Sophia gasped awake and sat up in bed, one hand over her mouth. Hot tears fell upon the bedclothes. Her heart pounded with the remnants of the jinniyeh’s panic; she breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.
Dima? she called. But there was no answer. The jinniyeh had gotten better at shutting her out—but their connection was stronger when Sophia dreamt.
After a while she wiped her tears away and rose from her bed, wrapped a silk robe over her thin nightgown. She went to the writing-desk, found a fresh sheet of paper, and wrote:
Lusitania sunk near coast of Ireland. Torpedo to starboard side.
She folded this once, placed it in an envelope, wrote the date and time across the seal, and took it downstairs.
It was late morning; she’d been up until three, walking the low cliff along the ocean, listening to the waves. All her hated childhood summers had been spent here, enduring badminton lessons and lawn parties. Now, though, she appreciated the place far better; it reminded her of her father. You were not meant to be tamed, the crashing waves seemed to whisper to the clipped boxwoods, the manicured lawn. You, too, would be free, if it were not for the work of men’s hands.
She found her mother in a chair in the solarium, watching the water, a cup of tea untouched beside her. She glanced up at Sophia as she entered, then away again. Sophia had flatly refused to speak to her mother—no polite small talk, no discussion of meals or her health—until Julia acknowledged the truth of what had happened to them. And thus silence had reigned since their arrival.
Sophia placed the envelope on the table. “Open this tomorrow night,” she said. “And then tell me it’s all mesmerism and suggestion.”
* * *
At the Faddouls’ coffee-house, the news arrived in a rush of murmurs and gasps that started at the door and swept to the back of the shop. All bowed their heads in prayer for the dead and the missing. Before long, their shock had progressed to speculation. Many swore that America would declare within a month; spirits rose at the thought of a swift end to the war, their families safe, the whole terrible ordeal behind them. And then who would rule Syria, when the Turks had gone? The French, the Russians, the English? Why not ourselves? a few voices said—and soon all were mired in debate.
Maryam walked among them, pouring coffee, saying little. It had been weeks since the Amherst burned—and yet still, in her dance between the tables, she occasionally caught the distracting, heartbreaking scent of springtime loam.
The customers argued and sighed and drank their coffee, and at last departed, leaving their newspapers behind. Maryam swept the shop and gathered the papers, and found among them a copy of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She hesitated—and then thought of all the friends and neighbors who’d come to her café looking for a bit of guidance, a small sign that pointed toward a more hopeful future. Perhaps, she thought, it was time to take her own advice.
She opened the newspaper, and found the listings for storefronts on Atlantic Avenue.
At the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews, the announcement of the Lusitania’s torpedoing came during the Havdalah service. The children sat in uncharacteristic silence as the headmaster read the headline from the dais, his voice thick with tears. He spoke at length about the patriotism of America’s Jews stretching back to the Revolution, and the duty of every good citizen to take a stand against brazen tyranny. The older boys shuddered, thinking of shells and trenchworks and U-boats.
The service ended, and the headmistress dried her eyes and went back to her office, where a dozen applications for the new Culinary Science position waited upon her desk. Idly she read them over, then put them down with a sigh. The wall in the basement had been patched over, Miss Altschul’s cot and footlocker removed from her dormitory. The hiring of the new instructor was the final step in expunging all traces of what had happened that day—yet there was nothing to be done about the story itself, which now existed in a hundred different tellings, each more lurid and outlandish than the next. A few of the instructors had suggested disciplinary measures for those caught repeating it, but the headmistress knew better. Before long, the story would wear itself into mundanity; it would become merely another ghost in the Asylum halls, another bit of lore that the children absorbed with their morning toast and stewed prunes. Be careful in the basement, or Miss Levy’s monster will crawl out of its closet, hunt you down, and chew on your bones.
* * *
The empty shell of the Amherst sat crumbling on its corner.
The building itself was now a source of some consternation. Its owner was presumed to have perished in the fire, and no one knew of any possible inheritors—which meant that, by law, it would become the property of New York State, a process that promised to take months. In the meantime, the structure continued to creak and decay. The children of Little Syria were warned away from it time and time again, yet still their mothers found strange new items in their pockets: shining lumps of steel, melted squares of opaque blue glass.
Then, news. An investment company had taken interest in the site, and was willing to purchase it from the state at a favorable price. The bureaucratic wheels were greased, and before long the wreck of the Amherst belonged to the Troy Investment Company of Wilmington, Delaware. No one had ever heard of Troy Investment, but that was nothing strange; half the buildings in Little Syria were owned by distant, unseen landlords. All the negotiations were handled by an intermediary. The owner’s name appeared nowhere on the paperwork.
The ink had barely dried on the deed of
