A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  The Drifter cocked her head, as if to indicate the answer was obvious. She started to float away.

  “Please tell me!” Brette pleaded. “Why does she let you come?”

  She loves us, the ghost said, and she glided away as if on a breeze.

  Clarity fell across Brette in a rushing wave.

  It all made sense. All of it.

  She knew why the ghost that had first found her didn’t speak or take bodily form. She knew why she’d been certain this ghost would never harm her. She knew why Trevor’s daughter thought Laura was on the Queen Mary.

  She knew why Annaliese’s name had to come off that placard.

  This ghost was a parent who’d lovingly tended those in her embrace and found great purpose in her life as a provider. The lives of those for whom she was responsible had mattered a great deal. She’d been stripped of that role when her life was taken from her in 1967.

  The ghost was a caregiver.

  The ghost was a mother.

  This ghost was the ship.

  “I know who you are,” Brette murmured to the air around her, and she felt a soft breeze swirl about her body. “You didn’t lose Annaliese Kurtz. You saw her safely home, didn’t you? She’s safely home. You made that happen. I understand now. And I understand what you did for my little friend Emily.”

  The breeze ruffled her collar as if to ask a question.

  “I’ll find a way to get Annaliese’s name off that list,” Brette said. “But I need to do something else first. And then I will come back. Not today. I need to get proof and it may take a while. But I will be back someday. I promise.”

  She pulled out her cell phone and texted Keith.

  I’m coming back out. We need to go.

  Everything okay?

  Yes.

  Then she texted Trevor.

  Are you still in Los Angeles? Can I come over? There’s something I need to tell Emily.

  His answer was swift. Can you help her?

  I think I can, she wrote.

  • • •

  BRETTE SAT ON A PAISLEY-UPHOLSTERED COUCH NEAR A PICTURE window that looked out on a manicured backyard lawn and rows of hummingbird feeders hanging from a patio cover. Emily Prescott sat next to her. Trevor sat on an armchair on the other side of the sofa, and Keith and Trevor’s mother were standing just off to the side. Trevor’s mother looked pensive, unsure, and ready to jump between Brette and her granddaughter at a second’s notice.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I know this has been hard for you,” Brette said to the little girl. “But I didn’t really understand what had happened to you until today.”

  “I know what I felt and heard,” Emily said, clearly ready to defend her belief that the ghost of her dead mother had embraced her on the Queen Mary.

  “I believe you. I know what it’s like to know something is real when no one else believes it is.”

  Trevor shifted in his chair. Brette looked up at him, admonishing him with her eyes to say nothing.

  “Can you really see ghosts?” Emily said, curiosity deflating some of her defensive tone.

  “I can. But they’re not as scary as most people think.”

  “I know that.”

  Brette pondered for a moment what to say next. “Not everyone who dies stays here as a ghost afterward. Most don’t, actually. The ones that stay behind are usually afraid to move on. They need a little time to get used to the idea that they don’t belong in this world anymore. They drift around while they figure things out. That’s why I call them Drifters.”

  Emily blinked and said nothing.

  “You see, Emily, there are places where the space between our world and the one we go to after we die is thin. Drifters hang out in those places. And it’s these thin places that I can see. I can’t see heaven or the angels or other people who have died. Only Drifters in a thin place. Do you understand?”

  Emily furrowed her brow and nodded.

  Brette leaned forward and took Emily’s hands in her own. “The Queen Mary is a very special ship. Ships aren’t just made of steel and wood. Captains and sailors know this; they’ve always known this. For a long time, the Queen Mary carried people across the wide ocean, sometimes in stormy weather, sometimes during wartime. She was like a mother, carrying everyone to safety, you see? But she doesn’t sail anymore. That purpose was taken from her. That was her life, and this is why she still has the heart of a parent. She still longs to be a mother. That’s why you felt her hugging you when you were there.”

  “It was my mommy,” Emily said, a silvery line of tears appearing in her eyes.

  “I know you miss your mom, Emily. You were given a touch of mother-love on that ship because you needed it so very much. We all do at times.”

  “But it was her!”

  “I’m not a mom yet, but I very much hope someday that I will be. I don’t know everything about moms and their little girls, but I do know that love is always what you get to keep when someone you care about dies. You will always have that love, Emily. And sometimes something will happen that will remind you of it. Maybe the next time it won’t happen on a ship. Maybe it will be when you smell your mom’s perfume on someone, or when you eat something she used to make for you, or when you hear her voice in your dreams. And for a moment it will be like she’s there, because in a way, she is. The love is still there. It always will be.”

  Two tears slid down Emily’s face. “She’s not on the ship?”

  Brette shook her head.

  “I was afraid for her there,” Emily whispered, a sob warbling her words. “It’s not home. I didn’t want her to be stuck there.”

  “She’s not.”

  Brette instinctively held out her arms and Emily fell into her embrace. She held the little girl, stroked her hair, and whispered that everything would be all right in time.

  • • •

  BRETTE AND KEITH HEADED HOME AFTER HAVING DINNER WITH Trevor and his family. On the way back down the coast, Keith asked what Brette was supposed to do with the knowledge that the placard in the isolation ward was wrong.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ve got to find a way to get that name off there,” she answered. “I think it bothers the ship that that placard bears the name of someone who supposedly died on her watch who’s actually still alive. Annaliese Kurtz isn’t one of those lost at sea. The Queen saw her safely home.”

  Keith shook his head. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t jump on the wagon of people who think inanimate objects can think and hear and see. No offense, Brette, but that’s just bizarre.”

  “I know it is. But just think, Keith. You men of science discover new things all the time. I think it’s amazing that a ship can feel like a person who cares about you. Phoebe said as much about the Queen Mary when I talked to her on the phone. And I’ve read that ships often come across to people as having hearts and souls. It explains perfectly why this ship lets the Drifters come. She sees them as anxious travelers who want safe passage to the next place but are afraid to let go. Letting them come aboard and stay as long as they want is exactly what a loving mother would do.”

  He smiled then, reached across the seat, and took her hand. “You seem to know a lot about mothers these days.”

  She smiled back. “I’m learning.”

  They rode for a few minutes in easy silence. Brette tipped her head back to the headrest to contemplate how she was going to persuade the City of Long Beach to correct the placard in the old isolation ward on the Queen Mary. Proving that Annaliese Kurtz hadn’t jumped was going to be difficult without Simone Robinson’s help. And yet she had no doubt the spirit of the ship, moored to the glory of its past and yet hollowed of its original purpose, wanted the world to know this one had not been lost. Not this one. As Brette pondered how she might convince the Queen Mary’s owners that there was a mi
stake on the list of the dead, her eyelids grew heavy. Perhaps Simone could be persuaded some other way to tell her the truth. Perhaps there was a way to convince the old woman that the vessel that had carried her to America so long ago was no ordinary ship. Perhaps . . .

  The tiredness she’d been battling the last couple weeks—a subtle sign of a pregnant woman’s first trimester—caught up with her gently, ushering her into a dreamless slumber.

  RMS QUEEN MARY

  LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA

  MAY 1969

  I don’t know what is happening.

  I am afraid.

  I am being emptied of myself.

  The boiler rooms are gone, and the forward engine room, both the generator rooms, the stabilizers. All but one of the propellers. The empty fuel tanks have been filled with mud to keep our center of gravity. Only the aft engine room at the stern remains.

  The heart of me has been torn out. I am sinking but not sinking. The sea surrounds me as always but it is as if I have ceased to exist.

  I am dying.

  I am dying and I am afraid.

  What will become of me? What will become of me!

  I hear the others, calling out to me from the mist of my agony.

  You are one of us now, they say. Stay.

  But I only know how to carry my passengers to safe shores. This is all I know. I am nothing now. I am nothing.

  You are as you have ever been, the others tell me.

  And at the moment of my deepest despair I realize they are right. I am still a vessel. Still.

  I can still bear travelers of another kind to safe shores. I can still do that.

  I am empty.

  An empty vessel.

  Come to me.

  Forty

  PROVENCE, FRANCE

  PRESENT DAY

  The elderly woman folded the letter from America and put it back in its envelope, fingering the lacy script of the return address. She let the letter drop onto the table in front of her. It landed in a band of sunlight cast by a low-lying afternoon sun slanting inward from an open window.

  “Will this paper do, Maman?”

  The woman turned toward the voice. Her daughter, Giselle, was coming toward her with a notepad and pen.

  “I thought I had some stationery in the bottom of the drawer of the desk. But I don’t,” Giselle continued. “And we haven’t unpacked your boxes yet.”

  “That will be fine. Thank you, dear.” The woman took the paper and pen.

  “So. A letter from America! How mysterious.” Giselle took her mother’s teacup to freshen it. “Wouldn’t Papa have been jealous!”

  The old woman laughed lightly. Sébastien had never been one to get jealous. Jealousy is weakness, he’d been fond of saying in his younger years. When you want something you don’t have, you work to get it, it’s that simple. And if it’s yours already, you work to keep it. They had worked hard, she and he, for the life they had carved out for themselves, their children, and grandchildren. It had been a good life, a better life than she had ever dreamed could be hers. And now she was old and in need of care and the little chateau that had been their home was up for sale and she had moved in with Giselle and Pierre.

  “I doubt he would have been jealous about a letter from a woman in America,” the old woman said.

  “So who’s it from?”

  The old woman cast a glance at the envelope, golden and warm in the sunlight. “From a very old friend.”

  “Who?”

  The old woman looked up at her daughter. “I’ll tell you in a bit. But first I need to write the letter.”

  Giselle smiled wide. “You are more mysterious by the minute, Maman. What’s this all about?”

  She nodded and raised one finger upward. “In a moment. I want to write the letter first.”

  Giselle looked at the envelope on the table. “You’re writing back to this Simone Robinson from America?”

  “No. Not yet. I need to write to someone else first. I need you to stay and help me with the English, though. And then I will tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Giselle laughed.

  “Everything.”

  October 11, 2016

  Dear Mrs. Caslake,

  My name is Anna Maillard but you know me as Annaliese Kurtz. I am writing to you because my dear friend Simone told me your very amazing story and I am much intrigued. She does not believe your story, but I want you to know that I do.

  She thinks you are hoping to get money from me by threatening to take my story public, but I have realized I don’t care if the world knows what happened the night everyone thinks I died. In fact, as I feel my mortal life slipping away, perhaps it would be a good thing to lay it all out in the open. In any case, you can lay to rest any notion that you are crazy. You are right, obviously. I did not jump. What Simone told you is true. She helped me escape, but not inside America. She told me you spoke to Phoebe, too. But we couldn’t tell Phoebe what we were doing because she wouldn’t have been able to keep the secret, God love her.

  I went back to England on the Queen Mary. I hid for six days in a decorations closet. A steward on the ship who was sympathetic to my plight brought me food and water and helped to smuggle me onto another ship, this one bound for Cherbourg.

  From there, I traveled to Paris, where I met up with the woman who had helped Simone escape after her father and brother were executed by the Gestapo. I ended up at the same vineyard in the south of France where Simone had hidden during the last months of the war, and where she met the American pilot whom she later married. I was given new identity papers and worked hard to scrub my voice of its German accent. I worked for the vintner and I took care of his and his wife’s children. A year later, I fell in love and married one of the men who had also been in the Résistance during the war. Sébastien was a friend of Simone’s, in a manner of speaking, and while we didn’t write to each other very often, Simone found it entertaining that I married him. He was a mechanic, and I taught dance to the little girls in the village. God gave us three beautiful daughters. My beloved Sébastien passed away some years ago and I now live with one of our daughters and her husband. The others and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are here and there. The closest is down the lane, the farthest is in Prague.

  I rarely think of the girl I was before the war, and even less of the girl I was during it. The woman whose name is on that list on the Queen Mary no longer exists, except in the thinnest of memories. I was her once, but so long ago; she is more phantom to me than anything else.

  So there you have it. You are right.

  I trust this letter brings you satisfaction. I truly do not care to whom you show it. If you step aboard the Queen Mary again anytime soon, throw her a kiss. She was a good ship to me.

  Regards, Anna Maillard

  P.S. I know you are telling the truth about having been told by some kind of apparition that I did not jump. The old passenger manifests have me listed in a cabin on B deck. But your ghost took you to the room I really stayed in, A-152. I had switched rooms the day we boarded the ship in Southampton. Now about that little cabinet. I left the ship thinking the husband of my dear friend Katrine would never know why I had left her the way I did, dead in that car. A letter I had written for him had been in the lining of my suitcase, which was in that cupboard. It was most distressing to me that he would never get it. But Madame Didion in Paris wrote to Simone at my request and asked her to contact John and tell him that before I died, I’d told her I had been heartbroken when Katrine was taken from me and was very sorry for his loss. She told him there had been a note for him from me, but after my suicide it had been lost. Simone told me some time later by letter that he not only got the message but eventually fell in love and married again. So you see? Tell your little ghost all is well. This is how it is for all of us. Life will send us across a bridge we did not wa
nt to cross, but when we finally open our eyes on the other side, we see that there had been nothing to fear after all.

  Acknowledgments

  It is always the insights and contributions of other people that enable me to carve out a novel from the rock of an idea. I am beyond grateful to the following individuals:

  June Allen, a British war bride who crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Queen Mary in February 1946, thank you for the hourlong phone calls, the messages, the letters, the sharing of your life and heart with me, the lovely lunch on the Queen Mary. There would be no book without you. I am so glad researching this story led to the genesis of our friendship.

  To my editors, Claire Zion and Jackie Cantor, thank you for loving this story and trusting me with the telling of it. I am also so very grateful to Berkley’s Ivan Held, Craig Burke, and Danielle Dill for much support and enthusiasm, and the amazing art department for such a hauntingly beautiful cover.

  Elisabeth Weed, literary agent extraordinaire, there aren’t enough words to express my gratitude for who you are and what you mean to me. Thanks for being my champion.

  To all my colleagues and friends who answered my question, “Do you believe in ghosts?” I am indebted to you for your candid answers. Thank you for sharing your personal experiences regarding the unexplainable. You made my fictional ponderings all the richer.

  To Kendra Harpster, your insights on that first early draft were invaluable to me. You are a gem.

  Thanks to Elizabeth Musser and Karen Mesch Cassidy for the foreign-language assistance; and to my mother, Judy Horning, for the expert proofreading; and to Michele Thomas for her excellent website, uswarbrides.com.

  Rene Gutteridge, fellow author and friend, that lovely chat we had while walking in a forest of redwoods changed the course of this story. You began a sentence with “What if,” and what you said next made me itch to run home and write this book. I owe you one.

  Lastly, I am grateful to God, who has assured me beyond all doubt that this life on earth is not all there is.