CHAPTER TWO
HAZEL
I find out the storm is serious from a deck chair.
Not from Christian, who has not come back up, and not from any official announcement, because official announcements arrive when management has finished deciding how you’ll feel about them.
I find out at six in the morning, standing at the window with Maren on my hip, watching two crew members drag a deck chair across the pool deck and lash it to a railing with straps they brought for the purpose.
You don’t strap furniture down for weather that might slide past.
Below them, a third crew member is stacking loungers with the speed of a man who has been told to hurry but not to look like he’s hurrying.
“Your father’s ship is lying to us,” I tell Maren. She gums her fist, unconcerned with maritime ethics.
By seven, the pool deck is empty and roped.
By seven-thirty, the captain’s voice comes through the suite speakers: a weather system, an abundance of caution, exterior decks closed until further notice, the ship altering course, please enjoy the indoor facilities, the crew is at your service.
He says the word precaution four times. He does not say the word storm at all, which is how you know it’s a storm.
I call Christian. It goes to voicemail, which he never lets happen when I’m calling, which means his phone is either dead or in his pocket while his hands are busy.
I text him: The deck chairs told me everything.
His reply takes nine minutes: Stay in the suite today. I’ll come up when I can.
I look at Maren, who has filled her diaper with an enthusiasm that suggests she, too, has reviewed the forecast.
The ship has already changed under us. It’s subtle at first, a lengthening of the sway, the horizon through the glass beginning to tilt and correct, tilt and correct, each cycle a degree wider than the one before.
I’ve sailed with Christian for fifteen years, through crossings that emptied whole restaurants, and my sea legs are better than most crew.
This motion is different. It has a will behind it.
At ten I decide the suite is a cage and the cage has no information in it, so I strap Maren into the carrier, clip her sun hat under her chin against absolutely no sun whatsoever, and take her down three decks toward the bridge.
The elevator down is full. A couple in matching Sovereign polo shirts, the kind you get for spending too much in the gift shop, are debating whether to sue over the canceled trivia.
A woman in a sequined cocktail dress at ten in the morning keeps telling anyone who will listen that she cruised through a hurricane in 2009 and it was fine, actually it was the best trip she ever took. Nobody is listening.
A little boy of about four is watching Maren in her carrier with the deep suspicion of an only child, and Maren, who has never met a stranger, gives him her full gummy smile until he hides behind his mother’s leg.
Nobody says the word storm. The captain has trained an entire ship not to say it, and I admire the discipline even as I resent it.
I know better than to walk onto the bridge itself. There’s a corridor outside it, though, with a windowed door and an alcove where officers wait, and I’ve spent enough years as the boss’s wife to know that nobody tells the boss’s wife she can’t stand in an alcove.
I stand in the alcove. Through the glass I can see Christian with Captain Okafor and Aubriella, all three of them planted in front of a weather display the size of a garage door, and the display is ugly.
I don’t need a meteorology degree to read it.
The storm is a red swirl with our little green ship icon skating along its edge, and the red part is growing while I watch.
Christian has his sleeves rolled up. That’s my personal barometer, and it’s at bad weather.
Sleeves down is boardroom. Sleeves up is engine room.
He’s pointing at the screen and the captain is shaking his head and Aubriella is tapping a tablet, and none of them looks like people managing a precaution.
The captain sees me first. He says something. Christian turns, and the look on his face is one part guilt, three parts fury at the weather for forcing the issue. He comes out into the corridor and the door seals the noise behind him.
“You were supposed to stay in the suite,” he says, not unkindly.
“The suite doesn’t have a weather display. How bad?”
“Bad enough that we’re moving. Not bad enough to panic.”
“Those are not reassuringly far apart.”
He exhales through his nose, almost a laugh, almost not. “We’re diverting around the worst of it. Okafor’s done this route for twenty years. The ship can take ten times what we’ll get.”
“Then why are your sleeves rolled up?”
He looks down at his own arms, caught. “Because it’s warm on the bridge.”
“Christian.”
“Because I think better like this.” He puts both hands on my shoulders, over the carrier straps, and bends his head down to my level.
“I need you and Maren in the suite. It’s the sturdiest accommodation on the ship, it’s high, it’s midships, and it means when I’m down here doing my job I’m not spending one single brain cell wondering where you are. Can you do that for me?”
It’s a good argument. It’s the same argument as the deck chairs, dressed up nicer. Before I can answer, Aubriella comes out of the bridge, tablet under her arm, and gives me her polished smile.
“Hazel. The safest place aboard right now is the family suite. You’d be doing us all a favor.”
I look at her. “I didn’t ask where I should wait for my husband.”
Christian steps between us, smooth and practiced, a man who has mediated boardrooms full of people richer and meaner than either of us.
“Aubriella, the tender schedule. Go.” She goes. He turns back to me. “She’s not wrong about the suite.”
“She’s wrong about everything else and it’s leaking into her tone.”
“I don’t have time to referee this today.”
“Then don’t.” I adjust Maren’s hat, mostly so my hands have somewhere to be that isn’t his collar. “We’ll be upstairs. Come up when you can. Actually come up, Christian. Not a text. Not a crew member with a reassuring card from the captain’s table. You.”
“Me,” he says. He kisses me fast, kisses the top of Maren’s hat, and disappears back through the sealed door into the red glow of his screens.
I last three hours in the suite.
Not because I’m restless. Because the ship stops pretending.
The swell builds through the afternoon until the horizon in the balcony glass is doing slow, sickening seesaws, and the glasses on the bar cart begin to chime against each other, a little crystal warning bell nobody rung on purpose.
Maren naps, wakes, fusses, feeds, and the whole time I track the motion the way I used to track her heartbeat on the ultrasound screen, counting, watching for the pattern to break.
The announcement system stays relentlessly upbeat. Trivia is canceled. The evening entertainment is postponed. Room service is complimentary tonight, which is cruise-line for we are very sorry about what’s coming.
At some point I call down to guest services and ask, politely, whether the ship is still diverting around the storm, and the poor woman on the phone tells me, in a voice that has clearly been given lines, that the captain has everything well in hand.
“Tell the captain his deck chairs gave him away,” I say, and hang up before she has to respond.
A steward arrives midafternoon with the complimentary tray, a silver dome situation involving tiny sandwiches and a dessert engineered to photograph well. His name tag says Emeka and his smile says he has delivered forty of these today to forty nervous cabins and his feet are killing him.
“Rough night ahead?” I ask.
“The ship has seen worse, ma’am.” A beautiful answer. Tells me everything, commits to nothing. I tip him anyway, and he pauses at the door, and lowers his voice to something off-script. “Keep the little one’s things together tonight, ma’am. Just in case. Probably for nothing.”
He leaves before he can get in trouble for kindness.
I stand there holding a tiny sandwich and look at Maren, asleep in the crib that has started, faintly, to creak against the carpet with the ship’s roll, and I do what Emeka told me.
I pack the diaper bag. Wipes, formula, the yellow sleep suit, her documents in the waterproof pouch Christian insists we travel with.
I tell myself it’s precaution. The word of the day.
Maren wakes, feeds, and falls asleep against my shoulder while the horizon seesaws, and I hum the same eight bars of the lullaby until even I’m sick of it.
Christian calls at dusk. His voice is worn down to the wood.
“You okay?”
“We’re okay. Maren’s had her bath. She waved at a seagull earlier, before the seagulls all quit. You’ll want that on the record.”
A beat of static. “Hazel, the next twelve hours are going to be uncomfortable. We’re going to take some weather on the beam while we clear the system. The ship is built for it. The crew is drilled for it. I need you strapped into the good life up there and not roaming corridors.”
“The good life,” I repeat. “You mean the suite.”
“I mean the suite.”
“Come upstairs.”
“I can’t yet.”
“You keep using that word.”
This time the silence is longer, and in it I hear everything he isn’t saying, all the tonnage of it, the captain and the course and the two hundred passengers and Aubriella’s tablet and the red swirl on the screen, and underneath it all the small domestic fact of his daughter in a towel an hour ago, kicking her legs at nothing, delighted by her own feet.
“The second I can,” he says. “I swear it.”
The ship rolls. It’s not like the other rolls.
It keeps going, farther and farther, and the bar cart glasses scream along their shelf, and I grab the wall with my free hand and plant my feet wide the way Christian taught me on his father’s first ferry when I was twenty-two and stupid in love.
The crib slides two inches across the carpet and stops against the bed frame.
“Christian.” Maren is screaming in the carrier, offended by physics. “That wasn’t beam weather.”
“No,” he says, and his voice has changed completely. “That was something else. Hold on, there’s—”
The impact hits before he finishes the sentence. It’s a sound more than a feeling, a gigantic metallic bang from somewhere below and forward, the whole ship shuddering through its spine, and then the lights go out.
Not all of them. The suite goes dark for three full seconds while I stand there in the black with my daughter screaming and my heart detonating, and then the emergency strips come up along the floor, dim orange, enough to see by, not enough to breathe by.
Somewhere far away an alarm begins. Then another.
The announcement system clicks, hesitates, and for the first time all day it doesn’t say anything at all.
The phone is still in my hand. The call is still connected, and Christian’s voice comes through it, no longer worn, no longer the chairman, just a man, sharp and fast:
“Hazel. Are you hurt? Is Maren hurt?”
“We’re okay. Christian, what was that?”
“I don’t know yet.”
It’s the first true thing he’s said all day that had no comfort in it at all.