Page 58 of Weathering The Storm

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 theSuojaand 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,myship, with its smothering weight.

TheSuojalets 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 mostimportantthing 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 theSuojaat 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 theSuoja. I can’t think about odds and losses when the storm is still thrashing us.

I have to keep fighting. For them. For him.