I don’t. Three days into our journey I still spend hours every day hanging over the railings, reproducing my breakfast like a cheap circus act, the locket swinging like a clock pendulum at my neck, ticking away the interminable hours as the ship plunges on and my stomach heaves in endless protest. In this way, the days pass until Ireland becomes a full stop at the end of a long paragraph, impossibly small and far away, and still we don’t reach America.
The farther the distance from home and the greater my sickness, the more I come to depend on Mrs. O’Driscoll. Far from being irritated by her, I am soon grateful for her patient concern, not to mention her endless supply of handkerchiefs and humbugs and reviving tonics. The truth is that in the brief time we’ve spent together, Mrs. O’Driscoll has already acted more like a mother to me than Constance Emmerson has in nineteen years.
I thank her as she helps me away from the railings once again. “I’d be lost without you, Mrs. O’Driscoll. Or lost overboard, more like.”
She bats my gratitude away, but the blush to her cheeks belies her appreciation. “You hush now with all that sentimental nonsense.”
But despite her words, she throws her arms around me and I press my face into the collar of her turf-scented coat, surprised to find that she isn’t as stiff and starchy as I’d imagined. She holds on to me a good while, and I am happy to let her.
“Now, come and sit down,” she says, “and get your breath back. You’re as pale as milk.”
She takes the crook of my arm and leads me, like an invalid, to a deck chair where she tucks a blanket around my knees and tells a passing maid to fetch sweet tea and smelling salts, and to be quick about it because the girl is awful seasick, so she is. I pick at a loose thread on the royal blue blanket and smile to myself, admiring her no-nonsense efficiency.
The maid promptly returns with a silver teapot and the ship’s best china. Mrs. O’Driscoll pours two amber-colored cups of tea, adding two lumps of sugar to mine. She sits with me until I drink it all and the color starts to return to my cheeks.
She places a floury old hand on mine and looks at me. “A few more days, and you’ll be back on dry land and the swaying will stop.” Her gaze drops knowingly to my stomach. “The other sickness will pass, too. You should be over the worst of it soon enough.”
I clatter my spoon around my empty cup and bite my lip. “You know?”
“Of course I know.”
“Did my mother …”
“She never said a word. Didn’t have to. You’ve that look about you, and besides, those sudden American holidays with long-lost relatives? They’re never that straightforward.” Although I’m embarrassed, I’m relieved that she knows; relieved to drop the charade. “I don’t need to be knowing the ins and outs of it all,” she adds. “But I thought you might be glad of a bit of advice all the same.”
I think about my mother’s refusal to talk, how she closed up like the Venus flytraps in her hothouse whenever I broached the subject of what to expect in the months ahead. I’m so used to not talking about it, I don’t quite know what to say. “Were you as sick as this?” I ask tentatively, sipping my tea as I feel myself slowly coming back to life.
“Suffered dreadfully on both my little ones. But it passes, and then …” She drifts off into some distant place of happy memories.
“And then?” For all that I don’t want to accept my condition or know what happens next, a curious part of me does want to know. Very much.
Mrs. O’Driscoll looks me full in the face. Her pinched little eyes sprout an unexpected flurry of tears. “And then your cheeks grow as round as peaches and your hair feels like gossamer silk. Your skin shines like porcelain and you feel as if all the goodness in the world belongs to you. It’s a miracle.”
I stare into my teacup, ashamed to remember how exceptionally un-miraculous this child’s conception was. Forbidden from courting Dan Harrington, the only boy I’d ever cared for but who wasn’t considered good enough for me, I’d decided to show my mother how much worse my choice could have been. A British soldier, a Protestant, was the worst possible man for me to be with, so I went to the bars where I knew the soldiers garrisoned on Spike Island went when they came into town. Except a bit of harmless flirtation, intended to get back to my mother, developed into far more than I’d bargained for. I wonder what Dan Harrington would think if he knew the real reason for my trip to America. I doubt he’d care. It hadn’t taken him long to fall out of love with me and in love with Niamh Hegarty, just like all the boys did, sooner or later.
“No matter how it happens,” Mrs. O’Driscoll continues, as if she can read my thoughts, “it’s still a miracle. When you feel that first flutter of life … there’s nothing like it.”
I stir my spoon around my cup, watching the whirlpools in the liquid. “Were you ever afraid?”
“Oh, yes. Of course! Fear is perfectly normal.” She pats my knee. “Plenty of courage will see you through. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be the end of the world either.” She straightens the blanket across her knees. “You never know, Matilda. Going to America. The child. It might even be the making of you.”
We talk for a long while that afternoon, Mrs. O’Driscoll glad of the opportunity to reminisce about her children as I hungrily devour her wisdom and experience, realizing how starved I am of any real knowledge about what lies ahead. By the time we sit down together for dinner that evening, I’m sorry to have wasted my first few days with her in sulky disregard. There are only two days left of our journey. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem nearly long enough.
Newport, Rhode Island. May 1938
I SMELL AQUIDNECK ISLAND before I see it, the briny odor of the ocean leaching through the open windows of the bus from Providence. A suntanned woman in the seat across the aisle sees me place my hand to my nose. “It’s the kelp, honey,” she explains. “You get used to it.” I smile politely, wishing Mrs. O’Driscoll was poised with her smelling salts.
I already miss her company and her funny little ways. After standing together on deck to watch Lady Liberty and the Empire State Building loom from the mist, she’d accompanied me to Providence, only willing to leave me when she was sure the bus wouldn’t stop until it reached Newport and delivered me safely to Harriet Flaherty. She’d insisted on taking Harriet’s address, giving me the address she would be staying at in return. “If you need anything at all, just write,” she’d said, pressing the piece of paper into my hand as we said a surprisingly emotional goodbye.
As the bus rumbles on, I take the piece of paper from my pocket, and unfold it. Beneath the address of her relative on Long Island, she’s written the word Courage. I lift the paper to my nose, inhaling the familiar scent of lily of the valley and wishing, more than ever, she was sitting beside me.
The bus takes us over a long stone bridge that spans the vast expanse of Narragansett Bay. I press my nose
