She closed her eyes. Opened them. Her breath was coming so fast, she saw it all through a cloud of mist. She could not look away; she could not fill her lungs. Carrie’s arm remained tight around her but Madeleine’s entire body was shaking, and she realized she couldn’t stop that, either.
Another series of whipping cracks, like gunshots. The forward funnel ripped loose from its cables in a blossom of hellish sparks and soot. The funnel teetered along its edge, then collapsed in a tremendous rush along the starboard side.
A woman near the back let out a wail. Madeleine felt her throat tighten, every ounce of her wanting to join in with that pained cry, but she couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t yell. She could only watch.
The steamer’s lights winked out. The stern of the ship rose so high it seemed like some great, invisible hand beneath the ocean must be pulling the prow straight down. More people fell—as her eyes adjusted to the sudden night, she could see them tumbling, blue and silver, lost to the waves below. A series of explosions began, rumbling booms that sounded like rockslides, like the strafing of bombs against a solid hillside or castle.
Titanic split apart. Just like that, she broke in two, and everything before the aft funnel dropped down in a rush beneath the water. Gone.
Madeleine bent her head, panting, covering her face with both hands. The cry trapped in her throat escaped but only barely, another airy thin moan whistling past Jack’s leather gloves.
“Holy God,” whispered Eleanor Widener. “Holy, holy God.”
When Madeleine could look up again, the aft section of the ship remained practically upright, as if it had been designed to float exactly like that. A shooting star lit a long, fiery path behind it, and as the star sank, so then did the ship: almost gently, almost quietly, except for the splashing and screams.
*
“There will be suction,” announced the quartermaster. “I need you to pull, lads. This is the time to put your backs into it.”
The boat spun for a moment while the two sailors found their rhythm; then it began to skim along the water, away from the boiling center of the wreckage. With the profile of Titanic gone, Madeleine thought she saw the bobbing lights of the other lifeboats around them, hundreds of them, thousands, until logic caught up with her perspective and she realized she was seeing the stars reflecting off the ocean, a boundless looking glass that cast their lights up and down and everywhere else in between.
She felt dizzy, her mouth dry. She shut her eyes and tried to measure out her breaths. When she opened them again, she was gazing downward, forward, at the blades of the oars that dipped and lifted and dipped again, stirring up phosphorus in the water, a golden green glow that spread outward in ripples, softly outlining the boat’s path before sinking back into oblivion.
“Do we have a lamp?” asked the quartermaster.
“No, sir,” replied one of the sailors. “I searched and found none.”
“Very well.”
The phosphorus dripped, shattered, dripped. Across the ocean, a terrible new noise began to rise.
She would think, later, that it was the sound of a mortally wounded beast, only if the beast had a thousand-some voices, all of them howling with pain and panic and pleading. The frothing of the water where the stern had gone down had not calmed with its loss. It was full of people, flailing and begging for help.
The blond woman next to Madeleine was quaking, the child on her lap clutched against her chest. Madeleine noticed that she was wrapped only in thin shawls, cotton or something else like it; beneath the starlight, the colors were faded, but she imagined that when touched with wind and sun, they resembled butterfly wings.
She pulled the fox shawl from her shoulders, draped it over the woman. She couldn’t fasten the hooks, not while the woman held the child, but she tugged the ends closed as best as she could.
“Tack s? mycket,” the mother whispered. The little girl squirmed, blinking. She lifted a hand to stroke the fur by her face, her eyes amazed.
The oarsmen had ceased their rowing, blades up, huffing. The lifeboat resumed its slow, aimless spin.
“We have to go back,” Madeleine said. It was difficult to get the words out without her teeth chattering. She looked up at the quartermaster, who now stood by the tiller with, oddly, an unlit pipe in one hand. “We have to. Only listen to them.”
“Yes,” agreed Eleanor. “Yes, she’s right.”
“The suction,” said one of the oarsmen instantly. “We can’t.”
“Surely it’s done by now,” said a woman seated on the other side of Eleanor.