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Iduna and Agnarr are relieved, more than anything, when Anna says her first word. The pediatrician is concerned, little Anna has been falling behind the bell-curve.
Elsa is in bed, it’s late. Anna is finishing up her night-night bottle, but they put the VHS in all the same. It’s a long movie, after all.
Before kids they’d have seen it in theaters, but it’s been months, already, of their childless friends raving about it instead. Insisting that they absolutely must see this movie.
“Ship!” Anna squeaks, kicking her chubby legs and knocking the bottle away, “Ship! Ship!”
“That’s right, sweetie,” Iduna says, letting her squirming daughter down from her lap, meeting her husband’s equally stunned expression. “Did you teach her that?”
He shakes his head, “No. The flashcard says boat, I thought?”
He’s right.
“Hmm. Must have been Elsa?” Suggests Iduna.
“Must be,” replies Agnarr, scooping his little daughter up, away from the TV screen and into his arms, holding her close. “Clever girl, Anna! The Titanic was a ship!”
-
Agnarr and Iduna are a modern sort of couple. They certainly don’t mind if their youngest daughter prefers boats and oceans over barbies and tea sets.
It takes a turn for the morbid, though, as she grows.
“How cold is the ocean?” She asks her Father, during a favorite marine documentary.
“Oh, very cold, in some parts,” he says.
“What is drowning like?” She asks her Mom, during a bath.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Iduna soothes, “Mommy’s right here.”
“If a boat was on fire and the water was ice, then what would happen if -” she says one day, out of the blue.
“Anna! No more questions!”
-
Anna is in the fifth grade when their teacher tells them it is the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Anna doesn’t care, initially. It’s her birthday, and her Mom is bringing in cupcakes for the class at lunch.
The teacher reads them a book about an unsinkable ship. How it hit an iceberg, and they didn’t have enough lifeboats, and a lot of people died.
The teacher holds the book out so everybody can see the picture. It’s a ship - half a ship, really, sticking up out of the water at a frightening angle.
Anna is crying, silently.
“It was so loud,” she says.
“We raise our hands if we want to - Anna? Oh, sweetie, what’s the matter?”
Anna can’t calm down, so they call her Mom to come get her. Some children are sensitive to tragedy, the principle says to Iduna.
The teacher feels terrible, so Anna gets to bring cupcakes in on a different day.
-
Agnarr takes his daughters to the library every weekend. Anna tells the librarian that she wants to find books about the Titanic. The librarian agrees that this is a very interesting topic to read about.
There are a lot of books to choose from. Agnarr says Anna can have two Titanic books, but says she also needs to pick a book that will make her laugh.
Anna picks a pop-up book that shows all the different pieces of the Titanic, and another one called Voices of the Titanic which has a lot of black and white pictures and stories from some people who survived.
Agnarr hesitates, wants the librarian to check the age recommendation on the book. The librarian says that lots of kids go through this phase - for some it’s dinosaurs, for some it’s Ancient Egypt, but that knowledge is the cure.
Anna looks at the pictures closely, stroking her fingers along the people’s faces. She doesn’t recognize them.
There were so many passengers, it’s silly to expect she would recognize anyone.
No... That’s not why it’s silly to think -
Anna begins to make her way through every Titanic book in the catalog.
-
It becomes a party trick at Grandma and Grandpa’s house - Anna's Amazing Titanic Facts!
“How many lifeboats, Anna?” Grandpa might ask if there's a guest around to impress.
Twenty, but it was designed to hold thirty-two and there were sixty-four in the original plans.
Over twenty-two-hundred passengers. Nine-hundred crew members. It hit the iceberg at 11:40 PM on April 15th, 1912. It took less than three hours to sink. The water was four degrees below freezing that night. Fifteen-hundred people died.
Thomas Andrews said there was no such thing as an unsinkable ship.
“Thomas Andrews?” Someone would ask, either genuinely impressed or just teasing.
“He was the man who oversaw the plans. The one who wanted more lifeboats.”
-
Iduna wrings her hands, “It was supposed to be a phase...”
It’s harmless, Agnarr insists. She’s young still.
-
For Christmas that year, Anna asks Santa for a thousand piece 3D model of the Titanic. She saw it in the Toys ‘r Us catalog. She cuts out the picture and has her Mom help her staple it to her wishlist, so Santa knows for sure which one she wants.
The elves can't make toys that complicated, her regretful parents tell a disappointed daughter on Christmas Day.
-
Elsa is having a sleepover. Iduna says she has to include Anna, if she wants her friends to be able to stay the whole weekend.
They have a lot of fun, actually. Anna doesn’t get immediately dismissed, either, when their parents finally turn off the lights in the living room and go to bed.
At midnight one of the girls produces a Ouija Board that had been wrapped in her sleeping bag.
When it's Anna's turn to play the board begins to spell R - M - S - T -
"Anna," Elsa warns, "cut it out."
"I'm not!" She insists. She keeps her fingers light this time, determined. They try again.
R - M - S - T - I - T
"Spooky," says one of Elsa's friends.
"No," says Elsa, "go away, you always do this!"
Anna retreats.
She's sure she wasn't doing it on purpose.
-
Elsa approaches Anna not long after.
"Listen," she says, "it was cute when you were little, but you want to knock it off, now. Trust me. You do not want to be Titanic Girl in high school, alright?"
-
The year Elsa turns seventeen she gets to pick where they go on summer vacation. Elsa picks Norway - she wants to see the mountains and the glaciers, and the Aurora Borealis.
It's the most amazing trip Anna's ever been on.
She takes her gloves off and touches the glacier-cold water.
One survivor described the water that night as being as cold as a thousand knives. She shivers in the Norway summer, cold, suddenly, to her bones.
-
Anna starts high school. Her English teacher assigns an open-ended research project. You can write about anything you want, she says, as long as it has primary and secondary sources.
Anna writes about the survivors of the Titanic. How the crew didn’t get paid past the sinking, how the families struggled to find each other. She goes on the school computer and searches for new sources she hasn’t seen before. Her teacher gives her the idea to go down to the college and look at their microfiche, it was a truly global news story - any newspaper that was running in 1912 will have stories about the Titanic.
She looks at pictures of the survivors. Printed in books, online, and in fuzzy old newspapers.
She doesn’t recognize any of them.
Her paper is longer than necessary and she’s very proud of it.
-
The year Anna turns seventeen, her parents ask her where she wants to go on summer vacation. She wants to go to Ireland. Belfast, to be specific.
The Titanic Belfast Museum, to be exact.
It’s recently opened, on the actual shipyard where the Titanic was built.
The tickets are too expensive, they say. Why does Anna want to go all the way around the world to see a museum about something she already knows? Wouldn’t she rather go to Disneyland?
Washington DC, Anna counters. The Smithsonian has a Titanic exhibit.
-
They spend four hours in the Smithsonian. Anna could have spent days. She reads every plaque.
Alone in a room dominated by black and white pictures, she closes her eyes, swaying ever so slightly from one foot to the next, like she’s on deck, being rocked by waves. She can smell it, almost. She can feel the breeze.
One picture has been blown up to the size of a wall. It’s from before the ship set out across the Atlantic, the photographer looking down from the higher deck as people stroll past too few lifeboats.
Anna steps closer. For the first time the picture is big enough, restored well enough for her to see the people’s faces.
No idea, she thinks. They had no idea.
The date is printed down in the corner. April 11th, 1912.
The last port. Eight people disembarked. One hundred and twenty-three people got on.
“Three days,” she breathes. She reaches out to stroke the tips of her fingers along a couple she can see, strolling with their arms linked along the deck. Three days left to live.
We had no idea.
“Anna?” Her mother calls, “Elsa and your father are in the lobby already…?”
Anna turns from the picture. She’s crying again.
Iduna hugs her, tutting slightly.
“Oh, Anna. I don’t know why you do this to yourself. You know you’re going to get upset…”
Anna turns to the photograph one last time as her Mom steers her along. She doesn’t know either.
-
The next afternoon the plan is to visit some American heritage sites.
“I want to go back to the museum,” Anna says. Elsa rolls her eyes. Their parents stiffen. No one asks what museum?
“Anna, honey, we spent hours at the museum yesterday,” says her Mother.
“I want to go back,” she says, again, “you don’t have to come. I can go on my own.”
“No, Anna,” says Agnarr, with finality.
They fight about it for the rest of the trip.
-
Anna moves away to college. She finally has unfettered access to a computer down in the lab below the library.
In her spare time she visits Titanic message boards, places where enthusiasts gather and share interesting facts, memorialize heroes, demonize the villains.
There's one thread she likes a lot. Ghost Stories from the Unsinkable.
One day a new poster appears, it's a small community, and this person has a username she doesn't recognize.
Not a ghost story, exactly, writes ice_is_my_life, but my family thinks I died on the Titanic in a past life.
The post gets a lot of probing questions. Gatekeeping - if you were there then how many buttons did the valet's uniform have?
He doesn't know things like that. But some people are more willing to believe.
What makes them believe that? They ask.
It gets cold, where I live. My uncle once told a cousin of mine to go get his coat or he'd catch hypothermia. my cousin asked what that meant, and my uncle said it's when you die of cold. I don't remember it, I was super young, but my Mom and my uncle swear I looked right at him and said "no it's warm at the end."
The board demands more proof.
It's probably just because my birthday is in April, ice_is_my_life writes, but I've always been obsessed with titanic facts. I said something about the lifeboats, once. Only women and children on the lifeboats, and coward men with cash to spare.
I have dreams, the post continues. I dream about the night it sank.
The board decrees the poster is fake.
Your family believes you? They really think you were reincarnated? Anna asks.
Yeah. Mostly because the nightmares started when I was so young, I think. Too young for me to be faking, my mom says.
Anna sends a request for an AOL direct message. ice_is_my_life accepts.
I dream about it too, she says.
She's never admitted it before. Her parents think the nightmares stopped a long time ago.
The reply comes almost immediately.
What kind of dreams?
I'm on a lifeboat, safe and far away, watching the ship break apart and sink. I'm crying, screaming, trying to climb off the boat and into the water. but the other women won't let me
For me I'm always on the upper desk. The bulwark bursts, and I watch the wave come over the lower level, dragging the people away. I jump off the side, into the water. I'm always cold when I wake up.
I wake up cold too.
-
They exchange email addresses. She rushes to the campus computer lab after class every day, stays there for hours sometimes. Back and forth, back and forth.
For the first time in forever, Anna's interest branches away from the Titanic.
His name is Kristoff Bjorgman. He promises he isn't a Nigerian prince who needs a bit of help with upfront banking fees. He lives in Canada, with his dog. He was adopted by a large and loving family. They talk about family a lot.
They exchange phone numbers. She doesn't have international minutes on her plan, but they talk sometimes all the same, at great expense.
His voice soothes something that was jagged inside of Anna. Something she had never realized was there. She calls him sometimes, crying because she wants to hear his voice.
"God, I'm so sorry," she sniffles, the first time, "it's so clingy and weird."
"No," he says, assuring her completely, "hearing you - it's like... like I can finally breathe. Always call, Anna. Always, whenever you want."
-
It's her third year in college and everyone has given up teasing Anna for her imaginary online boyfriend in Canada. She has a laptop of her own finally, and she checks it first thing when she wakes up.
No pressure, he says, but Belfast is going all out for the 90th anniversary this year.
Anna sucks in a sharp breath, heart hammering wildly.
To meet him in person? In Belfast?
She doesn't bother to check school dates or flight prices before replying.
Let's do it
-
Anna's flight arrives half a day before his. They've booked a hotel room, just one, as a cost saving measure. She doesn't want to venture into the city without him though, so she hangs around the arrivals.
She has a sign, a single piece of paper where she's written ICE IS MY LIFE, because it was a silly username she loves to tease him about it.
She's buzzing with nerves. She can't wait to see him for the first time. She can't believe they've come to Belfast together! It's the most romantic thing she can imagine. Like something out of a novel, rather than her ordinary life.
He stops dead when he sees her, a horrified, angry desperate expression twisting into his otherwise handsome features.
He stomps forward, expression intense.
"Is this some kind of joke?" He asks. She wilts, he's tall and angry and she's never actually met him before. Is he angry about the sign? Does the sight of Anna not match up to his hopes?
She takes two steps backward. He grips her shoulders tight. An electric thrill of fear runs through her at his touch.
"Are you a model or something?" He demands, "Do you do fucking porn, are you on billboards, what?"
"What are you talking about? Get off me!" She shrugs him away, looking around for a security guard.
He swings his backpack off his shoulder, taking half his jacket along, and starts frantically unzipping. He turns the whole thing upside down and dumps the entire contents onto the terminal floor.
Oh God, Anna thinks. They were all right. This was a mistake. He's obviously a crazy person. What have I done? What do I do?
He's down on his hands and knees and when he finds what he wants, he thrusts a sketchbook up at her, open to a random page.
It's her face. It's a sketch of her face. The hair is different, pulled up and away in an intricate-looking bun. Anna flips frantically through the pages, horror growing. They're all of her. Her in old-timey dresses, high necked collars and poofy sleeves.
It's worse than she thought - he's some kind of stalker, he lured her here, tricked her and she came because she's so desperate for someone to understand.
What has she done? What should she do? Scream? Run?
He catches her hands in his. She startles, looking down at him.
"I've been dreaming of her for as long as I can remember," he says, face shining with sincerity and confusion, "I thought - I thought she was my birth mother, but that never felt right."
It's the first Anna has been able to really look at his eyes. Warm and brown and familiar and brimming with tears.
All her worries evaporate. She sinks to the ground with him, crunching some of his stuff under foot as she moves closer to him.
She's crying, too
How can she have missed those eyes so much? How can they be so familiar? How can he know her face? Capture her expressions the way he has?
Security has to come and tell them to move along. She helps him gather his stuff, they're both smiling and laughing and crying still.
-
No complete passenger manifest survives from the Titanic. No modern recording of passport photos - if the ship had made it to it's port, there would have been a record, but the confusion of the sinking and the boat laden with seven-hundred survivors returning to Portsmouth, no complete recording was possible.
They won't ever get the answers they've sought for so long. But the burning void that drove them to seek - that fades, now.
-
The Belfast Titanic Museum is everything Anna hoped for. They take their time, unhurried, holding hands. The urgent sense of emptiness Anna has always associated with these familiar black and white images is gone.
They sit up, most of the night, sharing their deepest, most secret selves. A deep familiarity, a sated longing. It would sound crazy - to anyone else Anna wouldn't be able to bring herself to utter it. But it's true.
Ireland has so much to offer them - astounding scenery, history beyond recording, a vibrant pub culture. They only spend one day at the museum.
As the end of the trip approaches, neither can stomach the thought of separation. They begin to make plans to re-twine their lives.
When she wakes each morning, curled into the warm, yielding expanse of his skin, she's warm.
-
April 15th, 1912.
Pandemonium. Terror. Ear-splitting noise. Scared brown eyes.
He holds her face between two large calloused palms. Runs his thumbs over her wet cheeks. Kisses her roughly on the forehead and pulls back to look her in the eye.
"You must go. Women and children on the boats first. Once you're all on, the men are to follow."
"There won't be enough boats!" She cries, clutching frantically at his forearms "we can't seperate, I won't leave you!"
He grips her tight by the shoulders, desperate now.
"They called for a rescue. A boat will be on it's way. We will find each other, I swear it. But go, now!"
The floor beneath them groans. The lights flicker. There's a cacophonous roaring from deep below.
"I'll find you," she swears.
"I know," he agrees.
-
The ship sinks faster than anyone expects.
It's the hours that follow that are nigh unbearable.
The sinking screams. The creeping quiet. The cold.
It takes them longer than they thought, to find each other again.