***Whew, what a week. As always, thanks so much for reading and reviewing. I finally got some time to sit down and write, and pretty much finished up this story. I'm feeling like there might be a sequel, though. I'll have to think about that one. If you've got an opinion, let me know!***
When the crew was done eating, Dana stayed at the table as everyone else headed off to sleep. In her head, the whole crew would go to sleep and leave her there to wallow in self-pity for another hour or so before she would go grab some sleep herself. In actuality, though, Norman stayed at the table, too, and watched as she got up, emptied the contents of her stomach again, came back into the galley, and grabbed a cup of water. When she sat back down, he shifted so he was sitting next to her with room for maybe one person between them. She was too tired to deal with him right now, but her body wouldn't let her shift away, either.
"How you feeling?" he asked. She shrugged. "Don't give me that."
"I don't see why you care so much," she muttered to her hands.
"Dana," he started, but abandoned whatever he was about to say. His pause made her look up. "You've been drinking water a lot, right? You can get dehydrated really fast."
"Yeah," she sighed. "I'm drinking water."
"I do care, you know."
"I know. You just can't ever make anything simple, can you?" Before Norman had a chance to speak, which he might never have considering his track record, she pushed herself back up from the table. "I'm gonna go crash. Tell someone to wake me up when we're moving again." He watched her walk out and groaned when she was gone. All he wanted was to go fishing; why did the women in his life have to make it so much harder for him?
Winter winds whipped around the Northwestern crew as they hauled the last string before offload. The pots had to be good if they wanted to make their quota, because they'd been on crap numbers so far. Everyone knew it, too, and the tension on deck was thick. With what seemed like very little prompting, Kjiersten had threatened to castrate Matt right around the two-minute warning, which pretty much set the tone for the entire string. Eighteen hours later, in the dead of night, no one had much to say, but their glares showed that they sure were thinking a lot.
Edgar yelled something else at Jake, who set his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut to avoid snapping at his deck boss. Kjiersten patted Jake's shoulder as she squeezed behind him to go grab more bait. The roles seemed all jumbled on deck right now to Dana, who just couldn't get a grasp on anything at the moment. Edgar was on hydros and Norman was on the hook, but that was about all she could figure out. Jake and Kjiersten seemed to be taking turns running to the bait box, Matt and Nick kept switching at the rail to help pots on board, and every now and then an orange blur would pass her and she would have no idea who the hell it was. Maybe it was the storm, maybe it was her pounding headache, or maybe it was just the extreme lack of coffee in her bloodstream, but Dana was totally lost.
"Question," she pointed the camera at Kjiersten, who immediately rolled her eyes. "Stop whining."
"I'm not whining. Did you hear me say anything?" Kjiersten made a face before crawling in the pot to hang the bait. When she crawled out, she stepped aside and motioned for Dana to continue.
"Hang on, hang on!" Sig's voice cut across the deck, and everyone immediately grabbed the nearest object. For Dana and Kjiersten, that was the rail, and Dana winced as the shockingly cold wave washed over her like a sheet of ice and loosened her grip ever so slightly. When it had passed, she pointed the camera back at Kjiersten and continued on like nothing had happened because, if she had learned anything on this boat, it just didn't matter unless someone got seriously hurt.
"Why's everyone so uptight right now?"
Kjiersten shrugged and glanced at her dad. "This weather's shit and our quota's due soon. Life sucks right now."
"But you're hauling good numbers. Shouldn't you be excited?"
"Oh, we're fucking thrilled about the numbers. Speaking of," she turned from the sorting table and held up three fingers, then two, then seven. "Three-two-seven. Three twenty-seven."
Dana followed as Kjiersten headed to the rail to the stack to tie up the pot. Even though Don hated when she climbed on the stack, and Kjiersten shot her disapproving looks now because of her "condition", she still scrambled up after the young woman. She felt Norman watching them, but her inner cynic decided he was keeping a protective eye on his daughter, not on her. From up there, she could both continue the interview and get a good shot of the deck. She kept the camera focused on Kjiersten's hands, which flew deftly over the ties. The young woman tied the knots as if it was marked exactly where they went; she had this down to a science, and that level of competence amazed Dana. They weren't particularly high, only one pot-height up, so when Kjiersten finished tying, she carefully lowered herself over the edge and hopped down. Dana was just about to follow when the next wave came.
It was hard to say who exactly called, "Man overboard!" first. Maybe Sig was first on the hailer, watching his monitor for the slightest problem. It could have been Norman, who had kept a careful eye on Dana since she'd climbed onto the stack. Maybe it was Kjiersten, screaming at the top of her lungs as she lunged for the life preserver and ran at the rail.
Edgar grabbed his niece's arm and reached for the life preserver, but she pulled it away from his reach. "Let me throw it!" he snapped at her., but she shook her head and grabbed a spare line. The rest of the crew stood at the rail, fighting for a glimpse of orange in the dark waters of the Bering, but Edgar and Norman had a different focus. They watched in blatant confusion as Kjiersten grabbed the line and tied it first around her waist, then around the preserver.
"What the hell are you doing?" Norman snapped as she approached the rail. She checked the buoys on the end nervously and glanced out at the water, which was all the answer he needed. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to face him, which made her set her jaw and squeeze her eyes shut in an irritated look he knew too well. "You are not jumping in after her. Why the hell would you even consider that?"
"It's the best way to find her!" Kjiersten snapped right back, ripping her arm out of his grasp. "She won't last long in the water."
"Neither will you!"
"It's the only way!"
"You have to think about your safety, too, Kjiersten!" He grabbed her arm again as she approached the rail, but he knew better and held on too tightly for her to shake him off. That pissed her off even more as she shoved the buoys into Edgar's dumbfounded hands.
In a split-second decision she didn't mean to make, Kjiersten blurted, "Fuck my safety, Dad. She's pregnant!"
A thousand pound weight settled in Norman's chest. He dropped her forearm and stepped back as the sentence, snapped so bluntly it couldn't be anything but true, sunk in. He looked to Edgar for confirmation, but, judging by the slack jaw and wide eyes mirrored on his brother's face, this was news to them all.
"Throw the buoys like you would for a pot, but away from me," she ordered as if she hadn't just dropped that bombshell on everyone else. To herself, not loud enough for anyone else to even hear, she muttered, "Josh, please don't kill me for this," and, with a deep breath, plunged into the Bering.
The waves that washed onto the deck were nothing compared to the overwhelming cold that wrapped around her body as soon as she hit the water. Suddenly, deciding to switch Jake's with the Cornelia a few seasons back by dropping them in the water seemed immensely stupid. With that completely unproductive thought in her head, she sputtered water and thrust an arm above the surface to let the crew know she was alright. She used that arm to grab hold of the life preserver and drag herself above the surface of the tumultuous water.
"The bow!"
Jake Anderson's voice rang above even the roaring of the Bering, as if his voice had more power behind it than usual. She turned in the direction he pointed and, sure enough, there was the glimpse of orange she needed.
As a child, Kjiersten would cry the entire drive to the YMCA for her swimming lessons, and sat in completely silence on the way home. She hated them mostly because her instructor was this gorgeous redheaded teenage girl that she once overheard gushing to another instructor about how Norman was such a great man to raise a child all by himself. At age 7, she'd already developed a deep hatred for pity.
Now, at 25, she really wished she'd taken those lessons to heart a bit more. Swimming to Dana against the current of the Bering was not something she felt prepared for, and she actually had to stop a few feet away because she just didn't have the arm strength to fight anymore. She did, however, have enough strength to toss the life preserver and let out a sharp yell of, "Dana! Behind you!". The older woman barely grabbed the preserver, but it was enough. Kjiersten felt the line pull tight behind her as Edgar threw the hook to pull them back in. When they got close enough to the boat, Kjiersten grabbed the hook and forced it into Dana's hands so she could be hauled onto the deck, holding onto the buoys until the hook was lowered back down for her.
About five years later, or thirty seconds by real-time, Kjiersten collapsed onto the deck and Edgar immediately sliced the rope around her waist and threw a towel around her. She let him scrub her hair like she was a child coming out of the bathtub and allowed Nick and Matt to lead her behind the train of Dana, Norman, and Jake into the galley.
"You know something?" Edgar grunted, hoisting her onto his bunk because Dana's gang had taken over the galley. Kjiersten looked at him stupidly through her slightly hypothermic haze. "You're a complete idiot."
"Love you, too," she grinned as the men began pulling her gear off.
"Seriously. That was a stupid risk." She shrugged as he toweled off her head again with a bit more fervor to show just how stupid he thought she had been. When he pulled the towel away, his eyes were soft and the corners of his mouth were tilted up ever so slightly. He bent foreward to pull her hoodie over her head, and he used the opportunity to whisper in her ear, "I'm proud of you, Tyke."
"Thanks, Uncle Eddie."
He nodded, pulled her long-sleeve Alaskan Crab shirt off next, and frowned as its removal revealed just how many layers she wore that he now had to take off. He grabbed the bottom of her t-shirt and grunted matter-of-factly, "Just so you know, you've sure got a hell of a lot of explaining to do."