The Stranger in the Lifeboat

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contentment.
Then Lilly died.
She was only four years old. She’d been visiting Patrice’s mother, Doris,
and that morning they’d gone to the beach. Doris, who suffered from heart
issues, had taken a new medication at breakfast, not realizing it would make
her drowsy. In a beach chair, under the hot sun, she fell asleep. When she
blinked her eyes open, she saw her granddaughter facedown in the surf,
motionless.
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 He grew withdrawn, and shook his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.