A LIFE SO CHANGED
Chapter Thirty-Two
Officer Lowe is moving his flashlight back
and forth. The crewmen are rowing.
"Right ahead, sir!" said one of the
men.
The lifeboat finally gets to the massive sea
of bodies. From the boat as the torch illuminates floating debris, a poignant
trail of flotsam: a violin, a child's wooden soldier, and a framed photo of a
steerage family. Daniel Marvin's wooden Biograph camera.
Then, their white life belts bobbing in the
darkness like signposts, the first bodies come into the torch's beam. The
people are dead but not drowned, killed by the freezing water. Some look like
they could be sleeping. Others stare with frozen eyes at the stars.
"Do you see any moving?" asked
Lowe.
"No, sir. None moving, sir," said
one of the men.
"Check them! Bring that oar up."
A man picks one up by the life belt. A
woman’s face is pale and frozen.
"These are dead, sir."
"Check them. Make sure! Now give way.
Head easy."
As the lifeboat moves forward as the men move
the bodies out of the way. Soon bodies are so thick the seamen cannot row. They
hit the oars on the heads of floating men and women...a wooden thunk. One
seaman throws up.
"Careful with your oars. Don’t hit them.
Is there anybody alive out there? Can anybody hear me?" Lowe sees a mother
floating with her arms frozen around her lifeless baby. "We waited too
long." The worst moment of his life. Then he snaps out of it. "Is there
anybody alive out there? Can anybody hear me?"
Jack and Rose floating in the black water.
The stars reflect in the millpond surface, and the two of them seem to be
floating in interstellar space. They are absolutely still. Their hands are
locked together. Rose is staring upwards at the canopy of stars wheeling above
her. On her face. Pale, like the faces of the dead. She seems to be floating in
a void in a semi-hallucinatory state. She knows she is dying. Her lips barely
move as she sings a scrap of Jack's song:
"...going up she goes, up she
goes..."
A shooting star flares, a line of light
across the heavens.
On her again. We see that her hair is dusted
with frost crystals. Her breathing is so shallow, she is almost motionless.
"Come Josephine in my flying--"
A light faintly appears upon her face. Her
eyes track down from the stars to the water. The silhouette of a boat is
crossing the sea. She sees men in it, rowing so slowly the oars lift out of the
syrupy water, leaving weightless pearls floating in the air. The voices of the
men sound slow and distorted.
Thinking she’s seeing things, she close her
eyes and reopens them. They are still there.
Then the lookout flashes his torch toward her
and the light flares across the water, silhouetting the bobbing corpses in
between. It flicks past her motionless form and moves on. The boat is fifty
feet away, and moving past her. The men look away.
"Jack?" She tugs her hand into his.
She lifts her head to turn to Jack. Her hair has frozen to the wood under her.
"Jack? Jack?" She touches his arm
with her free hand. She looks over at the lifeboat. It is slipping away from
them.
"Jack, there’s a boat." He doesn't
respond. His face is rimed with frost. He seems to be sleeping peacefully.
"Jack? Jack? Jack? Jack!" She rubs
his arm harder.
"Jack!" She sobs harder.
"There’s a boat!" She can only stare at his still face as the
realization goes through her. "Jack."
All hope, will and spirit leaves her. She
looks at the boat. It is further away now, the voices fainter. She watches them
go. She closes her eyes. She is so weak, and there just seems to be no reason
to even try. She just wants to die now. But suddenly a flashback enters her.
Jack: "Promise me now, Rose. And never
let go of that promise."
Rose: "I promise."
Jack: "Never let go."
Rose: "I’ll never let go, Jack. I’ll
never let go. I’ll never let go. (Echoes.)
She snaps open her eyes. She raises her head
suddenly, cracking the ice as she rips her hair off the wood. She calls out,
but her voice is so weak they don't hear her.
"Come back! Come back! Come back! Come
back! Come back! Come back! Come back!"
Lowe hears nothing behind him. "Hello!
Can anybody hear me?"
"There’s nothing there, sir," said
one of the men.
The boat is invisible now, the torch light a
star impossibly far away. She struggles to draw breath, calling again.
"Come back! Come back!" Her hand, frozen to Jack's. She struggles
hard and finally unclasps their hands, breaking away a thin tinkling film.
"I won't let go. I promise."
She releases him and he sinks into the black
water. He seems to fade out like a spirit going to his watery grave.
She rolls off the floating staircase and
plunges into the icy water. She swims to Chief Officer Wilde's body and grabs
his whistle. She starts to blow the whistle with all the strength in her body.
Its sound slaps across the still water.
Lowe whips around at the sound of the
whistle. "Come about!"
Rose keeps blowing as the boat comes to her.
April 28, 2063
Rose still hears her whistling in her mind,
then stares at Lizzy, Lovett, and the rest of the crew. "Fifteen hundred
people went into the sea when Titanic sank from under us. There were twenty
boats floating near by and only one came back. One. Six were saved from the
water."
As she is telling this, the group is in
tears, Lovett feeling like a grave robber now.
"Myself included. Six out of fifteen
hundred. Afterward the seven hundred people in the boat has nothing to do but
wait...wait to die, wait to love, wait for an absolution, which would never
come."