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Left or Right – Part 02

Time within the ship resumed its flow.

A man dragged the woman away from the cabin, leaving behind the girl and the babe with the birthmark. Crooning a lullaby, the girl lulled the infant to sleep, until another man approached, roughly tapping her shoulder.

“You don’t have to look after that woman’s child. Getting mixed up with the wrong crowd will lead you down a dark path. If you were my daughter, I wouldn’t let you associate with such women. I’d beat you until you cried.”

The girl simply gazed up at the man, bewildered.

Victorique reappeared, slowly making her way toward the girl. Time stopped once again.

Kujou, if you’re coming to this dangerous place… Hmm…

Sighing, she watched the girl intently.

“Let’s begin piecing together these fragments of chaos,” she said hoarsely. “Hmm. La Guardia likely didn’t understand a word of what the man said. The men were speaking English. She only talked to the woman with the baby because there were no other Italian speakers around.”

Victorique withdrew once more, curling up as if mimicking a stone. Time resumed its flow. People moved sluggishly, exchanging hushed words.

Eventually, the woman stumbled back and drifted into sleep with her back turned to the girl. Holding the baby close, the girl shut her eyes and offered a silent prayer.

The ship’s interior grew dim. Night descended. Exhausted, everyone succumbed to sleep. Within an old, dingy cabin. Amidst the shadows of the past.

Victorique, the visitor from the future, stood alone, slowly glancing around. Moonlight streamed in through the porthole, casting a chilling spotlight on Victorique’s diminutive form. Time froze.

Victorique narrowed her enigmatic green eyes, shimmering like jewels, and extended her small, pallid hands outward.

“Fragment of chaos, reveal the whereabouts of sins bygone.”

Sleeping figures dotted the cabin—diverse in traditional attire, faces, and skin tones, ancestors of the New World’s people.

“It’s time for reconstruction!” she declared in a weathered voice reminiscent of an old crone’s.

Moonlight swirled, illuminating some slumbering figures while bypassing others. Nearly ninety percent of the immigrants’ bodies began to emit a soft glow. Those untouched remained shrouded in darkness, deep in slumber.

Victorique continued her slow scan, hands still outstretched. Moving silently among the passengers, she solemnly proclaimed with her aged, raspy voice, “The people on this ship were immigrants who crossed to the New World sixty-five years ago. The ones who laid the foundation of the new land, the great first generation of New World’s people, the nameless youth who had gone away.”

She gazed upon their luminous forms.

“And now, sixty-five years hence. Some still walk the New World’s soil. Some arrived, their strength spent. Some fought, thrived, birthed descendants, and aged before passing away. The glowing bodies signify the departed. Those unlit are the elders, still clinging to life, watching their descendants’ future in the New World.”

The deceased’s bodies glowed and withered. Eye sockets hollowed, skin desiccated, limbs peeking through garments—they assumed their current forms in their respective graves. The few unlit bodies aged swiftly, transforming into elderly figures.

Victorique stood at the cabin’s center, stretching her diminutive frame as far as it could go, arms outstretched.

“Wellspring of Wisdom!” she announced. “Bring the truth to light!”

She studied the petite girl sleeping at her feet, the baby in her arms, the mother curled up with her back turned.

Victorique groaned. One of the three figures twitched suddenly, as if startled.

“I found the liar.”

The person shuddered once more.

Thunder rumbled outside. Lightning streaked past the porthole, swift as Death’s scythe.

Victorique narrowed her eyes, studying the trio at her feet.

The girl’s body—her petite, slender frame—was bathed in a blue glow, the hue of the afterlife. And her visage, illuminated by the light, revealed hollowed eye sockets, desiccated skin, mouth agape like a cavern. Her hands, cradling the baby, turned black, resembling dried branches.

Victorique’s emerald eyes glinted as she proclaimed, “La Guardia… The real La Guardia… has already departed, sixty-five years hence!”

A streak of blood traced down the left cheek of the girl’s lifeless body. A crimson tear. A coup de grâce dealt by fate.

“In other words, the elderly woman we see before us sixty-five years later, identifying herself as La Guardia, is not the fifteen-year-old girl who boarded this vessel.”

The girl’s arms, clutching the infant, slowly slumped to the floor. Thud. Bright red blood trickled from her palms.

“And the babe too…”

The infant, bearing a star-shaped birthmark on his forehead, glowed blue, signifying his place among the departed sixty-five years hence. His name—Toto—was embroidered on his clothes. A gunshot wound on his chest oozed blood, while his face and hands dried up, turning brown and desiccated.

Victorique’s emerald eyes blinked languidly. She turned her attention to the person sleeping with her back turned—no, pretending to be sleeping. The mother of the baby.

The weary woman was not glowing. She was still alive somewhere, sixty-years since then.

Victorique narrowed her eyes coldly. “This woman went by Betsy, if memory serves. Once a hopeful young lass, now a weary mother with a babe. Aged thirty, perhaps thirty-five. Betsy, your true identity has been exposed.”

The woman remained motionless, but her back trembled faintly, as if sensing Victorique’s words.

The withered hand of the deceased babe reached out toward the woman, quivering like a wilted branch, but failing to make contact. Slowly, the woman rose. She seemed to be panicking that she had been found out. Stooping, she crept away, a diminutive figure. She aged before Victorique’s eyes, once-black hair lengthening and turning gray, cascading to the floor. Her arms, too, weathered with wrinkles.

Victorique advanced, trailing her with a mincing stride.

“The Wellspring of Wisdom has spoken,” she murmured softly toward Betsy’s aging form. “The woman currently bearing the name La Guardia is the same woman with the babe!”

The woman froze. Victorique went on.

“You stole someone’s destiny, lived as the young La Guardia after immigrating, and now you stand before us as the Femina Economica Monster.”

The woman slowly turned around. In the dim moonlight, her face had morphed into a familiar, aged visage—creased cheeks, thin lips, a prudish yet faintly sinister grin.

Then, the woman started laughing. A familiar elegant laughter that filled the halls earlier.

Beside her, the real La Guardia continued to bleed, the shadow of death blanketing her face. The baby, chest stained with blood, extended his desiccated hand toward the mother fleeing to the future.

The woman fell silent. Victorique stretched her arms wide, glaring with emerald eyes.

The woman’s eyes snapped wide, and with a satisfied yet vaguely eerie tone, murmured her catchphrase.

“Life is but a coin toss. Fortune favors the bold. What about you? Care for a coin toss?”

She smiled once more, with grace.

Another deafening clap of thunder resounded.

After the lightning’s flash, swift as Death’s scythe, the cabin plunged into darkness. The waves surged, and the ship rocked violently.

Coup de Grâce continued his story as they climbed the dim emergency staircase.

“On that fateful day, my Nonna was just fifteen, arriving alone from Italy, a spirited young girl.”

“Hmm?” Kazuya realized something. “So your grandmother came aboard the ship at fifteen, too? That’s exactly the same as Bon Vivant’s grandmother, La Guardia.”

Coup de Grâce gave a vague nod. Troll eyed him curiously.

“But then something horrible happened on that ship. Nonna befriended a wicked woman. According to her, she seemed like a nice person. As a result, my Nonna was deceived by the woman she trusted and terribly betrayed. Unable to abandon my father Toto, still an infant, she disembarked penniless. Standing there on the ship’s deck, holding onto the baby, she couldn’t shake off the memory of how huge and daunting the Statue of Liberty looked. She used to talk about reciting this poem, ‘Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door’ while tears rolled down her cheeks.”

“Wow…”

“That’s the beginning of my family saga. The tale of a poor fifteen-year-old. There’s a saying, ‘The beginning of a family’s history is crucial.’ It’s like a personal scripture for every family. Immigrants yearn for noble and valiant ancestors.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that saying. That’s why the first generation always work their butts off.” Troll remarked wistfully.

Coup de Grâce affirmed. “But for Nonna, life in the big city turned into a real struggle with no one to lean on. And that’s how the sad story starts and keeps going.”

“Ah, so it was unlike La Guardia, then?” Mary chimed in. “Your grandmother faced hardships alone in the New World. La Guardia, on the other hand, had a fiancé she corresponded with.”

“Nonna,” Coup de Grâce murmured softly, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “It wasn’t easy for a woman alone with a baby to find decent work. So, my dear Nonna had to take on a job she couldn’t talk about. But she raised my dad Toto right, even though they weren’t blood-related. Thanks to her, Toto grew up healthy, while he watched Nonna struggle on the sidelines. And Mary, like you, he worked hard for a stable life. He saved up, opened a little grocery store in Little Italy, got married, and then my mom took off because she was tired of being poor. After that, it was just Nonna, Toto, and me, a little kid at the time, living quietly together. Until the night we got robbed. And then Nonna got sick and passed away.”

He fell silent. A shadow fell over his face, his tear-shaped birthmark glistening crimson. His muscular frame quivered faintly. For a time, he climbed in silence.