The List of Unspeakable Fears Read online

  To my mom, who taught me to be brave, even when I’m most afraid

  Chapter One

  A red door.

  A dark hallway.

  A terrible feeling of dread.

  My dream always starts just like this. The only noise is a rhythmic dripping behind one of the walls. I’m so sick with fear, I can’t move. I squeeze my eyes shut, but when I open them, the red door is still there. Looming.

  A tingle prickles up my spine, like the toes of a hundred black spiders.

  Someone whispers my name.

  And right then, on most nights, I wake up.

  Usually I’m crying, my sleeping gown soaked in sweat. Usually I plead for my mam to light the gas lamp by our bed, and she holds me till the shaking has stopped.

  But sometimes I can’t wake up at all.

  Sometimes, still asleep, I thrash about or crawl to the floor. Sometimes I run screaming straight across the room, my eyes wide open but not seeing.

  Mam calls it “getting stuck.”

  On those nights, when she catches my cheeks between her hands, she can tell that I’m not really with her. She says she calls to me over and over, trying to lead me back to the world of the living with the sound of her voice, but it’s like I’m deep underwater. I hear nothing at all.

  * * *

  In the distance, on the other side of the East River, a lighthouse beam pierces the late afternoon fog. Five seconds of burning light. Five seconds of chilling dark. For a moment, I’m certain it’s happened again. I’m certain I’m stuck in the nightmare.

  I realize that the shadow forming across the murky, churning water is North Brother Island, and a shiver passes through me. I turn to go back inside the ferry, but Mam takes my wrist.

  “You promised,” she says under her breath. Since I can hear her, I know I’m awake. “Come now, Essie. Be a brave girl.”

  That’s easy enough for her, I suppose. Mam is the bravest person in all of New York City. Everyone says it—the cranky landlord in our crumbling tenement; my best friend, Beatrice; the nuns who teach us at St. Jerome’s Catholic School. I’ve seen Mam pick up dead rats without flinching. I’ve seen her stomp a fire out with her boot. When she was half my age, just five years old, she crossed the whole ocean with her mother to join her father in America. I can’t even take a ferry up Hell Gate without turning white as a petticoat.

  January wind, freezing and damp, spits into my face. There are slushy puddles of water on the deck and it’s so cold that I’m shaking even in my big coat, but Mam takes a step toward the rail, tugging me after. I get an irritated look from her when I dig in my heels, but I refuse to risk my life for a view. Besides, anyone with sense knows that the shadow in the distance is no sort of view to be glad for.

  “Brought a lot of luggage, you did,” someone says, and Mam and I both turn.

  A crewman in a long, wet rain slicker smiles, tipping his cap. The water is getting rough, so he’s checking cargo secured to the deck, pulling on ropes and doubling knots. One of the big wooden crates beside him reads MEDICAL SUPPLIES. Another reads LABORATORY EQUIPMENT. Tied up on top of the pile is our dented old steamer trunk and Mam’s pretty metal hatbox—a gift from her new husband.

  My new father.

  I cringe.

  “A lot of luggage just for a visit, I mean,” the crewman continues, several questions hanging at the end of his comment.

  He’s not the first curious person we’ve met today, but I don’t like the look of him. There’s something suspicious—his hair, perhaps, or his shoes—so I shrink behind my mother and narrow my eyes.

  “We aren’t visiting,” Mam says, raising her voice to be heard over the waves. “We’re moving to the island.”

  The crewman tilts his head. “You can’t be patients.”

  “Heavens, no!” says my mother.

  I don’t want to look out over the water again. I don’t want to see the lighthouse, warning us away from the growing shadow it guards. But the ferry rocks violently and I stumble from my mother, crying out as a huge wave splashes up over the bow. Terrified I’ll be swept overboard, I lurch to the side railing and cling on tightly.

  Behind me, Mam is giggling like a schoolgirl, pressing her fancy new hat to her head. She’s hardly even lost her balance, as poised and confident-looking as ever.

  “What weather!” she says to the crewman, and then, as if I didn’t just nearly fall to my death, “Not too close, Essie dear.”

  I shut my eyes, trying to keep from looking down at the icy rushing water below. All I want in the world is to go back inside—and then, after that, to turn the boat around and go home—but I’m frightened I’ll fall if I let go of the railing. And our home in Mott Haven is no longer our home. The rest of our possessions, few as they are, have already been packed up and sent ahead to the island. Our tenement back in the city is empty.

  Our apartment, where I’ve lived my whole life.

  Our apartment, where I lived with my mam and my da—my real da.

  When the beam from the lighthouse strikes me again, I force my eyes open, squinting through the brightness, then the gloom that follows.

  North Brother Island is desolate. The scattered trees look like the arms of skeletons. The shoreline is rocky and seems to be waiting for someone to step wrong and twist her ankle.

  “You’re a nurse, then?” the crewman asks my mother. “To replace the ones gone missing?”

  I let go of the railing and turn around, my eyes wide, but then the ferry crashes into another high wave and I’m sent tumbling toward Mam, shouting. She catches me as dirty brown water sprays up over the side of the boat.

  “I’m drenched!” I cry out.

  “You are not,” says Mam.

  “I’ll catch cold!”

  “Goodness, Essie. Don’t be dramatic.”

  My mother turns toward the crewman and excuses us politely before leading me back inside the ferry. By the time we make it, I’m a shivering, blubbering mess.

  “Stop it now,” says my mother. “You’re causing a scene.”

  I can’t help myself, though. It’s terrible, picturing all the ways you might die.

  Mam pries my fingers from her waist and begins patting her clothing down with a handkerchief. Her wet skirt is black-and-white-striped. Like the hat and hatbox, it’s new. Another gift.

  “We might have picked a better day to travel.” She tries to smile at me.

  “We might have not traveled at all,” I say.

  A sharp look is enough to get me quiet again, so I cross my arms, teeth still chattering, and pace away. Our ferry sways. North Brother Island creeps closer. The storm clouds darken above. When someone begins coughing, I glance over my shoulder. There aren’t many other passengers on the small boat, though I saw two police officers board with us. They must be up top with the captain. It seems the ferry is mostly just delivering a last run of supplies before bad weather makes crossing the river impossible. But then, in the far corner of the room, wrapped in a shabby blanket, I see a skinny man, his face flushed with fever.

  Anxiety knots in my gut. I take a step back.

  “Come dry off,” calls Mam, wiggling the handkerchief as she sits down on a bench. Her eyes dart to the man, and I quickly do as I’m told.

  For a while, neither of us speaks. We’ve said everything already, after all. Yelled everything. Shouted everything. Called each other terrible names. I’ve already cried till I was purple, gasping and begging like my life was in danger.

  Because, truly, it is.

  The ferry crests wave after wave, rolling my stomach.

  “We’re going to sink,” I whisper.

  “No, we aren’t.”

  “Ships sink in this part of the river all the time. Hell Gate is a graveyard.”

  Mam sighs. “You know, my first time on a ship, I was so excited. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my new home would be like. And we had quite a few worse nights than this. Have I told you about the time we started taking on water and the cabin filled up to my bloomers?”

  Of course she has. I’ve heard about every moment of my mother’s journey from Ireland. Even when she tells me the most frightening parts—the ship catching fire or the food spoiling or sharks circling in anticipation—she speaks as if it were all some grand adventure I missed out on. I suppose, in her mind, anything was better than what they were leaving behind. Mam and Granny were starving. Getting on the boat to America was a last chance at survival.

  The beam from the lighthouse pierces the fog, fracturing through the ferry windows. Light. Dark. Light again.

  “He’s a good man, Essie. You’ll see.”

  I go rigid. I don’t want to hear my mother try again to convince me that this is the right choice—the only choice. I don’t want to hear about Dr. Blackcreek and his hospital.

  “We’re going to get sick,” I say, my voice low as I glance at the other passenger.

  “No, we aren’t,” Mam replies, and she puts her arm around me, kissing the top of my head.

  I understand why my granda came to America. I understand why my granny followed him. But even though, through her pretty new dress, I can feel how thin Mam has gotten—even though, this past Christmas, we could barely afford coal to keep from freezing, much less any presents—I don’t understand why my mother’s remarried. I don’t understand why she agreed to move us to this strange man’s estate.

  Because North Brother Island isn’t like other islands.

  Our new home is whe
re the incurable sick of New York City are sent to die.

  Chapter Two

  The precise moment I knew all hope was lost came yesterday at half past three.

  I arrived home from school late and found nearly our entire apartment packed away. The biggest shock wasn’t the emptiness of the place, since we own very little. It wasn’t even the hulking steamer trunk, half-full with its heavy lid open, sitting right in the middle of the kitchen. No, the biggest shock was seeing Mam standing there in the midst of strewn clothing and hastily wrapped dishes, trying on a new hat. It was fashionably tall with a gigantic, wide brim and topped with piles of ribbon and lace. My mother was humming to herself, admiring her reflection in a tarnished hand mirror. For how much mind she paid me, I might as well have been see-through. She only turned and noticed me when my arms went limp and my schoolbooks thunked all over the floorboards.

  “Oh, Essie!” Mam said cheerfully, taking off her hat. “Thank goodness you’re finally home.”

  Her hair was pinned up, as usual, in a large, lush puff on her head. She was always threatening to chop it off and complaining about how it got in the way, but so far, I’d talked her out of such scandal. Clearly, my recent efforts to talk her out of ruining our lives hadn’t been as successful, because the next thing she said was, “You need to go pack your things. Tomorrow we’re leaving for North Brother Island.”

  The death sentence was so matter-of-fact, so perfectly simple and undebatable, that she might have been correcting my arithmetic homework. She’d used the exact same tactic two weeks ago. While cooking colcannon, she’d casually announced that she’d remarried.

  “We met marching together at a women’s suffrage rally,” she’d said with a smile, mashing together potatoes and cabbage. “His real name is Alwin Schwarzenbach, but he goes by Alwin Blackcreek because people get flustered when they try to pronounce ‘Schwarzenbach.’ Essie love, you’re going to get on so well. I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

  It was clear my mother had lost all common sense.

  Not only had she married a stranger—a German stranger, at that—but she’d married a man with the most unfortunate of occupations. Dr. Blackcreek was the director of one of the most feared places in New York City—Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island. People who were thought to be sick with infectious diseases, usually poor people or immigrants like us, were regularly rounded up by the Board of Health and shipped to one of the quarantine hospitals on the islands in the East River, often against their will. Everyone said that if you had the bad luck to wind up on North Brother, you’d never leave.

  During that first conversation about my new stepfather, as Mam had described how grand his estate would be compared to our tenement, I could do little but gape. Yesterday afternoon, coming home to find our whole life stuffed into suitcases, I had much the same reaction.

  “Bad weather’s on the way, so we’ve no choice but to leave quickly,” Mam had said. “Alwin sent a letter this morning from the hospital and there will be room for us tomorrow on a late ferry. It might be weeks till we can travel otherwise.”

  I didn’t argue that “weeks till we can travel” would be just fine with me. I didn’t say a word, in fact. I just turned and left the apartment. In the narrow hallway, where the yellowed wallpaper was peeling, I took off at a run. At the rickety stairs I slowed, worried I might trip and fall, but once I made it to the bottom and through the back door, I sped up again. The fenced-in dirt yard behind our tenement was bitter cold. Half-frozen clothes hung on lines overhead. The row of slanted wooden outhouses blurred as I rushed past them. With more than seventy people in our little building, usually all three were occupied, but thankfully, today no one was around.

  At the back end of the yard, I collapsed behind a stack of wooden barrels and hugged my knees, sobbing.

  “You sound sniffly as a babe with the pox,” someone called from nearby.

  I didn’t have to look up to tell it was Beatrice.

  “If you haven’t anything nice to say, leave me alone,” I muttered, wiping my eyes with my patched mittens.

  My best friend walked up in front of me and crossed her arms. The hem of her dress was caked with mud. Her hair was dirty and her stockings were ripped at the knees. In short, she looked much as she always did. Beatrice was forever going places she shouldn’t and coming out tattered.

  “What’s the matter then? Found another mouse living in your pillow?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Got teased by the older boys on the street corner? I’ll have my brothers ring their ears.”

  I shook my head again.

  “You heard a loud noise that scared you? Or your pencils rolled into the dark place under your bed?”

  “It’s nothing like that!” I cried, frustrated. “It’s more terrible than anything you can guess.”

  Beatrice frowned. “Well then, what?”

  “I’m moving.”

  Her eyes widened. “When?”

  “Tomorrow. To North Brother Island.”

  At this, Beatrice dropped down beside me, taking my hands. “Saints forbid,” she said. “That really is terrible.”

  My friend knew all about my mother’s recent marriage, about Dr. Blackcreek and his hospital. In fact, she probably knew even more than I did—upsetting things she hadn’t the heart to tell me—because Beatrice was a snooper. She listened in on people’s private conversations. She read their letters or followed them if they were acting odd. This was all in preparation, of course, for her future career as a detective, so it should come as no surprise that her favorite dime novels were sleuth ones, like Nick Carter Weekly, or that she liked to ask new neighbors weird questions and search down dark alleys for clues. Often she forgot about studying, or even going to school, because she was so busy tracking grifters and creeps.

  Beatrice’s mam and da didn’t much notice her sleuthing, not even when she came home from St. Jerome’s with bad marks and welts on her palms because the nuns had smacked them with a ruler. This was mostly due to the fact that Beatrice’s three older brothers took up all their parents’ attention. The Murphy boys were a real terror—the worst on our block. They started street fights and swiped sweets from shopkeepers. They spent their money from selling papers on gambling, cigarettes, and nickelodeons. In the evenings, they were frequently dragged home by the police, and even all the way up on the fifth floor, I could hear the yelps when the boys got the belt from their da.

  In any case, Beatrice was known to have the inside scoop on everything, so I appreciated that thus far she’d kept any rumors about my mam’s new husband to herself. Knowing I was moving to an island for people with cholera and yellow fever and typhoid was quite enough for me to worry about.

  I pressed my face into my hands. “I’ll never see you again. I’ll get sick and die.”

  “Essie, Essie, Essie,” Beatrice chided, nudging me with her shoulder. “Don’t be silly. If you can take a ferry there, you can take a ferry here to visit. And you’re not going to die.”

  “I don’t want to live with some strange man!”

  “It could be worse,” she said seriously. “I mean, it sounds like he’s loaded, so I bet your new house will be posh. You might even have electricity!”

  I gasped, horrified by the idea, and began sobbing all over.

  My friend sighed. “Sometimes I worry you’re hopeless.”

  And then Beatrice got a look in her eyes that I knew all too well. A wide, eager look that meant she knew something—and that I wouldn’t want to hear it.

  “No. Stop right there,” I said quickly, sniffling and scooting away.

  “But, Essie—”

  “Whatever it is, don’t tell me! I’m frightened enough!”

  “I just… if you see her… Oh, I’m so jealous!”

  “See her?” I sputtered. “See who?”

  “Typhoid Mary!” Beatrice exclaimed. “North Brother Island is where they shut her away!”

  At this, I felt myself go cold.

  Typhoid Mary.

  Two years ago, she’d been all over the papers. It was discovered that her cooking had infected multiple households with typhoid fever, so she’d been forcibly quarantined. Then, this past summer, the New York American had printed a terrifying picture that showed Mary spicing a dish on her stove with a sprinkle of skulls, which started the tabloids back up again. Beatrice thought Mary’s story fascinating. She’d followed it obsessively, snatching discarded papers from reeking trash bins to keep up.