Promise Me This by Cathy Gohlke Page B

the stairs. They were nearly to the top when they saw a lock upon the gate. Owen groaned but Michael gasped. “A key! There’s a key!”
    “Thank You, Lord Jesus!” Owen whispered. And then louder, “God is with us, Michael.”
    Michael twisted the key in its lock, hoping with all his heart that God was with Owen. He trusted God for Owen’s sake, though not for his own. And he trusted in the giant ship herself. “ Titanic cannot sink. She was the talk of Belfast—they built her unsinkable.”
    Owen snorted. “She is wood and metal, Michael. She can surely sink. Hurry now!”
    They climbed to the next landing and the next before coming upon another locked gate. This time there was no key, no crowd, and no steward.
    “There’s got to be another way. Think,” Owen ordered. “When we delivered the flowers and palms, which way did we come to reach this deck?”
    Michael knew. Not from their delivery of Bealing’s flowers and palms but from the night he spent dodging crewmen when he’d stowed away from Belfast to Southampton. “This way.” Michael, sure of his route, dashed through a labyrinth of corridors and wound up stairways. Owen matched him step for step.
    They raced the length of the broad hallway along E deck, the crew’s quick route from one end of the ship to the other. Scotland Road, Michael remembered. They call this Scotland Road.
    Their pounding boots formed a rhythm. They whipped round a corner, nearly colliding with the back of a steward withdrawing his key from a cabin door. A knocking sound startled all three, and a woman’s shrill scream from inside. “Let me out! Do not lock me in!”
    The flustered steward fumbled his keys, dropped them, retrieved the ring, and set to unlocking the door. “I’m sorry, miss—terribly sorry. I thought this floor was empty. My orders are to lock everything—a safeguard against looting.”
    The pale young woman did not speak but threw a heavy cloak over her shoulders and flew past him.
    Michael felt Owen’s jab to his arm, and the two of them shadowed the woman up the stairs. But something was the matter with the stairs. Michael’s feet did not fall where he placed them and he wondered if that was what it was like to be drunk—only it was the ship that swayed and not him. He steadied himself against the railing.
    Michael smelled the sea before he saw it. As he stepped on deck, the frigid night air pierced his trousers and jacket as though he wore nothing at all.
    The night sky, alive with millions of stars, close enough to touch, suddenly exploded. Rockets burst into white flame, trailing long and sparkling tails into the black sea below. Michael knew they signaled distress—he’d heard seamen talk of such—but they looked to him like the kind he’d seen burst over Belfast at the new year. Rockets should signal celebration, he thought, and not the end of the world.
    “I don’t want to go into the boat without Papa!” a small tousle-headed boy shrieked and made every attempt to squirm from his mother’s arms. But the man—his father, Michael thought—pushed him back toward his mother. Tearfully, she pulled the child close. “Why can’t Papa come now?” the child whined.
    But the proper British officer standing near the lifeboat was firm. “Women and children only. Women and children. Sir, you must step back.”
    Michael watched as the officer took the boy, now screaming mightily for his father, and handed him again to the mother once she had stepped into the lifeboat.
    Michael heard the father’s feeble assurance. “I shall see you in the morning, Robbie. Be good for Mother. It’s just a precaution. You will go for a little ride, and then we shall all be together in the morning.”
    Had he not known what was happening, he would have imagined they were all waiting for a train. But Michael knew it was a train that only some would catch that night. It reminded him of the night after Mam and Da’s burial, the night the village midwife—the