Since I Met Her

1200 miles from Papeete, one of the students woke me in the dark.

“Sorry,” she said. The red hallway light lit her face enough for me to recognize her - Kailey, a junior from Colorado College. “They need you on deck.”

She withdrew without waking the rest of the cabin. I listened - no alarms, no running feet. The ship felt stable. Something medical, then.

I put on a shirt and got up. Bunk curtains swayed as the ship took the swell. Nora had left a book on the floor and it slid back and forth as the ship moved - You Dreamed of Empires, by Alvaro Enrigue; she was almost done with it. I tucked it behind her shoes and moved toward the hatch.

The day’s heat lingered, a constant presence. There was a moment every day, just before breakfast, when I could sit on deck in the twilight and be almost cool enough. As far back on the quarterdeck as I could get, against the rail, I would sit in a sports bra in wind unfettered over a thousand miles of ocean and watch our wake zip closed on the horizon. Althea often sat nearby - not exactly with me, but almost.

“Hey,” Peter met me on deck at the top of the ladder, backlit by the compass light. After three months on the ship together, I could have recognized him by his footsteps overhead, by the way he exhaled when he bent over to pick something up, by the way he hunched his shoulders on dawn watch, his least favorite. Behind Peter, I spotted Kailey standing beside the helmsman, a few other members of their watch ranged along the quarterdeck, dark shapes against a dark sea. “It’s Jake.” Peter gestured to the port side of the quarterdeck with his whole arm. I went.

Jake hunched forward on the bench. Althea stood beside him. She wore a zip-up hoodie and had both hands in the front pocket. She looked at me and then looked back down.

“Hey, Jake.” I crouched beside him. “What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing.” Exhaled stiffly. “You should go back to bed.”

“No.” Althea.

I waited. “No can do, Jake.” I pitched a smile. “What’s going on?”

“Just pain. Here.” He put a hand on his abdomen. “I think I ate something or something.”

“He also vomited, once.” Althea. “We were going over the engineering checklists.” She didn’t look at me.

“When did it start?” I tried to conjure Jake’s medical forms in my mind. No medications. No chronic medical problems. Abdominal surgeries? I couldn’t remember.

“Maybe an hour ago?” Jake glanced at Althea, who kept her gaze on his knee.

A week earlier, one of the students, Harriet, slipped on the deck and hit her head during the Crossing the Line ceremony as we crossed the Equator. Head wounds bleed - by the time I reached her, a rivulet ran from her forehead down her cheek, pooling above her collarbone, a growing red patch on her tank top. She held a hand against her head and two crew and three students clustered around her, crouched and silent and holding their hands out toward her just slightly, as if I had interrupted them moments before they would begin to assist. Three staples closed the laceration easily. I reported to Althea once Harriet was in her bunk for a nap, a deckhand scrubbing blood off the deck. Althea had removed her costume and sat at the computer in the captain’s cabin with weather maps overlaid on our position.

‘She’ll be ok?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ Cleared her throat. ‘Thanks for taking care of it.’

‘Yeah, of course.’ She was barefoot, a gold ring on one toe, the tattoo on her foot obscured by the table leg. A fan sputtered behind her and I could smell her perfume, something floral and underlaid with salt. Perfume, all the way out here. A pit yawed in my stomach and I found myself taking a steadying breath. I cast an eye around the room. A book lay face down and open on her bunk - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. ‘Oh, how is that book? It’s been on my list.’ I had never heard of it.

Althea turned to look. A strand of hair pulled loose from her ponytail and stuck to the sweat on her cheek.

‘It’s very good. Beautiful. And brutal.” She bent her head a bit, addressing her words to the book itself. Her fingers plucked the air gently as she talked, a habit I had noticed when she was absorbed. The middle finger slightly bent, a prior fracture poorly set. “I think it’s the tenderness that gets me. He is writing about his schizophrenic grandmother and his mother who hits him, but his writing isn’t angry or blaming. It’s one beautiful sentence after another and it just kind of breaks your heart.”

She finally looked at me, the hint of a flush. Our last night in Papeete flashed in my mind. A rooftop bar loud with French pop songs, our long table littered with empty plates and glasses after the rest of the crew had moved on. Althea and I watched an explosive sunset fade over the sharp crags of Moorea. Beneath the table, our knees had been touching for half an hour. When we had paid for our drinks and walked back to the ship, she hesitated in the doorway to her cabin. For a wordless moment I froze in the hall and looked at her. Then she cleared her throat and bade me goodnight and I watched the door close behind her.

I wished I had read the book, so I could say I agreed. She pulled the strand off her cheek with her index finger, brought her hands back to the computer keyboard, curled to the keys. ‘You can read it when I’m done if you want.’

When I had asked Jake all of my questions, Althea sent a deckhand to the captain’s cabin to fetch the medical bag. I had him lay on the bench and palpated his abdomen - diffusely tender, but worst in the right lower quadrant. Althea noticed my clenched jaw and her eyes hardened. I checked his vitals - no fever. Heart rate 85. The blood pressure cuff was automated and wouldn’t turn on, even after I took the batteries out and put them back in. There were no replacement AAAs on the ship, and not for the first time I thought about a manual blood pressure cuff. I thought about an ultrasound machine. I thought about if Jake got worse, if I had to start antibiotics, bolus fluids. I thought about arterial lines. I had missed my first three arterial lines during my first year of residency. Sweating under the sterile gown, fumbling the ultrasound probe and the arterial line kit, attending physician sighing impatiently beside me. The next 6 with a 50% success rate, and then after that - I had never missed again.

Althea inclined her head at me and walked toward the bow of the ship, away from Jake and Peter and the rest of the watch on deck. I followed. Overhead, stars burst, the Milky Way a sheen. Ropes creaked softly as the ship rode the swell, as the breeze rose and fell. A few nights earlier, on evening watch, I had tripped over a booby on the foredeck while performing a boat check. Deep night, still night-blind from my trip belowdecks to check on the generators in the engine room, I felt sudden warmth against my leg, a throaty squawk as a part of the deck stood and moved. I reeled against the deckhouse. Jessica told me later that boobies land on the ship to rest but then can’t take off again - they need a longer runway to coax their heavy bodies into the air. She found the booby, picked it up, and tossed it from the foredeck. I flinched, but with the extra momentum the bird unfurled its wings and soared away.

“What do you think?” Althea turned to face me just shy of the foredeck. Red from the port running light cradled her cheek, pooled in her messy bun, dropped from her sharp jaw.

“It could very well just be food poisoning or something.”

She waited. I broke.

“What I worry about is appendicitis. Especially with the location of the pain. But, he doesn’t have a fever, and there are plenty of other things that can cause abdominal pain like that.”

A sail sighed aloft. I followed Althea’s gaze. The inner jib luffed gently.

“What do we do if it is appendicitis?”

“There’s not much I can do. He would need surgery. I could start antibiotics, but we would have to get him ashore.”

Shore was 900 miles away to the north, 1100 to the south, 1000 to the east. To the west, the Kirabas Islands, 300 miles.

She was very still.

“How do you tell if it’s appendicitis?”

She had told me once about her brother, about how the kids at school all made fun of him because he stood for the Pledge of Allegiance. I had a math teacher in high school who yelled at us for not standing for it, and every day thereafter we stood but we didn’t pledge, and we didn’t hold our hands over our hearts. I couldn’t think of a good way to relate this to her brother, except that both anecdotes contained the Pledge of Allegiance, which I could still recite even though it made me cringe.

I thought of my patients in the hospital back home. Of their spouses in the ICU, looking at me with pleading: tell me it’s all a misunderstanding; give me hope; or, eventually - tell me I can let go.

“Well. Usually you need imaging. A CT scan, or an ultrasound maybe. If it’s appendicitis, his symptoms will get worse over the next few hours. He should spike a fever. If it’s not, he will probably get better in the next few hours. The good news is right now his vital signs are normal,” I thought about the broken blood pressure cuff, “which is a good sign. Makes appendicitis less likely.”

She nodded and went back to the quarterdeck. She caught Peter’s eye and looked at the luffing jib. He followed her gaze, and sent a deckhand. I went below to the ad lib medications drawer in the main cabin and returned with a bottle of antacids. Jake sat with his head against the cabin and his eyes closed.

Althea sat beside him with one hand on his knee.

I thought about ruptured appendicitis and septic shock. I thought about turning around and going back to bed. I thought about arriving in Honolulu and never going to sea again. I turned aft to let the wind sweep the hair out of my face, and saw Peter watching me.

“Here Jake, try one of these.”

Jake did as he was told. He rested his head back against the cabin. I crouched beside him and looked out to sea. Black sky, black waves. Invisible, except here and there white caps showed, just enough starlight to make them shine. Back aft, Peter and the helmsman chatted, voices soft enough that their words were indistinguishable.

Pretty soon, Jake began to talk. He told stories of a guide boat he used to work on in Antarctica, a summer he spent fishing out of Seward, a wintertime gig rigging Christmas lights in Southern California. The sky paled. The horizon reddened. Cumulus clouds burned red, then pink, then gold. In time, there was daylight.

“How do you feel?”

“Good. It’s almost gone.” He laughed. “See? Just food poisoning or something.”

Althea rolled her eyes but she kept a hand on his knee.

“Seriously, I think I’m good. I think I might go to bed.”

Althea cleared her throat and followed him to the ladder.

I stretched my cramping legs and sat on the bench for a long time.

When the watch had changed over, I went below. Breakfast second seating was underway in the main cabin, just out of sight down the hallway. It was Monday - breakfast burritos, and a new bottle of Cholulah. Chords of laughter, whir of box fans, scrape of the hanging pots above the stove in the galley inscribing their parabolas with each sway of the ship. The generator whirred and I knew the students on deck had turned on the hoses for morning deck wash.

I doubled checked nobody else was in the hall, then shouldered open the heavy door into the walk-in refrigerator. In the corner by the root vegetables, Peter, halfway to his feet at the opening of the door, sat back down on his empty crate. He pulled a spare lid over a crate of carrots and nodded at it. I sat. Flat light from the single bulb overhead showed the empty lettuce crates, the last few green apples, a single yellow mango, flats of brown eggs, our corner abundant with crates of potatoes, beets, carrots.

“You ok?”

I lifted a Russet potato and picked at the little tendrils growing from its eyes. The light overhead flicked out and then back on, and I knew the assistant engineer had switched over from the port to the starboard generator - finally.

“I wasn’t sure until tonight.” Peter said, looking at the opposite wall. “How long have you felt like this about her?”

I set the potato down.

I thought of the booby on the deck on dawn watch. I thought of ice cream cones with chocolate sauce, of pudgy little fists and stained t-shirts. I thought of my apartment at home and absolute silence.

The thing about placing an arterial line is you have to know your angle. You find the vessel on ultrasound, a gaping black circle on the screen, and it’s barely beneath the surface. 2mm max. By the time you’ve punctured the skin and found your needle tip on the screen, you’ve already overshot. You have to approach at the shallowest angle your grip will allow, to buy time. Time enough for correction. You coax your needle into position with micro adjustments until the tip is poised on the lining of the vessel, and then you apply force and pop into the lumen. The needle tip a bright white spot in the center of the black circle.

I thought of the airport in Los Angeles, a group of shipmates-to-be trickling into the seating area beside our gate. I was sitting next to Peter, and she came up beside me to talk to him. Logistics, all frowns and quick nods of the head. She wore a skirt. Everyone else in oversized blue jeans and Carhartts.

She looked at me. ‘I’m Althea. I’m the captain on board.’

I didn’t say, I know. ‘Taylor,’ I breathed.

‘Do you mind if I trade seats with you? I need to go over a few things with Peter.’

‘No, of course.’

There was no empty seat. I sat on the floor.

In the walk-in refrigerator, I leaned my head back against the wall. I didn’t answer.