In the Shadow of Blackbirds(13)

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes, why?” I lifted my head. “Do I look sick?”

“No. I just worried all night you’d wake up with the flu from the train.”

“I feel fine.” I rubbed my dry eyes.

“We need to leave for Julius’s studio in two hours. Get dressed soon so we can eat breakfast. We also need to make sacks of camphor balls to wear around our necks so the stink can fight off germs on the ferry.”

On that repulsive-sounding note, she left the room.

I curled beneath my covers and watched the sun rise behind the lace curtains of my new window. Portland felt impossibly far away. I wondered when my father would go to trial. After the authorities had locked his wrists in handcuffs and punched him in the gut, I grabbed my bags, headed out the back door, and ran to telegraph Aunt Eva from the Portland Union Depot, as Dad had instructed me to do. I spent the night on a bench at the station until the morning train took me away. No one came looking for Mr. Robert Black’s sixteen-year-old daughter. There were too many other concerns in the world for anyone to bother with an accused traitor’s grown child.

I shut my eyes and pushed back the memory, finding breathing painful.

My thoughts turned to Aunt Eva’s troubles and poor, dead Uncle Wilfred. He had died in June in the tuberculosis home, but I wondered if his spirit had found its way back to his own house. Despite my skepticism of Julius’s spirit photography, and of ghosts in general, the possibility of life after death never seemed entirely foolish when I lay in bed all alone, my imagination whirring. I actually convinced myself I heard Uncle Wilfred cough in the room next door, which sent me flying out from under my blankets to get dressed.

I lifted the lid of my traveling trunk and grimaced.

“Cripes. What a morbid wardrobe.”

My dresses and skirts were either black or a navy blue so dark it was almost black. The lack of German dyes in the country drained every ounce of color from our clothing, ensuring we all looked as grim as the world around us. I pulled out a navy dress with a calf-length hem, a sailor-style collar, and a loose tie the same shade as the rest of the garment. In an attempt to brighten my appearance, I opened the wide mouth of my mother’s leather bag, slid my fingers inside the same slippery pocket that had held my goggles, and pulled out a necklace my father had made me from a clockmaker friend’s spare brass gear.

Even the gleaming metal looked dull against my drab, dark wool.

“You’re not going to see Stephen at his house,” I reminded my reflection in the mirror. “You can look dour. Who’s going to care?”

I gathered my long hair in a white ribbon at the base of my neck and tucked my gauze mask into the sash around my waist for later. Fumes from Aunt Eva’s onion omelets bombarded my nostrils.

“Are you almost ready for breakfast, Mary Shelley?” my aunt called from downstairs.

“Who’s there?” squawked Oberon.

“I’m coming,” I said.

I looked at another of my treasures nestled inside my mother’s black bag—Stephen’s butterfly photograph, Mr. Muse—before facing the rest of the day.


WE TRAVELED TO CORONADO ON THE SAME FERRY WE’D taken back in April—the Ramona—and leaned against the polished rails of the vessel’s bow while the cool winds of San Diego Bay whipped through our hair. During the trip in April, the breeze had carried the sharp scent of tar from the slips where the ferries docked, but this time around I could only smell my own onion breath stinking up my mask, as well as the menthol-like pungency of the camphor pouches hanging around our necks. Steam whistled into the clear sky from the ferry’s two black smokestacks. Side paddle wheels churned the waters into a salty white spray that flicked against my hands.

“Before our last trip, I always pictured the Emberses living on the Swiss Family Robinson’s island,” I admitted to Aunt Eva as we cruised toward the populated stretch of land no more than a half mile across the bay. A biplane from the Naval Air Station on North Coronado buzzed into the cloudless sky. “Stephen always wrote about living on an island, so I envisioned him swinging on vines and eating his dinner out of coconut shells. But it’s not even an island, is it? It’s a peninsula.”

“No one calls it that,” said Aunt Eva.

“Stephen said there’s a narrow road connecting the island to the mainland for people who don’t mind driving around the bay.”

“I wonder if this is a terrible idea.” My aunt picked at the rail with one of her freshly scrubbed fingernails.

“If what is a terrible idea? Sitting for another spirit photograph?”

“No, taking you back over there. Letting you have that package.”

“What do you think is going to happen if I get that package? Stephen will magically appear and ravish me right there in his brother’s studio?”

“Shh! Mind your mouth, Mary Shelley. Good heavens.” Aunt Eva eyed two children eight feet away from us—two little girls with big blue eyes half hidden beneath their flu masks. They stretched their chubby arms over the rails and called out to seagulls circling over the water, “Come here. Come here, silly birds.”

My aunt lowered her voice so I could scarcely hear. “You used to be as pure as those little girls.”

“Let’s not have this conversation again.”