Where'd You Go, Bernadette(74)

“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?”

“This is pretty rough.” She went behind the desk. “We’re getting thirty-foot swells.”

“Were you here for Christmas?” I asked.

“Yes, I was.” She opened a little unlabeled jar and dipped her finger into it. She started rubbing the inside of her other wrist.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “What’s that in the jar?”

“It’s a cream for motion sickness. The crew couldn’t function without it.”

“ABHR?” I said.

“Actually, yes.”

“What about tardive dyskinesia?”

“Wow,” she said. “You know your stuff. The doctor tells us the dosage is so low there’s no chance of it.”

“A woman was on the Christmas trip,” I said. “She bought a bunch of stuff from the gift shop on December twenty-sixth, in the evening. If I give you her name and room number, could you look up the receipt so I can see exactly what she bought?”

“Oh—” The woman gave me an odd look that I couldn’t figure out.

“It’s my mother,” I said. “She bought four hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.”

“Are you here with your dad?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you go back to your cabin, and I’ll dig up the receipt. It might take about ten minutes.”