Carpathia

by Matt Forbeck

  He noticed a pale, long-haired woman standing alone near the railing a bit to the port of where he stood. She wore a thick coat that was too large for her, but she still managed to shiver in the chill breeze that wafted over the back of the ship. As he watched, she wiped her face and sniffled.

  Brody edged his way along the railing closer to her. "I don't mean to be too forward, ma'am, but are you all right?"

  His voice startled the woman, and for an instant he feared she might bolt back along the length of the ship, screaming for help the entire way. She steeled herself then and responded to him. "No. No, I'm not."

  "You were on board the Titanic, weren't you?" Brody said. "You lost someone close to you."

  The woman nodded. "My husband and my son. They said that Edward was no longer a child. They wouldn't let him get onto the boat with me."

  "How old was he?"

  "Only fifteen! Tell me, does that sound like an adult to you?"

  Brody stifled a snicker. At fifteen, he'd been on his own for a year already, and he'd made his way from Ireland over to the States. He couldn't say he'd been the most mature man back then, but he'd never doubted that he was a man.

  "Of course not," he said, hoping he sounded sincere. It was so hard to tell. "When did you last see him?"

  "He and his father brought me up to the lifeboats. I didn't want to get into one of them, but they both insisted. They promised me that they'd get onto one of the next ones and meet me later."

  Brody reached out and put a hand on one of the woman's icy fingers, right where it rested on the railing. "And you never saw them again?"

  "They promised." Tears flowed freely down the woman's face, down her twisted mask of emotional turmoil. "They promised!"

  She turned toward Brody then, and he took her in his arms and did his best to comfort her, which even he had to admit wasn't much. She was too distraught to notice how half-hearted his attempt at exhibiting sympathy went.

  "I don't know how I'm going to make it without them," she said. "How am I going to live without my husband to support me? Without my son, what is there to live for?"

  Brody glanced around to confirm that there was no one else hanging around. Just about everyone on the ship must have been at dinner right then. Perhaps some of the survivors had remained in their cabins, too exhausted or ill from their experiences to venture forth that evening. Either way, this poor woman here was the only one who'd come up onto the open deck to stare back in the direction of the disaster they'd left behind earlier that day.

  "What is it with this 'women and children first' policy?" the woman asked. "Is it supposed to be humane to make sure that we survive without any means of support? Now here I am without a husband or a child. I have nothing left and no reason to go on."

  "Perhaps I can help you with that," Brody said. He looked down at her. He could see her pulse pounding in her neck.

  "I don't see how," she said. "It's impossible!"

  "Nothing's impossible, ma'am. We live in an amazing world filled with things far more amazing than your imagination allows for."

  "Sometimes," the woman said, "sometimes I think they were the lucky ones. The dead have no troubles. Not any more."

  Brody smirked at this. "For the most part, sure, but not even the dead are created equal."

  She stared up at him then, confused at how little sense he must be making to her. He reached down and held her chin so he could stare into her eyes. Tears flowed down her cheeks like rivers.

  "Let me help you," he said. "Let me make everything all right."

  "How?" the woman said. "Nothing can ever make me right again."

  "Let me show you," he said. With that, he bent his head until he could reach her throat, and he covered her mouth with his hand.

  She began to struggle then, realizing that she'd made a horrible mistake in confiding in this stranger, in letting him find her by herself. She tried to pull away from him as he drank the life pouring out of her severed carotid, but it was too little effort to prevail against him, and it had come far too late. Scant moments later, Brody had fulfilled his promise to her by ensuring that she would never have to worry about anything else ever again.

  When he was done with her, Brody wiped his mouth clean on her clothes and then dumped her over the Carpathia's rear railing. He watched her corpse splash straight through the ship's wake and disappear. Then he cocked his head to see if he could hear anyone else wandering the ship alone and forlorn and in desperate need of the gift he'd just given that sad woman whose blood was still on his breath.

  The night was still young, after all, and they had many miles to go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Quin awoke late the next morning, his head sore and his mouth as dry as a desert. He groaned at the weak sunlight streaming in through the porthole and buried his head beneath his pillow. He found little comfort there, and soon he resolved to leave the bed and from there the room.

  When he sat up, his head swam and his muscles protested. Every bit of him ached, and not just from the vast amounts of wine he'd helped his dinner table consume last night. He hadn't been this sore the day before, but it seemed that his adventures in the middle of the sea had finally caught up with him and demanded he pay for all the energy he'd borrowed during the disaster, with compounded interest.

  "Good morning, sunshine!" Abe spoke loud and clear enough that the words entered Quin's head like sonic bullets and bounced around inside his skull until they'd tortured him plenty. "That was one hell of a dinner last night, wasn't it?"

  "It was?" Quin thought back to it, but it was all a blur of food and conversation and wine. He remembered feeling relieved that his life seemed to have turned back to normal so quickly, even after such a horrible night – and then it had fallen apart.

  A woman sitting at the table next to theirs had started to weep in the middle of her soup, and that had set off the rest of the people with her. Soon the somber mood had infected the rest of the room, and within minutes there were children openly sobbing in their seats. Their mothers had wiped their noses and tried to stifle them, but a few of them had refused to play along.

  That was when Captain Rostron had stood up and spoke. Every eye in the room had turned to watch him, even those that still ran with tears.

  "My good people. On behalf of my crew, the entire Cunard Line, and the passengers who set out from New York with us, I wish to welcome our new passengers to the Carpathia. We know that you've all been through a horrible experience, one that the rest of us can barely contemplate, and we know that you've only just set your feet on the road to recovering from this terrible disaster.

  "Know this, though. You are among friends here. My staff and I will do whatever we can to make your journey to New York as pleasant as possible. If you need something, you have but to ask. Please consider your time aboard the Carpathia as your first leg in your convalescence. We will care for you as best we can until we bring you safely to the dock and set you down on solid ground."

  The captain's voice softened then, and he spoke to them not as the man in charge of the ship but as a fellow traveler.

  "I know many of you feel as if you have lost everything, or close to it, including those dearest to your hearts. There is a time to weep, and no one with a heart would dare begrudge you that. Still, I implore you to dry your tears for at least a little while and join me in a celebration of the fact that we have you here among us.

  "While we may have lost the Titanic and many of the souls who were aboard her, we still have you fortunate folks with us. That delights me to no end, and I hope you will not think me too shallow if I choose to focus on the joy that brings me rather than the sadnesses you have all suffered."

  He raised his glass in a toast. "To the Titanic and all who sailed on her. May their memories outlast us all."

  The tears had all dried during the captain's speech, and everyone in the room had joined in the toast. Afterward, Quin had spent the entire evening trying to figure out how he might pry Luc
y away from the others, but in that he had failed.

  "Do you remember nodding off at the table?" Abe said as he sat down on the bed across from Quin's. "I've never seen wine have that kind of effect on you before."

  Quin stood up and groaned from the aches that came with the effort. "I think I may have been pushing myself a bit too hard last night, before I was ready." He remembered excusing himself and stumbling back to his room. He'd had just enough energy left to shed his dinner clothes before collapsing back into the bed. "What happened with Lucy?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know?" Abe's eye glinted at Quin for a mischievous instant, but he waved off Quin's concerns. "I brought her to her room straight after dinner. She was nearly as spent as you."

  Quin grimaced. "I just couldn't find a chance to talk with her."

  "Well," Abe said. "According to Elisabetta, we should be in New York by Thursday evening."

  "Forgive me," Quin said, "but what day is this again?"

  "Tuesday. You slept most of Monday away."

  "Right. That gives me two full days before we land."

  Abe gave Quin a smile that never quite reached his eyes. "Can I give you some advice?"

  "As long as it's not 'Don't do it.'"

  "I think you're past that point. I hope you are at least."

  Quin stretched, feeling the soreness in his trunk and limbs. A part of him enjoyed the sensation. As much as it hurt, it meant he was alive – and warm enough to feel things again too. "Then spit it out."

  "Don't wait too long for this."

  "You think I'm going to play the coward when I look into Lucy's eyes?"

  Abe winced. "You've been holding this one deep inside you for a long time, Quin. It's become a habit."

  Quin peered down at his old friend. "Why are you, of all people, pushing me to do this?"

  Abe laughed. "I've been wondering for months when this moment might come. I thought I might go one day to call on Lucy and find the two of you had run off together. Now that the time's finally here for it to all come out, I'd like to get it over and done with so we can all move on."

  "And if we had disappeared, Lucy and I, what would you have done then?"

  Abe grunted. "Assuming I couldn't somehow find you? I suppose I'd have spent a lot of time deciding which one of you I would miss the most."

  Quin's heart sank. "Abe," he said. "I– I wish I had some kind of control over this, over how I feel about her."

  "So do I," Abe said. "None of us get to have that, though. The emotions come to us no matter what. We only get to decide what we do with them."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Quin didn't see Lucy until dinner that night. Having slept late, he'd missed breakfast entirely, as had Abe. They managed to make luncheon, but she was nowhere to be found. Quin left Abe to lounge on the Bridge Deck while he went to look for her, but he never managed to connect.

  He hesitated to call on her in her cabin. The topic at hand required a certain amount of privacy, of course, but Quin didn't want to harm Lucy's reputation by having her seen entertaining young men in her quarters. He determined to make a full circuit of the ship first.

  Quin had never been on an ocean liner before boarding the Titanic, and while the Carpathia was a fine ship, it suffered some by comparison. The Titanic had to be at least half again as large as the Carpathia, both in terms of length and width, and it only had four decks with passenger cabins on it, as opposed to the Titanic's seven.

  The Carpathia had to be older than the just-launched Titanic, but it had been maintained well and with a clear amount of pride on the part of the Cunard Line's crew. It could not compare to the Titanic's no-expenses-spared accoutrements, but then neither could any other ship in the world. The fact that it still sailed the seas while the Titanic now served as a watery grave for hundreds of innocents put it much in Quin's favor though.

  Crowded with grieving survivors though it now was, Quin found he felt far more comfortable on the Carpathia than he ever had on the Titanic. The bigger ship had reeked of so much money that it had sometimes felt stifling. Quin had often felt like a child dressing up as an adult on board the Titanic, but here he felt much more like his own man, even though he wore borrowed clothing.

  He wound up on the rear of the Shelter Deck, staring out over the aft railing in the direction from which they'd come, toward where the Titanic now lay. So many of the people he'd met or even just brushed against during his short time on the ship were still out there with her. None of them would ever be coming home.

  "It's a desperately sad sight, isn't it?"

  Quin turned to see Lucy standing right behind him. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind an ear as the wind whipped at her dress. He remembered how blonde it had been when they were children, shining like gold in the sun. It had darkened over the years but grown no less beautiful.

  "It's not the things I see out there that make me sad."

  Lucy smiled at that and joined Quin at the rail. "You know what I mean," she said. She gazed out at the sea. "Abe said you were looking for me."

  "He's right."

  He turned to face the ocean with her, and they stood there for a while, wordlessly watching the sunlight sparkle off the surface of the sea. Quin reveled in that moment, never wanting it to end. He wished he could stuff it in Abe's hip flask, seal it, and keep it with him wherever he went, taking little sips from it whenever he needed to remember it.

  "I heard a terrible thing happened here last night." Lucy leaned over the railing and stared at the churning wake far below them. "The watch saw a woman fall overboard from this exact spot."

  "How horrible." Quin put a hand on Lucy's shoulder, keeping her from leaning over any further. "Did she slip?"

  Lucy shrugged. "At breakfast, I heard she'd lost her husband and son to the Titanic." She looked into Quin's eyes. "It may not have been an accident."

  Quin swallowed hard. He'd been so thrilled that both he and his two friends had survived that he'd not dwelled for long on how such a loss as others had suffered might unhinge him.

  "She took her own life?"

  "Can you blame her?"

  Quin grimaced. "Yes. Yes, I can. If there's one thing my parents taught me over the years it's that where there's life there's hope. That woman may have lost everything that meant anything to her, but she still breathed. I can't imagine that her husband and her son would have wanted her to die."

  "Maybe she just wanted to join them."

  Quin pushed away from the railing, stretching his arms out against it. "But think of the sacrifice her husband and son made for her. They died knowing that they had at least arranged for her to survive. And despite them giving their lives for her, she throws that away. Better she had stayed on the ship with them. At least then they'd have been together at the end."

  Lucy wrinkled her brow at him. "You really can't understand how she felt?"

  "Understand? Sure. I just can't muster up any sympathy for her actions. It was a selfish thing for her to do. She had a responsibility to go on."

  "And what if you and Abe had gone down with the Titanic? Would you dismiss my grief so easily?"

  Quin gaped at her. "Lucy, we put you on that lifeboat, fully expecting we'd die."

  "That's not what you told me at the time. You lied to me."

  "Of course we did. You were being stubborn about it, and it was a far more polite alternative."

  Lucy put her back to the railing and crossed her arms over her chest. "To what?"

  "We'd have tied you up into a sack and thrown you into the back of that boat if we'd had to."

  "So," Lucy said, "no respect for me as an individual. It's 'women and children' first, is it?"

  "Yes!" At the horrified gasp from Lucy's lips, Quin spun in the opposite direction. "I mean, no!"

  Lucy put her gloved hands on her hips and glared at him. "Well?" she said. "Which is it?"

  Quin ran his hands through his hair and tried to collect his thoughts. He'd never been good at that when she was mad a
t him. "I didn't lie to you to trick you into that lifeboat because you're a woman."

  "Really?" she said. "I notice you didn't do the same for Abe."

  Quin winced. "True," he said, "but–"

  "But he's no gentle flower of a woman, someone who needs to be protected, shielded from the challenges of life. He's a strapping young man who can fend for himself, right?"

  Quin shook his head. "No, that's not it. That's not it at all."

  "You think about it for a moment, Quin. You think about it and tell me I'm not right."

  "I don't have to do that, Luce. I know why I did it!"