CHAPTER THREE
HAZEL
The alarm has a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.
It’s not even loud. That’s the awful thing about it.
It’s calm, a rising tone, polite and relentless, the sound of a system that has decided something for you.
I stand in the orange gloom of the suite with Maren clamped against my chest and listen to it while the ship shudders around us and somewhere, far below, water meets steel in a way it isn’t supposed to.
Then the captain, finally, stops being polite.
His voice comes through every speaker at once, no more script, no more warmth, just instruction. All passengers to muster stations. Leave belongings. Follow crew directions. Wear the life jackets from your cabin. He repeats it, and the ship rocks while he says it, and I am already moving.
Life jacket on. Maren’s infant jacket, a yellow horseshoe of foam I prayed to never use, clipped around her while she screams her outrage at the indignity.
Diaper bag over my shoulder. Shoes with tread.
I look around the suite, the travel crib, the ridiculous silver tray of tiny sandwiches, the reception dress still hanging on its door, and then I leave all of it and carry my daughter into the corridor.
The corridor is a river of people.
Emergency strips glow along the floor. The main lights flicker and hold, flicker and hold.
Passengers pour out of cabins in every state of dress, pajamas, cocktail wear, one man in a tuxedo jacket and boxer shorts holding a shoe in each hand like he couldn’t decide which one mattered.
Crew members stand at every junction shouting directions with a calm that must have been beaten into them in training, and the passengers flow the direction they’re shouted in, mostly, except for the ones who’ve stopped dead to argue about laptops and passports, and the crew wade back for them, patient, relentless, physical when they have to be.
Our muster station is two decks down. The stairs are wet. I don’t want to think about why the stairs are wet.
A crew member takes one look at the baby and inserts himself in front of us, clearing a path with his body, one hand back toward me, not touching, just there. “With me, ma’am. Slow. Watch the third step, it’s slick.”
“Where was the impact?” I ask him.
“Can’t say, ma’am.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Third step, ma’am.”
The muster station is a theater, of all things, the ship’s show lounge repurposed by disaster, rows of plush seats filling with people in life jackets, the stage lit by emergency floods, crew at the front with clipboards and radios.
The noise is extraordinary. Hundreds of people being brave, children crying, someone laughing the high wrong laugh of a person coming apart, and over it all the crew calling names and numbers and the ship rolling, rolling, each roll answered by a collective gasp from the crowd like the theater is watching a very frightening film.
I get Maren’s name and mine onto a clipboard. The officer checking us in has a mustache and shaking hands and a voice that doesn’t shake at all.
“Morse. Two.” He reads the name, looks up, and I watch him realize who he’s just checked in. His eyes flick to the yellow horseshoe jacket. “Mrs. Morse. There’s a separate—”
“Whatever everyone else gets,” I say. “We get what everyone else gets.”
He holds my gaze for a second, then nods and writes something down, and I love him a little bit for not arguing.
I find a seat near the aisle and hold Maren and count exits, because that’s what I do now, I count exits.
An elderly couple takes the seats beside us, matching gray hair, matching life jackets, holding hands with the coordinated grip of people who have survived everything by holding on.
The woman looks at Maren and her face crumples and rebuilds itself.
“How old?” she asks.
“Five months.”
“My granddaughter is five months.” She says it to her hands. “She’s in Tampa. She’s safe in Tampa.”
“Then you’re already luckier than me,” I say, and she laughs, a wet, shocked sound, and grips my wrist for a second before letting go.
Her husband pats her knee. They go back to holding hands.
I want to be them in forty years. I want the chance to become them, and I file that want away where the fear can’t chew on it.
Maren’s stopped screaming and gone quiet and watchful, eyes huge, taking in the lights and the noise and the strangers. Five months old and she’s at her first evacuation. Her father was going to teach her the names of things. Muster station, baby. Life jacket. Tender. Lesson one.
Time does something strange in that theater.
It goes very fast and doesn’t move at all.
Names get called, groups get led out, the seats thin around us.
The ship’s damage report filters through the crowd in whispers, and whispers are always worse than facts: we’ve been holed, we’re sinking, we’re not sinking but we can’t sail, there’s a fire, there isn’t a fire.
A woman two rows up keeps standing to shout questions and being sat gently back down by her teenage son.
The woman from the elevator is nowhere, or everywhere, telling people about 2009.
And then Christian is there.
He comes through the side door in emergency gear, high-vis over his rolled sleeves, wet to the elbows, and he scans the theater the way a man scans for his own people, and finds us.
The whole room could be on fire and I’d know that scan.
He crosses the rows fast, ignores three people who grab at his sleeves, and drops into the seat beside me and puts his hand on Maren’s yellow-foam back and his forehead against mine.
“You’re okay,” he says. It isn’t a question.
“We’re okay. Christian, the ship—”
“Holed below the waterline, forward sections. She’s stable. She’s not going down.” He pulls back enough to look at me. “But she’s hurt, and we’re in the middle of the worst of the weather, and the captain is staging an evacuation. Hazel, listen to me.”
I grab his sleeve with my free hand. “Come with us.”
He looks at me, and then he looks past me, toward the side door, toward the stairwell beyond it where crew are still moving passengers down from the upper decks, a line of gray-haired people in life jackets holding the rail and each other. I watch him do the arithmetic he was born doing.
“I can’t.”
“Christian.”
“There are still people aboard.” He cups my face with one wet hand. “There are still people aboard, and every officer who knows this ship is needed. I know her better than anyone. I have to stay until they’re off.”
I want to fight him. I want to be the woman in the movie who argues while the water rises.
But I have been married to this man for years and I have stood on dockside and watched him wade into every emergency his company ever produced, and I fell in love with him partly because of this, because of this very thing, and I will not now, in a sinking-ship theater, in front of two hundred terrified strangers, ask him to be someone else.
I understand this decision. It costs me everything I have and I understand it.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
He kisses me, hard, tasting of salt and fear, and then he takes Maren’s small jacketed head in his hand and kisses her hair, and for a second his eyes are shut and his face does something I’ve only seen at her birth.
Aubriella appears at the end of the row with a tablet and a headset, soaked through, composed, carved out of competence. “Christian, assignments are ready.” Then, to me, and I will give her this until my dying day, her voice is kind: “Hazel. You’re on the first tender.”
Christian straightens and becomes the chairman again. “Families with infants, elderly, medical cases. You’re going to Morse Cay. It’s our island, it’s ninety minutes by tender—”
“An island?” The word lands wrong. “We’re evacuating a ship onto an island in a hurricane?”
“It’s not a hurricane yet, and the island is the safest point in reach.
Hazel.” He crouches in front of me, both hands on the seat arms, and makes me look at him.
“Reinforced buildings. Our resort, built to ride out storms ten times this size, because I built it, because I made them overbuild everything. Emergency power. A medical center. Our own staff. It’s the safest place I can put you.
Safer than any open boat to the mainland. Safer than staying here.”
“You promise?”
He looks directly at me. “I promise.”
“Say it knowing I’m going to hold you to it forever.”
“I promise,” he says again, and behind him Aubriella looks down at her tablet and gives us that much privacy, two seconds’ worth.
Our row gets called. The mustache officer is at the aisle, and crew are moving us out, and Christian stands and helps me up and steadies the diaper bag on my shoulder, this last husbandly act, adjusting a strap.
“Ninety minutes,” he says. “I’ll call the island the moment I’m able. I’ll come to you the moment I’m able.”
“I know.”
He kisses us both once more, and then he’s gone, back toward the stairwell, toward the people still aboard, and Aubriella goes with him, and at the door he looks back, and then he doesn’t look back again.
Getting from the theater to the tender is its own small odyssey.
Down a crew stairwell, along a working corridor lined with pipes, through a hatch held open by a man the size of a refrigerator, and out onto an embarkation deck open to the weather, where the rain hits us sideways and the sea is right there, black and breathing, closer than the sea should ever be to a ship.
The tender waits below, riding up the hull on a swell and crashing back down, riding up and crashing down, and the crew load us one at a time in the gap between, timed to the water.
My turn comes and a crewman holds out his arms for Maren.
“No,” I say. It’s out before I can think.
“Ma’am, I have to. Two hands for the ladder. I’ll pass her straight down, I swear to you, I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
I look at him. He’s maybe twenty-three, rain running off his chin, arms out, completely certain of himself in a way I will never be certain of anything again. I put my daughter in a stranger’s arms. She screams.
I go down the ladder backward, hands burning on the rails, eyes never leaving her, and at the bottom another pair of hands takes me at the waist and then Maren is passed down into my arms and the whole exchange has taken maybe eleven seconds and I am a different woman than I was at the top of the ladder.
That was the worst thing I have ever done, and I did it because I had to.
The tender is a covered lifeboat, orange, stinking of diesel, and the crossing is the longest ninety minutes of my life.
Rain lashes the little windows. The boat falls off every wave and climbs the next one, and around me strangers pray in four languages while a crew member stands in the aisle throwing up into a bag with professional discretion.
Maren screams herself hoarse for the first hour and then falls abruptly, completely asleep, limp as a sandbag, and I spend the last thirty minutes with two fingers against her throat because asleep is fine but I need the pulse, I need the proof.
Through the salt-blurred window, behind us, The Sovereign sits lower than she should, lit up like a birthday cake in the black, and on her decks I can see tiny figures moving, one of whom is my husband.
I hold Maren tighter and watch until the rain takes the ship away entirely.
Ahead of us, invisible in the dark, the island is waiting.