The Stranger in the Lifeboat(11)

Lilly was buried a week later. LeFleur and Patrice had been in a fog ever since. They stopped going out. They barely slept. They crawled through their days and fell into their pillows at night. Food lost its taste. Conversation faded. A numbness draped over them, and they would stare for long stretches at nothing in particular, until one would say, “What?” and the other would say, “What?” and the other would say, “I didn’t say anything.”

Four years passed. In time, to their neighbors and friends, it appeared as if the couple had reached an equilibrium. In truth, they’d become their own private Montserrat, blown apart, existing in ashes. LeFleur shut the door to Lilly’s room. He hadn’t entered it since. He grew withdrawn, and shook his head whenever Patrice wanted to talk about what happened.

Patrice found solace in her faith. She went to church often. She prayed every day. She spoke of Lilly “being with God” and nodded tearfully when her friends said Lilly was in a better place and never had to worry again.

LeFleur could not accept that. He disavowed God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, anything he’d been taught as a kid in church. No merciful god would take his child that way. No Heaven needed his daughter so badly that, at four years old, she had to drown. Faith? What idiocy, he thought. The world to LeFleur became dark and irrational. He drank more. He smoked more. Few things mattered to him. Even the yellow house and the four-poster bed seemed stale. The power of misery is its long shadow. It darkens everything within view.

But this orange raft and its hidden notebook? They were a jolt to that misery. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the idea that something—even a few pages of something—had endured a tragedy and crossed an ocean to find him. It had survived. And witnessing survival can make us believe in our own.

He carefully separated the front cover from the first page. He saw dense writing. On the inside flap, there was a message scribbled in blue ink.

To whoever finds this—

There is no one left. Forgive me my sins.

I love you, Annabelle DeChapl—



The rest was ripped away.





Sea





Our eighth day in the raft, Annabelle. Blisters have formed on my lips and shoulders, and my face is itchy with a budding beard. I obsess about food all the time now. It enters my every thought. Already I feel my flesh stretched tighter over my bones. Without food, the body eats its fat, then its muscle. In time, it will come for my brain.

My feet sometimes go numb. I believe this is due to inactivity, and the cramped positions we must sit in to make room for the others. We shift to keep the raft balanced. At times, to stretch our legs, we lay them over one another’s, like pick-up sticks. The raft bottom is always wet, which means our bottoms are always wet, which means constant blisters and sores. Geri says we must rise and move around regularly, or risk more sores and hemorrhoids. But we can’t all get up at once without tilting the raft, so we take turns; one person walks around on their knees, then someone goes after and someone after that, like exercise breaks in a prison yard. Geri also reminds us to keep speaking, to make conversation, it will help our brains stay sharp. It’s difficult. It’s so hot much of the day.

Geri was a guest on the Galaxy, but in the raft, she is the steadying force. She did some sailing when she was younger and she comes from California, where she spent much time on the ocean. Initially, others looked to Jean Philippe or me for answers, because we worked on the yacht. But Jean Philippe says little now. He is grieving his wife. And I only worked one other boat before the Galaxy, as a junior deckhand. I had to learn fire prevention and some basic first aid. But mostly I was cleaning, sanding, waxing. And attending to guests. None of that prepared me for what we are enduring now.

Our last can of water, according to Geri’s calculations, will be gone by tomorrow. We are all aware of what that means. No water, no survival. Geri has been working on a small solar still from the ditch bag, a conical plastic thing that is supposed to use condensation to produce fresh water. She set it up so it drags behind the raft on a cord. But so far it has been ineffective. A rip, she says. The truth is, with ten of us, how could it come close to producing enough?

I did just write “ten of us.” I realize I have not told you of Bernadette’s fate. Forgive me, Annabelle. I could not bring myself to write it the last two days. The shock took time to absorb.



It was Mrs. Laghari who finally got an answer from Jean Philippe. He had been silent for hours, softly crying. The Lord, sitting next to him, twirled a raft paddle between his palms.

Finally Mrs. Laghari rose to her knees, still wearing the long pink T-shirt Geri had given her, her salt-and-pepper hair pushed back behind her ears. She is a short woman, but she commands respect. With a determined voice, she said, “Mr. Jean Philippe. I realize you are grieving. But you must tell us what happened to Bernadette. We cannot have secrets. After this man revived her”—she pointed to the Lord—“did he do something else?”

“The Lord did no harm, Mrs. Laghari,” Jean Philippe whispered. “Bernadette was dead.”

Several of us gasped.

“But she had woken up,” Nevin said.

“She seemed fine,” I added.

“We thought he healed her,” Nina said.

“Wait,” Yannis said. “I asked if he healed her, and he said he didn’t.”