If Tomorrow Never Comes

A Promise Kept

"Can you exchange one life for another? A caterpillar turns into a butterfly. If a mindless insect can do it, why couldn't my mother? Was it any more unimaginable than the sinking of the Titanic?"

Old Caroline sat with the group in the Imaging Shack, lit by the blue glow of the screens. She held her mother's haircomb with the jade butterfly on the handle in her gnarled hands.

Bodine sighed. "We never found anything on Andy. There's no record of her at all."

"No, there wouldn't be, would there? Cassidy and I told everyone she was our mother. I've never told anyone that I was the daughter of the famous editor Miranda Priestly until now," she turned to Serena. "Not even your grandfather. A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets. I would have said that Andy saved my mother. But now I'll say, she saved all of us, in every way that a person can be saved."

Caroline closed her eyes.

"She always took the photos of Cassidy and I, she was never in them. I don't even have a picture of her. She exists now only in my memory."

...

The Mir Two submersibles made their last pass over the ship wreck in the dark. Over a speaker came a voice ordering all subs to return to the surface.

The submersibles rose off of the deck of the wreck, taking its light with them, leaving Titanic once again in its fine and private darkness.

Back on deck of the Keldysh, a desultory wrap party for the expedition was in progress. There was music and some of the Russian crew members were dancing. Bodine was getting drunk in the aggressive style of Baker Joughin.

Lovett stood off to the side, leaving over the rail and looking down into the black water. Serena approached him, offering a beer. She put her hand on his arm.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

Lovett shook his head.

"We were pissin' in the wind the whole time." He held up a cigar. "I was saving this for when I found the diamond."

With a hefty throw, he launched the cigar over the railing and into the blackness beneath the ship.

"Three years, I've thought of nothing except Titanic. But I never got it. I never let it in."

Suddenly, Lovett noticed a digure moving through the lights far down at the stern of the ship.

"Oh shit."

Down below, Caroline walked through the shadows of the deck machinery. Her nightgown blew gently with the wind. Her feet were bare, and her hands were clutched at her chest, almost like she was praying.

Lovett and Serena ran down the stairs from the toop deck, hauling ass.

Caroline reached the stern rail. Her gnarled fingers wrapping over the rail. Her ancient foot steps on the gunwale. She pushed herself up, leaving forward. Underneath her, the black water glinted far below. She was a striking imitation of the way her mother hung onto the stern railing of Titanic eighty four years ago.

Lovett and Serena ran up behind her.

"Grandma, wait!! Don't--"

Caroline turned her head, looking at them. Then she turned further, and it was clear that she had something in her hand, something she was about to toss overboard. It was the Heart of the Ocean.

"Stop! Don't come any closer. I'll drop it!"

Lovett saw his holy grail in her hand and his eyes went wide. Caroline kept holding it over the railing where she could drop it at any time.