“She’s your mother,” Frog muttered. “I didn’t know.”
“None of you knows anything!” I gave Karen’s chair a kick, but it didn’t move because it was bolted to the floor. I flew down the back stairs, but I had forgotten our room number and even what deck we were on so I kept walking and walking through these horrible narrow hallways with low ceilings and which reeked of diesel fuel. Finally one of the doors opened, and it was Dad.
“There you are!” he said. “You ready to head upstairs for orientation?”
I shoved my way past him into the room and slammed the door. I waited for him to come back in, but he didn’t.
Off and on, throughout preschool and even the beginning of kindergarten, my skin was blue because of my heart. Most times you could hardly tell, but other times it was pretty bad, which meant it was time for another operation. Once, before my Fontan procedure, Mom took me to the Seattle Center and I was playing in the huge musical fountain. I had stripped down to my underwear, and I was running up and down the steep sides, trying to outsmart the shooting water. An older boy pointed. “Look,” he told his friend. “It’s Violet Beauregarde!” That was the bratty girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who turned blue and ballooned into a huge ball. I was puffy because they’d pumped me up with steroids to get me ready for surgery. I ran to Mom, who was sitting on the edge. I stuffed my face in her breasts. “What is it, Bee?” “They called me it,” I squeaked. “It?” Mom’s eyes were across from mine. “Violet Beauregarde,” I managed to say, then burst into fresh tears. The mean boys huddled nearby, looking over, hoping my mom wouldn’t rat them out to their moms. Mom called to them, “That’s really original, I wish I’d thought of that.” I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn’t fall, because Mom was in the world.
I sat down on one of the narrow beds in our tiny room. The ship’s engine began to rumble, and the Kiwi came over the PA.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. The sound cut out for a second, like he was about to announce something bad and he had to collect his thoughts. Then, he came back on. “Say good-bye to Ushuaia, because our Antarctic adventure has just begun. Chef Issey has prepared the traditional bon voyage roast beef and Yorkshire pudding to be served in the dining room, after our orientation.”
There was no way I was going to that, because it would mean sitting with Dad, so I decided to get to work. I pulled out my backpack and took out the captain’s report.
My plan was to follow in Mom’s footsteps because I knew something would jump out, some kind of clue that nobody but me would notice. What, exactly? I had no idea.
The first thing Mom did was charge $433 at the gift shop a few hours after she got on board. The bill wasn’t itemized, though. I headed out, then realized this was also my perfect opportunity to toss Dad’s neti pot. I grabbed it, then walked toward the front of the ship. I passed a trash can in the wall and chucked the neti pot, then covered it with paper towels.
I turned the corner to the gift shop, and that’s when — whoa — the seasickness hit. It was all I could do to keep it together to slowly turn around and back down the stairs, one by one, very gently, because I’d vomit if I jerked my body even a little. I’m not kidding, it took me, like, fifteen minutes. When I got to the landing, I carefully stepped into the hallway. I took a deep breath, or tried to, but all my muscles had seized up.
“Little girl, you sick?” a voice sliced into my ears. Even the sound of a voice made me feel like throwing up, that’s how bad it was.
I turned stiffly. It was a housekeeper, her cart bungeed to a handrail.
“Here, lady, take this for seasick.” She handed me a little white packet.
I just stood there, barely able to lower my eyes.
“Oh, you sick, lady.” She handed me a bottle of water. I could only look at it.
“What cabin you in?” She picked up the ID badge around my neck. “I help you, little girl.”
My room was a few doors away. She opened it with her key and propped open the door. It required fierce determination, but I slowly managed the steps. By the time I entered, she had closed the shades and turned down the beds. She put two pills into my hand and offered me the opened water bottle. I just stared at them, but then counted to three and summoned the concentration to swallow the pills, then sat on a bed. The woman kneeled and pulled off my boots.
“Take off your sweater. Take off pants. It’s better.”
I unzipped my hoodie, and she pulled it off by the cuffs. I squirmed out of my jeans. I shivered with the air against my bare skin.
“You lie down now. You sleep.”
I gathered the strength to slip under the chilly covers. I curled up and stared at the wood paneling. My stomach was filled with the wobbly chrome eggs Dad had on his desk. I was alone with the rumbling of the engine, the tinkling of the hangers, and the opening and closing of drawers. It was just me and time. It was like when we had a backstage tour at the ballet, and I saw the hundreds of weighted ropes, the bank of video monitors, and the light board with one thousand lighting cues, which were all used for one small scenery change. I was lying there on the bed, seeing the backstage of time, how slowly it went, everything it’s made up of, which is nothing. The walls were dark blue carpet on the bottom, then a metal strip, then shiny wood, and then beige plastic to the ceiling. And I thought, What horrible colors, they might kill me, I have to close my eyes. But even the effort of that seemed impossible. So, like the ballet stage manager, I pulled one rope in my brain, then the other, then five more, which closed my eyelids. My mouth hung open, but no words came out, just a crackly moan. If there were words to it, what they would say was, Anything but this.
Then it was fourteen hours later, and there was a note from Dad saying he was in the lounge, listening to a seabird lecture. I jumped out of bed, and my legs and stomach got sloshy again. I pulled the chain on the window shade. It was like we were on the inside of a washing machine. I got pitched back onto the bed. We were crossing the Drake Passage. I wanted to absorb it, but there was work to do.
The ship’s hallway was festooned with barf bags, pleated like fans and tucked in the railing joints, behind hand-sanitizer dispensers, in door pockets. The ship was so tipped that one of my feet was walking on the wall and the other was on the floor. The reception area was really wide, which meant there were no railings to grab onto if you wanted to cross it, so they had rigged a Spider-Man web of ropes. I was the only person. Like sick animals, everyone else had retreated into their warrens of misery. I pulled on the door of the gift shop, but it was locked. A lady working behind the desk looked up. She was massaging something into the inside of her wrist.
“Are you open?” I mouthed.
She walked over and unlocked the bottom metal strip. “Are you here for the origami paper?” she said.
“Huh?” I said.
“The Japanese passengers are doing an origami demonstration at eleven. I have the paper if you’d like to participate.”
I had noticed them, a group of Japanese tourists. They didn’t speak a word of English, but they had their own interpreter, who got their attention by waving a stick with ribbons and a stuffed penguin dangling from it.
The boat jerked, and I fell into a basket of Harmsen & Heath sweatshirts. I tried to get up, but there was no way. “Is it always this bad?”