Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

Dawn came as a relief to both of them, it seemed to Miriam. As soon as it was light enough to see, they dressed wordlessly and left their cabin. The hallway, lit by windows at either end, looked like a lunatic asylum that had run out of medication: old people staggered around, some still in pajamas, others in misbuttoned shirts and rumpled shorts.

“Finally it’s morning,” a woman said, clutching Miriam’s arm. Her eyes were ringed with pigmented circles. Her lips were cracked and pale. “I was sick all night. I have nothing left inside to throw up.”

“Me too,” said someone nearby. “What was in our dinner last night?”

“The toilets aren’t flushing!”

“Mine’s all stopped-up!”

A bridge officer appeared in the hallway. “Good morning.”

“Can we get some breakfast, do you think?” said someone.

“Breakfast is being served in the buffet.”

“What about the plumbing? It’s broken.”

“We’re working on that,” said the officer. He looked painfully young to Miriam, mid-twenties at the most.

“Thank you,” she said to him as she walked by. “You’re doing a good job.”

“We’re trying,” he said. “I am so sorry about this, it’s awful for you all.”

Isaac and Jakov’s room was the last door before the stairs. Miriam put her hand on Sasha’s arm for him to wait, and knocked. Jakov opened it. He wore pajamas and held a washcloth over his eye. “I knocked against something in the night,” he explained, disappearing into the small bathroom. Miriam stuck her head into the room. Isaac was sitting up in his own bed, his legs still under the blankets. “I’m glad to see you got through the night all right,” she said.

“This is not what I would call ‘all right,’ ” said Isaac.

“I know,” she said, feeling a rush of tenderness toward him. “Do you want to come with us now? We’re going to the breakfast buffet to see if there’s anything to eat.”

Isaac waved her off with a mournful expression. “Go, go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

She nodded at him and went, shutting the door behind her. She joined Sasha and the rest of the herd as they went hobbling to the stairs, along a hallway, and into the breakfast buffet room. It was heartening to see the sunlight streaming in with fresh air through open windows, two staff members in uniform behind the long tables, breakfast arranged: small boxes of cereal, fruit, bread and butter and jam, cheese, napkins. Even the garish patterned carpet cheered her up a little. The storage refrigerator had been opened, and its drawers were filled with small, single-portion containers of milk and juice and yogurt. Most of the service tables, draped in white linen tablecloths and holding empty electric chafing dishes, had been pushed over by the open sliding doors to the balcony, through which fresh air blew steadily off the ocean.

“What, they can’t cook anything?” came a plaintive voice that belonged to an skinny elderly redhead in a flowered muumuu who could have been one of Miriam’s cousins.

“The stoves don’t work,” said Sasha. “They’re electric. We need the generators for them.” He turned to Miriam. “I’m going to go see if I can help fix them. I used to be a good mechanic, when I was young.”

“Yes,” Miriam said. “You should, of course you should.”

He gazed at her tenderly. “Will you be all right, my beloved? Can you eat something?”

Just like that, Miriam melted with love for him, all over again. “I’m perfectly all right,” she said.

He embraced her, and she clung to him for a moment, feeling all her fears and worries from the night before turning into fear for his safety. There might be another fire down there, some sort of catastrophe.

“Be careful,” she said, anxiously.

When he’d gone, she joined the crowd clustered by the food and collected a container of yogurt from the open refrigerator, a banana from the mound of fruit on the serving table, and a plastic spoon, and looked around for somewhere to sit. The cavernous table-filled space made her feel as if she were in school again, casing the cafeteria for allies. Then she spotted Rivka Weiss slumped all alone at a table by the window, her small head wrapped in a lime-green turban. Her face was averted, looking toward the ocean.

What was she doing here, Miriam wondered. Rivka never came to the breakfast buffet room. She and Larry had the palatial owner’s suite near the top of the ship, where she probably had her breakfast brought to her on a private balcony off her bedroom. Why had she come slumming it down here?

“Rivka,” said Miriam, walking up to her. “Good morning, how are you? Can I sit with you?”

Rivka looked up with a snap of her head. “I don’t mind,” she said automatically, before she’d even registered who it was. “Oh, Miriam,” she said, and turned back to look out at the bright water and hot sky.

Miriam was startled by her ravaged face, tormented and creased, probably by a pillowcase, without its usual artful makeup. Her arched, plucked eyebrows and downturned pale mouth, the turban swathing her coconut of a skull, made her look like an invalid in the immediate aftermath of major surgery.

“I’m so sorry about this mess,” said Miriam as she settled herself in the chair opposite her. “Have you heard anything more about what’s happening?”

“Larry is leaving the ship.” Rivka glanced at her again, her mouth working, saliva gathering at the corners, her eyes wide with pinpoint pupils. She had taken something, a sedative maybe. “He’s trying to get a military helicopter to come and get him. They only have enough fuel to take two or at the most three people at this range. I’m not going with him. I’m staying here. I can’t believe he would do this.”

“You should go,” said Miriam, feeling perversely charitable. “We’d all do the same if we were you, and no one will judge you.”

“He says it’s because he has an extremely important meeting with some Chinese investors,” Rivka said. “But that’s a big fat lie. He could reschedule it. He just wants to get out of here, that’s all. There’s no way the engines can be fixed. They’ll announce it soon.”

“Oh. I hope that’s not true,” said Miriam.

Rivka didn’t seem to hear her. “They came to get him last night to tell him the ship was on fire. And the first thing he did was to call for a helicopter. ” She stabbed a bony finger at the table. “This is his ship ! He’s responsible for it! For all of you!”

“But what can he do for us, really?”

“Stay here and suffer with the rest of us!”

Miriam was tempted to put her hand on Rivka’s to soothe her, but she was starting to feel angry at Larry herself.

“There’s a meeting with the captain and officers later this morning,” Rivka said. “Would you do me a favor, Miriam? Would you come with me? If I have to face Larry alone right now, I might kill him. Apparently the meeting is in a place called the ‘war room,’ which strikes me as appropriate.”

“I’d be happy to go with you,” said Miriam.

She couldn’t imagine what had changed overnight, why Rivka was treating her all of a sudden as a necessary ally, a confidante, even. For the first time ever, she almost liked Rivka for her staunch horror at her husband’s entitled defection from his own crippled ship. She remembered with disgust how Larry had herded her and Sasha out of the bridge last night, his hand like a sharp claw on her shoulder, the way he’d yelled at the bridge crew when it clearly wasn’t their fault. It made her sad, more than anything else, to see him behave that way, a man she’d liked and trusted for so many years. And it also made her feel queasy, that this was the person who had sustained the Sabra Quartet, provided the bulk of their livelihood and supported their performance career. She hated having to be beholden to such a jerk, having her outrage tempered by ancient loyalty and gratitude. Larry probably saw the Sabra as a tax deduction, a worthy cause to offset all the terrible things he did to have all that money. Well, the quartet was getting too old to play anymore. After their retirement, they could have nothing to do with Larry Weiss, ever again. Small comfort, but she’d take it.