On some level, the experiment had appeared successful. Before the voyage, Annabel had not taken care of the babies for even a single day, but, once forced, she had somehow known how to swaddle them and change their diapers and plug their small mouths with bottles of a warm mixture of cow’s milk, sugar, and cod liver oil made according to the night nurse’s written formula and brought at all hours from the ship’s kitchen. Addison might have felt vindicated if there hadn’t been something not quite right about how Annabel went about her maternal tasks: blank-faced, mechanical as a mill worker. One night, he had found her standing at the stern, looking down into the dark water.
They were five days out when the explosion occurred, still a full day from Liverpool, slowed by the fog, entering a region of the sea bristling with periscopes and studded with mines.
Only five hundred and twenty-three passengers were on board, with room for three times that. The crew outnumbered them.
Addison had been awake when the blast came, before dawn. Driven mad by the wailing of one twin while Annabel fed the other, he had snatched up bottle and baby and brought both into bed with him.
As soon as the rubber nipple was in its mouth, the child had quieted, its pale eyes intent on his face. Addison loosened the swaddling, and a pair of mottled pink hands emerged. “Which one is this?” he said.
Where she sat, Annabel’s face was in shadow. “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
The baby’s body pulsed in his lap. Its small fingers flared and curled.
He felt the change of pressure in his ears before he heard the blast. The sound came from everywhere, permeating the air. The ship shuddered and seemed to twist. A whoosh, a second of suspended silence, then water raining down. Grinding vibration followed by quiet.
“What was that?” Annabel said. Sharp, not fearful.
He dressed hastily.
A section of the starboard railing was mangled and twisted; smoke and steam drove him back when he went to look over. A fire alarm rang shrilly, maddeningly. On the bridge, he ordered the engine room be telegraphed STOP, though the engines had already gone dead. He sent the third officer below to investigate. Already, the list to starboard was noticeable. He stood motionless, looking at his boots, calculating. Fog pressed flat against the bridge windows like a blindfold. “Ready the boats,” he said. “Sound the general alarm.”
In the radio room, the operators tapped out distress calls. Dots and dashes. The nearest ship, a merchant vessel, was thirty nautical miles away and COMING FULL SPEED. But it would not arrive for two hours.
He considered the fire, the starboard list, the blue fog, the black water. “Abandon ship,” he said to the first mate, who shouted it to the other officers, who shouted it in return. A strange echo, growing louder instead of fading.
The boat deck was in chaos. Crew members with megaphones yelled instructions over the passengers’ commotion, the cranking davits, the hiss of steam. Addison strode the length of the ship, trying to impose order. He told himself he would only duck away for a moment, only ensure that Annabel was on her way to the boats with the babies and bid them a brief, stoic farewell.
He made his way through the smoke and clamor.
The simple fact that Annabel was not in the cabin dawned on him with dreamlike slowness. The two swaddled infants screamed in their basket. Annabel was not in the armchair or in the bed. She was not in the bathroom, where seawater was pouring from the fixtures. The babies’ faces were purple and contorted with outrage, their spongy pink tongues curling in their shrieking mouths. He opened the wardrobe, but of course Annabel was not inside. He stepped out into the corridor, called her name, then shouted it.
Long ago Addison had trained himself not to hesitate. If he had hesitated before throwing that line to Lloyd, his friend would have drowned, would never have been his friend. But now he hesitated, standing in the middle of the cabin, waiting for something to change, for some solution to emerge. Finally, still hesitantly, he went to the wardrobe and removed his pistol from its case, loaded it, and dropped it in the pocket of his greatcoat. He lifted the babies from their basket, one in each arm.
Down the tilting stairs, out a heavy tilted steel door by pressing the latch with an elbow, pushing with a shoulder. He found the twins’ flopping heads alarming, their larval bodies cumbersome. On the boat deck, pressing aft through a panicked mob, he craned and swiveled, looking for Annabel. Where was she? The question rang in his mind, deafening and relentless. A quiet voice, speaking from some silent inner part of him, answered You won’t find her. If she had planned to return, she would not have left.