It has been passed down through the customer’s family, and she and her sister both like it and wanted to see if the print could be found to make another one. In September 2001, that same marigold scarf is brought into the heirloom fabric shop where Taryn Michaels works. Clara is drawn to him in their mutual grief, and in trying to help him, gets herself embroiled in a dilemma that causes a crisis of conscious. Since he has been exposed, he is detained, and he indeed comes down with the fever. She learns that he lost his wife to scarlet fever on the voyage to America. One day she notices one of the incoming immigrants has a colorful scarf, a woman’s scarf, around his neck. She does her work well and is friends with her roommate, but never goes out, never pursues other friendships, has no future plans. She moved to Ellis Island to work and hasn’t set foot in Manhattan since. But she lost him in the Triangle Factory Shirtwaist Fire. Their relationship had never progressed beyond mutual attraction, but she felt certain they were going to know each other better.

Some months earlier she had worked in Manhattan and encountered a man named Edward every day on the elevator.

Clara is in her own in-between place as well.

Immigrants who come in are kept on the island for a time if they have been exposed to any kind of contagious disease. She describes it as something of an in-between place. In A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner, Clara Woods is a nurse on Ellis Island in September of 1911.

Book a fall of marigolds