16. Nick
Nick
Ilose sight and grip of Seth as soon as we hit the water. Faster than the plunge itself, the current tears him away from me.
We’re on our own. Adrift.
Shock sets in, and all my adrenaline narrows to a single point, a sole focus. I search for five reflective blips in the freezing black water. Four red ones and one yellow one. By the looks of it, Orlov, Perry, and Jorgensen have managed to find their way to the life raft.
The biggest red splotch, Orlov, I believe, has made it inside, Jorgensen is climbing over the side, and then they both help Perry. I’m not sure if it’s the blur of salt and rain obscuring my vision, but his leg doesn’t seem to be bent at the right angle.
That still leaves Seth though. Fuck.
Where is he?
“SETH,” I scream.
Thunder rumbles. Lightning cracks, splitting the sky like a fracture through drift ice. The sea gurgles and hisses, laughing in my damn face while it threatens to take everything from me.
“SETH!”
I have no idea if he’s able to hear me even if his head is above water. Between the silence from Seth, the shrieking dissonance of the weather, and the anguished groans coming from the Suoja, I’m living through the soundtrack of my worst fears.
“Can you see him?” I shout to the others in the life raft.
If we don’t get out of here soon, our odds of surviving this night are going to plummet from uncomfortable to impossible.
When a ship sinks, it doesn’t go down on its own.
It sucks everything near it into the vortex, pulling it straight to the bottom of the sea.
I’m not sure if she’ll take on too much water first and succumb that way, or if the weight of the ice will finally roll her over.
Either way, it’s bad news for us to be this close.
The last thing we need is two hundred tons of steel coming down on top of us.
The other guys appear as little blips of bright reflective material beneath the canopy of the raft, shifting side to side as they search for Seth with me. For the first time tonight, I’m not second-guessing. I am confident that I’m about to make the wrong decision.
If it comes down to it, I know I’ll cut that painter line and send them on their way without me. I can’t evacuate knowing Seth is still out there. I just can’t.
I can’t leave him.
I can’t lose him.
A little voice at the back of my mind, a cruel one, tells me he may already be lost. Survival suits have built-in flotation, but that means nothing if he got snagged by debris, or if the waves were simply too strong. Drowning him before he could make it to the surface.
The ship lets out a cautionary wail, now listing so hard that I get a bird’s eye view of the deck.
I have to get my crew out of here—with or without me. Perry needs to make it back to his wife. Jorgensen and Orlov are so fucking young, with so much life left unlived.
But I’m not leaving here without Seth. Sink or survive, I’ve waited too long for him to not be with him in the end.
I find my knife and grab onto the painter line, putting blade to rope, but it’s not so easy to sever when I’m being thrown around like a lead-filled sock in a washing machine.
“Wait! Captain!” Jorgensen grabs my arm and shakes me, pulling my focus over to the side.
A bright red spot outlined in reflective strips, moving in the black water. Seth is paddling our direction, but he’s too far to make it to the raft on his own. An undercurrent must’ve swept him out.
It’s a weird thing to feel relieved when our fight to make it out alive has only begun.
I climb into the life raft and saw through the last fibers of the line. “We’ve gotta go get him.”
Rowing in this water is like fighting a wildfire with an eyedropper, but at least the winds are carrying us in the same direction he’s floating.
Seth disappears for a moment in the trough of each swell, and as soon as the crest lifts him, my eyes refocus and find him. Again, and again. I don’t blink. Not even to clear the saltwater and rain from my vision.
The guys push hard alongside me. I think they know, if it came down to it, I’d jump right back into the freezing ocean to pull Seth out of it.
When we finally catch up to him, I fling myself over the side to grab him before other hands join me. All of us dragging him into the raft.
I fall back against the rubber floor and cradle Seth to my chest, both of us shivering and panting from exertion. My arms form two steel bands around his midsection, a surge of gratitude flowing through me each time his lungs expand and contract.
“Well, fuck,” he says eventually. “That was c-cold.”
He laughs a little when he says it. I’m not sure if I want to yell at him or kiss him, but I do know I’m never fucking letting go of him again.
The storm carries us away from the vessel, an invisible line stretched taut between the Suoja and some deep part of my soul. Tearing a little more the further we drift.
It goes against every instinct but survival to sit by and watch her grow smaller and roll harder in the distance.
As though I can feel her suffering, when the only one suffering is myself.
Waiting for the moment she can’t recover.
Staring off into the night and wondering which swell on the horizon will be the one to finally put her out of her misery.
It happens slow, then all at once. The list worsens, and then she’s rolling. Taking on water.
The sea works its way through every opening, from doors and windows to the smallest of crevices. Filling my father’s ship, my ship, with its smothering weight.
The Suoja lets out a sound that’ll haunt me for as long as I live on without her. The death rattle of a vessel that’s spent the last fifty years in the very waters that would become her graveyard.
I wish I could say I don’t care. I wish I could say the only thing that matters to me is getting to safety, because it’s far and away the most important thing on my mind.
But when I hear her final moments echo in the darkness, watch her finally succumb to the storm, something inside of me breaks. A piece of me dies, as indisputable and permanent as if I lost one of my own men.
That boat was more a home to me than any structure on land.
The place I grew up, the place I discovered who I am, the place I became a man, the place I fell in love.
And now she belongs to the ocean. Swallowed whole, as if she never existed.
A shelter to whatever life turns her corpse into a new ecosystem. Fish and sharks. Crabs.
No one wants to die, but we all know it’s coming for us. The crews out here, maybe more than most. Ask any captain and you’ll find almost all of us would rather die at sea. But our worst nightmare is watching our vessel go down and being the one left behind.
I wonder if, tonight, I’ll find out what it’s like to experience both.
I can’t dwell on it—the very real possibility that, after everything, I’ll be reunited with the Suoja at the bottom of the Bering Sea. Becoming food to the same crabs we were about to sell at the market.
Because if I go, the crew goes. Seth goes.
I can’t think about the Suoja. I can’t think about odds and losses when the storm is still thrashing us.
I have to keep fighting. For them. For him.
I drop the sea anchor to slow the drift of the raft. Even with the EPIRB transmitting our coordinates to the Coast Guard, there’s no way of knowing how long we’ll be stuck out here before the conditions calm enough for them to send aid.
We’re on our own.
A small emergency flashlight at the center of the canopy washes the inside of the raft in dull orange.
Shadows of overspray pattern the fabric overhead with splashes that spread like squid ink through water.
It’s almost louder in here than it was on the ship, the rubber squeaking and straining.
Freezing rain and ice dumping down on us as the waves threaten to upheave our last remaining source of warmth and comfort.
My men are shivering so violently, I can practically hear the trembles that wrack their muscles. I have no idea how my own body is responding. I can’t feel a thing.
“Bring it in,” I say, huddling everyone together to hold on to as much warmth as possible. Hypothermia is a far bigger threat than the towering waves right now.
We lay side by side. Sardines in a tin. I take the outside and bring Seth’s back to my chest with my hand over his heart. Wishing I could feel the reassurance of its beat through all these thick layers of fabric.
Perry’s on his other side, Jorgensen sandwiched between him and Orlov.
“And here I thought Rittenburg and Captain were the only ones sharing body heat,” Jorgensen says.
We must be hysterical. That’s the only explanation for why that dumb joke sends a ripple of laughter through the lifeboat.
“Hope you’re not the jealous type, Cap’,” Perry keeps it rolling. “I promise, I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
“Not even funny,” Orlov says. “Is so cold, my dick is inside my body. It may never come back out.”
The laughter swells. A big, bright bubble in the midst of darkness that bursts almost as abruptly as it formed. Tapering off into a quiet that drags like a trawl net scraping bottom.
“I think my leg’s broken.” Perry’s teeth chatter.
His leg is definitely broken. Based on the sickening angle of his tibia, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of his bone is poking out through his skin like the tip of an iceberg, but I can only hope the cold is doing a decent job of numbing the pain.
“You know what they say about broken bones,” Seth starts.
“They fuckin’ hurt?” Jorgensen says.
“They build character.”
“Who says that?” I ask.
“Is true,” Orlov backs him up. “I have broken twelve bones, and look at me.”
“Twelve?” a few of us repeat at once.
“Jaw, ankle, foot, big toe, three fingers, nose—twice—and a few ribs.”
“You know, I never thought I could win a fight with you, big guy,” Jorgensen says, “But if you’re that fragile…”
“Maybe you should ask if I won the fights I broke the bones in, first.”
Against me, Seth shakes with laughter. Just laughter, I hope.