I checked the service and found the harshest storm within 50 miles and I steered us straight into it. 16 hours now of hard rain, washing our boards clean. The boat gets a baptism.

It’s a deluge, like firehoses pointing straight down at us from above. I stand at the helm as the ship is tossed and bounced and rocked to and fro. I dare the ocean to take us, swallow us whole.

I know it’s hard on the passengers, but not so for the talent. They love a rainy day. The theaters get packed to capacity for magic and comedy and the musical revue, and they have the best shows of their tenure on our waters. The crowds and the show folk share a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Like they’re stuck in a bomb shelter and someone is going out of their way to lift people’s spirits, to make the children laugh.

I catch a little bit of the ventriloquist act before heading back to the bridge. A family headed into the theater gets in my way.

“Why are you doing this?” the little boy asks me.

“Tommy,” his mother says. “The captain doesn’t cause the weather.”

“I’m doing it because the ship needs to be made right again,” I tell Tommy, ignoring his mother. “It needs to be clean.”

“Was it dirty?” the boy asks.

I nod.

“How long before it’s clean?”

I tell Tommy another few hours, most likely.

“The ship looks damn clean to me,” Tommy’s dad barks at me. “Betting it’s your heart that’s dirty.”

“Sid!” his wife says.

“Uh uh,” Sid says. “I was in the Navy and I can tell when a captain is punishing a ship by steering her into weather until the storm outside matches the storm brewing in her chest.”

Sid’s now poking me in that chest he was speaking of. Normally he’d be in the custody of my officers already for speaking to me this way. But normally, someone speaking to me this way is never so dead on.

“You get three more hours,” Sid says. “If you haven’t sorted things out for yourself by then and steered us back into the sunshine, I’m coming upstairs and turning that wheel myself.”

They leave me there, knowing Sid’s right. The ship doesn’t need to be washed of sin. I just want everyone to feel the same chaos that I’m feeling. I’ll give them back their sunshine. In just a few hours. I need just a few more hours of screaming wind and driving rain, and that should do the trick.