7. Sebastian #2
I would give the entire ship, and everything in it, to be that soaked, stupid, and hopeful again.
Blinking back to the present, I now stand in a two-billion-dollar corridor, and I check my watch, deciding I’m done here.
I’ve given this ship enough. Tonight I’m giving the rest of it to her.
So I made my remarks short. I raise a glass to my father’s memory, to the ship, to the future, and I get off the small stage before anyone can pin me to it.
My mother intercepts me near the champagne tower, a senator’s wife at her elbow.
“Sebastian, darling, you have to meet…”
“Not tonight, Mother.”
“It will take two minutes.”
“I’m done for now.” I don’t slow down. “I have somewhere to be.”
I feel her watching me go, that cool assessing weight between my shoulder blades, and I don’t care.
For once in my life I don’t care.
I take the private elevator up to the owner’s deck two at a time, loosening my tie, checking my watch again, because the sooner I get there, the sooner I can start making it up to my wife and daughter.
“Margo?” I let myself into the suite. “I got away early, I thought we could…”
The rooms are dark.
“Margo? Sandy?”
Nothing answers me but the thrum of the empty space and the sea moving somewhere far below.
They’re on deck, I decide.
Sandy wanted the dolphins again this morning.
They could be watching the harbor lights come on, or they’re down at the family pool, or Sandy talked her mother into one more ice cream.
I go back out into the corridor and I call the room steward, taking the stairs down to the pool deck, and I stop a girl in white with a tray of towels.
“Have you seen my wife? Dark hair, and a little girl?”
“Not this evening, Mr. Austen, no. I’m sorry.”
I try the observation deck.
The children’s club, already closing. The atrium where the gossip lives.
I call Margo’s phone and it rings out and I tell myself she’s got it on silent because Sandy’s asleep on her shoulder somewhere, and I call again, and again but the calm I walked in with is coming apart thread by thread, the same rope, the same failure to hold.
I go back to the suite because I don’t know where else there is.
When I sit down on the edge of our bed to think, I see it.
At the nightstand, small and bright against the dark wood, catching the last of the window light.
Her wedding ring.
I don’t move for a long moment. I look at it the way you look at a word you can’t read yet, waiting for it to turn into a thing that doesn’t mean what it means.
It doesn’t. I reach over and pick it up and it’s cold, sitting in my palm weighing almost nothing, and the weight of it nearly puts me on the floor.
Margo took it off and she set it here. On my side, where I couldn’t miss it.
I close my fist around it until the setting bites into my skin, and I let it, and into the quiet of that ruined suite, the last two days come back to me all at once, clear and undeniable now that it’s too late.
The roses she couldn’t look at. Her words that confuse me, flat, as if she’d already stopped hoping I would understand. My mother with her on the deck, Sandy asking if her mother was mad and Margo lying to spare her.
Every single sign, laid out for me in order, and me too busy saving a ship to read a word of it.
She’s been trying to leave for days.
And underneath the grief, hot and rising, comes the other thing, because I know exactly whose fingerprints are on the worst of it.
I get up off the bed. I put the ring in my breast pocket and I go to find my mother.
***
Her suite door is open a crack, warm light and laughter spilling into the corridor, and I stop with my hand on it because I hear my own name and then I hear worse.
“…told you it would sort itself out.” My mother’s voice, light, delighted. “Honestly, I was prepared to have the helicopter sit there all afternoon. And she simply left. Saved us all a great deal of trouble.”
“Mm.” Therese, lazy and pleased. “The first sensible thing she’s done.”
“The first useful thing. I’ll say that much for the girl, she knew when she wasn’t wanted.”
I push the door open.
They’re at the mirror, the two of them, half into their gala finery, my mother fastening an earring and Therese holding a glass, and they turn and their faces do the same small thing, the smooth closing-over of people caught mid-sentence.
“Sebastian.” My mother recovers first. She always does. “You startled me. We’re not nearly ready, tell them the toast will have to…”
“What helicopter?”
The pause is very short. To anyone else it would be nothing but I’ve spent years learning to read the half-second before my mother lies.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you…”
“You offered my wife a helicopter.” My voice is quiet and it costs me everything to keep it there. “I heard it myself, drop your act and don’t tell me you don’t know. What did you say to her, Mother?”
Therese sets her glass down and finds the door. She’s not stupid; I’ll give her that. She slips out past me without a word and the latch clicks and it’s just the two of us, mother and son.
My mother turns from her reflection and faces me, and she doesn’t bother with the wounded act. She looks, if anything, tired of me.
“Yes,” she says. “I offered her a graceful exit. A settlement, a story for the press, her dignity intact. It was a kindness, Sebastian, which is more than she’d have gotten if she’d dragged this out.”
“How is that kindness?”
“She was never going to survive this life. You knew it the day you married her. I simply had the courage to say so out loud.” She reaches up and finishes the earring, calm as still water. “I did what a mother does. I protected you from a mistake you were too sentimental to fix yourself.”
“You drove my wife off a ship in front of the whole world!”
“You drove her off.”
She says it without heat, which is how I know she means it, and it lands on me.
“Don’t look at me like that. Because it wasn’t hard to do it and please, I didn’t take you from her, Sebastian.
You did it yourself.” Her eyes move over me, cool, almost curious.
“Why do you care now? You didn’t seem to care yesterday or before that.
She’s gone, and suddenly you’re a husband?
Son, it’s a little late for the performance. ”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out, because there’s no argument in me.
As much as I fucking hate it, she’s right.
And it is the single most damning thing anyone has ever said to me.
She watches me. For one beat, a look almost close to pity crosses her face, and that’s unbearable, so I stop looking at her.