The Last Train to Key West Read online

  “There are police officers here. The nurses will keep an eye on you. He’s not going to hurt you again.”

  “I’ll be better when we can leave.” When we can disappear. “Have you heard anything about my aunt?”

  “No, I haven’t. I’ll keep asking. If she wasn’t injured too badly in the storm, they probably wouldn’t have evacuated her until later. Hopefully, she’ll show up here soon.”

  “And the men in the camps? Did the train get them out safely?”

  I’ve been ensconced with Lucy in this hotel room, cut off from the rest of the world. I keep thinking about the people who came to dine at Ruby’s passing on to their next destination, everyone who called this stretch of the Keys home.

  John is silent for a few moments, his gaze fixated on some point on the wall behind me.

  “They tried to evacuate the men from the camps. Sent a train to get them out, but it ran into problems on the way down and was delayed. It didn’t even make it to the camp where I worked. It hardly mattered. It was too late for most of them by the time the train arrived at the other camps. The tidal surge got them. They say the train cars are littered across the ground, the railroad destroyed. They’re still unearthing the bodies.”

  I gasp. “How many—”

  “Hundreds, maybe. That’s what they’re saying, at least. It’s a shame. A damn shame. They were good men. They deserved better than what they got.” He clears his throat, tears swimming in his eyes. “They’re mounting rescue efforts to go down and treat people. To help with the bodies. There’s a real risk of disease spreading and becoming an issue with that many corpses.”

  “Your medical training will be useful.”

  “It will be. I don’t want to leave you and Lucy, not when you don’t know where your husband is, or your aunt, when you’re afraid, but you saw what it was like down there. I worked beside so many of those men. I have a duty to them. If there are people to be treated, rescued, they’re going to need all the help they can get.”

  “Of course.”

  Worry fills me, but my fear hardly seems reasonable in the face of all everyone else has lost.

  “I’ll be back in a day or two.” John leans forward, and his lips brush my forehead, the scent of his soap filling my nostrils.

  There’s so much I wish to say, but words seem inadequate, and as I try to conjure the right ones, they slip away from me. I never realized giving birth would be such exhausting work, but I’m drained, my limbs heavy, gait sluggish, brain foggy. The nurses say it’s my body’s response to the two shocks—the storm and labor—but I can’t help but wonder if I’ll ever feel like myself again.

  “I’ll come back to you soon,” he promises.

  Thirty

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1935

  Mirta

  The smell of death surrounds us, the decay of flesh unbearable. What was an island paradise now feels unmistakably like hell.

  There’s a lawlessness down here, a sense of fear that has settled among the survivors. Looters scavenge the beaches, stealing from empty, damaged houses.

  I am someone I no longer recognize, a feral creature who has lost all sense of niceness and politeness, who is concerned with one thing and one thing only:

  Survival.

  “There’s a boat,” Anthony shouts, and I follow him out the front door, to the space where our dock used to be before the storm hit, and there’s a boat waiting for us.

  The Coast Guard.

  It’s finally our turn to leave.

  * * *

  —

  They’ve set up assistance for the storm survivors at the First Baptist Church in Homestead, Florida, and people trickle in all day long after we arrive, the seriously injured heading north to the hospital in Miami.

  One of Anthony’s local friends and business partners greets us at the church, dropping off a car and some fresh clothes for us, a few essentials.

  We arrive at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables in the early evening, checking into a sumptuous suite.

  Anthony leaves me alone to make some phone calls and meet with his business associates. I undress, sinking into a warm bath and washing away the grime of the past few days. Anthony sends up food with a note not to wait for him, and after my bath and a quick phone call to my family in Havana to let them know I’m fine, I dine on steak paired with a fine vintage of red wine, devouring the thick, juicy cut of meat with a hunger I’ve never experienced before.

  After I’ve finished, chocolate mousse for dessert, the hotel room door opens, and Anthony crosses the threshold. He seems exhausted, the suit he changed into earlier rumpled, his hair mussed.

  “How did your meetings go?” I ask, rising to greet him with a kiss.

  “Things seem to be in order. I got us tickets for the railroad to take us back to New York. With everything that happened, it seems best to go home as soon as possible. If Frank Morgan is going to move against me, I need to be prepared. I’m too exposed here.” He pours himself a drink from the wine bottle sitting on the table. “We should have done this all along. We should have stayed in some elegant hotel rather than roughing it like we did. I’m sorry I took you down there, that I put you in danger. I wanted us to get to know each other, away from everyone else and all the stories of my past.” He gives a bitter laugh. “I wanted you to get to know me without seeing me as some gangster who wasn’t worth your time. I know we’re an unusual match. I know if things were different, you could have married someone far better than me. But I wanted to make you happy.”

  I wrap my arms around him, resting my head against his chest, making a space for myself in the curve of his embrace.

  “I keep seeing that man holding a knife to your neck,” he whispers.

  “I keep seeing his eyes in the moments before he died,” I confess.

  “You shouldn’t feel guilty about that.”

  “You keep saying that, but it doesn’t make it easier. Will there be other men who come after us? Is this what our future will look like?” I take a deep breath. “One day, will a man hold a knife to one of our children’s necks?”

  “I will never let that happen.”

  “How will you stop it? You told me your enemies want what you have, that power is a target on your back.”

  “What would you have me do? Get out of the business altogether? There are those who will view me abandoning my less legitimate interests as a sign of weakness, who will be emboldened by it and will strike against me because they believe they can.”

  “Then make it impossible for them to see you as weak. But this life—how will we raise a family like this? How will we be happy if we are constantly glancing over our shoulders, fearing the next attack?”

  “Is that what you want from me? A family? After what you’ve seen of my life?”

  “What else is there?”

  “I don’t know.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “You could go back to Cuba. Buy a house close to your family. You’d be safer there. I would understand if that’s what you wanted. This marriage—I was wrong to think I could bring a wife into this life. To go about things as I did. I’m so sorry.”

  His apology isn’t enough.

  Once, I would have been grateful for it, taken the scraps he tossed my way as an encouraging sign that he was a good man, that he respected me.

  It’s not enough.

  I want it all—a partnership, his love, and I want the safety and security of a future where I don’t have to worry that I will be collateral damage for another man’s whims.

  I demand it.

  “I’m not going back to Cuba. I am your wife. My place is by your side. Those promises we made when we married each other—I want them. But we can’t have that life if we’re constantly in danger. And what’s the alternative? We go into hiding somewhere?

  “I’m tired. Tired of making myself small so no one
will strike against me or my family. We did that in Cuba when my father’s decisions led to our ruin, and I won’t do it again. I’m tired of always being afraid, of my life being dictated by others’ decisions. You want me, you want to have a family with me, then you fix this.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  I meet his gaze. “Whatever it takes.”

  “You’ll stay beside me?”

  It’s a chance for a fresh start to our relationship; despite how we began, in this moment, for our future, I am choosing him.

  “I will.”

  He pulls a small black box out of his jacket pocket. “I didn’t do this properly the first time; I hope this makes up for it.”

  Anthony kneels down before me and opens the jewelry box.

  The diamond is smaller than the one he gave me back in Havana, the ring that could be somewhere with a dead man. The new ring sports a round stone, encircled by more diamonds, the thin band studded with them.

  It’s beautiful, and unmistakably something I would have chosen for myself.

  “I love it.”

  I extend my hand to Anthony, and he slides the engagement ring on my finger beside the simple band he gave me during our marriage ceremony in Cuba.

  We come together in a frenzy, the depth of my desire staggering me.

  For as long as I remember, I was told not to want more than I could have, to be pleasing, and pliant, and subordinate my wants to the needs of my family, taught that the greatest height I could hope to achieve was to belong to another. No longer. Let him belong to me. Let him work to earn my affections.

  I’m done settling for anything less.

  Thirty-One

  Helen

  They’ve printed a list of the dead and missing in the Miami Herald, and I scan the names, my heart in my throat, searching for Tom.

  His name isn’t there.

  Is Tom scanning the lists for my name, or is he up here looking for me himself, wondering if I’m one of the nameless victims whose bodies have been found but not yet identified?

  The fear of the unknown haunts me.

  In the hurricane’s aftermath, we exist in a state of waiting for news, the recovery process slowed by how many are still unable to find answers about what happened on September 2. I can’t fathom learning a loved one has died from reading their name in a newspaper. How do you go on after a thing like that? How do you wish to?

  For as much as I hope to see Tom’s name printed in black and white among the dead and missing, I worry equally that I will see my aunt Alice’s there.

  But her name isn’t, either.

  In John’s absence, I turn to the newspapers, to the nurses for updates. They say the National Guard is preventing people from going home. That there are so many dead bodies that it’s unsafe to return. They’re searching for victims on land, by boat.

  What sort of horrors is John seeing as he helps with the recovery efforts?

  People are still dying from their injuries; others simply disappeared, their bodies unaccounted for, their families desperately searching for them.

  I’m not sure what would be harder, the finality of death, or the uncertainty of it all, the absence of a body, the inability to achieve a sense of closure. Then again, how do you get closure after a thing like this?

  There are some who never will.

  It’s as though the hand of God has come down and reordered the world as we know it. Entire families are gone, swept away by the water and winds, and the living are left with the question:

  Why were we spared when so many others weren’t?

  With each day that passes without Tom, Lucy and I become more and more of a family, and I settle into the idea of raising her on my own, allowing myself to slip into the dream of a life without him. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that he was ever here at all, the sight of my daughter so all-consuming, as though little else mattered before she came into the world. My life is divided into “before” and “after,” and I have come out of the experience of motherhood reborn as someone new.

  But other times, I can’t forget him, the memory of his body pressing me into the mattress, his hot breath on my neck, his hands—

  I jolt awake, my heart pounding, my body covered in sweat. I turn toward the crib where the nurses have allowed Lucy to sleep in my room.

  It’s empty.

  I lurch up from the bed, pulling back the sheets.

  “Helen. I have the baby. She’s right here.”

  John walks toward the bed from his corner of the room, Lucy bundled up in his arms, and hands her to me.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you. I came back tonight and I wanted to check on you. You were sleeping, but Lucy was awake and I wanted you to get some rest.”

  I help the baby latch on to nurse, my heartbeat still erratic.

  “No, it’s fine, I just had a bad dream. When I woke up, and she was gone, I thought Tom might have taken her.”

  John strokes my hair. “You’re safe.”

  Will I ever be safe? Or will I always need to glance over my shoulder as long as my husband is in this world?

  “I’m glad you’re back safely. How bad was it?”

  “I thought I’d seen the worst that could happen to a man when I went to war. But nothing prepared me for this. You expect to see death on the battlefield. But these weren’t soldiers. There were women, children. People trapped in their homes who had nowhere to go when the storm hit.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I am. As bad as it was, it helped to do something. There was this little girl who’d hurt her shoulder. Had to set it. She was so brave. She’d lost her father and her brother, and we pulled her out from beneath an icebox. It wasn’t even their icebox. Some neighbor’s that blew for miles. When we found her body, it seemed like her death was a foregone conclusion. But then I realized she was breathing. It took a few of us to pull the icebox off her. It was a miracle she survived. She’s going to make it, though. We brought her up to the hospital here.”

  “I’m glad you were able to help her. You’re good at that—taking care of people.”

  “It felt good. Even in the midst of all that horribleness, there was hope. I don’t know. I guess I missed practicing medicine more than I realized.

  “In the war, there was so little to be done for so many. It was difficult to face a man and know he likely wouldn’t survive his injuries, that for all my training and experience, there wasn’t much I could do. I forgot how good it feels to give someone a chance.”

  “You could go back to practicing medicine, couldn’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would you want to?”

  “I don’t know. When I came home from France, I didn’t understand why my life was saved when so many others weren’t. A part of me wanted to die, too, because living with their voices in my head, their final moments playing over and over again, was infinitely harder. But now, it seems like there should be something more than death. Like maybe there is something else I am meant to do while I am on this earth.”

  “You saved us.”

  “No. You saved yourself. You would have done what you had to do to protect Lucy. I happened to be there at the right time.”

  “I’ll kill him.” The words come out louder than I intended in the quiet, dark night, but I have never meant anything more. “God help me, if he comes after me and Lucy, if he tries to hurt her, to take her, I will kill him.”

  John is silent for a beat, and I wonder if I’ve horrified him with my honesty, if he’s not equipped to handle the fury inside me burning bright and sharp.

  He leans forward and kisses my forehead, his voice in my ear.

  “He’s never going to hurt you again.”

  * * *

  —

  When I wake the next morning, John is gone, and the nurse tells me he went
to get some food and will be back shortly.

  “You’re healing well,” she informs me. “That baby of yours is doing fine, too. They’ll let you all go home soon.”

  I’ve been so focused on recovering, on what will happen if Tom finds us; I’ve thought little of what happens next, of where we will go when we are released from the hospital. I’ve still heard nothing of Aunt Alice, and based on the scene John described and the pictures of the hurricane’s destruction that fill the newspaper, I can’t imagine returning to Islamorada.

  At the same time, Key West isn’t home anymore, either, especially if Tom is alive.

  “You have a visitor,” one of the nurses announces. Her eyes widen slightly. “A new one. A man.”

  My heart pounds. “Did he tell you his name?”

  “He said his name was Matthew.”

  She returns with a man dressed in a pair of overalls and a white shirt.

  I recognize him instantly from the Sunrise Inn—he worked behind the front desk for my aunt.

  The expression on his face, his hat in hand, tells me everything I need to know.

  “She’s gone,” I say.

  “Yes.” His voice cracks over the word.

  Tears well in my eyes, spilling onto my cheeks.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “We were hit hard. The inn wasn’t strong enough to hold up against the wind, the water. She ran out to check on you, to make sure you were safe. The roads were already washed out when she set out, and she had to turn back. We waited out the storm in the inn; there wasn’t anyplace to go.” His eyes swim with tears. “Only two of us made it. The rest—”

  He wipes at his brow.

  “I loved that woman. Your aunt. Worked for her for almost a decade, when your uncle was still alive, and after. I always thought there would be time to tell her. To get her used to the idea. I knew she cared for me, but I didn’t know if she felt the same way, if—” His voice breaks off. “I would have traded places with her in a heartbeat.”