who came from where and had how many siblings. And I used to think this story of hers was true. I used to think I was born for my career.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Not anymore, not while I galloped past Belvedere Castle, dodging baby strollers; not while the smell of Central Park filled my mouth, warm green leaves and hot dog stands, car exhaust and pavement stained with urine. The great metropolitan outdoors. On my left, the gray-beige spike of Cleopatra’s Needle loomed up, cornered by about a dozen tourists brandishing their selfie sticks, and the sight of them seized me with panic. I accelerated to a jog, then back to a speedwalk. When I burst through the gap to the horns and shouts of Fifth Avenue, I paused to check my phone and realized the panic I’d felt was genuine instinct: I’d misjudged the walking time. I was already eleven minutes late. All the other women would’ve arrived by now. Probably figured I’d flaked and felt pity for me. Upper East Side housewives always had their act together, checklists every morning neatly checked off by bedtime, and they couldn’t understand those who daydreamed and lost track of time, whose brains and lives could not be contained inside straight, organized lines.
Mimi hadn’t mentioned the cross street in her message, just the address on Park Avenue that suggested Seventies. I plunged across Fifth, weaving between two tour buses and into the path of an oncoming taxi. The driver laid on the horn. I reached the curb and dashed down Seventy-Ninth Street to Madison, waited for a gap in traffic, crossed Madison and tore east toward Park. A dogwalker blocked the sidewalk with six or seven pooches, ranging in size from a gray-and-white Havanese to an Irish wolfhound who belonged anywhere in the world except New York City. The Havanese lunged toward me like an old friend—I had this thing with dogs—and I thought, maybe I should be a dogwalker, maybe that’s my calling. Not this. Running down a sidewalk to a book club meeting, hoping I wasn’t too late for the hors d’oeuvres. I was counting on those hors d’oeuvres. Mimi probably catered from Yura or someplace equally exquisite. Checked phone. Fourteen minutes late.
Of course the building was all the way between Seventy-Second and Seventy-First. I counted down the numbers on the long green awnings, passed doorman after doorman, finally found the right digits. Checked them against Mimi’s message, just to be sure. When I looked up, a doorman in a sober black suit was staring at me. I straightened my back the way Mom used to make me and said, “Hi there? I’m here for the book club? Mimi Balfour? 8B? Sorry, I’m a little late!” Bright smile.
He smiled back, kind of sympathetic, hired help to hired help, and pulled open the bronze-grilled door. “Elevator’s right ahead,” he said.
* * *
I guess I should mention that I don’t know Mimi Balfour, not personally. We’ve never met. She sent me a message on my Facebook author page, explaining that her book club was reading Small Potatoes in May, she noticed I was a New Yorker from my bio, would I mind meeting with them. It was the kind of self-assured message that assumed my acceptance; opposite to the messages and emails I received from book clubs in the months after Small Potatoes was first published, when you couldn’t turn on the Today show or The View or Live with Kelly and Michael without watching me hold forth—brimming with wit and importance, taking Joy’s fascination and Michael’s flirtation for granted—about the Irish potato famine like I might break out in Gaelic any second. Remember those emails? The deference, the how busy you must be, the adored your book so much, the forever grateful. I passed them all on to my publicist, who picked out a few lucky winners and sent the rest my regrets and a helpful list of articles and interviews. No more than twice a month, I told her then. I just can’t fit any more into my schedule.
As the elevator rose slowly toward Mimi’s floor—how I loved old Candela buildings and their small, dignified lifts—I tried to recall the last time I visited a book club. A year ago, maybe. No. Longer. That group in Greenpoint, in the tiny apartment that smelled of cat food. There was a blizzard, and they canceled the me
eting without bothering to tell me, so I turned up while the woman and her roommate were binge-watching House of Cards on the sofa with their cats. To her credit, she apologized. She’d just assumed no author in her right mind would venture out in that snowstorm. Made me some hot chocolate, offered me stale Tostitos, and asked what I was writing next. My favorite question. By the time I left, the subways had shut down, and I had to walk all the way back home in a pair of too-short Uggs, across the Williamsburg Bridge to Manhattan, crosstown and uptown while the snow bit my cheeks and piled on the sidewalks. Good times. How could I forget a night like that?
I stared at the bronze arrow, inching its way around the arc, and I told myself Mimi would be nothing like the cat food lady. There would be hors d’oeuvres for my empty stomach, wine for my empty soul. They would drench me with their enthusiasm for Small Potatoes. Everybody loved the book, once they read it. The trouble was, five years out from publication, not a lot of people did. Long ago were the days of that Boston school district that ordered Small Potatoes for the entire seventh grade and asked me to speak at the middle school assembly.
Floor six, floor seven. I rehearsed a few key bits from my stump speech in my head. That riff about the sheep always got a laugh.
Floor eight. The doors of the elevator parted, revealing a small cream-and-gold foyer. To the left, 8A. To the right, 8B. Only two apartments per floor in a building like this. Mimi’s husband was probably an investment banker or a hedge fund manager. Maybe a partner at one of those white-shoe corporate law firms. Wouldn’t that be nice, to have someone else worry about making all the money that kept you alive? I’d once had a fling with a hedgie. He was in his late thirties and stinking rich, a mathematical genius with a crass sense of humor, and also sort of handsome in a skinny, electric, thin-lipped way. That was a few months after Small Potatoes came out, when my celebrity writer cachet briefly eclipsed my Irish freckles and too-curly reddish-brown hair. Dinners at Daniel, sex at his sleek Tribeca loft, private cars taking us everywhere. I’d broken it off when I discovered he was also having flings with a couple of twenty-year-old Victoria’s Secret models, but maybe that was a rash decision, after all. I stepped forward and knocked on the door to 8B. Checked my phone a last time before sliding it into my tote. Nineteen minutes late.
The door opened. I half-expected a uniformed maid, but a tall, skinny, sharp-boned blonde stood before me, wearing white jeans, holding a glass of white wine, still giggling over some joke left behind.
I held out my hand. “Mimi? I’m so sorry—”
“Oh, hi! I’m Jen. Mimi’s in the living room. Are you Sarah? Oh my God, you look nothing like your author photo!”
“Sadly, you can’t take the makeup artist home with you,” I said, my standard answer. “I’m so sorry I—”
“Come on back,” she said, turning away. “Everyone’s dying to meet you.”
I realized, as I stepped after Jen into a massive paneled gallery painted in tasteful dove gray, that my silk blouse—bought during the days of plenty—was sticking to my skin. That I was still sweating from the mad dash across Manhattan, that my hair was wet at the temples, that my lungs were sucking wind. That my stomach was actually growling. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Figured I’d be feasting tonight, so why not save a few dollars? I lifted my hand and wiped the sleeve of my cardigan against the sides of my face, along the skin above my upper lip. Jen’s back wove in front of me, the bumps of her spine just visible underneath her snug navy tank. Her arms swung, improbably sleek. Probably a team of vigilant stylists kept every follicle on Jen’s body under immaculate control. Blond, thick, shining hair growing rampant on top and absolutely, positively, nowhere else.
The foyer opened into a formal-yet-contemporary living room, shades of gray accented in crimson, containing a pair of opposing sofas and a flock of chairs in coordinating upholstery, all of them occupied by straight-haired women in skeletal white jeans identical to Jen’s. Jen stepped aside and gestured to me with her wineglass. “I brought the author!” she trilled, and I realized she was already half-drunk, and I thought, For God’s sake, how much wine could you possibly drink in twenty minutes?
I waved my hand a little. “Hi, everyone! I’m so sorry—”
A woman rose from the left-hand sofa, a brunette in a turquoise trapeze top, anticipating summer. “Sarah! I’m Mimi. Wow, you look nothing like your author photo!”
Jen screeched, “I know, right? That’s what I said!”
“Sorry, I’m just a lip gloss and mascara girl in real life. And again, I apologize for being so late—”
Mimi checked her watch. “Oh my gosh, is it past seven already? Girls, we’ve been chatting for an hour and a half!”
Everybody laughed. On the coffee table lay a few trays of elegant tidbits. I spotted Lilliputian cheeseburgers crowned by single tiny sesame seeds, ceviche, some kind of bruschetta, guacamole furrowed by tracks from the blue corn tortilla chips in a bowl alongside. Glasses of white wine perched between fingers, and a Filipino woman in a uniform was refilling them methodically from a chilled bottle.
“I’ll bet you’re dying for a glass of wine, right?” said Mimi. “Angel, could you pour a glass for Miss Blake? And you can take all this back in the kitchen. You’re not hungry, are you, Sarah?”
“Actually—”
“Just bring out the cupcakes, Angel. And the wine for Miss Blake.” Mimi turned back to me and waved at a strange, high-backed wooden chair at the far end of the coffee table, painted in silver. “Sit! Omigod! This book! So amazing.”
I tottered to the silver chair and sank on the seat. Allowed my tote to slide to the floor. Before me, Angel scurried around the table, lifting trays of beautiful, untouched food. I started to reach for a miniature cheeseburger, but she went by too quickly, and I converted the gesture into a sleeve adjustment. “Thanks,” I said. “It came out of some research I did for my thesis—”
“What I loved,” Mimi said, “were all the stories of the Irish women immigrating to America. That really resonated with me. I’m totally Irish on my mother’s side. My great-grandmother was a maid, can you believe it?”
“Domestic service was one of the few occupations open to women and girls who—”
“Wait, your great-grandmother was a maid? Meems! I had no idea!” one of the women said.
“I know, right? To some family on the Upper East Side. I wish I knew where. Wouldn’t it be crazy if she worked in this building?” Mimi tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Anyway. Go on, Sarah.”
“Um. So there I was in Dublin on this research grant, seven or eight years ago, and I actually wasn’t studying the potato famine at all. I was researching the absentee landlords—Englishmen, basically, whose families had been granted land in Ireland, but they never lived there at all, just took all the rents from the tenant farmers and hired estate managers to oversee—thanks so much.” I snatched the glass of wine from Angel and sipped. The eyes of the women around me had taken on a polite, glassy sheen. Jen reached for her iPhone and skidded her thumb in quick strokes across the screen. I swallowed the wine and hurried on. “Anyway, blah blah, I came across this archive—”
“So when you’re doing your research,” one woman said, “do you ever, like, come across stuff that nobody else has seen? Or something really valuable, like a painting or whatever from a famous artist that was, like, lost or something?”
“Um, not exactly. It’s more like—”
“Oh, I totally saw something like that on a TV show once! It was like a da Vinci or like Michelangelo or something.”
“Yes! I saw that, too! And I was like, wow, that dealer could have totally screwed that guy over, like bought the painting for five bucks or whatever—”
“Wait!” Mimi held up her hand, palm out, like she was trying to stop traffic. “Girls. Come on. The author’s talking. So you were getting your master’s, right? What subject?”
“Doctorate, actually. History.”
“Oh, obvs!” She laughed. “Whe
re did you go to school again, Sarah? Somewhere in New York, right?”
“Columbia. It’s in my bio? On the back of the book?” I looked around the room and realized, for the first time, that not one single copy of Small Potatoes lay on any of Mimi’s expensive surfaces. “Um, I don’t know if anyone brought a copy with them—”
“Oh, I’ve got it right here.” Mimi set down her wine and picked up an iPad from the side table at her left. “Hold on a sec. Ugh. Messages. Did anyone else bring their iPad?”
“I’ve got it on my phone,” said Jen.
“Can you open the file and find Sarah’s bio? I have to answer this.”
Mimi burrowed into her iPad and Jen swiped away on her phone. I swished my wine and said, “It doesn’t matter, really. Long story short, I was at grad school, doctorate program in history, went to Dublin for a semester and found—”
“Oh, here it is!” said Jen. She stood up and handed me her phone. “Here, read it out for us.”
I took the phone and looked down at the screen. “It’s kind of blurred, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, sorry about that. Mimi found this awesome website so we could all download it for free.”
I looked up and stared at Jen’s bright, smooth face. The upholstery behind her was some kind of gray-toned leopard print with a furry texture, like a real hide, stretched over a delicate Louis XVI frame painted in the same silver as my own chair. I found myself wondering if it was a reproduction or an antique, if Mimi and her interior designer had actually gone and refinished a genuine Louis XVI chair in silver paint.
The words looped in my head. Download it for free. Cheerful, triumphant. Download it for free! What a freaking bargain.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She found what?”
“That website. Meems, what was the name again? Bongo or something?”
Mimi looked up from her iPad. “What are we talking about?”
“That website where you found Sarah’s book.”
“Oh,” she said. “Bingo. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s like an online library. You can download almost anything for free. It’s amazing.”
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