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knew unofficially. I stayed at my father’s practice, working by his side, pondering what I might do with my life as my closest childhood friends married or went away to teachers college. I wanted to be in the city. Marriage to a Pennsylvanian farmer wouldn’t take me there, and teachers college held no attraction for me. There was comfort in knowing it would be easy to find work as a nurse in Manhattan, and there was no other employment that called to me, despite my affection for color. I didn’t paint and I didn’t arrange flowers, and needlepoint and sewing bored me. The world was an immense, vibrant place. I knew this was true, despite my sole experience with the quiet country life. I wanted to see it in all its colorful vitality. New York was the place to be.
    When I thought about what was taken from me, this secondary loss came to mind. The fire robbed me of a future with Edward in it, I am sure of that, but it also stole from me my affinity for the wild and wonderful. The hospital was busy, but it was not wild, or wonderful. It was a steady place, with its hum of ten thousand words that were unknown to me. Despite the hammer of illness, it was a very tame place. I saw only what I had lost when I slept at night. I didn’t see it on that calm slab of earth surrounded by water.
    •   •   •
    AS I walked away from Ward K with Andrew Gwynn’s trunk keys and claim ticket in my apron pocket, I was glad I’d already been requested by Mrs. Crowley to see that we had more interpreters. It gave me a bona fide reason to go to the main island, though I doubted more interpreters would be spared. If Ellis was as busy as we’d been led to believe at breakfast, all the interpreters would be needed in the great hall.
    More of the infirm and the suspect were heading across to the hospital as I walked through the ferry house to the main immigration building. Several of them made eye contact with me, silently questioning me, it seemed, to explain how the medical inspectors could so adamantly insist they weren’t well enough to chase their dreams. I kept my head down and moved quickly past them. The farther into the ferry house corridor I went, the more people I passed who were either just arriving or heading out to American shores at last. Once past the ferry house, I was on the main island.
    Ellis’s primary immigration building stood palatial on its rectangle of land. I loved its red bricks and creamy limestone trim, and its little towers and their domes. It was designed in the French Renaissance Revival style, which made me wonder what the Europeans thought when they saw it. Did it make them feel at home, or a little unsettled that their first glimpse of America was not so different from the place they had left?
    The main building still smelled and looked new. The first station had burned to the ground more than a decade ago, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by me. That original building was made entirely of wood. Ellis’s new buildings were made of stone and brick. There were no traces of that fire here.
    As I made my way inside, I encountered a hive of activity, and as I suspected, there was a desperate need for interpreters at the inspection stations. I managed to convince someone from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to pay a visit to the hospital later. And one of the nurses assisting the doctors in the medical inspection, who spoke German, said she would come over in the late afternoon, but the others could make no promises. That first errand complete, I set off to see about completing the second one.
    I knew the baggage room would be bursting with commotion. On days with many ships arriving, trunks and cases would be coming and going until nightfall. That would work either to my favor or against it. If the handlers were too busy to attend to me, I would have to return to island three empty-handed. If they were too busy to wonder about my request and simply let me look inside the luggage, I could get Andrew