The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

“What about Kitty?”

“There’s no sense in dragging her out into all this,” Jack said. “She’ll be warmer and safer in here. We’ll be back soon.”

this whole passage….my heart

omg they missed them bc they were INSIDE!!!!!!!!! no way!!

O M G IM CRYING

this happened so fast

Jack and Kitty, her barks still echoing, slid from her view.

Titanic split apart. Just like that, she broke in two, and everything before the aft funnel dropped down in a rush beneath the water. Gone.

oof

But in the end, it took all of them rowing, Madeleine and Eleanor and any of the other women who could, to stroke back to the flotsam of human souls and debris, to begin the dreadful task of trying to salvage the dying from the glossy black sea.

I never stopped looking.

asshole

Kinder hearts are stronger, her mother had once said. Maddy needed to be strong.

The nature of hope is curious to me. It can sustain us through the darkest of times. It can buoy us above every reasonable expectation of despair. Yet hope can shatter us just as readily as the darkness can. People refer to it as false hope, but I think that’s misleading, because the feeling itself is painfully true.

I understood how barbaric hope could be. For your sake, Jakey, I could not allow myself to be destroyed by it.

“I have been protected by you my entire life,” she said quietly. “You, and then Jack. I’ve been the most fortunate girl in the world my entire life.”

decade later, she would come across a newspaper clipping with an image of the three of them pegged frozen as they walked in, skirts clutched in fists, feet lifted. The caption beneath it read, THE LAST OF THE HOUSE OF ASTOR? She would think, holding that clipping between her fingers, How young we all look, none of us older than twenty. How young and audacious and afraid.

“Yes,” she said. “Jack was his anchor.” Just as he was mine.

At long last, I had managed to gain the world’s admiration and respect, and all it took was the loss of my husband. The felling of my heart. Jack was right when he’d told me that his people would eventually come around. The taste of this success is like ashes on my tongue.

Vincent reached up to clutch at his hair with both hands before letting his arms fall loose again. He made a sound deep in his throat, not a word but that low, flat moan of despair that chilled her as nothing else could have: the wounded beast again, here on dry land.

She must not break. Not yet.

She sat, still not looking up, wreathed in lilies, always lilies, and tried not to retch.

“Asalamu alaykum,” Madeleine whispered. “Goodbye, my heart, my guide. Goodbye, beloved.”

Like Madeleine, its heart—whatever heart it might have once possessed, beneath its stylish public shell—had been felled.

How awful that was, she thought, exhausted, remote. How wonderful. How awful and wonderful to feel him like this, above my heart, just where his father used to rest his head.

Jack was clear to me. Jack was me, and I was him, and you, sweet child, are now us both.

Only exhaling at the very, very end, when I know I’ll see him smiling at me once more.