Nightmares
From the adventures of Cpt. Heather T. LaFourge, commercial cruise ship captain.
Patrick’s been showing up to my room every night since he joined the crew as a junior deckhand. He knocks on my door and asks if he can sleep in my bed.
“Nightmares,” he says.
I know it’s hard being a 12-year-old away from his parents in the middle of the ocean and new to the workforce, but I have to toughen the kid up.
“Nightmares are a part of the job,” I tell Patrick. “If the passengers can look in your eyes and see some remnant of the horrors that you endured through the night, they’ll respect you more. They won’t hassle you if the curly fries don’t get refilled at the outdoor aerobics studio’s buffet.”
I might have buckled for Patrick. He’s a sweeter kid than the other teenage runaways, drifters, and accidental dads escaping paternity that I’ve got on my crew. But even if I wanted to let him sleep in my room, I couldn’t. I’ve recently reignited a fling with Donald, my Chief Medical Officer, and my room is no place for a child lately.
“That fucking kid again?” Donald bellows from the bed with his usual drunken slur as I close the door on Patrick. He’s been drunker on this cruise than any previous cruises, and it’s made him very creative in bed.
“That fucking kid will one day throw our corpses overboard and salute us as we sink to the ocean floor,” I say. “There’s a lot of promise in him.”
Another knock on my door. I fling it open ready to raise my voice at Patrick, but it’s my brother Matteo.
“You’re needed on the bridge, Captain,” he says. “An urgent message from the cruise line.”
Matteo peeks past me at Donald, who’s semi-passed out with his eyes rolled up into his head. I roll Donald onto his side and place a garbage can by the bed for him to vomit into, then I follow Matteo up to the bridge.
“We need you to go off course,” the fleet director tells me when I get on the radio.
“Off course?” I ask. “These passengers didn’t pay for me to go off course. It’s my boat but they bought the gas, dammit.”
“Heather, are you alone?”
I nod at Matteo, telling him to step outside. He complies.
“One of our ships is in need of assistance,” the director says. “We need you to get to it and relieve its captain. I wouldn’t ask you, but yours is the only boat that could reach it.”
I ask what ship, and the director hesitates.
“We got the first pings from it the other day,” he says. “So we went to satellite and we were able to confirm. There’s no doubt.”
“No doubt of what?” I ask.
“Heather, it’s the Lady Regency II,” he says. “Your father’s boat. It never sank. It’s been on the water for years, and if this satellite image is accurate, your father is still alive.”
I put the phone down and immediately open the door to the bridge to locate Matteo. He’s seated on a deck chair one stairwell down. He didn’t hear.
“What is it?” Matteo asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Return to your bunk.”
Back on the radio the director asks me if I’m okay and if I think I can handle this. I don’t answer his questions. I just demand the coordinates and hang up.
When I get back to my room Donald is gone. I sit on the edge of the bed, feeling the motion of the water like never before. My ship feels like it could be overturned with the slightest gust of wind. It’s never felt so precarious.
I don’t get the chance to sort through the wild mess of thoughts in my head. The knock on my door is a gift.
“I had another one,” Patrick says.
I open the door wide and he runs to the bed and crawls under the covers. He can toughen up later. The nightmares are too powerful tonight. We need all the help we can get.
