Undertow

by Natusch, Amber Lynn

“Bye, Dad.”

  The click of his phone hanging up preceded the line going dead. It left me alone in my hotel room to contemplate everything that had just occurred in that one short phone call. My dad and I were officially mending our relationship. We both not only acknowledged it but had all but made plans to sit down upon his return and hash out the rest of it. And I knew we would, without fear of the past derailing us. We were beyond that now. We just needed to address those open wounds so that they could finally be laid to rest in a way my mother's body never could be.

  I smiled to myself, suddenly pleased that so much was changing around me. I may have preferred a life with no attachments, but I was seeing the benefits of having at least a few. They would keep me grounded and steadfast.

  I couldn't wait for them to return.

  23

  My first day at work was overwhelming. It was a fairly large emergency medicine hospital and staffed by a considerable number of people. Between learning names, policies, and the layout, I was ready to go home by the end of my twelve-hour shift.

  I collected my things from the lounge area and made my way to the nurses’ station, wanting to let them know I was leaving and that I had appreciated all their guidance that day. They were an amazing support staff; I could tell that immediately. As they were congratulating me on making it through my first shift unscathed, a call came in over the radio.

  The radio that connected them directly to the Coast Guard.

  The man on the other end wasn't coming through clearly, but there were words that rang out through the speaker so loudly that I felt slapped by them. “Norwegian Queen” were two of them. They echoed through my head, never fully dying out while I stood by the nurses’ station completely paralyzed. My body was beyond numb; it was cold, like the night I was fished out of the very waters that were again claiming my father's ship. According to the report coming in, she had likely been taken already.

  Her final resting place.

  “Doctor Fredriksen,” a nurse called, grabbing me by the shoulders. “The Coast Guard is already en route. They will be here soon with the survivors. We need to prepare—you need to pull yourself together.”

  “How many?” I whispered, still staring past her, unfazed by her sense of urgency.

  “Three. They're bringing three men in with them.” Only three . . . three of five. “Please, we need everyone's help on this one. The ER will be swamped once they get here, and we need all hands on deck. This is no time for cold feet. You want to be an ER doc in Alaska? Then these are the kinds of cases you are going to see.”

  I shook my head, focusing on her firm expression. With a nod, I indicated I could get it together long enough to be of use to them. She must have thought it was a miracle I had made it through medical school at all. The staff couldn't have known why I was shutting down, and I couldn't find the words to tell them.

  Those few minutes ticked by in painfully slow motion while I ran around, helping to collect everything necessary to deal with the status of the victims being flown in. Two were reported to be stable but injured; the other was critical and unconscious. I kept playing the odds in my head, hoping selfishly that the three I wanted to survive had. It was a horrible thing to think, and I wanted to feel the shame I should have, but I couldn't. I wanted my father, Decker, and Robbie to be wheeled down the long hall to the ER so that I could see them again. I wanted to tell them I loved them—all of them.

  Before my mind could send me down a path I didn't want to tread upon, Dr. Lewis came up behind me, ushering me out to the huddle of white coats in the hall. Dr. Wakefield was in the middle, handing out orders to all those in attendance, including me. I was to accompany the third gurney to ER5 and help assess the most critical patient under the watchful eye of Dr. Lewis. I wanted to tell them I couldn't and why, but the paralysis that had owned my body minutes earlier had made its way to my tongue, rendering it useless. I couldn't make a sound. I only nodded in response.

  The crash of the double doors slamming against the wall at the far end of the hall jarred my attention back to the crisis at hand. Instantly, the white coat-wearing mob hustled down toward the first patient being carted into the hospital. My vision narrowed, seeing nothing but the barely visible head of the patient atop that gurney. He had brown hair, but it was wet, making it harder to determine who it was. Throwing protocol to the wind, I darted down the hall, my footsteps creating a loud reverberation in my mind. I couldn't hear anything but my breathing, those steps, and the muffled voices of the doctors calling out orders.

  I pulled up alongside the quickly moving cart to see Robbie looking horrible, but alive. His badly bruised face was swollen with some lacerations, his one eye nearly engulfed by the inflammation surrounding it. His good eye was open and found its way to my face.

  “Robbie,” I squeaked. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  Before he could answer, he was pushed into ER3 and I was turned away by Dr. Lewis, who ushered me back down the hall, reiterating what my job was to be. But I wasn't listening to his inane ramblings. I didn't care. One . . . I thought to myself. One of them had made it. While the thought was comforting for a fleeting moment, it quickly gave way to sheer panic. Two survivors yet to come. The two I most wanted still unaccounted for. Luck had never been on my side, the sea taking those I loved at will and without conscience. I feared it had done so yet again.

  The second gurney rolled quickly toward me down the hall, and I broke away from the light hold Dr. Lewis had on my arm to see who it was. On the short trip, I prayed that it would be one of the two faces I wanted to see—needed to see.

  But it wasn't.

  “Aesa?” a confused and badly burned Brad called when he saw me. I took his hand in mine without looking to see that it was nearly charred. He shrieked at the pain, and I instantly let go, hating myself for my stupidity. I wasn't thinking like a doctor. I was thinking like someone who had too much skin in the game to be effective in a crisis situation. I watched helplessly as he was taken into ER4, then Dr. Lewis blocked my vision entirely.

  “Do you want to tell me what your problem is, or should I just sideline you until I can deal with you later?”

  Beseechingly, I looked up at him as the final gurney came bursting through the double doors. And then it hit me. One survivor left. Two men I loved still missing.

  “It's my father's boat,” I whispered, turning away from him with eyes closed, aimed in the direction of the oncoming patient. I was too afraid to open them. My chest seized and breathing stopped entirely. I could not win. I never did. The sea always beat me, spiteful bitch that she was.

  He started to respond but I wasn't really interested. I walked away from him on leaden feet toward the news that I dreaded more than any other. I had lost someone, of that there was no question. What remained to be seen was if I'd lost it all.

  The Coast Guard officers ran alongside the gurney, holding IV bags while they filled in the staff as to how the patient presented. The words that made it into my consciousness were not good. “Unresponsive,” “massive blood loss,” and “poor vitals” let me know that our most critical patient had arrived. I prayed it was one I wanted to see.

  As he rolled by, his face was obscured from my vision, too many bodies surrounding him to see. Once I got my wits about me, I chased them down the hall as they rounded the corner into ER5, slamming through the doors right behind them. Instead of jumping into the thick of things, I stood at the foot of the bed and waited to see who lay hidden behind the mass of hospital staff tearing away the blankets and what remained of the victim's clothing to hook up leads and various other monitoring equipment to his body. Once his feet were exposed, my heart sank and I choked back a sob.

  They were not the feet of a fifty-year-old sea captain.

  With the knife still in my heart, I gathered the courage to slowly make my way toward the head of the bed. I no longer cared about my fears; I needed facts and absolutes. I needed to know just how much pain my heart could endure. If Decker's
face was not there to greet me when I moved past the final nurse, I was certain that I would break. That was fact.

  In slow motion, the bodies surrounding me seemed to magically part, allowing me to slide past them effortlessly to my destination. The entire ordeal was surreal. When I looked upon the face of the last fisherman to have survived the Norwegian Queen's death, I screamed, collapsing onto the bed. My tears could not be stopped, nor could my sobs. Eventually, I was pulled unwillingly from my position, dragged kicking and screaming to the staff lounge where it took a team of nurses and one doctor to pin me to the couch and sedate me.

  As the chemical calm surged through me, all I could think was that they shouldn't have been in there with me. The patients needed them—the crew needed them. They should have been helping them, not fussing over me as hysterics took me over.

  Decker needed them most of all.

  The image of his nearly unrecognizable face was etched in my mind as I was pulled into an artificial slumber. I found no solace there, the darkness too familiar to be soothing at all. While I was thankful for Decker coming back to me, I mourned the loss of my father, a true captain, who went down with his vessel. Would I see him in the darkness too? Would he find my mother's soul there, reunited finally?

  Sadly, I would never know.

  24

  I awoke groggily, like someone had roused me from a long night's drinking far before I was ready to face the world. But I had to face it. I needed to know if Decker had survived the night. I needed to know if he would survive at all.

  The face I had seen before I was ripped away from him was not the face I knew. He was so ruined, his body punished terribly by the losing battle he'd waged against the failing ship. I couldn't fathom how he'd sustained the injuries I'd seen, let alone the ones he inevitably had to which I was oblivious in my fear-induced state.

  Pulling myself from the sofa, I stood for a moment, allowing my head to get its bearings before emerging into the main hallway of the ER department, headed directly for his room. Ignoring the nurses at the station, I stormed through the double doors and was met with emptiness—then my world stopped.

  I fell to my knees, unable to even cry. Tears took emotions I was long past. Sadness had been blown over, my grieving process moving at lightning speed. I was utterly wasted beyond repair.

  “Dr. Fredriksen,” a small voice called from behind me. “He's been moved up to the ICU. We were trying to tell you when you walked past, but you didn't hear us. Do you want me to take you up there now?”

  My body still in shock, I couldn't even lift my head to respond. I only muttered a faint yes as I stared at the floor. The nurse came up behind me, helping me to my feet and out of ER5, a place I never wanted to be again. She ushered me gently through the hospital, up to the third floor. After inquiring at the nurses' station, she continued walking me down the hall to Decker's room.

  “Do you want me to go in with you, honey?” she asked, her tone motherly, no longer seeing me as her superior but as a member of a patient's family who needed her love and support.

  “No,” I whispered. “I'll be all right.”

  “Okay, Aesa. If you need anything, have the girls give a ring down to the ER and I'll come up.”

  “Thank you,” I muttered mindlessly, staring at the door that separated me from a man struggling for his life. My man. My love.

  Without further hesitation, I gently pressed it open and made my way over to the chair by the head of the bed. I pulled it up as close as I could beside him and sat in it, afraid to make any noise as though I would wake him. But you couldn't easily rouse someone in a coma. I found out that he had been put in that state shortly after his arrival at the hospital; I read his chart notes that were clipped to the side of the bed. Nothing in that file made me especially optimistic.

  I leaned in close to his head, whispering in his ear.

  “You can't come this far and then leave me, Decker. I'm not going to let you.”

  His head was wrapped in white gauze and his face looked painful, but I managed to find a spot to lay the faintest of kisses on before I left him momentarily to check on the others. I needed answers about what had happened to them, the ship, and my father. Desperate to help Decker in any way I could, I thought that somehow, if I knew how his injuries were sustained, I could do just that.

  Quietly, I made my way out of his room and back down the hall to the main desk. I inquired about the other two crewmen that were brought in the previous evening, and they informed me that both had been moved to rooms in the main part of the hospital; neither in ICU. With their room numbers committed to memory, I made my way down to see them.

  Robbie had a private room, so I knocked on the door lightly before entering, not wanting to wake him if he was resting. To my surprise, he answered.

  “Yeah? Come in.”

  I poked my head around the door, and his bruised and weathered face lit up instantly.

  “You're a sight for sore eyes, or eye, as the case may be,” he joked, a smile in his tone but not his expression. I was sure it would have been far too painful to wear one anyway.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I replied, moving toward the edge of his bed. A sling was strapped tightly to his body, his arm in a cast. I leaned in to hug him gingerly, not wanting to harm any other injuries I couldn't see. “Are you okay? How badly are you hurt?”

  He minutely lifted his arm, indicating the obvious. I scowled at him in return.

  “That's really the worst of it, Aesa, I promise. I know I look like I was on the receiving end of one helluva beating, but otherwise I'm fine. Nothing permanently damaged, I promise.” His eyes drifted away from mine to stare out the window, his mood shifting in an instant. Despite his obvious change, I didn't expect what he was about to say. “I'm sorry about your father.”

  His words took me aback for a moment, and I struggled to compose myself. I wasn't there to grieve—not yet. I was there for answers.

  “What happened?” I whispered, my voice tightened down far too much for any more sound to escape.

  “There was an explosion. It nearly blew the aft right off.”

  “How?” I probed, wanting more explanation than he could probably give.

  “We don't know. There was no time to find out. Everything from that point on was a race to survive. We knew there was no saving the ship, so we all hauled ass to the suits and started to put them on, but the Queen was taking on water so fast—there was no time.”

  “No time for what, Robbie?”

  His eyes fell to the blanket covering his lap.

  “For everyone to get them on.” He then lifted a bleary eye to mine, and I could see that the experience had been far more harrowing than I had realized. “Your dad . . . he never had a chance. By the time he made it to the deck, we were nearly underwater. He couldn't move fast enough . . . neither could Andy. We never even got the raft inflated. It floated off unused while the rest of us bobbed around in the water, trying to get as far away from the boat as possible.”

  “He went into the water without a suit?” I managed to choke out, a tear running down my face.

  Robbie nodded in response.

  “I tried to get to him,” he said softly. “I really tried, Aesa. I loved him like a father. You know that.”

  It was my turn to nod in acknowledgment of what was said. My father had died without ever having a fair chance to survive. The thought angered me deeply. How cruel and callous the Bering Sea could be.

  Robbie went to say something else, but a nurse popped her head in and interrupted, letting me know that there were some men downstairs asking for me.

  “I'll be back, Robbie,” I told him, kissing him gently on top of his head before walking out of the room behind the nurse.

  Once we were back on the first floor, she indicated the waiting room, and I made my way there, opening the door to a slew of worried-looking crabbers. I poised myself, knowing what I was about to endure, having to recount all that I knew for them. Their brot
hers had fallen victim to the sea. Such things were taken seriously amongst the tightly knit community of fishermen. They may have been each other's competition, but they were also friends and family.

  “Who made it?” Jonathon asked without pomp or circumstance. There was no time for etiquette. They had likely had a long steam into port thinking about who had lived and who was lost. Answers were in order, no matter how insensitive his methods for attaining them may have seemed.

  Words failed me yet again as I stared at their wall of blank expressions. Jeremy and Justin eyed me with sympathy, knowing that their father's question had not been the most tactful, given whom he was asking. Nevertheless, it was plain that they too wanted to know who to mourn and who to pray for.

  “Your father . . . ?” Jonathon prompted gently. A tear escaped my eye in response. “Fuck,” he yelled, turning away from me to wipe his own eyes. Fishermen were strong and proud, but even they felt keenly the loss of a friend, though they hated to show that weakness to others.

  “Robbie and Brad are upstairs,” I managed to force out. “I saw Robbie. He's okay. I don't know what shape Brad is in, but he had some burns on his hands. I saw them when he came in last night.”

  “And the third man?” Uncle Keith asked, looking at me expectantly. He and Andy, the other member of my father's crew, had been longtime friends. Breaking the news to him that Andy too was lost was not something I wanted to do.

  “Decker . . . ”

  “He's okay?” Jeremy asked eagerly as he stepped toward me.

  I couldn't hold back my remaining tears anymore. I shook my head in negation before I fell into his arms, Justin coming up behind me to hold me too. There was no way that any of them would be allowed up to see him, and I had no intention of trying to describe the myriad injuries he'd sustained as well as interpret for them what they meant. His prognosis was iffy at best; that much I knew.

  I stood and cried while the cluster of fishermen huddled around me. I was one of theirs too, the daughter of a legacy captain—their fallen friend. It was an unwritten rule that they would take me in, continuing to treat me like the family they always had. They would make sure that I had everything I needed—everything my father would have wanted me to have. That was the code, and they would follow it to a tee, starting with putting me back together after an almost insurmountable loss.