New York City, June 1931
She closed the mission on a Thursday.
She did it herself, and she would not let him come. She stood in the basement in front of two hundred men with her hands folded and told them the mission would not open again on Monday, and that there was no money, which was a lie, and that she had lost her nerve, which was a worse one, and that she was sorry.
She did not cry.
They did not shout. That was what finished her, that night and for the next thirty-nine years. They did not shout. They sat in a wet basement with their caps in their hands and took it the way men take a thing they have taken before, and one by one got up and went out into the street, and some said goodnight to her, and some said thank you, and one of them, an enormous Dutchman named Vandermeer who had a daughter in Rochester who did not write, stopped in front of her and took her hand in both of his and said, "You'll be all right, Miss Keeler," and went out.
Ellis gave her back the register. He did it without a word. He had kept it two years in a beautiful copperplate hand, and had written a page and a half of a statement to the Board of Aldermen that would never be delivered, and he closed the book and set it on the table and put the pencil on top, squared, and went up the stairs.
Solly Marks stayed until the end. He was a small man, perhaps fifty, perhaps sixty, and he had been coming for two years, and he kept kosher when he was starving, and she had made him a separate plate on the nights there was meat and never said anything about it.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hat in his hand.
"Miss Keeler."
"Solly."
"It ain't the money," he said.
She did not answer.
"You got a face on you like a woman at a funeral. And it ain't the money. I been broke my whole life. I know what broke looks like on a person, and that ain't it." He looked at her a while. "All right." He put his hat on. "You don't gotta tell me. You been the only one in this whole city knew my name. Whatever it is, I figure you got a reason, and I figure you can't say it, and I figure that's the worst thing that ever happened to you."
He went up two steps and stopped.
"So I'm gonna say one thing and then I'm gonna go, and you ain't gotta answer. Whatever you traded us for, I hope to God it was worth it. Because you fed me for two years and nobody else in this city did, and if you needed something that bad, then it must have been the whole world."
And he went up the stairs.
* * *
James Kirk stood at the back of the empty basement with a mop in his hand.
She had told him not to be there. He had gone up to his room at six and stood at the window for forty minutes, then come back down and stood at the back, behind the boiler, in the dark, and watched all of it.
She sat down on the bottom step, slowly, the way a person sits when their legs have stopped being reliable, and put her face in her hands, and stayed there a very long time.
She did not make a sound.
Kirk stood behind the boiler with a mop in his hand and did not go to her, because he understood that he was the last person in the world with any right to.
And a small voice at the back of his head said, quite reasonably:
You could tell her. Right now. She is sitting on that step with nothing left, and you could go over and sit down beside her and tell her the truth, all of it, the ship and the street and the voice in the frozen air, and she would believe you. She would believe you tonight. She would believe you tonight because she has nothing left to defend.
He stood there for a long time with the mop in his hand and did not move.
And then Edith Keeler took her hands from her face, wiped it once with the heel of her palm, stood up, picked the register up off the table, and went upstairs to bed.
And James Kirk mopped the floor of an empty basement at half past ten at night, alone, in the dark, and did it thoroughly, and did it well, and put the mop away.