Overboard

Plunged into the dark waters off Sumatra when her ferry sinks, 14-year-old Emily fights to stay alive amid the chaos and horror of passengers drowning in the night. Striking out toward land, Emily finds a young Islamic Indonesian boy, Isman, floating in a life jacket. Hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, Emily realizes that their survival depends on her ability to keep her mind clear and her emotions in check. Testing the limits of their physical strength, she and Isman face a shark scare, a whirlpool, and other dangers. For emotional strength, Emily increasingly looks to Isman, who draws courage from his quiet but firm Islamic faith. Overboard is based on the true story of a young American woman who survived the sinking of an overloaded Indonesian ferry in January 1996. Of the more than 400 passengers aboard, only 40 people survived.

Emily might have been the only fourteen-year-old in the world who could change the sheets of a hospital bed with the patient still in it. She had done it more times than she cared to remember.
“I didn’t come to help,” Emily said, refusing the stack of folded sheets that her mother held out to her. “I just came to see if you and James would be home for dinner tonight.” She glanced around the clinic. “Where’s your loyal candy striper? Madjid is good at beds now.”
“We don’t use the term ‘candy striper’ here, Em. I wish you’d be polite to him, at least.” Olivia wiped sweat from her forehead onto the sleeve of her white lab coat. “Anyway, Madjid’s looking for a repairman to fix the air conditioner.”
“What’s the point? It never works,” Emily griped. The humidity was stifling, as it always was in Indonesia, and today there was an odor in the clinic that pinched at the back of her nose and throat. She breathed through her mouth to dull the scent.
“Please, Emily . . . the bed? I’d really appreciate it . . .” Olivia said, holding up the sheets again. Emily took them from her with a sigh.
Olivia nodded toward a cot with a sleeping boy no more than five years old. “It’s Yaso’s bed, over there. Thanks, honey.”
The boy’s gown had fallen to the side, and Emily saw that his leg was in a cast up to the hip. Farther down the row of beds there was a dark, still little girl with an intravenous tube snaking from her arm up a pole to a plastic bag filled with clear fluid. She was glistening with sweat.
“Little Rabina’s having a rough day,” Olivia said over her shoulder. “Otherwise I’d do it.”
Little Rabina, Emily grumbled to herself. Rabina didn’t seem all that bad today. Olivia had been hovering over the seven-year-old for the past two weeks, ever since the girl’s parents had brought her in with a ruptured appendix. The family was from a small village twenty miles south and they had allowed the dukun, the local healer, to use his folk potions and prayers to treat her, but she never got well. Emily’s father, James, had saved Rabina’s life with an emergency operation. Still, Emily thought, Rabina was being stubbornly slow about her recovery.
Emily went over to the cot that needed changing. When she got there she discovered the source of the odor in the clinic. The boy had relieved himself on the bed in his sleep, and his urine had the acrid smell of antibiotics. His gown was soaked in the front. The sheets and pad were soaked beneath him.
“Great,” she said with a huff. She put the sheets on a chair next to his cot and went to the nurses’ station to get a new gown and a wet washcloth.
The trick to making a bed with the patient still in it is to make it one half at a time. Emily turned the little boy onto his right side and untucked the old sheet and pad, rolling them up against his back. Then she made half of the bed with the new sheet and pad, neatly rolling up the excess and laying it alongside the roll of dirty linens. Next she turned him onto his left side so that he was lying on the clean sheets, slid the dirty linens off the bed, unrolled the second half of the clean linens, and made the rest of the bed. Finally, after being turned twice, Yaso began to stir.
Emily eased him onto his back and straightened the damp gown in front, knowing that even the youngest patients could be modest. Yaso opened his eyes, so she tried to raise the head of the cot a notch or two, but the mechanism was stuck. She yanked it hard, and it slid into place with a jolt.
“You’re very strong,” Yaso said in his own language.
“Strong, like a bull.” She wrinkled her nose at him and made a snorting noise.
Yaso laughed and tried to snort like a bull himself.
“You are good,” she smiled.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I am one hundred years old,” she said, sitting in the chair with a sigh. Emily had found that Indonesians often asked personal questions, and it wasn’t rude to give nonsensical, evasive answers.
“You speak Bahasa Indonesia well,” the boy said.
“That is because I have lived here for too long.”
“I know you. You’re the doctors’ daughter. You help in the clinic, like that boy, Madjid.”
“Sometimes.”
He looked into Emily’s clear, green-gray eyes. “Ooh, your eyes! You have glass eyes!”
Emily shook her head “no” and handed him the washcloth. He accepted it, but continued to stare into her eyes.
Emily looked away. She bent down to escape his gaze, wrapped his old sheets into a ball, and put them on the floor next to her chair. Then she held up the new gown for him to see. He looked at it blankly, but was riveted back to her eyes.
“Please wash yourself and put this on,” she said. She frowned, looking at his cast. “Will you need help washing and dressing?”
“I want to try by myself first,” he said.
Emily said, “I will be here if you need me.” She put the folded gown next to him on the bed and turned her chair away to give him privacy.
While she waited she reached out her long legs and pointed her toes in her sandals. She clasped her hands together, rounded her shoulders, and cracked her knuckles in front of her. Her underarms felt moist, and two wet marks stained her blouse, so she quickly brought her hands down onto her lap. She was wearing a long floral scarf around her head, a kerudung, and it itched in the heat, but it covered her blond hair and helped avoid endless conversation on that subject.
Emily was hungry, and it made her feel more hollow than ever. She looked down the row of cots at her mother, head bowed, eyes closed, listening through a stethoscope to the bony chest of Rabina. Olivia’s blond hair slipped from behind her ears and fell in front of her face. Soon, Emily decided hazily, the stethoscope would become a permanent physical link between Olivia and Rabina, like an inorganic umbilical cord.
“I’m ready,” the boy said. Emily turned her chair back. He had put the gown on but was unable to fasten the ties.
“You’re so big!” he said, as she stood over him to reach his back.
“Yes, I know.”
“And so white!”
She looked at her pale hands tying the back of the gown closed. The veins branched up from her knuckles to her wrists, like blue rivers.
Actually, I’m transparent, she thought with disgust.
“Yes,” she said out loud, “very white.”