FIVE
WEDNESDAYS
by
Kincaid Jones
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We live in a period of atomic chaos …
and the hunt for happiness will never be greater
than when it must be caught between
today and tomorrow.
-Nietzsche
We are the most alive when we are in love.
-John Updike
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THE LAST WEDNESDAY
October 31, 1962
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CHAPTER 1: Red Rain Hat
Rosie O’Brien stood in the open hull of the Washington State Ferry, thinking about love and how it had overlooked her. Every friend she had was married, some even happily, yet at the advanced age of twenty-eight, Miss O’Brien was still aggrievedly unattached and overly ripe.
Rosie was a ferry worker with black, bobbed hair and a round, cheerful face, now covered in green grease paint and beading under the increasing drizzle. With her rain boots firmly planted on the lower car deck, she braved the roiling waters of Puget Sound as the lights of the new Space Needle faded in the distance.
Built for the recent World’s Fair, the towering structure had staked Seattle’s claim as the “City of the Future,” and in a six-month run from April to October, the Exposition had attracted such dignitaries as John Glenn, John Wayne, Robert Kennedy, Nat King Cole, Prince Philip, and Walt Disney. Billy Graham had preached a sermon on the fairgrounds, and even the King of Rock’ n’ Roll himself had filmed an entire motion picture there.
Just eleven days earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been slated to preside over the Fair’s closing ceremonies, only to withdraw the day before, citing a “severe cold.” The news had crushed Rosie, who rejected Press Secretary Salinger’s explanation for the President’s abrupt return to Washington. Anyone who’d read the supermarket magazines as much as she had would have seen through that ruse. It was as obvious to Rosie as the green nose on her face that the recent suicide of Marilyn Monroe had been weighing heavily on JFK, and that the Leader of the Free World was not suffering from a common cold, but rather, from a broken heart.
Rosie felt a kinship with Marilyn because she thought their curves were similar, although Rosie’s were undercover on this stormy night, and the boxy cut of her foul weather gear wasn’t doing her full figure any favors. But no one could hold that against her. Especially not Angus.
Angus Donovan, a weathered sailor at the age of thirty-one, had been sizing up Rosie’s curves for months. Tall and waggish, with enormous Popeye forearms and a rusty beard, Angus was an “Able-Bodied Seaman,” making him Rosie’s superior—but in rank only. Pulling up his rain hood, he stepped out into the weather, approaching her with an eager smile, only to be met with a glare that would make lesser men shrivel. But not Angus. Even with green makeup streaking down her face, he’d never met a girl as fetching as Rosie Abigail O’Brien.
“You goin’ to the Halloween party later?” he asked with a bit of a brogue.
“Maybe.”
“I called you last night to—”
“I was out.”
“I reckoned you were out. Tootsie Roll Pop?” He held open a pillowcase on which he’d written “TRICKS OR TREATS” in red marker pen, the letters now running together in the rain.
“Don’t think you can buy my affection,” Rosie said, reaching in and pulling out two suckers before unwrapping and plopping the cherry one in her mouth. Angus stared at her chipmunk cheek and thought of friends who joked about things one could infer about a girl by the way she licked her Tootsie. But Angus didn’t trek with rubbish like that.
“Something on your mind, Lass?”
“I am twenty-eight years old, Angus Donovan, and if the world ended tomorrow, I’d still be waiting for you to—” She paused as a couple in raincoats passed by, nodding to the woman in a red rain hat.
“Waiting for me to …” Angus prodded.
“Waiting for you to get up the nerve to kiss me!”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so! So, you’d better step up 'cuz there’s plenty of other fish to fry in the sea.”
She amused him.
“Alright then,” he said, looking around, then leaning in, lips first—
CLANG! CLANG! A bell rang, signaling their arrival on Langley Island and initiating docking protocol. “Lucky break,” Rosie sighed as passengers descended from the cafeteria deck, returning to their cars. “Raincheck?” said a disappointed Angus, turning his attention to hanging out the white plastic bumpers, port and starboard, while Rosie collected the orange traffic cones.
“Two stragglers on the sundeck. Over.” Their walkie-talkies squawked in unison. “Copy that,” said Rosie, beating Angus to the draw. “They’re out at the bow,” said an annoyed female voice, “in trench coats and hats, like a scene out of Casablanca or something. It’s choppy as hell up there.”
“On my way,” said Rosie, putting on her black witch’s hat.
“Not so fast, Lassie!” Angus took out his handkerchief and dabbed the green makeup dripping from her hooked putty nose. “We don’t want you scaring the children, now do we?”
Before taking her leave, Rosie fixed her eyes on him, savoring one long, last lick of her sucker, twirling it around and around and around on her tongue—before cracking the hard candy shell between her powerful jaws.
“Ah, Jesus!” Angus winced.
Truth be told, she also terrified him.
After running up two flights of metal stairs to the socked-in sundeck, a winded Rosie spotted two distant figures standing out at the bow under an umbrella. When she approached the couple, they seemed unaware of anything but each other, suspended in the kind of silence that usually marks the beginning or end of things.
Nonetheless, Rosie had a job to do. “That was the bell, folks.”
“We’ve still got time,” said the man in the Mackintosh, with a proper British accent. His companion lowered her head, obscuring her face with her red hat.
“Well, unless you’re walk-ons, there’s about to be a lot of angry drivers downstairs, so pip, pip, Cheerios, spit spot!” Her levity seemed to leave him cold, so she turned to the woman. “You alright, Your Highness?” The woman nodded without lifting her head.
“She’s fine. Please, if we could just have some privacy?” said the man.
“It’s not safe up here, folks, so… oh, alright, but I’ll be waiting for you back at the stairs, so don’t dilly-dally!” Rosie chuckled at her jolly old joke all the way back to the stairwell as Angus burst through the door, chest heaving. “Everything alright, Luv? They’re about to lose their minds down there!”
“All under control. They just need a minute.”
“Well, alright, then … So, m’lady never answered me about tonight.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Oh. Well. I see,” Angus said.
“Life is short, Angus Donovan, and my clock is ticking so—”
Angus quickly licked his lips and leaned in close, closer than he’d ever gotten, so close he could smell the Dove soap on her neck—
“Pardon me,” said a teenage boy in a plaid shirt, coming in from the storm.
“Oh, hey there!” Angus squeaked, wrenching himself away from Rosie once again. “Young man, did you happen to see a couple out there?”
“Yeah, I think they’re coming in now,” he said, studying her green face.
“I’m going to our Halloween party later,” Rosie explained. “Angus here is taking me.”
“I am? Oh— I mean, I AM!” Angus beamed. “Well then, son, best get back to your car before the buggers start honking!” Angus opened the stairwell door for him as a swell of horns rose up from below, then turned back to Rosie. “So, I’ll swing by your locker and pick you up?”
“You’d better,” she said, grinning broadly, and Angus grinned back even bigger.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for the amount of me that’s about to come your way, Little Lady.” He pecked her on the cheek and bounded down the stairs, leaving Rosie alone to savor the moment and the possibilities. And then she remembered. “Hey!” she called, rushing back into the rain toward the bow, “Hey, you two!”
“No need to shout,” said the man in the Mackintosh, emerging from the storm.
“Where is she?”
“Let’s give her a moment, shall we?” he said, striding past her toward the stairwell. “Wait!” Rosie called after him, and when he didn’t, she pulled out her walkie-talkie.
“Anyone seen a woman in a raincoat and hat? Over.”
“Negative,” was the answer from the car deck.
“All clear here,” came the answer from the cafeteria deck.
“Hang on— I think I see something!”
The boat was tossing with such ferocity as Rosie fought her way toward the railing. “Your Highness, is that you?” she shouted, squinting through the rain, desperate to make sure she’d seen what she’d seen. “Your Highness!” Then into her radio, “I need assistance! Need assistance, STAT!”
The rain was coming down at an angle now, and even though it stung like a trillion tiny needles, Rosie kept calling, kept pressing through the wind and waves, searching for the woman in the red rain hat … until she was quite, quite certain something terrible had become of her.
CHAPTER 2: The Man in the Mack
Four Weeks Earlier
The whoosh of hot, frothing milk echoed across the Langley Island Ferry Terminal, emanating from the wind-battered shack on the short pier, which, in any other state, on any other coastline, would sell Fritos and bait. This one sold cappuccino.
Langley Island, situated at the northernmost tip of Puget Sound, was a heavily forested mass of land, sixty miles long, ten miles wide, and divided up the center by a two-lane highway. It was the largest in a cluster of islands from which workers and businessmen commuted to Seattle by ferry. With its raspberry farms and fishing villages, Langley Island attracted a heartier stock. Those who required a greater distance between themselves and their neighbors. The kind who could weather the storm.
It was only the second day of October, but the grounds of the modest ferry terminal were prematurely decorated for Halloween. Hay bales and carved pumpkins adorned the tollbooth, while a life-sized scarecrow sat on a stool in front of the real toll-taker, to the delight of children in pre-boarding cars.
Putting on her red rain hat, Sarah stared through the window at the thick morning mist. The water lapping on rocky shores created a calming effect, interrupted by the occasional seagull diving for crumbs tossed by commuters. It was a novel way to start the day and one of several reasons why Sarah Morton Jones had begun to look forward to her now weekly trips into Seattle.
She was parked in one of the prized spots at the head of Lane Three, surveying her fellow commuters through her windshield as they chatted with friends and drank their coffees, waiting for the moment when the incoming ferry from the Mainland crossed Possession Strait and began its final approach to Langley. Even then, it would still take a good ten minutes before the arriving boat had fully docked and all vehicles had disembarked.
Sarah got out of her Jaguar to gauge the length of the line at The Shack’s take-out window and decided to risk it. As she tiptoed across the short pier in her high heels, she passed frustrated customers balancing Styrofoam coffees, rushing back to their cars to avoid the ultimate offense of holding up their lane from boarding.
Anabella, the proprietor and sole employee, had slowed down of late due to the cancer and struggled to operate the brass espresso machine she’d brought from Sicily as a young war bride. The Shack was one of the only places in Seattle that served cappuccino, and Sarah, having spent her early teens in Tuscany waiting out the Blitz, could vouch for its authenticity. Sarah, however, was slavishly devoted to her English tea, and thankfully, Anabella had stocked up.
“Tea’s ready!” Anabella shouted to Sarah, who sidestepped her way past grumbling patrons to the front of the line, whispering her apologies. “How are you feeling, Bella?” Sarah said loudly, reminding her fellow customers of her friend’s ill health.
“Can’t complain. Don’t you look fancy!” Anabella said, handing Sarah an odd two-handled china cup with a fitted lid, a novelty of French design called a Tasse Trembleuse, for those suffering from “the trembles.” Anabella had inherited a set of the rare vessels and brought them in for Sarah, whose anxiety had been getting the better of her lately. Sarah detested drinking her tea out of the new Styrofoam cups with plastic lids, which she believed to be a leading indicator of the end of civilization and further evidence that Americans lacked standards.
“Here’s last week’s,” Sarah said, returning an identical two-handled cup wrapped in layers and layers of tissue paper. Anabella shook her head, amused by Sarah’s cautiousness.
“I couldn’t forgive myself if something happened to your family heirloom, Bella—”
HONK! HONK! Drivers tooted from the landing. “Oh dear, that’s me!” Sarah said.
“Wait, hang on, you’ve left the price on your blouse!” Anabella glanced at the amount before tucking the tag into Sarah’s collar. “Fancy! You should wear this when you see Jackie.”
“Jackie?” Sarah asked.
Anabella exchanged glances with the nosy woman behind Sarah. Sarah was either getting better at spotting people’s glances or people were doing it more often.
“Hello, Sarah? When you see Mrs. Kennedy, silly!”
“Shhh,” Sarah said, hoping no one had heard, especially not the nosy woman behind her.
“You actually know the First Lady?!” shouted the nosy woman behind her.
“They’re friends from college! Sarah’s going to the closing ceremonies as her guest!”
A burst of car horns, then a voice on the loudspeaker demanded the return of the driver of the forest green Jaguar with the steering wheel on the wrong side, blocking Lane Three.
HONNNNNK!
“Oh dear, that’s me! Grazie, Anabella!” Sarah called as she turned heel and ran, her teacup and porcelain lid rattling all the way back to the landing.
As the honking escalated, she concentrated on navigating the boardwalk in her high heels—on not tripping, not letting them get to her, and not, under any circumstances, looking up.
When the rabid drivers laid eyes on the well-dressed woman in the red rain hat, they leaned even harder on their horns, cursing at her through closed windows. Trembling, she set Anabella’s heirloom china teacup on the roof of her Jaguar and, with all eyes upon her, rummaged through her purse for her keys. Nothing.
HONNNNNNK!
Panicked, she patted the pockets of her London Fog. Nothing again.
Oh, dear God.
HONNNNNNNNNNK!
Heart racing, face flushed, she struggled for breath—then crouched down and covered her head, scanning the grounds for shelter—first left, then right, then left again—
And that’s when she saw him.
A few lanes over, a middle-aged man in a Mackintosh and fedora got out of a white Mercedes and surveyed the scene. As commuters pounded their steering wheels, he wound his way toward her, smiling with the perfect amount of empathy. When he extended his hand to help her to her feet, she shuddered with a wave of recognition, which he must have felt, too, because there, amidst the clatter of the madding crowd, they held each other’s gaze, and for one brief, buoyant moment … time simply tread water.
HONNNNNNNNNNNK!
When the world crashed back in, the Man in the Mack winked at her as if to say, trust me—which she already did, somehow. She watched in wonder as he turned to face the loud and angry mob—and simply raised his arms.
It wasn’t a grand gesture as gestures go, but as if by alchemy, the over-caffeinated drivers slowly regained their composure until, mercifully, everything fell silent. The man shot her a grin over his shoulder as if they’d shared a delightful private joke, and a grateful Sarah jingled her newfound car keys and mouthed the words Thank you.
He nodded back, implying it had been his pleasure, and with his arms still held high, he kept her tormentors at bay until she’d driven safely onto the ferry ... leaving a shattered china teacup on the asphalt behind her.
