After the Cruise Ship Caught Fire

Around 10:45 p.m., I stood at my muster station after learning there was a fire on the ship.

The Atlantic below us was invisible in the darkness.

My husband was directly behind me as the loudspeakers blared, “Women and children in the front, men in the back!”

It was our honeymoon.​

The crew had ordered us out of our cabins with our life jackets. Now, hundreds of passengers crowded the deck, all wearing the same blocks of neon orange over formal dresses, shorts, pajamas, and whatever else they had managed to throw on.

No one panicked.

I couldn’t stop glancing at the lifeboats and wondering how a woman from Alabama had ended up as an extra in Titanic.

Getting there hadn't been that complicated. It had only taken three and a half years: meet a man in a Yahoo chat room, fall in love long-distance, get baptized and engaged one Easter weekend, get accepted to graduate school, pack a U-Haul, move to New Jersey, find a job at a public library, plan and have a wedding, and board a cruise ship.

I'd never been baptized, which meant I skipped confession and went straight to the sacraments. I took night initiation classes in southeast Alabama, where Catholics were about as common as snowplows, taught by a priest who looked exactly like Clark Kent in the Christopher Reeve movies. I kept myself awake on Altoids and never missed a single class.

I’m not saying it was because of the Superman priest.

I’m not saying it wasn’t.

The wedding itself felt like a small production: a soprano’s voice filling the church, the smell of incense lingering in the air.

Back on the ship, the fire was eventually contained, but the waiting wasn't over. We spent another couple of hours in the ship's lounges before we were finally allowed back to our cabins sometime after two in the morning.

When we woke up, a letter had been slipped under the door offering us a complimentary seven-day cruise to any of their destinations as an apology.

The ship slowly made its way back to Bermuda, and we were all herded onto flights to New York City.

But something between us had begun to change long before we stepped onto that ship.

During the eighteen months we were long-distance, every visit came with a countdown. The time we spent together was fun, intense, and completely disconnected from the routines of everyday life.

After I relocated to New Jersey, I was homesick and in culture shock. I'd left my family, my friends, and everything familiar. Even simple things felt overwhelming. The first time I had to drive in snow flurries, I pulled over and cried.

Meanwhile, he finished school and traded his overnight janitorial job for his first position as a physical therapist. The new job changed him. The quiet man I’d met online grew more confident. He bought running shoes and started grabbing drinks with colleagues after work, while I panicked at the thought of braving New Jersey traffic.

After the honeymoon, we fell into a predictable routine. We both continued working and soon moved into a new apartment. I prepared to bus into the city two nights a week for my Master's program. One week after classes started that fall, the September 11 attacks shut the city down.

I woke up to an empty apartment that day. He had already left for the hospital. When I got into my car, the voices on the radio were frantic. No one seemed to know exactly what was happening. By the time I arrived at the library, everyone was gathered around the television in the staff lounge. We stood there watching the towers fall. Fighter jets roared overhead for the rest of the day.

We both went home that night.

We hadn't called each other during the day. We didn't comfort each other. We didn't even talk about it.

Sometime that fall, I noticed him disappear into the walk-in storage closet off the dining room. The door was nearly closed. He stayed there longer than it should have taken to put something away. When I opened the door, he was standing there with his flip phone in his hand. I didn't know what I'd interrupted, but something about it didn’t make sense. I stored the moment away without thinking much about it.

Soon after, I had a dream that he was cheating on me with someone from work. It was so convincing that I confronted him over breakfast.

“Are you having an affair?”

“No.”

His answer came too fast.

I rephrased the question until I found the answer I already suspected.

“If I were no longer in the picture, is there someone at work you would be interested in?”

He stared at me.

Then he said, “Yes.”

It was not a confession, but it was the first useful search result.

When our telephone bill doubled one month, the pages listing the individual calls were missing from the statement on the desk. I asked the telephone company to email me another copy.

One number appeared again and again. Early mornings. Late evenings. Dozens of calls.

I scrolled until there was no explanation left.

I screamed. I cried. I demanded details and then regretted every one I received.

I destroyed our ironing board, although it had done nothing to me and had barely been used.

At some point, I picked up a kitchen knife and threw it across the room. It struck the wall and fell onto the carpet.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

My husband looked at the knife, then at me.

“You need anger-management classes,” he said.

I pressed him for more. I wanted to know everything.

What was her name? How old was she? How tall was she? What color was her hair?

“Red,” he said.

“Freckles?”

“Yes.”

Back when we were just chatting online, before we had even spoken on the phone, he had told me, with surprising enthusiasm, that he loved redheads with freckles.

I have brown, naturally curly hair.

Every answer led to another question. She was a coworker at the hospital. It had started before we got married.

He insisted it had never become physical.

He said he went through with the wedding because we were already in too deep.

I had moved there for him.

I called his father that same day. We had completed Pre-Cana at his family's church. I'd been baptized there, and we'd been married there just months earlier. I hoped he could talk some sense into him. Part of me also wanted him to feel ashamed of what he'd done.

He admitted they’d been meeting at a park across the street from the house where she lived with her parents. That's what the running shoes were for. He also revealed where she was from. She was twenty-three.

I drove to her hometown library and asked to see the local high school yearbooks.

There she was. She'd been on the track team.

Now I had a last name.

I searched online in the white pages until one listing made me stop.

This had to be them.

I knew calling was unhinged.

I did it anyway.

My heart pounded as I dialed. By the second ring, adrenaline had already taken over. A woman answered.

"Do you have a daughter named Shannon?"

"Yes. Why?"

"I think you should know she's having an affair with my husband."

I hung up before she had a chance to respond.

I walked out of the bedroom.

"I called her parents," I announced.

He looked at me.

"No, you didn't."

"I did."

For the first time since finding out, I felt like I'd finally done something. I was convinced I'd just put an end to it.

After he spoke with his father, he told me it was over. I wanted to believe him.

We tried to save the marriage with therapy, all of it out of pocket. Our counselor was an elderly man who spoke with the same slow, sleepy cadence as the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He had a way of peering at us over his wire-rimmed glasses that made me think he felt sorry for us. By the third session, I had the distinct impression he knew our marriage wasn't going to survive. He just wasn't going to interrupt us while we paid him to discover it ourselves. Ironically, his office was in her hometown.

We were also running out of time to claim the free trip. My husband thought the cruise line might let us use it separately. I insisted we go together. For reasons that made perfect sense to me at the time, I thought seven days on a boat could accomplish what three sessions of counseling had not. We sailed to the Western Caribbean, timed to coincide with our first anniversary.

​This ship didn’t catch fire. That should have been an improvement. ​

In Grand Cayman, we took a small boat out to a sandbar, where I stood waist-deep in turquoise water with my arm stretched straight out, a tiny fish sticking out of my clenched fist, as a stingray glided over and sucked it away like a vacuum cleaner. Around me, other passengers shrieked or refused to get out of the boat.

​But beneath all of it, the week felt like pretending.

My husband was suddenly attentive in a way he had not been at home. He held my hand as we walked through the ship and put his arm around me at dinner. On the night of our actual anniversary, he rubbed my leg beneath the table while we ate with two other couples.

When dessert arrived, the waiter proudly placed a small cake in front of the young couple seated across from us. Written across the top were the words Happy First Anniversary.

They stared at it. We stared at it.

After a few confused seconds, my husband said, “I think that’s ours.”

The waiter glanced at the cake and back at us, apologized, and moved it across the table.

Throughout the week, photographers wandered the ship, stopping by dinner tables and around the decks. We smiled whenever a camera appeared. By the end of the week, we had a stack of pictures.

The return trip was rough, and I spent most of it violently seasick. Once we reached dry land, I knew the marriage was over.

The next day, I told him to leave.

He packed a duffel bag and made sure to grab his golf clubs on the way out. He probably believed they would be the next innocent objects caught in the path of my anger.

I have a feeling he was right.

After he left, I requested some time off from work and barely got out of bed. I stopped eating.

I’d wake up and turn over. My arm would land on the empty half of the bed. My heart sank before my mind caught up to it. He was gone. I was alone.

My mother took time off and flew in. I picked her up at the airport, and when she wrapped me in the biggest hug, I melted into her arms and sobbed.

Back at the apartment, I went straight to bed while she quietly took over.

One night, I broke down and told her, "I'm never going to be able to have children."

"Honey, you're still young," she said. "And not everyone was meant to have children."

I didn't want to hear that. I wanted her to tell me I was wrong.

A few days later, she got me dressed and rode the bus with me into the city, so I wouldn’t fall behind.

While I sat inside the Puck Building for my Organization of Information lecture, my mother stayed nearby, striking up conversations with students. Within two hours, she knew more about my classmates than I had all year.

Before leaving, she filled my freezer with homemade soups and casseroles. I dreaded saying goodbye.

After her flight home, I was alone in the apartment again. Only this time, there was no one coming back.

​Days later, I finally looked through the photos from the cruise. Among them were pictures of a waterfall in Ocho Rios, dolphins bursting out of the crystal-blue water in Cozumel, and a close-up of the two of us sitting side by side at dinner. I stared at him. He looked happy.

I thought about the ironing board and the knife and the way he calmly said I needed anger-management classes.

I went into the kitchen and took out the shears.

The first cut went through his shoulder.

I kept cutting until he was gone.

I swept the pieces of him into the trash.

Then I went to the computer, logged on to Match.com, added my newly cropped photo, called myself SouthernGirlNJ, and started over.