“Step here, madam, and mind the gap. Do you see the plank? Your foot just there, one and then the other. I have you.”
Below her, so much closer than it should have been, the ocean whispered and flicked against the side of the ship.
“Don’t look down,” advised the officer, and thrust her all the way into the boat. She collapsed next to a blond woman clasping a toddler, and then Carrie was beside her, and Rosalie after her.
She heard Jack say, “Ladies, you are next,” and two more women climbed in.
Madeleine sat unmoving, the numbness blossoming all the way through her body, freezing not just her legs but her arms and hands and heart.
The ship’s officer was assisting the latest woman aboard, helping her to find a place to sit. It was Eleanor Widener, her face reflecting all the quiet horror Maddy was working so hard to keep at bay.
Jack’s voice reached her again; she lifted her head. He was standing at the open window adjacent to the one they all had crept through, leaning out.
“Sir. Might I board the boat in order to protect my wife? She is in a delicate condition.”
The officer straightened. “No men are allowed in the boats until all the women are loaded.”
“What is the number of the boat, then? So that I may find her afterwards?”
“This is Boat Four, sir.”
“Thank you.”
She wanted to say something. She wanted to say anything, his name, a demand to be let off, but the last few women were jostling by her, and someone stepped on her foot, and someone else was crying by the prow, and the officer who had pushed her in had climbed back inside the promenade.
Jack, still leaning out the window, stripped off his gloves.
“Madeleine, catch!”
He tossed them to her one at a time and she did catch them somehow, both of them, the leather still warm from his hands.
Above him, someone called out, “How many women are in that boat?”
“Twenty-four,” the officer called back.
“That’s enough. Lower away.”
“Lower away!” the officer shouted, lifting his arms, and the ropes creaked, and the boat gave a sudden hard jerk, pitching toward the stern before leveling out again.
“Jack,” she cried, but the black thing had taken over her voice completely, and the only sound that emerged was a strangled whisper.
The little girl next to her shifted in her mother’s arms to examine Madeleine curiously.
Even now he waited, watching the lifeboat descend, resting on his elbows and smiling his warm, slight smile at her until the craft struck the water and began a gradual spin, and the distance between them erased him entirely.
CHAPTER 25
Those next few hours. Those next few wretched hours. Some nights still, I close my eyes and I’m trapped back inside them, flattened between the mirrored line of the ocean and the suffocating stars.
Those are the nights that I don’t go back to sleep.
I’m so grateful, son, that you will grow up with no memory of any of it. That by the time you’ll read these words, those hours, that godforsaken morning, will be nothing but recorded history.
Despite my nightmares, I am merely an addendum.
Monday, April 15th
Alongside Titanic
Lifeboat Four came out of her spin and Madeleine found herself looking directly into a first-class stateroom, the window almost near enough to touch. The lights blazed inside it, chairs knocked over, water surging over the sculpted feet of the furniture, splashing against the tables and bed. Amid a jumble of long-stemmed fresh flowers, a woman’s peach satin slipper danced along its surface, whirling for a moment or two before tipping and sinking down to the rug.
“Hey there, Mr. Perkis!” shouted one of the crewmen manning the oars, his head thrown back, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Quartermaster, hey! We need another hand down here!”
They all looked up. A thickset man appeared on the nearby ropes, descending clumsily hand over hand. His boots hit the lifeboat with a thump, and he turned, tugging at his coat.
“The tiller,” said the same sailor.
The quartermaster nodded, bent over the gunwale and shoved away a steamer chair that was knocking against their side. In just the few moments that followed, two more men clambered down the ropes, not sailors. They huddled, wide-eyed, against the keel.
The quartermaster’s gaze raked them up and down. He shook his head, his mouth flattened, then looked back at the oarsmen.
“We’re to go aft, lads, to the open gangway. We’ll pick up more women there.”
The men dipped their oars into the sea; the lifeboat gained a steadier compass, gliding gradually away from the ship. A series of crashes still reached them from the inside, china breaking, doors breaking, wood breaking. The deeper innards of the liner grinding, balefully loud, steel against steel.