Wayfarer (Passenger 2)

“Impossible,” Hall agreed, reaching out to take his hand, his eyes lit from within. His words spilled out of him with the force of a river dammed for far too long. “But tomorrow you leave this ship. You travel five years into the past, where you found—will find—me in Norfolk, force me to swear to God to keep this infernal secret, and then, my boy, we do precisely that.”

ETTA’S DEBUT AS A CONCERT soloist came months after she’d released that dream to the wind and let it soar away for someone else to claim.

“You’ll do great. Don’t be nervous!”

Etta glanced over at Gabriela. They stood in the wings of the stage, listening to the intermediate orchestra sail through its rendition of Mendelssohn’s Symphony no. 4—the “Italian Symphony,” as it was also known. They were playing only the first two movements, giving Etta about fourteen minutes to mentally take stock of her nerves and decide whether or not she really did need to throw up or if it would pass, as it usually did, once she was actually onstage.

She forced herself to smile at her friend, giving her a weak thumbs-up before she turned back to listen to the symphony. She breathed in and out, as Alice had taught her, but inside she was a little girl all over again, the one who burst into tears from fright the moment she stepped out onto the stage. It had nothing to do with whether or not she would be able to remember nearly thirty minutes of music, and everything to do with the fact that it was the same piece she should have played six months before with the New York Philharmonic, in Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, with Alice sitting directly in front of her in the audience.

“I’m more nervous about the interview for the tutoring gig on Tuesday,” she whispered back, needing to bolster herself a bit. Whether Gabby actually believed her was up for debate.

The strings caught her attention again, with a vibrancy and joy that breathed life into the tiers of Carnegie Hall’s audience. She felt them stir, responding to the triumphant call of the first movement. And in that moment, she let herself resonate with that tone; she let the piece lift her out of the quiet, small existence she led.

It was an odd thing, she’d discovered, to haunt your old life. A year before, Etta had waited until the fourth of November, her eighteenth birthday, before self-enrolling late in the fall semester at Eleanor Roosevelt High School using the meticulous, not entirely truthful homeschooling records Alice had kept on her behalf. For the first two weeks, she’d walked past the music room, daring herself to go in, to see if there could be a place for her in the orchestra.

There was. She very much liked the idea of playing as part of a group, of disappearing seamlessly into a whole, but the challenge wasn’t there, and Etta had felt herself settling into a complacency that frightened her. The teacher, Mr. Mangrave, recommended her to the director of the New York Youth Symphony, who allowed her to gladly take a seat left open by some poor boy who’d managed to break both of his arms falling off a bike. After graduating high school and spending the summer teaching violin and waitressing, she had auditioned again for a second year with the program to fill the time that wasn’t spent applying for college.

Only sometimes did she let herself go to the Met. On days when it rained, or she was caught in a black mood, or it somehow seemed that enough time had passed to check again. She would always pay the full suggested donation to enter, walk through the exhibits she did not recognize, and sit at the top of the stairwell, waiting.

Now Etta was finished waiting.

The intermediate orchestra moved flawlessly into the second movement. Next to her, Gabby began to shift from foot to foot, adjusting the collar on her black dress. Etta had pulled her own plain, floor-length gown from Alice’s closet. She wondered what her old instructor would have made of all this. Sighing, Etta reached up to smooth a stray hair back into her low chignon, and glanced over at her friend.

Gabby was the only other member of the senior orchestra from her school. She seemed determined to befriend everyone, even the shell-shocked blond girl who would only be in school for about seven months, and she had dragged Etta through all of the introductions in the group. She’d walked her home the night after their first practice, just talking, filling her in on the intricate hierarchy of who was who in their school. And then she’d managed to draw Etta right into her family’s life, where they had welcomed her like another child, and never once mentioned how odd it was that her mother was constantly traveling and never available to take calls.

It was the oddest thing, because the more time Etta spent with Gabby, the better she came to understand her mother. She caught herself managing that same careful distance Rose had cultivated, not only between herself and her daughter, but with everyone in her life save for Alice. Etta tried to fixate on the memories of the life she’d had with Rose before all of this, but inevitably the image of her on the ground, bleeding, dying, was close behind.

The finality of the realization that her father, Nicholas, all of the others, were not just lost to her, but dead, had left her unable to leave Alice’s apartment for days. It was easier to think of time, of their lives, as the loop Alice had written of—that, although they were not with her now, they were still alive in the past.

As much as she understood why Nicholas had done it, understanding did nothing to beat back the piercing loneliness, or the devastation of its finality.

There were moments Etta felt suffocated by the secrets and scars, times she’d had to dig her nails into her palm to stop herself from telling Gabby the truth: that her frequent nightmares weren’t about stage fright or even failing school, but about ancient cities long dead, deserts, and shadows in a dark forest.