The Lifeboat: A Novel (10 page)

THE TENTH DAY
dawned gusty and cold. The sea rolled under us in giant swells. Despite the size of the waves, they didn’t break, and we somehow managed to keep the level of water in the bottom of the boat to a matter of inches. Mrs. Grant continued her quiet reassurance, and once or twice she voiced her regret that, for fear of swamping the boat, Mr. Hardie would not allow us to put up the sail, for she was sure that our salvation lay in making progress toward some far-off shore.

Mr. Hardie refused to look me in the eye, but every now and then I smiled in his direction, trying to impart encouragement. I didn’t know if he needed it or not. I had come to think of him as something either more or less than human, so little did he resemble any of the rest of us. Mostly, though, I directed my attention inward, trying to make one moment turn into the next with whatever that would bring, evil or good. I noticed little of what went on in the boat that morning beyond the enormous discomfort of sitting in damp clothing in the middle of a nothingness that was everything, or everything that mattered. I measured the intervals of time between the spasms of shivering that shook my body or between the ticks of my shrunken heart. I examined the chill of my breast and compared it to that of my feet. I tried to decide whether it helped at all to press my hands between my legs or if it was better to pull them inside my life vest and hug them tightly around my chest.

I remembered my worries about the distress signals from the evening before, and twice I opened my mouth to speak of it. Once I started to tell Mary Ann, and later I turned to the deacon, who had caught my eye when Mr. Hardie failed to pass around the water cup. But no words presented themselves, and I also wondered what good it would do to sow seeds of distrust against the only man who could save us. Besides, I had no firm proof that the Marconi had been in anything less than perfect condition. It was as I was trying to assemble my tumultuous thoughts that my mind descended to yet another layer of thinking.

Mr. Hardie had indicated that Mr. Blake was in the radio room until the fire forced everyone to come up on deck and that Blake had confirmed that distress signals had been sent. Indeed, I recalled seeing Mr. Hardie with a ship’s officer who might have been Blake when Henry and I came up on deck that afternoon, so it would seem reasonable that Blake would have told Hardie about the distress signals at that time. But if the Marconi had been broken, then either Mr. Blake had been lying to Mr. Hardie or Mr. Hardie was now lying to us; and if Hardie was lying, I could only assume the reason was to reassure us. Still, it seemed to me that Mr. Hardie must believe that signals had been sent, for why else would he have been so insistent that we hold our position in the vicinity of the shipwreck if he knew that no vessels were likely to be searching that location? Now I wondered if Mr. Blake, and perhaps Mr. Hardie, had been somewhere else after the explosion and Mr. Hardie was merely assuming that signals had been sent by whoever was in the radio room, since that would be the logical course of action in a disaster. If that was the case, he was lying not about the distress signals, but about what he—and maybe Blake—had really been doing in the first minutes of the disaster. But despite the intensity of my concentration on the matter, there was no way I could know what that was.

Instead, I practiced speeches I would give to Henry’s family, speeches about love and inevitability and about how all my life I had wanted aunts and cousins and how I fervently hoped the Winter family would provide them for me. I tried saying I loved them already from what Henry had told me, but I couldn’t say it sincerely, so I decided not to say it at all. During our argument, Henry had told me how his parents had adored Felicity Close, how they had known Felicity since she was a child, how Felicity’s mother was his own mother’s dearest friend. “Henry,” I whispered to the water that stretched around us in all directions, “don’t you dare desert me now.” In all of my imaginings, Henry was standing sturdily by my side; I didn’t know how on earth I would be able to face his mother alone. I worried that she would blame me for his death, that she would somehow decide that I had taken Henry off to Europe, not the other way around, and that I had caused us to return on the
Empress Alexandra,
not a war between nations over which I had no control.

That morning, it finally began to rain. At first, the drops were small and fine as mist, and the amount anyone was able to catch and drink would hardly have filled a thimble, but the drops grew steadily larger and soon we were all soaked to the bone. It was this rain I was reminded of the day in Boston when Mr. Reichmann called me insane. Around me, people turned their faces up to catch the water. Mary Ann continued to prove herself troublesome by refusing to open her mouth, so Hannah had to slap her and hold her nose until she did. Mr. Hardie pointed into the distance to something that no one else could see and said that the weather was about to go to hell and that we would too if we didn’t face our situation squarely. We were already so wet and cold that it was hard for us to have any clear sense of what he meant.

Mrs. Cook came back from where she had been sleeping in the dormitory and tapped my shoulder. “Be sure to pull the canvas cover over you so the blankets don’t get soaked through,” she said. I didn’t think it was my turn again already, but no one protested, so I made my way forward and burrowed into the musty blankets, where I experienced something that wasn’t sleep so much as a sort of natural drifting even further into my inward-turned state. Inside were pockets of warmth—not memories, exactly, but places where the parameters of life were less stark and unyielding. Perhaps this thinking only of myself was willful, but I could not think of myself, then, as possessing a will. I had only a body. I did what I was told almost automatically, as if I had entered the trancelike state I had observed in Mrs. Cook. My smallest sensation was apparent to me, a matter of intense interest; but what was going on with the others made very little impression on me at all. When Mary Ann came to shake me out of my stupor and take my place on the blankets, I returned to my place to find that while I was sleeping, Mrs. Cook had sacrificed herself to the sea. I felt nothing, only a mild curiosity about why she had done it. “Orders from Hardie,” whispered Hannah, and Greta said, “You know how Mrs. Cook would do whatever she was told.” It frightened me to think that the same could be said of me.

I can neither confirm nor deny Hardie’s involvement in Mrs. Cook’s death. My lawyers questioned me over and over on this point, but I could only say that I had been asleep. Apparently Hannah said in her statement that my turn to sleep had come earlier in the day, that no one was allowed to take extra turns on the blankets unless they were sick, and that I had not been in the dormitory during the incident at all. Mrs. Cook, who could have testified to tapping my shoulder and sending me forward, and Mary Ann, who later took my place in the forward crease, are both dead, and apparently no one else remembers my small part in the incident. I don’t know what it would have proved even if I had been awake, which I wasn’t. Mr. Reichmann said the lawyers for Hannah and Mrs. Grant were trying to establish that we had a reason to fear Mr. Hardie, that the incident with Mrs. Cook had given us a valid motive for what happened later; but no matter how Mr. Reichmann peppered me with questions, I said that when it came my turn to testify, I would state truthfully that I harbored no such motive in my heart and that I had not been present to hear anything Mr. Hardie might have said to Mrs. Cook.

In any case, when I emerged from under the dripping canvas cover, Mrs. Hewitt, the hotel proprietress, was wringing her hands and shuddering in great dry heaves. She said she had been the last to speak to Mrs. Cook, and I had no reason to doubt her until some of the others whispered it about that Mr. Hardie had talked to her after that. Mr. Hardie did not make a habit of talking individually to the women, so I thought that maybe the story had changed in the telling or that Hannah and Greta had exaggerated or even lied. But since I had witnessed none of it, I did not offer an opinion on what had transpired. Although Mrs. McCain had been Mrs. Cook’s traveling companion, she refused to show any emotion at all. “There’s naught I can do about it now, is there?” she said.

The rain abated and the morning passed. I have little memory of it, except that sometime before noon, Mr. Hardie pointed to a distant line where the texture and color of the water abruptly changed and said, “Squall.” A minute passed before he added, “We have until it reaches us to decide what we want to do.” I looked around me at the remaining thirty-six of us, then blinked at the water sloshing around my ankles before turning to watch the far-off line of wind-whipped water with a kind of detached trepidation, as if I were remembering it rather than living it for the first time. When Mr. Hardie spoke up to inform us it was fifteen minutes away, his bottomless eyes finally met mine. “We’re in your hands,” I tried to tell him with a look. “Just tell us what to do.” His gaze rested on me for a long roll of the boat. I was thrilled by it, buoyed up. For the first time in days I felt warm. I knew Mr. Hardie would save us if he could.

So many waves were now breaking over the gunwale that such occurrences were unremarkable, but the sky had turned a greenish-yellow color that we had never seen before. Hardie said, “Say yer prayers, mates,” and my hopes of the moment before were immediately dashed. Around me the bailers worked with furious and futile activity. “Oh, give it up!” I cried, for the level of the water was clearly rising in the boat despite their best efforts to stop it. “We’re going to drown!” I could see no possible alternative. I squeezed my arms about the airless room of my chest. “There’s no way out,” I shouted to the others or maybe only to Mary Ann. “Don’t you see that we’re going to die?”

“Why, of course there’s a way,” said Mr. Hoffman reasonably. “We’ve talked about it before. Some of us can go over the side to lighten the load.” He paused to let the words sink in, then added, “It’s our only option.” I looked at Hardie to gauge his reaction, but he was glaring at the squall line with a fixed expression. Colonel Marsh shouted, “Is it true, Mr. Hardie?” and the beam of Hardie’s gaze swept across our upturned faces like a searchlight. “Aye, it’s true enough, unless ye all prefer to drown.” His words were like opening the door to a caged beast, and once it was loose among us, I could breathe again. “Of course,” I said, coldly calm. My fear had disappeared completely. I felt like a man rationally assessing his investment options based on a ledger full of numbers and probabilities.

Mary Ann looked horror-stricken. “Jump over?” she asked. “On purpose?”

“Of course on purpose!” I hadn’t meant to shout at her, but suddenly, it did not seem to me that this course of action involved death, but life. It did not occur to me that I might have to sacrifice myself. Until my father’s misfortunes, doors had been opened for me, dinners served to me by pretty young women like Mary Ann. She must have sensed this, and it caused her face to stretch out over her bones with fear and loathing.

It seemed to me that someone weak like Mary Ann or Maria would be the obvious choice, but when one of the men—was it Mr. Nilsson?—pointed out that men were more useful than women in these circumstances and that if anyone should be sacrificed, it should be a woman, I was horrified; yet on some level, I agreed with him. Maybe we fought so hard against this idea because it was true. When Mary Ann cowered against me in a near-faint, I pushed her hair away from her ear and whispered, “Why not, Mary Ann? You’d save yourself a lot of suffering by flinging yourself into the sea. You’re going to die anyway, and I’ve heard drowning is far more pleasant than dying of starvation or thirst.”

Am I to be blamed for this? We do not ask certain ideas to enter our heads and demand that others stay away. I believe that a person is accountable for his actions but not for the contents of his mind, so perhaps I am culpable for occasionally letting those thoughts turn themselves into words. I can only say that I had to sit next to Mary Ann. I was the first one to whom she turned with her whining and complaints. In any case, when she came to her senses, she said she had had a vivid dream where she had saved us all by throwing herself into the sea.

“Ten minutes!” shouted Mr. Hardie. I counted out sixty seconds and said, “Nine,” more to myself than to Mary Ann. Mr. Preston became highly agitated. “The men!” he screamed. “All of the men should gather back here.”

“What for?” asked Mr. Nilsson, and Mrs. Grant said, “I’m sure there’s another way.” But then she fell silent and busied herself with a bailer she wrested from someone else.

“Hardie’s right! We men must draw lots to see who goes over,” said Mr. Preston, his voice high-pitched and quivering, just as Hardie said, “Eight.” A sudden terror seethed through my entire being, but it only remotely belonged to me. I was able to examine it the way I had examined my chattering teeth, the barrage of raindrops that hit my face, the steady trickle of water that found its way inside my collar and down my neck, the arrhythmic flutter of my heart.

Nilsson said, “Why the men? Why only the men?”

Mary Ann asked, “What about the women? Are they still thinking of sending one of us?”

“Of course not,” I said, “what do you think? But I doubt they would stop a woman if she volunteered.” I did not notice then how we both believed in the concept of “they,” of omniscient decision-makers who occupied a place in the power structure above us—a “they” who made the decisions and took the spoils or suffered the consequences of being wrong. I did notice, however, that Mary Ann was greatly relieved to hear that no one would call on her to be heroic, and she put her useless little hand trustingly inside of mine.

Hardie held up a fistful of tiny splinters of wood that seemed to appear for the purpose by magic. “Only the men,” he stated. “Two straws are short, six are long. The short straws lose.” I don’t know why we thought two people fewer would make the difference between life and death, but we didn’t question it. If Hardie said two was the magic number, then it was two. We assumed that Hardie knew.