Then he smiled and showed all his yellow teeth and silver caps.

“I’m going to kill that fat man,” Colonel Warrant said.

Travis left. He would return with the gun for Warrant tonight.

Golding, he thought, gonna getcha!

Up at the lounge, he saw Darren and Corrina sitting alone. As he got closer, he knew something was wrong. Without knowing why, he ran to them. Corrina burst out crying, and he put his arms around her. There were red marks all around her beautiful long neck. Darren just sat quietly and looked away.

“Just a boy. He was just a boy,” Corrina whispered into Travis’s ear.

45

 

He pressed her to his chest, knowing only the urge to protect her. She sobbed once more, then inhaled and held it, looked up and seemed to be waking, realizing where she was. She pushed Travis away, crying louder. He began to loosen his grip, trying to understand. She hit him in the chest. Someone grabbed his shoulders and threw him hard backwards and he saw it was Gerry, putting himself between Travis and Corrina. Travis instinctively reached to throw Gerry away when he saw the look of terror in his son’s eyes, watching.

Travis backed away. What had happened? His family had been hurt, he knew. Now he had to stand back and let Gerry deal with Corrina. He raged at Gerry in the instant, then saw again his son and calmed. Overflowing with worry for him he grabbed Darren and held him tight. A dumb, sad expression on Travis’s face, he smothered the boy, his right hand going up to the back of Darren’s head, rubbing it and rocking it. He turned Darren so that Travis could look down into his face, and he felt himself breaking seeing the sadness of his son.

The six-year-old face was blank, but Travis seemed to see cracks deep down in the wet, red eyes. Travis felt as if someone had taken away his most precious thing, and that which he felt he owned most securely. He had nothing now that was his.

Travis’s own face showed less and less emotion, the longer he looked at the blank and loose face of his son, and he hardened in accepting the irreversibility of what had happened on this ship. Nothing that could have happened to their homes or to the world could have changed them like what had happened on this ship.

“He hit Darren,” Corrina was saying quietly to Gerry, but Travis could hear. She was calming her breathing, trying to hold back the crying, “Darren was there the whole time.”

That was all she said. She quietly began crying again, her shoulders hunched up to her ears, coming forward and shielding her lowered-face. Her face was blotched with dried blood and wet with tears and snot.

Gerry too held her close, and she again pushed off him. She turned and hid her head in the couch. Gerry sat next to her rod still. He was trying to control his own rage. It was like being submersed, trying to swim out as a wave tossed him around and around. It was a feeling he’d not had since his teenage years when rage was all he knew. He wanted to destroy somebody’s face. He was a skinny man but strong, his wiry muscles were all tensed. He was being torn to pieces, pitying his wife and longing to erase her pain, while bursting with red energy to beat somebody.

He became aware again of the presence of Travis, of Claude who had come in with him and stood well back from the scene, of the dozen or so others in the lounge who were watching, none even bothering anymore to pretend to not.

He bent his head down to hers and their foreheads touched, so that they each looked down and not into each other’s eyes. She allowed it. Finally, he cried too. But the violence in his belly did not cool. He didn’t want to leave her, and time seemed to just flow by without touching them, he and her, Travis and Darren. At some point, Professor Claude had disappeared from their circle.

Others came and went from the lounge.

Finally Travis picked up Darren and left. The two victims were one to him, his family, but he knew Corrina didn’t need him and Darren did. He felt guilty even to be calculating that much to guide his actions, as though the proper thing would be to turn into a beast and tear off for blood. He couldn’t turn it off, his calculating.

They walked a long way without much talking. Travis held him close and rubbed the back of his head and said, “It’s alright. It’s alright,” knowing nothing better to say or truer than that lie.

They passed someone in a hallway that Travis recognized from the Atrium. Otherwise it was deathly quiet. They found a stairwell that was closed to the world and they climbed up to the Resort Deck. Then they walked further forward in a hall banked all by glass on one side. They went into the spa and Travis still held Darren as he sat down in an upright linen chair. Darren felt cold. Travis wanted to heat him up, but he felt so cold himself, like his furnace had shut down. His heart was broken, and no more heat emanated from there.

“I love you,” he said. “Darren, I love you so much. I’ll be here for you, always.”

“Will this ever be over?” Darren said.

Travis was struck by how that beautiful voice was just as it sounded yesterday, and before any of this started. It sounded just the same but the boy was so different.

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t know what will happen but I will never leave you and I will protect you.”

He kept on that way and imagined he was speaking to Corrina. For a moment he faltered, his voice halted and he held his breath at the sadness that he couldn’t even do this for her. He recovered himself and kept on, and he felt somehow stronger to be telling his son something he knew was true. He knew just how much was false, how much changed with circumstance, but he saw that love was a basic fact and immovable.

He held Darren quietly a long time. Darren was still sick and his breathing was labored. Travis looked out over the pool and realized it was different. It was clean. Someone else was using his pool, and they had found the chlorine.

He looked at Poseidon, still in the shadows, staring with milky white eyes over the room.

“You didn’t,” Darren whispered.

“What?” Travis said.

“You didn’t protect me and mommy.”

Yes, he had broken his promise to his son. The ship had done that to him as well. This ship made right action impossible. He had failed to protect his most loved ones and they were broken. He had sat back and waited to be saved, trusted in God and in other humans to keep them safe. He had the second gun on the ship, he alone, but he hadn’t used it. That gun was part of the family now. But to what end? To what end did they struggle for each breath? They fought like roaches for crumbs.

The world out there had always been awful, he knew that this had been the rule of life, and their modern American bubble, the tiny bubble of their time and place, was popped. The rule of life was pain, and it was also the rule that those that loved the most endured the most.

Since Darren had been born, Travis had understood that love brought happiness and terror. Life with his beautiful wife and their gorgeous boy was intoxicating, but nothing beautiful lasts. If he’d had a mission in life, it was to protect this fragile child from the specter as long as he could. The child was broken, Travis had failed.

Three years ago, his wife left him and his father died in the same week. He had just returned to work in New York after taking leave for his Sudan mission, so he could not take any more time off his job. When he buried his father, his wife was there, with his son. She walked by him in the line of mourners.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She gave him his son to hold and walked away, and Travis held the little boy in the car to the graveyard, putting him down only to lift a shovel and throw dirt on his father’s coffin. At some point, his son and wife were gone.