Fateful (31 page)

Time slows down, dragging out the horror of every fraction of a second that I tumble through the cold dark. What I see is a mixed-up kaleidoscope of images, each horrifying in its own way: the sleek white side of the ship banging into me as I thud against it on the way down, the small lifeboat as a light-colored teardrop against the dark ocean, Alec’s face above me looking down. I want to reach out to him—I want to catch myself, climb back up, refuse to leave him—but there’s no stopping the fall.

I land hard. Board and bone and oar slam into my back, and my already-whirling head strikes something that makes the world go dim. Cold water sloshes over the side, further soaking my dress, and the chill is so deep and so strong that my marrow aches.

“Watch it, you!” a woman cries as hands shove me roughly against the side of the lifeboat, my back against the canvas. “You like to have drowned us all.”

“Stupid girl!”

“Lay off her, I’d have jumped too if it was me.”

And other cries in languages I don’t know. I try to tell them that I didn’t jump, I was thrown, but the breath’s been knocked out of me. As I try to focus, I see the lifeboat’s mostly filled with women—third-class women like me, to judge from their humble shawls and tatty nightgowns. There are men too, though: a couple of sailors, and one wealthy-looking fellow with a handlebar mustache and a dull, dead look on his face.

But it all fades away too quickly.

When the lifeboat tips precariously to one side, I rouse myself—and only then realize that I blacked out for a moment. I’ve been repeatedly struck and doused with cold water, and while I kept myself going for so long, I can’t go much longer. Nausea overwhelms me—the whacks to my head? Seasickness? I don’t know. But I manage to push myself up on my arms to look around, and what I see makes me cry out in shock.

The
Titanic
is rising from the waters—the back end of it, I mean. Its lights are still burning despite everything, and so we can see the horror silhouetted against the starry sky. The gigantic propellers are surfacing as the prow of the ship dips down beneath the waves. Though we’re farther from it than I would’ve thought—people onboard are rowing the lifeboat vigorously away from the ship—we’re close enough that I think I can still see Alec, hanging on to the guardrail as the deck slopes out from beneath him.

“Go back!” I shout—or I try to shout. My voice is hardly a croak. “We have to go back for Alec.”

“We’ve got to get clear, miss,” one of the sailors replies. He never stops rowing. “When she goes under, the suction will drag down anything close to her. We’d be pulled down sure as anything.”

I’m shivering so hard that my teeth chatter, and groggily I realize that there are a few inches of near-freezing water in the lifeboat. I’m getting more soaked by the second, and colder, but that doesn’t seem as important as the fact that the lifeboat is apparently sinking too.

Someone else sees it and cries, “We’re taking on water fast!”

“This is a collapsible,” the sailor replies, like that ought to answer everything. Maybe it does. Maybe the lifeboat will eventually collapse and we’ll be dunked into the water to freeze to death, or drown, whichever comes first.

There’s a place just past terror where it turns into calm. I can do nothing to save myself, nothing to save Alec or the others. And least of all can I turn from the terrible sight before my eyes.

The
Titanic
tilts farther forward, its nose sinking forever beneath the water as the ship rises to stand almost on end. And there’s this tremendous, unearthly sound—the crash of everything and everyone on board sliding forward at once. I imagine the grand first-class lounge with its carved wooden chairs and its crystal chandeliers, all of them falling from place and smashing into so many splinters and shards. My cabin with its humble bunk beds and my bag with all the few possessions I had in the world. That damned lockbox the Lisles made me carry. All of it is crashing down.

“My God,” whispers someone in the lifeboat. None of the rest of us can speak.

The ship’s lights flicker, shining on the still ocean for one moment more. I can see portholes of light underwater. Then they go out. The darkness around us is almost complete.

Then comes the most terrifying roar I’ve ever heard or will ever hear. It’s metal tearing apart. It’s an earthquake. It’s nothing that seems to belong to this world. Vibration ripples through the water, through my body, as the dark silhouette of the
Titanic
against the stars suddenly changes direction. The back of the ship crashes down, propellers slicing back down into the water, as the front vanishes forever. For a moment it seems as though the rear of the
Titanic
can float on its own, but within seconds it, too, is going down.

“Did it break in two?” I whisper. “How could it?”

“That’s impossible,” snaps the man with the handlebar mustache. “White Star vessels do not break in two.”

Whatever argument we might’ve had about it is silenced that moment, because that’s when we hear the screaming.

One person screaming is a horrible noise, but this is hundreds of people. Maybe a thousand people, all of them screaming at once, screaming for their lives, though there is no way to save them. We’re already more than a quarter of a mile off, but the screaming is so loud that it surrounds us. The women on the boat cover their ears, grimace, and cry. Yet the sailors never stop rowing farther away.

“Stop.” My voice is no more than a whisper now. I hardly have the strength to speak. “Please stop.” There’s no stopping. No saving them. No hiding from what’s happening.

They’re all dying. If they didn’t get out at the last moment, if they never boarded lifeboats—Mrs. Horne. Lady Regina. George. Ned. Layton. Irene.

Alec.

There’s a strange sound beneath the screaming, like the tide coming in. I think it must be the last of the ship sinking underwater. But I can’t tell anymore. I can’t see. I can’t even sit up. It’s as if I am dying too.

Everything after that is strange and distant. I hear someone say, “She’s in shock,” and something stiff is wrapped around me—sailcloth, perhaps, the closest thing to a blanket onboard. As I’m lying in a few inches of cold water, this does little to warm me.

The screaming stops after forever, and yet too quickly.

The only sound is women sobbing and the lifeboat oars slapping into and out of the water in a steady rhythm, over and over.

My head hurts. I look up at the stars and imagine Alec’s face among the constellations. Or is that a dream? I can’t tell dreams from reality any longer.

“She won’t last the night,” someone says. “No telling how many will freeze to death before help comes.”

“How long will that be?”

“No one knows.”

The words don’t seem to have anything to do with me. I don’t feel cold any longer. I’m not shivering. The sensation that fills and numbs me is a sort of second cousin to heat—not warm and yet equally as comforting.

I think,
This must be death
.

Live for me
, Alec said. So I can’t die, not yet. I remember how much he wanted to see the sun rise again, and so I make a deal with myself. I will hold on until daylight. I will watch the sunrise for him. Then I can let go, and we’ll be together again.

There’s more darkness, more crying. Some surprise in the night as new people are discovered in the lifeboat—Chinamen who have been hiding under the seats. The sailors say they’re stowaways, but I recognize one of them from down below. His eyes meet mine briefly, and with a clarity that seems to be part of dying, I understand immediately what happened: They realized the ship was sinking, suspected nobody would let a Chinaman onboard a lifeboat, and hid to save their own lives. I think they did right. I wish Alec had done the same.

The others are angry. Then they’re quiet. Still the rowing. My head feels too heavy for my body. Pain sometimes shoots through me, but as a pale, distant echo of itself. It hardly matters.

Finally, some endless time later, I see the horizon turning faintly pink. Dawn has come. It can end now.

But even as I lift my head for the sunrise, I hear someone shout, “A ship! It’s a ship! We’re saved!”

I feel nothing. It doesn’t seem real, not even when we row up next to it, not even when they begin lifting us out in slings, one by one. I can’t hold on to the sling, so they tie me in. Then it’s like I’m floating, banging up along the side of a ship, like my fall from
Titanic
in reverse. I wonder if I will find Alec again on the deck waiting for me. Maybe none of it was true; maybe I’ve been trapped in some kind of nightmare.

Instead I fall onto a wood plank deck, and worried faces crowd around. One of them is Myriam’s. When she takes my hand, I know it’s all been real—all of it—and the horror is even more powerful than the fact that I’ve survived.

Chapter 29

AS OUR RESCUE SHIP, THE
CARPATHIA
, ARRIVES IN New York harbor on the night of April 18, we are greeted by such throngs of people as I’ve never seen or imagined in my life. Rain pours from the skies in a deluge, but that is not enough to deter the thousands of curiosity seekers who have come to see the survivors of the sinking of the
Titanic
. The ones with the cameras are no doubt reporters. One of those even jumps into the water, trying to get hauled onboard and thus nab the exclusive story.

Myriam and I watch the bedlam from our vantage point, a porthole a couple of decks below. We’re in a nice cabin, one turned over to us by kindly
Carpathia
passengers. Though the doctors weren’t very optimistic about me when they hauled me up from the lifeboat, Myriam bundled me in blankets and made me drink mug after mug of hot soup until I finally asked her if she was trying to feed me to death. At that point Myriam proudly told the doctors that if I was strong enough to be rude, I was strong enough to live. While I still feel wretched, I can walk around a bit now, so I guess she was right.

“Let’s go,” I say to her. “We can press through the crush if we have to. I don’t want to be on a ship again as long as I live.”

“Soon. The first- and second-class passengers have to leave before we can.”

“Of course.”

We watch our fellow survivors walk out silhouetted by flashbulbs, many of them in the fur coats that represent the only things they saved from the
Titanic
. Mostly they’re women, but more first-class men than you’d think got away. A few of them even got their dogs on lifeboats; one lady struts out with her pet Pekingese in her arms. There’s a young girl, my age, who helped Myriam with me on deck and who turns out to be the newly made widow of John Jacob Astor. There’s Margaret Brown, the tough-talking American woman who apparently had to save her lifeboat from the ineptitude of the sailor who was supposed to run it. And there’s Beatrice Lisle in the arms of the kind woman I handed her to on the night of the sinking. We were able to talk this morning; she sent a Marconigram to Viscount Lisle, who will come to Boston to collect his lone surviving child as soon as he can. I watch little Bea vanish into the crowd, the last link to everything in my life that came before.

At least I saved her
, I think.
At least I did that.

But that’s only one life, one rescue. Yesterday as I tossed and turned in my borrowed bunk, passing between hallucination and dream, it seemed to me as if I had to watch all the others die.

I saw Mrs. Horne cowering in a corner of the Lisles’ cabin, refusing to face the water even as it rose to cover the elegant carpets and the furniture, to swallow her whole.

I saw Lady Regina and Layton in one of the corridors, staring at the onrushing tide almost in outrage that the water could dare to interrupt their journey.

I saw Howard Marlowe smoking a final cigar on his private promenade deck, taking what comfort he could in the memories of the wife he’d lost and his pride in the son he believed he’d saved.

I saw George on the bridge with the captain, shouting orders to the last, hoping that by doing his duty he might save a few others.

Worst of all, I saw Irene and Ned already beneath the waves and beyond any hope, her dress and hair flowing out around her as the two of them reached toward each other. As the water closed deeper and deeper over Irene and Ned, they floated into a kind of embrace, the last one they could ever share.

This morning I walked the length of the deck, leaning feebly on the doctor’s arm. He said it would do me good to walk. But what I was really doing was looking for them—all the ones I lost, the ones whose deaths I had dreamed. I wanted the visions to be only dreams.

But none of them were there. They’re all gone, forever.

I never saw Alec, either in my dreaming or on the
Carpathia
. I can’t bear to think about what happened to him. Perhaps my mind spared me that vision because the sight of his death would kill me. And as awful as I feel—as close as I came to the end—my heart stubbornly keeps beating.

Live for me
, Alec said, and it appears I must.

They gave me a new dress, a gray frock donated by some
Carpathia
passenger with better manners than taste in clothes, and tossed out the red one ruined the night of the sinking. Before they did, though, I collected the two things I needed from my pocket. The first is the two ten-pound notes Irene gave me, crumpled and still damp; it doesn’t seem like money now, more like a farewell present. The second is even more precious. I take it into my palm now: the silver locket Alec gave me at the end of the one night we had together. He said it would protect me; maybe it did.

The face of Alec’s mother looks up at me. Her husband and son are with her now. Should I take comfort in that? I can’t.

Myriam makes a small sound in the back of her throat, and I focus again on the gangplank to see some of the
Titanic
’s surviving officers departing. They all stayed aboard until the last, just as George did, and went down with the ship. But some of them were able to climb atop an overturned lifeboat and save themselves. George wasn’t among them. She must be tormented by the idea of him thrashing in that frigid water, trying to save himself and coming so close, but failing just the same.