When he walked out, Conrad called, “Next time bring the ex!”

Gerry Adamson sat alone on the Penthouse Deck promenade. He had a piece of paper and a pen. He looked out over the ocean and tried to see in it monsters of the deep, mermaids and sirens, and Odysseus searching for his way home. All he saw was the ocean. He wrote.

 

The end of the world came

And we no longer asked, who to die by fire and who by sword

We all died by water.

Six days after the lifeboats left, the rations were cut again. They were eating stews now to stretch the meat. Still, it was enough to live, and still, somehow, everything was delicious. They occasionally included pastries; strange and fanciful deserts that seemed so out of place with everything else. The Festival’s Executive Chef began to struggle with the ingredients they had. Flour and eggs were used in more substantive recipes, but what could be done with marzipan, mascarpone, baking chocolates, berry compote, and icing sugar?

33

Corrina took Darren to the playroom every afternoon. It was supposed to be a daily play date with Brenda’s kids, but Brenda would often postpone or not show up at all as her work dictated. Occasionally, other kids were there, and Darren played with them. Corrina didn’t care; she went with Darren everyday and they played together. Some days she’d have a heavy heart crawling through lime green plastic tunnels.

She knew some would consider this, her indulgence of her boy, frivolous or disrespectful. She didn’t care. There would be heartache enough for everyone. She didn’t need to make it worse than it had to be. If Darren could come out of all this not really understanding until he learned about it in school some day, that would be fine. Things weren’t that fine though. Here, Darren was struggling. This was her best medicine.

As she slid down, Darren in her lap, she heard familiar screams as Darren’s friends came running to take him away from boring old momma. Corrina got to her feet and walked over to Brenda. They hugged.

Holding hands, they fell back into the beanbag chairs.

“Close your eyes,” Corrina said. “I’ll watch the girls.”

Brenda closed her eyes and fell into solid sleep to the sounds of the kids’ screams.

After an hour, Brenda opened her eyes and the kids were still screaming.

“I took this cruise to relax,” she said. “I never worked so hard in my life. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode. I think my husband is behind it. All these years he begs me to slow down my work, to take a break, even a sabbatical from power and electronics and all that beautiful stuff. So I do it. A lo-o-o-ong cruise. And now I’m in this Seventh Hell of wiring and power management. And it’s constant. I close my eyes and dream about voltages and capacitors.”

Corrina had been surprised when Brenda’s work had carried on after the first week, when power and water were stabilized. But as she questioned and understood the endless succession of issues, emergencies, and new demands, she knew Brenda would be working like this until whatever end was coming.

“What are you working on now?” Corrina asked.

“The communications, always,” Brenda said. “But we’re trying to get power to the toilets. They’re wired to the emergency power system, and like everything else, we’ll have to get them back bit by bit. Like everything. With all the sickness, this is getting to be a serious priority. But we were really getting somewhere with the satellite, too. I wish we didn’t waste so much time, I wish we didn’t always have a million things to take care of… we could be talking to someone!”

“Oh, hello,” Corrina said into an imaginary phone. She slipped into an exaggerated Long Island accent – with South Carolina under it. “Yeah, this is Corrinna. Uh huh. Yeah. Yes, I’ll hold.”

She held up her invisible phone and whispered to Brenda, “I’m on hold.”

Corrina put the imaginary phone back to her ear. “Yes, could I get a cab? We’re on the Festival…. Yeah, that’s right. OK, you’ll honk when you pull up? Oh, what am I wearing? Yeah, it’s the same underwear I put on like, three weeks ago. Uh huh. Yeah, it’s nasty. Oh, you like that?”

Brenda was laughing, wiping tears from her red eyes.

“There’s a party tonight,” Brenda said. “Did you hear about it? Leon and I are going. We even got a sitter. Some of the bands are having a dance party in the night club.”

“Really?” Corrina said. She looked out at Darren and smiled. “Yeah, I love to dance. And we have the luxury of a live-in babysitter right now.”

“Travis?” Brenda said.

“Yeah, well, he never was much of a dancer anyway,” Corrina said.

“Do you still work together well as parents?” Brenda asked.

“I suppose we’re all outside our comfort zone right now,” Corrina said. “We’ve probably spoken more these couple weeks than the last couple years.”

Corrina paused. Spending this time with Travis had been emotional for her. She couldn’t talk to Gerry about it, so she’d been blocking it from her mind. She wished she could forget things, as Vera did.

“I couldn’t take him back, you know?” Corrina said quietly.

Since that first time they’d met, Corrina had always seemed cheerful and strong to Brenda. Now, she sounded sad.

“I wanted to punish him. But I never wanted to ruin his life. He is a good man. I wish he could be happy again in his life, without me.”

“You can’t fix everything,” Brenda said. “Or everyone.”

Brenda took her kids back to her cruise suite, the same she had moved into that morning in Florida.

As the sun went down, they met up in the disco: Corrina and Gerry, Brenda and her husband Leon, and dozens of others. Brenda flicked a switch and the strobe lights and spotlights came to life, circling the room. The crowd cheered and clapped, and Brenda took a little bow as the first band, a small salsa combo with acoustic guitar, bass, trumpet and shakers came up on the stage and led off with “Besame Mucho”, driven by a powerful syncopated bass line and trumpet blasts.

The crowd kept the cheer right up and rushed to the dance floor. Corrina pulled Gerry out, and Brenda and Leon followed them. The band played with fire. It was for them a greater release than for the dancers. They’d been doing cruise gigs a long time, sticking together as a group. They came from the same village, and they left it together and stayed together. They veered between Mexican boleros, Cuban mambo, Brazillian samba and Latinized versions of American hits.

Gerry and Corrina were very good dancers. It was what they did nights at home in their apartment when Darren slept. Looking around at the dozens, if not hundreds, crowding the dance floor, Corrina was pleased to again see faces she’d seen once or twice but then lost to their private routines. It felt like a reunion.

The Mexican quartet blew themselves out and bowed their way off the stage, glowing with sweat in Brenda’s glorious strobe lights. They were replaced by a Jerry Lee Lewis style piano player, who unveiled the grand piano, hidden by a black tarp in the shadows, with a deft yank. They all danced, and smiled at each other in acknowledgment of this special moment they were sharing, the spirit they still felt as humans. When the rocking piano player played himself out, he was replaced by the Dixieland band.

It was the show of their lives.

There was no alcohol, but they felt drunk. Brenda and Corrina stumbled out to the promenade to cool off.

“You did all this?” Corrina said.

“Well. I talked to some people,” Brenda said.

“You’re amazing,” Corrina said.

“So are you,” Brenda said. “You’ll make it.”

Brenda pointed at her spotlight, snake-like in the mist.

“What do you see when you look at that?” Brenda said.

“I see a shout out to the world,” Corrina said. “We’re still here. We ain’t going away.”