18

EVERLY

Present day

Darkness pressed on the windowpanes of my little house, the clock ticking toward two a.m. My sight went blurry as I scanned the tight type of a 1924 article in the Savannah Tribune about the business dealings of Lamar Longstreet and his son Charles. I sat back with a smile—one more clue discovered, one more person who had survived. This was the thrill I sought with hours of research—a truth that led to the next and the next. I texted Oliver and Maddox—Lamar survived—and continued with my projects.

On poster board, I’d drawn a rough image of the ship, the twin masts and the double wheels. Another poster board held the names of the passengers from the manifest. The few people the newspaper articles had listed as survivors I’d circled in red. I desperately wanted a complete list.

On another board I’d drawn the Longstreet family tree as far as I knew, with a red circle around Charles, and another around his father, Lamar. Adam Forsyth had also presumably survived, according to the newspaper article about his wife’s statue.

My drawings of the ship were rougher than an untalented third grader might make, but the museum would know artists who could decipher my notations. The night of the explosion was taking shape. Accounts in several newspapers from the period had allowed me to write out a timeline on butcher block paper.

I’d told Oliver I’d work from home for a few weeks. I’d handed in the final grades for my students, and settled into the curation. The Pulaski consumed me. I didn’t have to think about much else—my life, for example—if I was thinking about the ship, the passengers, both Lilly Forsyth and Charles Longstreet, or the night when “everything changed,” as Papa would say.

I felt at ease with my simple schedule, the summer now filled with a purpose it’d lacked. I woke early, did a morning run, grabbed my coffee from the Sentient Bean, and then dug through records and archives. I spent evenings with Mom and Allyn and my niece and nephew.

I called everyone I could think of who might know where Longstreet family papers might be stored: the historical society, the Telfair museum, the Oglethorpe Club, the Aquatic Club. The word was out: Everly Winthrop was on the hunt. But so far—complete silence.

As for my drawings of the ship—I’d crudely delineated the 225-horsepower engine pistons, which looked like posts pointing to the sky. Down the middle of the ship, I drew a zigzag line where the ship was broken in two by the blown engines. Then I took a red marker and made an X on the engine that sank to the floor of the sea and another X over the wheelhouse, with an arrow toward the sky to indicate it had been blown apart. Where had the captain been? I’d read that he’d claimed he never slept while the ship plied the sea, yet First Mate Hibbert had manned the wheelhouse that fateful night.

I’d pored over newspaper accounts, one after the other, looking for inconsistencies, for verification. The men’s accounts had spoken of surviving, the women’s of almost drowning. I read about the children who disappeared beneath the waves, of the inadequate lifeboats. But still I couldn’t find anything about the Longstreet family, only that Lamar had invested in the ship and joined its fourth voyage.

I’d walked to the riverfront and done my best to imagine the steamship at port, to envision the families boarding with their humpback trunks and hand-sewn valises, with their well-dressed children and their housemaids in drab uniforms. The enslaved weren’t allowed unless they were accompanying the families they cared for; after all, the ship was sailing toward free land. Most enslaved stayed on the wharf during the departure then headed back to in-town homes or plantations miles away. Those same slaves would have packed the trunks, ironed the clothes, organized and packed the silver and china for the journey. Passengers could take what they wanted without giving much thought to how long and arduous the packing and unpacking would be. Nursemaids were allowed on board to feed the children.

I imagined the soft, sandy roads of those days. The city’s guards parading up and down the ship looking for stowaways. Then the ship’s pistons starting up. The powerful turning of the huge paddle wheels, cascades of water flowing over the glossy red paddles. Black smoke exhaling from its double stacks. The clang of the bell; the blast of the whistle; the crash of the gangplank. High above, on the bluff, the Customs House looming over all of it.

When I felt like I’d slipped into 1838, and the oil lanterns were all there was to light the way, I returned to my house and again worked on the charts, drawings and timeline. With a magnifying glass I read the tiny script of handwritten letters and articles. Then I painstakingly transcribed them into my computer.

A compulsion I hadn’t felt in years pushed me harder to understand the events of the night of the explosion, and all that had followed. Why hadn’t anyone compiled this information before me? The people on the ship came from families with ties from here to Charleston. Had some unwillingness to gaze at the darker side of life impeded earlier historians? Or was it the unspoken southern assumption, with which I was thoroughly familiar, that we just didn’t talk about certain topics?

I didn’t know why no historian had thoroughly explored the Pulaski. I almost didn’t care. I would be the one to reveal the truth.

Using the list of passengers, I wrote their names on Post-it notes. I wanted to place them on rough sketches of the various floats that saved some passengers—lifeboats—two yawls on the deck, two quarterboats covered and hanging on davits; smaller debris; a large swath of promenade deck; another fragment of the aft deck. But I couldn’t . . . yet. For most I had merely last names. What inner resources had allowed them to survive those harrowing days and nights? And what happened after they were rescued and were forced to confront the full weight of their loss?

Exhaustion seeping slowly over me, I slipped into a kitchen chair. The crude drawings would appear ridiculous to anyone but Maddox, Oliver and me. For now, they were meant only to help me construct a minute-by-minute account of that fateful night, and the cruel days and nights afterward.

June 13, 8 a.m.—The luxury steamship leaves Savannah and sails toward Charleston, passing Tybee Lighthouse and skirting the South Carolina coast.

June 13—The ship docks for the night in Charleston.

June 14—Charleston passengers board and the ship departs for Baltimore in calm weather at 6 a.m.

June 14, 11:04 p.m.—The starboard boiler explodes approximately thirty-five miles off the North Carolina shore and shatters that side of the ship. The wheelhouse is blown apart. Men are burned and maimed from steam. Water rushes in. Lifeboats are launched holding few people. Passengers fall off. Others jump ship.

June 14, 11:45 p.m.—The ship breaks in half while the aft and promenade decks rise, break off and float.

June 15, 2 a.m.—The two quarterboats head toward the North Carolina shore.

These were the data points, but I felt the weight of the tragedy as heavy as the iron remnants resting at the bottom of the sea.

One hundred and eighty years had passed since then—they meant little to me. The explosion was happening now, again, in my kitchen, on my table, on the poster boards, as miles away Maddox and his crew brought up from the depths combs, silver, medicine bottles and keys.

With a sigh, I ran my finger over the list of Longstreet family members. “Did you find each other again?”

The explosion on that ship had been as unexpected, irreversible and violent as a car being gunned through a parade crowd and taking a young woman’s life: a savage interruption of life.

When sleep finally seduced me toward oblivion, I fell onto the couch and closed my eyes to dreams in which I kept looking for something I couldn’t find.

---

“Everly!” A voice woke me, setting my pulse to pounding. I rolled over and tumbled off the couch. Where was I?

Home. The couch. My living room.

“Everly!”

Oliver’s voice came from behind the front door. I stood and ran my hands through my hair, swallowed against a dry mouth and groaned. “Hold on. Give me a minute.”

I ran upstairs to the bathroom and washed my face, brushed my teeth. No time to deal with my disheveled appearance. And who cared anyway? As I trotted down the stairs, I felt the weight of sleepless days in my fuzzy head and growling stomach.

Oliver stood on the threshold wearing a blue seersucker suit with a white button-down. He appeared well rested, holding in one hand a box containing something that smelled rich and sugary, in the other a cardboard carrier with two steaming coffees.

“You’ve adopted the traditions of the southern gentleman,” I said, flicking the sleeve of his suit jacket.

“You’re funny.” His wry tone turned bright. “I brought sustenance. I know how you are when you fall into the research rabbit hole and I thought . . .”

I stepped aside and let him in. “You don’t need to check on me.” But I did reach for the box—donuts and some kind of egg sandwich running with cheese and butter.

“I don’t?” His eyes crinkled with amusement.

“I’m a mess but I’m fine.” I walked to the kitchen in my drawstring bottoms and pink T-shirt, braless, and thought how I should have changed when I ran upstairs. I set the box down and took out two heirloom flowered china plates I’d inherited from an ancient aunt and arranged the food on them.

“You’re awful dressed up. A date?” I asked.

“It’s ten a.m. No. I have a meeting with a donor.” He brushed off my question. It wasn’t any of my business, I knew, just as my love life, or lack thereof, was none of his. But that didn’t keep the question from popping out of my mouth like a balloon over the head of a comic strip character.

He made a whistling noise when he saw my work. “Whoa. Look at all this.”

I pushed aside a pile of papers and placed the plates on the table. Oliver set down the coffee carrier and I took a long swallow; the coffee burned the roof of my mouth but I said nothing. It was caffeine, after all.

“Yes. I’ve been working through the night . . . I mean, through the events of the night but also through my nights.” I laughed. “You know what I mean.”

He sat down and so did I, for a minute both of us eating as though we hadn’t in quite a while.

“Thank you for this,” I said, wiping my mouth free of powdered sugar. “All of this—I’m trying to figure out the timeline of the wreck, find out how people survived.” I pointed at the crude drawing. “Art isn’t my forte, is it?”

Oliver regarded me with concern. Maybe even pity. “When was the last time you really slept?”

“Well, since you just woke me up, I’d say a few minutes ago.”

“This is a lot of work.”

“Well, Oliver, sometimes things look worse before they look better.”

“That’s about the truest thing you’ve said in a long while.” He seemed to relax.

Then something that had been whirring around in the recesses of my mind slipped out like breath. “Those flowers you leave Mora. They’re beautiful.”

“Excuse me?”

“On her grave. The flowers.”

“You mean the St. Patrick’s ones?” He scratched the side of his face and took another sip of coffee.

“No. I went to Bonaventure last week. The peonies. And the week before, Gerber daisies and . . .”

A micro-shake of his head told me I’d gotten it wrong. He hadn’t left the flowers and now I’d done the damn thing I’d promised I wouldn’t—I’d opened up a conversation about Mora.

“I don’t leave flowers. Or at least not in a long while.”

“Must be her mom.” I wiped my hands on a paper towel and stood, needing the conversation to be over. “Did you know that the captain of the Pulaski died on board? He’d earlier claimed he never slept during any voyage, but he must have been asleep somewhere—First Mate Hibbert stood in the wheelhouse when the explosion occurred.”

“Don’t change the subject, Everly. No. Mora’s mother rarely goes to Bonaventure. She barely leaves her house. Though I suppose maybe she sends someone.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Powdered sugar fell in an arc from the donut I waved.

“It does matter.”

I took a few bites in silence and stared over his shoulder. He didn’t try to fill the quiet before I asked, “Do you still look for him?” I set down the donut and leaned across the table, my fatigue turning into a release of anger I hadn’t known was brewing.

“Him?”

“The monster who killed her.” All at once I became acutely aware of my state of disarray. I’d meant to one day have this conversation when I was well dressed and alert. But there I sat, asking him all the things I’d wanted to ask over the past year.

“I do look for him,” he admitted. “But not like I once did. I figure he’s long gone, on to the next city. He was a vagrant as it was, I’ve decided. I still can’t believe no one grabbed him at the time. That he stood so close and no one even tried to stop him from getting away.”

“It’s the kind of situation in which, looking back, people wish they’d acted differently.”

“What would you have done differently?” his gentle voice asked.

I stood up straight, ran my hand through the tangles in my hair and told the truth. “I would have grabbed his shirt, snatched him by the hair, taken him to the ground. But before that moment, if I’d known, I would have switched places with Mora. I would have stood on the other side of you . . .”

“Then it would have been . . .”

“Me.”

“Don’t say that, Everly.”

“I just did.”

“Don’t say it again.”

“Well, I would have at least taken back the little bump, the one that sent you a few steps over.”

“Stop!”

“This wreck”—I waved my hand around the room—“is all about destiny. And fate. If there is such a thing. Who made it to the lifeboats, and which lifeboats at that. Two were sturdy; two were cracked. Who found something to cling to. Who lived and who died . . . and then what the survivors did afterward.”

The buzzing of my phone interrupted our conversation. We could both see the name: a text from Maddox Wagner.

I read silently and then out loud. “Forgive if I’m interrupting, we’ve brought the boat back with a bounty of salvaged artifacts. Maybe you could drive up here today?”

I texted in return without looking at Oliver. Will leave in 30. Wait for me.

He bent over to read my text. “I’m going with you.”

His brown eyes swam with a desire for adventure; I’d seen it more times than I could count. “No. Let me do this alone. Please. You hired me to do this job, and the one reason I almost didn’t do it was because of what just happened—talking about Mora as if we could change anything.” I brushed my hands together and took a step or two toward the stairs. “I know it was my fault. I brought it up. Looks like you’re moving on quickly anyway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your date. The one at the river.”

He exhaled audibly. “You were there?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t . . .”

“It’s none of my business. But I will say this. I don’t trust a girl who can chug wine like beer.”

He almost laughed. “Everly. It wasn’t exactly a date.”

“What is exactly not a date? A half date? A sort of date? You sure do get over things quickly.”

“Over it? You’re serious?”

“I am.”

“You have no idea, Everly. No idea what I’ve been through or what I’ve felt or even what I was doing at the river the other night. You have no idea of the sleepless nights. Or the hours of walking through the city wondering if I should leave Savannah because it will always remind me of Mora. You have opted out of our friendship and my life, and you have no idea . . . none at all . . . what I’ve been through.”

A flush of embarrassment washed over me. “I’m sorry. I . . .”

“That so-called date was a setup. The worst. My friend Harris asked me to meet him for a drink and then left me there with that lovely woman.”

I held up my hands. “It’s none of my business. Listen, we shouldn’t bring up our past just because we’re bringing up the past of this ship.”

“So eloquently said and such bullshit.” He stood and took a few steps toward me. I moved backward one step up the stairs. A prickling dread crawled on the back of my neck. Looking up at me standing taller than him, he said, “She will always be here with us. Always. We can talk about her.”

“Not now.” I placed a hand on my chest. “For now let me do my job. The one you asked me to do.” My voice was ice.

He nodded and bowed his head. I could see the whirls of his hair growing into tangled curls. I placed my palm on top of his head as if I were a priest and he were receiving absolution when we both knew it was I who needed to be absolved for bumping Oliver and making them step into the path that the car, minutes later, drove through. I withdrew my hand as if fire bit my palm and ran upstairs. I slammed the door shut, then stripped naked to shower. I waited to hear the opening and closing of my front door, and finally I did.