Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven

by Susan Fanetti

  The car itself had been fitted with a revolutionary kind of shock absorber, designed specifically for the Cruise Line—and his father’s true innovation of the project. It reduced the typical rock and weave of a traveling train to almost nothing. For his part, William considered that a loss. He rarely slept better than he did on a train, soothed by the motion of its passage. Like a babe in a cradle.

  While Nora explored the car, William was stuck at the door. As soon as he’d seen the Scot-Western logo on the side of the car—before that, as soon as they’d stepped into Grand Central and he’d heard the workaday noise of a train station at peak activity, something inside William had started to shift. Each familiar marker of a journey he’d taken scores, hundreds, of times in his life had made the shift more pronounced. Now that he was standing in the Destiny Car, his hand on the dark-paneled wall, the rich smell of wool and silk and wood polish circling his head, the station sounds rumbling beyond the well-insulated walls, William could scarcely breathe.

  “Mr. Frazier? All right, sir?” Allen asked behind him.

  Nora turned, the skirt of her pretty traveling dress swirling around her ankles. “William?” When he didn’t move, she hurried back to him.

  He took her gloved hand before she could reach for his forehead. “I’m all right, darling.”

  “What is it?”

  How could he explain? Words came again when he called them, but they were on him in a rush right now. So many kinds of feelings—feelings that had been cowering in the dark corners of his mind, drowning in icy water, for weeks. That was the shift: those things he hadn’t been able to reach were stirring, stretching toward him.

  Finally, a way to describe it appeared to him, and he clasped Nora’s hand.

  “Home.”

  When he’d booked this trip, a world and a lifetime ago, he’d planned an epic honeymoon for his new bride: A sumptuous sail across the Atlantic on the maiden voyage of a spectacular new ocean liner. Two weeks in New York City. A luxurious journey on the finest train in America, with week-long stops in Boston and Chicago, and a long weekend in Denver, before arriving in San Francisco to be feted by his eager family. He’d wanted to show her all of his home.

  Instead, they hurried toward San Francisco and scarcely left the train, and all Nora saw of the country was what passed by the leaded windows. She was transfixed by the view and regularly marveled at the breathtaking variety of climate and landscape, asking hundreds of questions, which William was delighted to answer.

  When they went through the Rockies, and the Sierras, she stared in gaping wonder, and turned to him more than once with tears on her cheeks.

  It wasn’t enough; he’d wanted her to experience America with every one of her senses. He owed her another honeymoon.

  But when they crossed into California at Tahoe, while Nora stared goggle-eyed at the view, that shift in William’s soul was an earthquake. This was home. This. He was home.

  He was home, he was home, he was home.

  “How do I look?” Nora smoothed her skirt for the hundredth time, then fussed with her sleeves and adjusted her hat.

  William grabbed her fidgeting hand and pulled her close. “You’re beautiful, as always.”

  She cocked a blonde eyebrow at him and put her hand on his chest before he could get her as close as he wanted. “’As always’ isn’t good enough. It means you’re not really looking, and I have to be perfect. I’m meeting your parents, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You’re beautiful as always because you can’t possibly be more beautiful. You are perfect, my love. But your dress is especially lovely today. Strikes just the right note.”

  She wore a sedate, dove grey traveling suit with a high-necked white lace blouse and a broad-brimmed grey hat festooned with blue ostrich feathers. He’d sat with her in the sitting room of the Central Park Suite while she’d discussed this outfit at length with the dressmaker. It was her ‘meeting his parents’ suit—stylish and attractive, but modest and mature. William, who wore black suits always, had long ago given up wondering at the fuss women made about clothes; he’d spent enough time with his mother on her speaking circuit to understand that women’s clothes were rhetorical choices.

  He moved her hand out of his way and drew her tight to his body. “My parents would love whomever I loved, Nora, because I loved her. But they will love you because of who you are.”

  Her nervous tension softened with a sigh, and she looked deeply into his eyes. “How am I so blessed?”

  “I ask myself the same question every day.” William ducked under her hat and brushed his lips over hers. Through the leaded glass behind her, he saw his family on the platform. “They’re waiting.”

  “All right. I’m ready.”

  When William stepped down and his feet hit the platform, before he could turn and help Nora down, his mother rushed forward, crying out his name, and threw herself into his arms.

  As soon as he was holding her, the earthquake that had been shaking inside him broke him apart, and tears sprang up. He was mortified to be crying—damn, he was sobbing—but he couldn’t stop. “Mom. God, Mom.”

  She wept, too, holding him hard, her hand on his head and his back, pressing him tightly to her. “William! Oh, love. Oh, love! It’s all right, my sweet boy. You’re home now. You’re home.” She held him until they were both calm, and William rested on her shoulder until he thought he could look up and face the audience of his weakness.

  It was Nora he saw first. Still standing on the step, one hand pressed to her heart, tears streaming down her beautiful face.

  He stepped out of his mother’s embrace and held out his hand to his wife. As she stepped onto the platform, he cupped her face and, with his thumbs, wiped her tears from her cheeks. She lifted onto her toes, and he bent to meet her for a kiss.

  He turned to his mother. “Mom, please meet the love of my life. Nora, this is my mother, Angelica Frazier.

  “I’m so very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Frazier.” Nora spoke with shy politeness and offered her hand.

  His mother passed that hand right by and hugged her. Nora—significantly shorter than his mother—nearly lost her carefully chosen hat as her stunned head hit his mother’s bosom.

  “It’s an honor and a delight to meet you, lovely Nora. I’ve been waiting for years to meet the woman who could hold my William’s heart.” His mother stepped back but held on, her hands around Nora’s slim arms. “But no ‘Mrs. Frazier’ nonsense, please! I’d love for you to call me Mom, as William does, but if that’s too intimate just yet, then please, I’m Angelica.”

  “All right … Angelica.”

  “Son.”

  William turned to his father. “Hi, Dad.” He held out his hand, and his father grabbed it. They shook like gentlemen for a second or two, and then something happened in his father’s eyes, an unexpected gleam, and William was yanked forward. His father hadn’t hugged him since his days wearing short pants, but he settled fully into that warm embrace now.

  Standing on a train platform in Oakland, California, William felt the gauze lift from the world and the wood from his soul. He was home. He was home.

  When his father let him go, Nora was there, finishing a hug from Aunt Adelaide. She smiled through her tears and said, “And his father. May I call you Henry?”

  His father didn’t say a word. He simply nodded and opened his arms. Nora stepped into his embrace as if she’d been born in this family.

  She was home, too.

  William felt good, he felt restored, as he and his wife and family left the station and rode to the Port of Oakland and the ferry that would carry them to San Francisco and the house in Presidio Heights.

  His first flutter of anxiety came as the driver pulled the car up and stopped. But he grabbed his skittering mind by its lapels and assured himself that it was fine. It would be fine. He’d spent three days on the Carpathia without additional incident. A short skim across the Bay, in full sight of land in nearly all directions, was nothing.
He’d taken this ferry thousands of times. It was fine.

  That stern internal lecture got him out of the car smoothly. Not even Nora noticed a change in him. He made it all the way to the pier behaving like a normal human being, a grown man. He kept his eyes assiduously away from the typically choppy Bay, fixed them firmly on Nora, and he was fine. It was fine.

  But then he put his foot on the pier. It was solid, but the ferry docked there bobbed—almost imperceptibly, but William saw it. He felt it. And he couldn’t go farther. As he tried to stay calm, to overcome this absurdity and move forward, his body rebelled, and instead he went backward, quickly, nearly tripping over his feet. All the air in the world was sucked away in a noisy rush, and he couldn’t breathe. Vaguely, he knew he was making a scene, people were watching as he reeled away, gasping for breath, and his family ran after him, calling his name.

  His father caught him and grabbed his arms. “William! It’s all right! You’re all right!”

  But he couldn’t breathe. Jesus Christ, what was happening? What was wrong with him?

  Adelaide shoved his father out of the way and grabbed William’s hands. “Look at me, William. Look at me. Only me. Come on, dear heart. Just me.”

  He looked down into her eyes and focused. The clamor in his head settled slightly, but not the clamor in his chest.

  “Good, good. Now, breathe with me. Just as I do.” She took a deep, slow breath through her nose and blew it out through her mouth just as slowly, pursing her lips. He tried to follow, but he couldn’t get nearly as deep a breath as she had. She took another breath, staring into his eyes, holding his hands, and another, and another, until finally he could match her breath for breath, and the crisis was over.

  His aunt held his hands until his breathing was normal, and he sighed his relief. Nora ran up to him and embraced him at once. “William!”

  He held onto her and took strength from her. “I’m all right. I don’t know what that was.”

  “A stress reaction,” his aunt supplied, leading him to sit on a bench. He brought Nora down with him and kept her close. “I’ve seen it in soldiers. You experienced an extreme trauma, William. It’s bound to have an effect.”

  “Are you saying I’m having a nervous breakdown?” His parents stood right before him, beside his aunt, but he couldn’t meet their eyes.

  “No. I’m saying your mind sees a large body of water and remembers that trauma, and relives it.”

  “I don’t remember it, Adelaide. All I remember is disconnected images. Except for those, I’ve lost everything from just after dinner that night to waking up in the Carpathia with Nora beside me.” She squeezed his hand when he said her name.

  “My expertise is not psychiatry, but in my opinion, the memory loss itself might be the source of this mental stress. You can’t make sense of an event you can’t remember.”

  “What sense is there to make of it at all, Addie?” his father asked. “Who can make sense of tragedy like that?”

  “That’s not what I mean, Henry.” She huffed and put her hands on her hips. “This isn’t the place to discuss it. We’ll talk when we get you home. But here’s the choice you need to make right now, dear: which home? We can take the long way around and go to the ranch, away from the Bay. Or we can get on this ferry and go to the city. The first is easy, the second very hard. But it will only be harder the longer you put it off.”

  “You want me to get on the ferry.”

  “Yes, I do. I think you need to. But it has to be your choice.”

  William forced his eyes up. He looked between his mother and his aunt, across the pier, out at the Bay. Thousands of times, he’d crossed that water. He’d swum in it all his life, cold as it was.

  He’d swum. In the cold.

  Kicking his legs. Got to keep kicking. Don’t let the cold in. Stay warm. Stay awake. Stay alive. Get back to her. Get back to Nora. Be with her. Be with you. I’ll be with you. I’ll be with you.

  “I’ll be with you,” Nora whispered, holding his hand to her chest, and William nearly leapt from his skin.

  “Son.” His father crouched before him and set his hand on William’s knee. “I know you can do this. You’re strong. You’re tough. You make me proud. Make me proud now.”

  “Henry, no,” his mother said.

  “It’s okay, Mom.” William sucked as much air into his lungs as he could get, against the chest-crushing panic that was surely on its way back. He clasped Nora’s hand in both of his and let himself fall into her serious eyes, full of love and worry. “I’ll do it.”

  Getting across the Bay was one of the hardest things William had done in his life, and he was deeply ashamed that that was true. He was on a ferry his family owned, in completely familiar surroundings, and yet he’d had to sit near the center of the boat and clasp his hands together to stay outwardly calm. Nora sat with him, and his mother—two women he meant to protect with his life, for his lifetime, bookending him so that he wouldn’t fly apart.

  It was awful.

  But he made it. And though he could have cried when he was on land again and could get away from the water, the trip had gotten incrementally easier, and he had gotten incrementally calmer, as they’d neared San Francisco.

  He’d choked up again showing Nora the house in Presidio Heights and watching her awed glee at the view around it. His emotions were definitely back, and rioting inside him for having been cooped up in his shadows for so long.

  They spent a quiet and recuperative evening at home. After dinner, he and his father relaxed in the library. Mainly, William napped, stretched out on the sofa with a book on his chest. The exhaustion that had clamped onto his shoulders when they’d arrived in their suite in New York had never entirely eased, and this day of his wildly careening mind had wrung him dry.

  His mother and aunt had collected Nora and dragged her out to the garden for ‘girl talk,’ and William sincerely hoped that hadn’t been a secret code for ‘party planning.’ As he’d expected, his mother had been planning a soirée to celebrate their marriage, but she’d postponed it indefinitely upon word of the wreck, and William was in no hurry to put that event back on San Francisco’s social calendar. What he wanted was quiet. He had to get his feet back under him and get control of this ‘stress reaction,’ or whatever it was, even if it was a fucking breakdown.

  Into the quiet of the room, his father said, “When you’re ready to get back to work, you let me know. You’ve been missed, son.”

  At the thought of traveling up and down the West Coast, and back East, looking for the next Big Thing in transportation, the fatigue pressed harder on his shoulders. But his job, and his place, was at his father’s side, and he’d been away for six months. He opened his eyes and sat up, setting aside the book he’d hardly read a paragraph of. “I want to get Nora settled first, get our home settled. Then yes, of course.”

  “Your home? You’re not staying here?”

  “You thought we would?” William had always lived at home, but he’d been a single man. He’d assumed that when he married and started a family, he’d buy a home for them. As his father had done for his family.

  His father folded up the paper and set his spectacles aside. “There’s more than enough room here, and even more at the ranch. I think your mother would be very disappointed if you moved away. She wants her grandchildren around her.”

  “Not away, Dad. Still in the city. And we’re in no hurry for children. Nora is young, and she wants some time of her own first.”

  A heavy white eyebrow lifted high. “Well, your mother will be conflicted as hell, son. She’ll be delighted you married a woman who knows her own mind, but appalled to have to wait for her to start popping out babies.”

  William chuckled. “We probably shouldn’t tell either of them about this conversation.”

  “No, we should not.” He came over and sat at the other end of the sofa. He didn’t say anything right away, but William could tell he wanted to. His father was eloquent but not garrulous. H
e spoke his mind clearly and with forthright assertion, but he rarely exposed any doubt or weakness, or even anything too intimately personal about himself. Only his wife was privy to the deepest workings of his heart and soul.

  When he did disclose something tightly held, he got a look in his eyes, like he’d made himself relive the thing first before he shared it. He had that look now.

  “When I was on the line, back in, oh, what was it … ’68 or ’69, I guess. We were laying track through the Sierras, and that was damned hard work. Going through the mountains … shit. One time, we’d set a charge to take out a big hunk of rock in our way. Done it time and time again. It was routine. Every day through that span—set a charge, get clear, blow it, lay track, come up on another block, do it all over again. I guess it was the routine that got us that day. Seemed like everybody got sloppy at once—the charge was too big, the fuse was too short, people didn’t clear back far enough.” He paused, staring into the empty space before him, as if his mind had gone back to that day. “When it blew, it turned five men to hash. Part of a head landed right at my knees. One eye, hanging out of its socket like a marble on a string. Guy by the name of Rusty had been wearing that head not fifteen seconds earlier. Good guy. Had a wife and a kid, who traveled with us. She was a good cook. I stood there in the blast zone and saw what was left of my friends, and all I could think was it looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse.”

  He stopped and drifted off again, staring at the dark fireplace. Knowing there was a point to this story, William waited quietly.

  “I was young, barely more than a boy. Years before I met your mother. Doing my time on the line, like my father wanted. I dreamt about Rusty’s head, and all those hashed-up men, for years after. It got in my head something terrible so I couldn’t even look at raw meat without thinking I’d cry or puke or who knows what.”