At three and one half, Rosie crosses over against her will from waking to sleeping. After dressing her in a nightgown, brushing her teeth, and reading her two stories, Little Bear’s Visit and Horton Hears a Who, I am done.
But she isn’t.
She gathers so great a stack of books for her bedtime reading that she cannot lift it. “You may have to take fewer books, Sweetie,” I say to her. She understands and, after extended deliberation, picks two. Then she climbs into bed, puts her feet under her Little Mermaid blanket, opens her first book, and gives me the squinch face. She shuts her eyes tight, moves every feature of her face as close to her nose as she can, and tilts her head. That means the moment suits her and I am released.
I do not leave the room, however. She has taught me that if I stay with her half an hour after tucking her in, she settles down for the night with less fuss. After lying down on the floor by her bed, I open a journal, take a breath, and see what images bob to the surface of my mind. I wonder about Rosie and her friends at daycare and how they can play together so vigorously without saying much to each other. I remember the dead raccoon I saw this morning. I see the body alone on the road in my rearview mirror again.
Before I get the cap off my pen, Rosie announces that when you die, you go to heaven.
“Who told you that?” I ask.
“Robbie.”
“Is your daddy died?” she continues.
“Yes,” I answer.
“Is he in heaven now?”
“Yes.” Everything seems to be in order now and she resumes reading.
I return to my book too. The article I read today about the Titanic comes to the surface. The National Geographic published pictures of the great ship. What a compelling story. All of these years later and people are still interested in it. Just as more than a man was killed in Dallas in 1963, more than a boat sank in April of 1912. Ground was consecrated and icons fashioned in both endings.
“Daddy?”
“Can I have another book? Couple minutes.”
“No, sweetie.”
“Please.”
“It’s time for you to go to sleep.”
“But, I don’t want to,” she protests.
“Yes, but it is time,” I say as I tuck her in and turn out the lights.
I lie down and return to my thoughts. Other ships have sunk. The Arizona. The Lusitania. The Andrea Doria. Only the Titanic persists in my memory, claiming me like the kind words I thought to say to a stranger but didn’t. Nothing about the Challenger pulls on me. Nor the Hindenburg. The name Titanic alone suggests a great struggle, a curse even. The building, the naming, the indifference to the danger, the collision, and the sinking. The story of the Titanic reads like a Greek myth.
I see a photograph of a man with a mustache and a hat, and a black coat standing on the deck, hands clasped behind his back, and I know that he died in the water after midnight on April 14, 1912, in the north Atlantic. I remember a painting of the sinking; the great stern of the ship rises hundreds of feet into the night. That man saw the stern of the Titanic too, towering above him as the terrible waters soaked through his heavy woolen clothing.
Rosie asks for a bottle. She doesn’t drink from it anymore, but ritual makes passing into the night more bearable. After going to the kitchen, filling a bottle with juice, and returning to her room, I place the bottle on the corner of the bedstead shelf, same as every night. Then I turn on the bunny light, open the bedroom door all of the way, and turn off the hall light. I tuck her in again and return to my thoughts.
The tale is true. The Titanic sank. It really happened. If I could walk through time as I walk through space, I could go see the people boarding in Southampton. Up the gangplank they carry their luggage. With great settling in breaths, those living people drop their bags onto the floor of their cabins. They look around at the little room in which they will spend the rest of their lives. Or I could see the radio man receiving the warnings of iceberg and the captain, another living man, ignoring them.
While there is no time or place that I could hear the sad songs of Orpheus, in a time remembered by living people in my own day and at a place five hundred miles east of Nova Scotia, had I been present, I could have heard the great rumble from under the water as the iceberg opened the hull of the Titanic. I could have heard the captain ordering one of his officers to lock the doors to steerage, sealing in the Irish families in the hold of the ship. The shutting of the steel doors made a noise people heard. Men, younger than I am, thinking of home, broke noisily into cupboards containing the life jackets, and handed them to some of the passengers with the same mundane hand movements I used moments ago when I pulled the night gown out of the dresser for Rosie.
Rosie announces that she wants to say something to her brother who is downstairs watching TV. I tell her that it is too late for her now. She is in bed and it is time for her to go to sleep. She begins to cry and protest loudly. I close my journal and prepare to leave. As usual, the threat settles her down. She concedes. I stay.
A father helps a mother into a lifeboat and tucks their two children in beside her. He says that he will get into the next lifeboat, but both of them know that he is lying. His hand clasps hers one more time, sixty feet over the black and waiting water, arms reaching over gunwales before he releases her. As the boat is lowered, he steps back onto the listing deck in the darkness and, amid the shouts of the deckhands and the clatter of tackle and halyards, breathes in the crisp night air. He sees his children in a sunlit meadow.
“Daddy?” asks Rosie and I return.
“Yes, Rose.” I add just enough irritation to my voice to let her know that I expect her to be asleep by now.
“Here’s my hat,” she says, dangling for me in the dark her winter hat with the attached scarf.
“Drop it on the floor, dear, and go to sleep.” She understands and releases the hat.
Outside, the wind rattles the dead leaves on the oak tree. I think about the lone squirrel in the ball of leaves at the top of the big cottonwood. I saw a Cooper’s hawk, catch his mate last month. The hawk carried her to a branch and ate her, leaving only the tail. Staying near, the surviving squirrel watched. As the hawk flew away and the uneaten tail blew across the lawn with the leaves, the squirrel stepped back onto the listing deck in the darkness, breathed in, and remembered his mate.
A waning moon rises. In the north Atlantic, the same moon is nearly overhead. The rolling water breaks and scatters its image. From that surface, eighty years ago, the Titanic dove through the frigid water, plunging through the watery darkness to a distant meadow under the ocean. There it has waited all of these years. Schools of fish swam through the ballroom on the day I buried my father and stepped back onto the listing deck in the darkness and breathed. Unnamed living things have moved through the debris at the bottom of the lightless swimming pool every night that I have put Rosie to bed. The door to steerage remains sealed even as I close my journal.
I hear her steady breathing. She does not cry out as I leave.
Fall of 1991