Annie lets go my hand and stretches her arms out on either side of her, closing her eyes and breathing in the wind.
“Look at her,” Tyler whispers, perhaps without knowing he’s doing it.
Her smile broadens, and she opens her eyes. “Maddie,” she says. “I’m ready.”
Maddie rummages in her bag and pulls out a tiny, battered cameo ring. After all that fuss to find it, it’s nothing like I pictured. It looks old and worn-out.
“Are you sure?” Maddie asks, holding the ring between finger and thumb.
“I’m sure,” Annie says, starting to reach forward to take the trinket from Maddie.
I’m overwhelmed with an insane desire to tear the ring out of Maddie’s hand and fling it over the edge of the observation deck. I could get arrested, if I did that, but the image burns in my mind, the sunlight sparkling off the gold as it falls, falls, falls and shatters on the pavement below into a thousand shards of reddish shell. Then she’d have to stay here. I want her to stay here!
“Wait! Don’t! Please!” I cry, choking back a sob. I don’t care that Tyler and Eastlin and Maddie are here to see. I don’t care if they’ll think I suck. I don’t care! I want her to stay here!
Annie pauses, hand poised in midair.
“What’s going to happen?” I babble crazily. “When you get back. What are you going to do? What’s going to happen?”
“I’m going to help the United Brotherhood of Luddites blow up the corporation barge at the Grand Aquatic Display,” Annie says smoothly, her brow serene.
“What?” I shout “No!”
“They’re slavemongers, Wes,” she continues. “My father. The corporation. All of them. They’re using slave money to finance the canal. It’ll flatten the wilderness and line their pockets, while fooling the poor into thinking it’s good for them, too. The Luddites are right. We have to make people see the canal is a mistake. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Damn,” Tyler says under his breath, his camera training an unblinking eye on the crazed girl in her tattered dress who’s holding my hand, her curls blowing like a corona around her head.
“Luddites!” Maddie exclaims, her eyes bright with happiness. “Wait! You’re one, too?”
“What?” I say, going cross-eyed with confusion. Tyler zooms into a tight shot on Annie, Maddie, and me.
Annie throws her head back, laughing, and says, “You all are amazing, you New Yorkers of the future. I love you.” She looks straight at me. An electric shock statics through the air, and my hair stands on end. A spark flies off my hand where it grips the metal railing, and I let go with a squeal of pain.
Before I can stop her, Annie plucks the cameo from Maddie’s waiting fingers and slides it onto the ring finger of her left hand.
For a split second, nothing happens.
Then beams of light pour out from underneath the ring where it meets her skin, and the static electricity in the air gets so thick I can hear it snap.
“Wait!” I scream in a panic. “No! Wait!”
But I’m too late, she’s already—
CHAPTER 15
The sky spins over my head and the observation deck drops from under my feet, and I hear an incredible roaring in my ears, louder than any sound I’ve ever heard, as the skyscraper beneath me pulls apart and vanishes into nothing. The sun burns brighter, and I close my eyes against it as I start to fall, seeing nothing but the red behind my eyelids, feeling wind rush through my hair, ripping the pins out of my pigtails. A slipper flies off, and my stockinged toes stretch into the void, my hands reaching out into thin air. Herschel’s ring burns into the skin of my finger, and it’s like there’s a light growing up from deep inside the shell, the figure of Persephone bending and moving as if she were as alive as I am.
I open my eyes and find myself plunging into fresh dusk, the sky below me ribboned with red clouds. Faster and faster, I pass a seagull, then a pigeon flutters off screaming in a cloud of feathers. The ground is speeding up to meet me, and I’m afraid I’m going to hit the cobblestones and that will be the end. I fling my arms up in front of my face to ward off the coming blow, but it’s no use, I open my mouth and take a breath to scream . . .
But instead of the shattering of my bones, I plunge into a soft pillowing, as though my body were a leaf fallen from an oak tree in autumn. The air catches me, cupping me in its palm, and I drift through a gap in the world until my feet come softly to rest on the ground. My eyes are still closed, but everything is silent. I stand immobile, listening.
Then, as though I were an image in one of Wes’s captured moving pictures that’s been frozen and is now speeding forward, a wall of sound comes bearing down on me. I cringe in fear, but when I open my eyes I see that the terrific noise is local Ward 4 fire brigade’s brass band and bass drum, and I’m standing on a dais next to Mother and Papa, with Beatrice cradling one of my hands and Ed dragging down the other like a sea anchor. Throngs of New Yorkers are crushing forward to reach the platform, all brightly lit by lanterns and torches throwing all our faces into jack-o’-lantern shadow. The firemen parade by in formation, whiskered cheeks puffed out with effort blowing into their horns, tall hats and fringed epaulets gleaming, and the governor stands at the podium next to us, clapping his white-gloved hands and grinning.
My father looks beefy-faced and blurry from too much gin, and Mother stands next to him, propping him up with the crook of her arm, beaming in her proprietary way across the heads of the people parading below her. The dais has been set up in front of the town hall, which is almost completely obscured with billowing bunting in red, white, and blue, and on the heels of the band come uniformed private police mounted on painted horses, trotting high, their tails flicking. When the policemen pass the governor, they raise their arms in salute, and the governor acknowledges them with a happy return. My father salutes them back, sloppily, leaning with his free elbow on the banister.
I glance around, trying to get my bearings. Everywhere faces throng together, tired or leery, bright-eyed, excited, painted, hot-cheeked, drunk. Voices babble and shout in all different languages, German, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Arabic, Chinese. A fresh horn section bears down on the platform, flanked by children tracing bright sparklers and streamers through the air, followed by the boys from Columbia College, all decked out in woolen academic robes and tasseled hats.
“Wave,” my mother hisses to me, grinding her foot on my toe.
I look around myself in panic, and Ed drags on my arm, trying to hide behind me. My left ring finger burns with the heat from Herschel’s cameo, and my senses are alive with the need to find him. I hunt over the heads of the crowd, searching. Desperate.
And then I see him.
He’s there, a few shoulders back in the crowd at the foot of the stage, staring at me, his face pale under his dark-rimmed hat, his ear curls tucked up out of sight. When I spot him his eyes widen, and his whole face brightens in a smile, and he starts fighting his way through the throng to get nearer to me.
“Herschel!” I breathe, and Beattie hears me and stands on her tiptoes to see.
“He’s here?” she whispers in my ear as the college boys parading past in the street are supplanted by robed young men from the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Two different brass bands blare warring themes from opposite ends of the green in front of the Town Hall, bass drums throbbing in syncopated disunion.
“What? How do you know about Herschel?” I hiss at her.
“Come on, Annie”—my sister looks at me from the corners of her eyelashes—“everyone knows. You act like no one sees you when you go walking in New-York.”
“I have to talk to him,” I say, trying to drop Ed’s hand. He clings to me like molasses.
“Don’t go!” my brother pleads. “It’s so loud! Stay here!”
“What are you doing?” Beattie says with urgency. “You can’t go
!”
“You don’t understand!” I cry to her. “I have to!”
We’re interrupted by a tattoo from a trumpeter, and the crowd simmers to a roar as the governor waves his hands for their attention. The sunset flames across the sky over Manhattan, turning the shop windows into red mirrors. I hear a sharp rapport, like a gunshot, and jump as a mob of children scatters laughing before an exploding string of firecrackers. The air smells rancid with gunpowder.
“Welcome, one and all, on this historic occasion in the City of New-York, and indeed, the world over!” Governor Clinton booms through a speaking tube, arms held wide as though he could embrace all the rabble and gather them to his noble chest. “Welcome to the flotilla newly arrived from Buffalo with their Aborigine guides, and welcome to the esteemed members of the Canal Corporation, whose vision and achievement this is!”
Applause smatters across the crowd as my father and a few other men, waistcoats too tight and hats too tall, attempt to bow in a way both puffed with noblesse oblige, yet sufficiently modest as to win the votes of sailors and draymen. Everyone fails, with my father’s secretary even losing his hat in the crowd to a quick-fingered urchin. The bronzed Aborigine standing behind the secretary, in a tight plaid suit and hat but with long black plaits over his shoulders, has to smother a laugh.
“We gather tonight to celebrate the union of the waters of Lake Erie with the waters of the mighty Atlantic Ocean,” the governor continues, thumbs behind his lapels.
“Look at them,” I whisper to Beattie, glaring at Mother and Papa, both of them beaming out over the crowd, my mother’s gloved hand waving at no one. “They’ll say anything to the crowd to get what they want. The canal’s corrupt, Beattie. The corporation took money from the slave traders to get it built. And they’re going to rip open the Indian lands, too. It’s rotten, and it’s wrong, and these people should know it’s all a scheme to fatten up the slavers, and fatten ourselves to boot. Look.”
Beattie follows my gaze, and I see a glimmer in her eyes of beginning comprehension. Monsters aren’t these fairy things in storybooks. They’re not pumpkin-headed ghouls galloping through the night in old Knickerbocker stories. They’re people like this, who bend others’ suffering to their own gain, and smile and wave while they do it.
“The note—” Beattie starts to say.
“Herschel put it on our door,” I whisper, my breath hot on her ear. “Herschel did. It was a message from the Luddites. To warn me, about our parents. Don’t you see?”
Beattie’s eyes are widening with panic, and Ed has edged nearer to us. My mother opens her mouth to laugh, her face long and distorted like a marionette’s.
“Now,” the governor booms into the night, “the assembled company shall process down to the Battery for the Grand Aquatic Display, wherein the waters of all the greatest rivers in the world shall be joined together as one. It’s a new world, a new dawn for the City of New-York!”
The bands all bellow in semi-unison, jarring enough to make ears bleed, as a bevy of carriages rolls through the massed crowd, liveried drivers scattering beggar women here and there with a brandishment of the horsewhip. A dark woman with her head wrapped in a scarf trips as she backs out of a horse’s way, and she collapses on the cobblestones with a scream. Hands grasp her arms and dress and haul her out of the way. A hoof clops down on the stone where her head lay an instant before, and the horse whinnies against the shouts of the crowd.
“Come, children,” Mother calls to us as she steers Papa to the edge of the dais and toward the waiting carriage. Its door is open, and a small child with no shoes on and a muddy face hangs gawking on its window.
“What are you going to do?” Beattie asks me.
Mother gestures to us impatiently as the carriage driver fights off the throng from dragging on the horses’ reins. Beattie’s eyes jump between our parents and me, and Ed clings to her waist, trying hard not to cry.
I’ve lost sight of Herschel. He’s been swallowed by the crowd, or worse, what if he’s been trampled? I crane my neck, rising on tiptoes to try to get a better look, but the light is failing, and the flames of torches make the shadows of the mob duck and dance crazily in the street.
“Annatje! Beatrice! Edward! Get in the carriage!” Mother commands.
“Annie, we have to go,” Beattie says. “We can’t stop now.”
Then I see him. Herschel’s stepped up where one of the liverymen should be standing, on the trunk platform at the rear of our carriage. He catches my eye with a quick wave of his hand, and he gestures with his chin over his shoulder. I see the other two boys from the Luddites, the ones who frightened me in the street, attached to other carriages in the procession, here’s the one in the skullcap sitting up next to the driver, there’s the broken-nosed Senegalese holding a horse’s bridle in his fist. There’re probably others I don’t know and can’t see.
I think of the painting in Maddie’s house as my eye falls on a quivering-lipped Ed. The barge. Must they all be on it but him? They were before. But must they now?
Can memories be made to change?
I nod and hustle my brother and sister to the waiting carriage door. As I take Beattie’s hand to bundle her in next to Mother, I clutch her wrist and force her to look me in the eye.
“Listen to me,” I say, digging into her skin with my fingernails. “Listen. Whatever you do, do not get on that barge. Understand?”
“What? Why?” Beattie asks, Ed peering moonfaced over her shoulder from inside the carriage.
“Don’t you let Ed get on, either. Neither of you gets on the corporation barge. Got it?” I shake her.
Ed and Beattie nod silently as Mother shouts, “Get in the carriage! Now!”
I glance at Herschel perched on the rear of the coach, who leans in close to me and says, “Annie. Get in. I’ll be right here.”
His voice. Oh, his voice. That’s what it sounds like. I feel like I haven’t heard it in decades, even though I only saw him last week. My skin shivers with pleasure, waves running along my limbs to the tips of my fingers and toes. The ring on my finger glows at the sound of it, and my heart swells so that I fear everyone will see, as though light might come streaming off my face.
I climb inside, and Herschel slams the carriage door closed and raps on the roof, signaling to the distracted driver up front that we’re ready to go. Another loud series of pops as more firecrackers go off rat-tat-tat on the cobblestones, causing a horse on the carriage in front of ours to rear, clawing the night with his hooves. Our horse backs up, too, throwing me into my mother and then cracking my temple against the door handle. Stars explode behind my eyes, and the reek of gunpowder gets even thicker.
Cries of “Let’s go!” and “Walk on!” and the carriages lurch one at a time into the rolling river of people who walk, some carrying little makeshift Stars and Stripes, some dressed to the nines and others in rags, bands marching past the carriage windows, trombones and cornets blurting their sounds over the heads of the passersby as we all flow in a river of humanity down Broadway to the Battery.
I twist my skirts in my fists. Papa is laughing, his head rolling on his shoulders, and Mother is waving across his great belly out the window, keeping her hand just out of reach of the beggars.
“What are you going to do?” Beattie leans forward to whisper in my ear as we bounce over a curb.
“New-York has to see what the canal will do,” I whisper back. “We have to show them.”
“But, Annie,” Beattie says. “You can’t stop it now. The canal’s finished. They’re going to dump the water of Ganges and the Hudson and the Amazon all into the sea, and then it’ll be open.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, setting my jaw. “When they see what the canal really means, there’ll be riots in the streets. I’m going to give them a grand display they’ll never forget.”
We roll with drumbeats and fanfare and torches
all down along the water’s edge, the crowd finally growing so thick that the carriages can go no farther. The governor has gotten out of his carriage ahead of ours and wades through the populace, escorted on either side by rough-looking young men with hats pulled low over their eyes. The Battery is thronged with crowds the likes of which I’ve never seen, the waterfront bristling with masts in silhouette against the darkening sky, and more ships floating at anchor here and there in the harbor, with low black rowboats sculling back and forth between them. Lanterns hang from every mast and spar, smoke belching out of smokestacks and casting the night in a burning haze. We’re nearly there. How can I keep them off the boat?
Mother and Papa are fumbling at the carriage door when a drunk sticks his head through the window and cries, “Canal Day! Issss Canal Day! Huzzah!”
He thrusts a bottle in through the window, and in a trice I knock the bottle out of his hand, dumping foul-smelling liquid in Papa’s lap. With a bellow Papa jumps to stand up and brush the spillage off him, cracking his head hard on the landau roof. He collapses with a groan back into the seat, his head lolling, eyes rolled up in their sockets.
“Peter?” my mother asks, resting a concerned hand on his chest. She shakes his lapel, and he slumps over senseless to the side, leaning on Beattie, who struggles to right him. Ed cuddles closer to me, the tears having overflown their dams.
Now who’s the crackbrain, I think wickedly.
“Mr. Van Sinderen?” a young corporation lackey cries into the carriage window after hustling the drunk away. “Are you quite all right, sir?”
The bands outside are striking up again, and a lone firework goes off with a whine and glittering pop over the water. Someone bellows through a speaking tube that all parties expected on the barge should make their way to the gangplank.
Mother shakes Papa more roughly. “Peter!” she shouts in his ear. “We’re going to miss the boat! Wake up!”
The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen Page 33
