Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,79
every kind of ship, skiff, or tug, and beyond the water traffic rose the high buildings and factories of a city unlike any Vida had yet witnessed.
But she had meant—as she had thought would be obvious—the long sheets of white on the blue-gray surface of the Hudson. She pointed: “Those.”
“Ice floes,” Fitzhugh said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she whispered. “Rivers don’t freeze where I come from, they just keep running.”
“This one keeps running, too, believe me. The Hudson is a great highway. It brings goods from New York Harbor to the Great Lakes. It must have been damn cold overnight, or those ice floes wouldn’t survive with all the boats on the water.”
“Isn’t it strange?” She meant the feeling of the word in her mouth. “Ice,” she said, to taste this fantastical concept. On the island it had been hot, often intolerably hot. You would have thought she dreamed about ice all the time. But the opposite was true. She’d forgotten its existence. She was about to say this when she realized that it was Sal she wanted to say it to, not Fitz, and then she had tripped once again into a murky room of her consciousness where she felt helpless, and a little stupid, and most definitely ungrateful.
Shouldn’t she just feel lucky? Lucky to be alive. To be rescued. To be engaged to the famous Fitzhugh Farrar.
But there were so many things she wanted to ask Sal, and he was always leaving rooms when she walked into them. She was always catching a glimpse of his back, and though she hoped that he would turn, that he would meet her eye, he never did. He would be gone again, and she would be one again with that helpless yearning feeling. The feeling that tugged at her, demanding to know what might have been. Then she’d wonder if she had made it all up—that Sal had wanted her, and she had wanted him. Maybe that was just a delusion caused by too much sun and salt water.
Surely yearning for something back on the island was delusional. What after all would have become of them if they hadn’t been rescued? It would have been a nightmare, she reminded herself, not some blissful dream.
“Well, it’s frozen water, I don’t know if ‘strange’ is the word exactly. . . .” Fitzhugh folded up the paper and tossed it on the little teak side table. He smiled, put a hand on her shoulder. “Have you ever seen snow?”
“Oh yes, there’s a lodge Mother and Father like in the winter. There’s plenty of snow in California. But that sounds strange, too, now that you mention it.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I’ve taken this trip a thousand times, but you’ve never seen the approach to the city. Should we go up to the observation deck?”
“Oh yes, can we?” Vida asked.
They crossed the salon, Vida trailing behind her fiancé, to the wingback chairs where Mother and Father sat, both reading the newspapers that had been delivered to them by servants in Farrar Line livery at the train station as their twenty-seven pieces of luggage were loaded on a wheeled cart to be delivered to the ferry. Having lost one suite of fine bags, Vida had thought this a little ridiculous. But Mother seemed to have learned the opposite lesson from the sinking of the Princess, and insisted upon bringing enough spare clothes for a lifetime. Vida had rolled her eyes, but Nora reminded her what a trial Mother had been through, that she should go easy.
“Oh, but do be careful,” Mother said now, almost standing up as though to come along with them.
“I know that it will take some time for you to trust this,” Fitzhugh said in his steady way, “but I will never let your daughter in harm’s way ever again.”
Mother smiled and lowered herself back into her seat, and Father patted Mother’s knee. “Well, put a fur on, anyway,” she said.
The air on the top deck of the ferry was sharp and exhilarating. Vida felt the cold under her cheekbones, behind her earlobes. This despite the fur she had dutifully draped over her shoulders. A city was coming into view—a city unlike any she’d ever seen. It went on and on forever, its forest of docks stretching off the coast of the place, the buildings that rose from its whole length, as far as she could see. She didn’t know precisely what lay beyond that first line of cityscape, although she had